Part 6

Now he cocked one arm akimbo, and stared with insufferable insolence on the pronouncer of his name.

'Know'st me, Prophet?' bawled he. 'Not more than I thee, methinks. Wert well coached in this same inspiration.'

'Well, indeed,' answered Bembo. 'Thou hast said it. It was God spake in mine ear.'

Tassino laughed scornfully. It was a study to see these young wits opposed, the one such plated goods, the other so silver pure.

'In the name of this lying carle,' he cried, 'what spake He?'

'He said,' said Bembo quietly, '"Let the false swearer remember Ananias!"'

Then in a moment he was all ruffled and combative, like a young eagle.

'Answer!' he roared. 'Didst thou this thing?'

Now, a woman-petted, cake-fed belswagger is too much of an anomaly for the test of nerves. Tassino, shouted at, gave an hysteric jump which brought him to the very brink of tears. He was really an ill-bred little coward, made arrogant by spoiling. He had the greatest pity and tenderness for himself, and to any sense of his being lost would always respond with a lump in his throat. Now he suddenly realised his position, alone and baited before all--no petticoat to fly to, no sympathy to expect from a converted tyrant, none from a mob which, habitually the butt to his viciousness, would rejoice in his discomfiture. Actually the little beast began to whimper.

'Darest thou!' he cried, stamping.

'Didst thou this thing?' repeated Bernardo.

'It is no business of thine.'

'Didst thou this thing?'

'An oaf's word against----'

'Didst thou this thing?'

'Lord Duke!' appealed Tassino.

'Didst thou this thing?'

The victim fairly burst into tears.

'If I say no----'

'Die, Ananias!' shouted the Duke. His eyes gleamed maniacally. He half rose in his chair. He seemed as if furious to foreclose on a denouement his superstition had already anticipated. Tassino fell upon his knees.

'I did it!' he screamed.

The Duke sank back, his lips twitching and grinning. Then he glanced covertly at Bembo, and rubbed his hands together, with a motion part gloating, part deprecatory. The Ser Ludovico's eyes, shaded under his palm, were very busy, to and fro. Bembo stood like frowning marble.

'The law, Master Scrivener?' said he quietly.

The kneeling clerk murmured from a dry throat--

'Holy sir, it takes no cognisance of these accidents. The condescensions of the great compensate them.'

The Parablist, his lips pressed together, nodded gravely twice or thrice.

'I see,' he said; 'a condescension which ruins two lives.'

He addressed himself, with a deadly sweetness, to the Duke.

'I prithee, who standest for God's vicegerent, call up the Jew to sentence.'

Jehoshaphat was produced, and placed beside the blubbered, resentful young popinjay. The Saint addressed him:--

'Wretch, thou art convicted of the crime of defacing the Duke's image; and he at thine elbow of defacing God's image. Shall man dare the awful impiety to pronounce the greater guilt thine? Yet, if it merits death and mutilation, what for this other?'

He paused, and a stir went through the dead stillness of the hall. Then Bembo addressed one of the tipstaves with ineffable civility:--

'Good officer, this rogue hath sweated coins, say'st?'

'Ay, your worship,' answered the man; 'a hundred gold ducats, if a lire. Shook 'em in a leathern bag, a' did, like so much rusted harness.'

Bembo nodded.

'They are forfeit, by the token; and he shall labour to provide other hundred, with cost of metal and stamping.'

Jehoshaphat, secure of his limbs, shrieked derisive--

'God of Ishril! O, yes! O, to be sure! I can bleed moneys!'

'Nay,' said the Saint, 'but sweat them. Go!'

The coiner was dragged away blaspheming. He would have preferred a moderate dose of the rack; but the standard set by his sentence elicited a murmur of popular approval. From all, that is to say, but Tassino, who saw his own fate looming big by comparison. He rose and looked about him desperately, as if he contemplated bolting. The spectators edged together. He whinnied. Suddenly the stranger's voice swooped upon him like a hawk:--

'Man's image shall be restored; restore thou God's.'

The little wretch screamed in a sudden access of passion:--

'I don't know what you mean! Leave me alone. It was his own fault, I say. Why did he insult me?'

'Restore thou this image of God his sight,' said Bembo quietly.

'You know I cannot!'

'Thou canst not? Then an eye for an eye, as it was spoken. Take ye this wicked thing, good officers, and blind him even as he blinded the poor armourer.'

A vibrant sound went up from the spectators, and died. Messer Ludovico veiled his sight, and, it might be said, his laughter. Tassino was seen struggling and crying in the half-fearful clutch of his gaolers.

'Thou darest not! Dogs! Let me go, I say. What! would ye brave Madonna? Lord Duke, lord Duke, help me!'

'To repentance, my poor Tassino,' cried Galeazzo, leaning lustfully forward. 'I trow thy part on earth is closed.'

The little monster could not believe it. This instant fall from the heights! He was flaccid with terror as he fell screeching on his knees.

'Mercy, good stranger! Mercy, dear lord saint! The terror! the torture! I could not suffer them and live. O, let me live, I pray thee!--anywhere, anyhow, and I will do all; make whatever restitution you impose.'

As he prayed and wept and grovelled, the Saint looked down with icy pity on his abasement.

'Restitution, Tassino!' he cried, 'for that murthered vision, for that ruined virtue? Wouldst thou even in thine impiousness arrogate to thyself such divine prerogatives? Yet, in respect of that reason with which true justice doth hedge her reprisals, the Duke's mercy shall still allot thee an alternative. Sith thou canst not restore his honour or his eyes to poor Lupo, thou shalt take his shame to wife, and in her seek to renew that image of God which thou hast defaced. Do this, and only doing it, know thyself spared.'

A silence of stupefaction fell upon the court. What would Bona say to this arbitrary disposal of her pet, made husband to a common gipsy he had debauched? True, the sentence, by virtue of its ethical completeness, seemed an inspiration. But it was a disappointment too. None doubted but that the popinjay would subscribe to the present letter in order to evade the practice of it by and by. Already the paltry soul of the creature was struggling from its submersion, gasping, and blinking wickedly to see how it could retort upon its judge and deliverer. It had been better to have trodden it under for once and for good--better for the moral of the lesson, as for all who foresaw some hope for themselves in the crushing of an insufferable petty tyranny. Galeazzo himself frowned and bit his nails. He would have lusted to see heaven pluck off this vulgar burr for him. Only his brother, sleek and smiling, applauded the verdict. He had a far-seeing vision, had Ludovico, and perhaps already it was alotting a more telling role to the little aristocrat of San Zeno than had ever been played by the cockney parvenu down in the arena.

Suddenly the Duke was on his feet, fierce and glaring.

'Answer, dog!' he roared; 'acceptest thou the condition?'

Tassino started and sobbed.

'Yes, yes. I accept. I will marry her.'

The Duke took a costly chain from his own neck, and hung it about the shoulders of the Parablist.

'Wear this,' he said, 'in earnest of our love and duty.'

Then he turned upon the mob.

'These judgments stand, and all that shall be spoken hereafter by our dear monitor and proctor. It is our will. Make way, gentlemen.'

He took Bernardo's arm and descended the steps. A cloud of courtiers hovered near, acclaiming the boy Saint and Daniel. Messer Ludovico saluted him with fervour. He foresaw the millennium in this association of piety with greatness. Galeazzo sneered.

'Remember that three spoils company, brother,' said he. 'Keep thou thine own confessor, and leave me mine.'

It was then only that Bernardo learned the rank of his accoster.

'Alas! sweet lord,' said he, 'is piety such a stranger here that ye must entertain him like a king?'

The Duke laughed loudly and drew him on. He was extravagant in his attentions to him--eager, voluble, feverish. He would point out to him the lavish decorations of his house--marbles, sculptures, paintings, the rising fabric of a new era--and ask his opinion on all. A word from the child at that period would have floored a cardinal or a scaffolding, have clothed Aphrodite in a cassock, have made a _fete champetre_ of all Milan, or darkened its walls with mourning. Messer Lanti, following in their wake, was amazed, and dubious, and savage in turns. Earlier in the day the Duke had had from him the whole story of his connection with the Parablist, up to the moment of their interference in Montano's punishment.

'_Meschino me!_' he had said, greatly laughing over that episode; 'yet I cannot but be glad that the old code beat itself out on his back. 'Twas a reptile well served--a venomous, ungrateful beast. A mercy if it has broken his fang.'

That remained to be seen; and in the meantime Carlo, the old auxiliary in debauch, was taken again into full favour. He accepted the condescension with reserve. The oddest new attachment had come to supplant in him some ancient devotions that were the furthest from devout. He found himself in a very queer mood, between irritable and gentle. He had never before felt this inclination to hit hard for virtue, and it bewildered his honest head. But it made him a dangerous watchdog.

By and by the Duke carried his protege into the Duchess's privy garden. There was a necessary economy of ornamental ground about the castello, though the most was made of what could be spared. In a nest of green alleys, and falling terraces, and rose-wreathed arches, they came upon the two ladies whom Bembo had already seen, themselves as pretty, graceful flowers as any in the borders. The young Catherine sat upon a fountain edge, fanning herself with a great leaf, and talking to a flushed, down-looking page, who, it seemed likely, had brought news from the court of a recent scandal and its sequel. Her shrewd, pretty face took curious stock of the new comers. She was a pale slip of a girl, lithe, bosomless, the green plum of womanhood. Her thin, plain dress was green, fitting her like a sheath its blade of corn, and she wore on her sleek fair head a cap of green velvet banded with a scroll of beaten gold. A child she was, yet already for two years betrothed to a Pope's nephew. His presents on the occasion had included a camera of green velvet, sewn with pearls as thick as daisies in grass. It seemed natural to associate her with spring verdure, so sweet and fair she was; yet never, surely, worked a more politic little brain under its cap of innocence.

Hard by, on one of the walks, a woman and a child of seven played at ball. These were Bona, and her little son Gian-Galeazzo. As the other was spring, so was she summer, ripe in figure and mellowed in the passion of motherhood. Her eyes burned with the caress and entreaty of it--appealed in loveliness to the fathers of her desires. Her beauty, her stateliness, the very milk of her were all sweet lures to increase. She loved babies, not men--saw them most lusty, perhaps, in the glossy eyes of fools, the breeding-grounds of Cupids. She was always a mother before a wife.

The Duke led Bernardo to her side. Pale as ivory, she bent and embraced her boy, and dismissed him to the fountain; then rose to face the ordeal.

'Hail, judgments of Solomon!' she said, with a smile that quivered a little. 'O believe me, sir, thy fame has run before!'

'Which was the reason thou dismissedst Gian,' said Galeazzo, 'in fears that Solomon would propose to halve him?'

He did not doubt her, or wing his shaft with anything but brutality. It was his coward way, and, having asserted it, he strolled off, grinning and whistling, to the fountain.

Bona shivered and drew herself up. Her robe was all of daffodil, with a writhed golden hem to it that looked like a long flicker of flame. On her forehead, between wings of auburn hair, burned a great emerald. She seemed to Bernardo the loveliest, most gracious thing, a vision personified of fruitfulness, the golden angel of maternity, warm, fragrant, kind-bosomed. He met the gaze of her eyes with wonderment, but no fear.

'Sweet Madonna,' he said, 'hail me nothing, I pray thee, but the clear herald of our Christ--His mouthpiece and recorder. We may all be played upon for truth, so we be pure of heart.'

'And that art thou? No guile? No duplicity? No self-interest?'

He marvelled. She looked at him earnestly.

'Bernardo, didst know this Tassino was my servant?'

'Nay, I knew it not.'

'Wouldst have spared him hadst thou known?'

'How could I spare him the truth?'

'But its shame, its punishment?'

'Greater shame could no man have than to debauch innocence. His punishment was his redemption.'

'Ah! I defend him not. Yet, bethink thee, she may have been the temptress?'

'He should have loathed, not loved her, then.'

'Madreperla, mother-of-pearl,' cried Catherine, with a little shriek of laughter, from the fountain; 'come and help me! I have caught a butterfly in my hand, and my father wishes to take it from me and kill it!'

*CHAPTER VII*

Bernardo wrote to the Abbot of San Zeno:--

'MOST DEAR AND HONOURED FATHER,--Many words from me would but dilute the wonder of my narrative. Also thou lovest brevity in all things but God's praise. Know, then, how I have surpassed expectation in the early propagation of our creed, which is by Love to banish Law, that old engine of necessarianism. [_Here follows a brief recapitulation of the events which had landed him, a little sweet oracle of light, in the dark old castello of Milanl._] Man' (he goes on) 'is of all creatures the most susceptible to his environments. Thou shalt induce him but to feed on the olive branches of Peace in order that he may take their colour. O sorrow, then, on the false appetites which have warped his nature! on the beastly doctrines which, Satan-engendered, have led him half to believe there is no wrong or right, but only necessity! Is there no such thing as discord in music, at which even a dog will howl? Harmony is God--so plain. Yet there is a learned doctor here, one Lascaris who disputeth this. My father, I do not think that learned doctors seek so much the intrinsic truth of things as to impress their followers with their perspicacity in the pursuit. John led James over-the-way by a "short cut" of three miles, and James thought John a very clever fellow. Pray for me!...

'I will speak first of the Duchess, to whom I delivered your letter. She is a most sweet lady, with eyes, so kind and loving were they, they made me think of those soft stars which light the flocks to fold. She asked me did I remember my mother? "That is a strange question," quoth I, "to a foundling." "Ah!" said she, "poor child! I had forgot how thou fell'st, a star, into Mary's lap. I would have taken care, for my part, not so to tumble out of heaven." "Nay," I said, "but if thou, a mother there, hadst let slip thy baby first?" "What," she said, looking at me so strange and wistful, "did she follow, then?" My father, thou know'st my fancies. "I cannot tell," I said. "Sometimes, in a dream, the dim, sad shadow of a woman's face seems to hang over me lying on that altar." She held out her arms to me, then withdrew them, and she was weeping. "We are all wicked," she cried; "there is no heart, nor faith, nor virtue, in any of us!" and she ran away lamenting. Now, was not that strange? for she is in truth a lady of great virtue, a pure wife and mother, and to me most sweet-forgiving for an ill-favour I was forced to do her upon one of her servants. But not women nor men know their own hearts. They wear the devil's livery for fashion's sake, when he introduces it on a pretty sister or young gentleman, and so believe themselves bound to his service. But it is as easy as talking to make virtue the mode. Thou shalt see.

'Does not the beautiful Duomo itself stand in their midst, the fairest earnest of their true piety? Could intrinsic baseness conceive this ethereal fabric, or, year by year, graft it with sprigs of new loveliness? There is that in them yet like a little child that stretches out its arms to the sky.

'I have, besides the greatest, two converts, or half-converts, already, my dear Carlo and his Fool. The former is a great bull gallant, whom a spark will set roaring and a kiss allay. I love him greatly, and he bellows and prances, and swearing "I will not" follows to the pipe of peace. Alas! if I could woo him from a great wrong! It will happen, when men see honour whole, and not partisanly. In the meantime I have every reason to be charitable to that lady Beatrice, sith she holds herself my mortal enemy. And indeed I excuse her for myself, but not for the honest soul she keeps in thrall. My father, is it not a strange paradox, that holding the senses such a rich possession and life so cheap? Here is one would prolong the body's pleasure to eternity, yet at any moment will risk its destruction for a spite. Nathless she is warm, loamy soil for the bearing of our right lily of love, and some day shall be fruitful in cleanliness.

'Now the Fool--poor Fool! I have won to temperance, and so Carlo growleth, "A murrain on thee, spoil-sport! What want I with a sober Fool? Take him, thou, to be valet to thy temperance!" by which gibe he seeks to cover a gracious act. And, lo! I have a Fool for servant, a most notable Fool and auxiliary, who, having sworn himself to abstinence, would unplug and sink to the bottomless abyss every floating hogshead. In sooth the good soul is my shadow, and so they call him. "Well," says he, "so be it. But what sort of fool art thou, to cast a fool for shadow?" "Why, look," says I, for it was sunset on the grass--"at least not so great a fool as thou." "That may well be," says he, "for you do not serve Messer Bembo." So caustic is he--a biting love; yet, as is proper between a man and his shadow, equal attached to me as I to him. And so, talking of his gift to me, brings me to the greater gifts of the Duke.

'O my father! How can I speak my gratitude to heaven and thy teaching, which brought me so swiftly, so wonderfully, to prevail with that dread man! I think evil is like the false opal, which needs but the first touch of pure light to shatter it. I have come with no weapon but my little lamp of sunshine; and behold! in its flash the base is discredited and the truth acknowledged. It is all so easy, Christ guard me! There is a Providence in what men call chance. Only, my father, pray that thy child be not misled by flattery to usurp its prerogatives. Men, in this dim world, are all too prone to worship the visible symbols of Immortality--to accept the prophet for the Master. I am already feted and caressed as if I were a god. The Duke hath impropriated to me an income of a thousand ducatos, with free residence in the castello, and a retinue to befit a prince. At all this I cavil not, sith it affords me the sinews to a crusade. But what shall I say to his delegating me to the chief magistracy of Milan during his forthcoming absence? for he is on the eve of an expedition into Piedmont, touching the lordship of Vercelli, which he claims through his wife Bona of Savoy. Carlo, it is true, warns me against this perilous exaltation. "Seek'st thou," says he, "to depose the devil? Well, the devil, on his return, will treat thee like any other palace revolutionist." "Nay," says I, "the devil was never the devil from choice. Restore him to a converted dukedom, and he will aspire to be the saint of all." "Yes," he said, "I can imagine Galeazzo endowing a hospital for Magdalenes and washing the poor's feet. But I will stick to thee." A dear worldling he is, and only less uncertain than his master in these first infant steps towards godliness. For vice is very childlike in its self-plumings upon a little knowledge. Desiring beauty, it tears the rose-bush or clutches the moth, and so sickens on disillusionment. Forbearance is the wisdom of the great.

'The more destructive is a man, the simpler is he. Now, my father, this destroying Duke covets nothing so much as the applause of the world for gifts with which, in truth, he is ill-endowed. He cannot sing, or rhyme, or improvise but with the worst, yet, thinks he, they shall call me poet and musician, or burn. Well, he might fiddle over the holocaust, like Nero, and still be first cousin to a peacock. I told him so, but in gentler words, when he asked me to teach him my method. "To every soul its capacities," says I, "and mine are not in ruling a great duchy greatly." "So we are neither of us omnipotent," says he, with a smile. "Well, I will take the lesson to heart." Now, could so simple a creature be all corrupt?

'Of more complicated fibre is his brother, the Signior Ludovico. Very politic and abiding, he rushes at nothing; yet in the end, I think, most things come to him. He is gracious to thy child, as indeed are all; yet, God forgive me, I find something more inhuman in his gentleness than in Galeazzo's passion. These inexplicable antipathies are surely the weapons of Satan; whereby it behoves us to overcome them. That same Lascaris attributes them to an accidental re-fusion of particles, opposed to other chance re-combinations, in a present body, of particles similarly antipathetic to us in a former existence--a long "short cut" over the way again.

'Now, as for my days in this poignant city--where even the benches and clothes-chests, not to speak of most walls and ceilings, yea, and the very stair-posts themselves, are painted with crowded devices of scrolls and figures in loveliest gold and azure and vermilion--thou mayest believe they are strange to me. Amidst this wealth I, thy simple acolyte, am glorified, I say, and courted beyond measure. Yet fear nothing for me. I appraise this distinction at its right market value. The higher the Duke's favour, the greater my presumptive influence. Believe me, dear, my urbanity towards his attentions is an investment for my Master. I am an honest factor.

'In a week the Duke sets out. In the meantime, like an ambassador that must suffer present festival for the sake of future credit, I sit at feasts and plays; or, perchance, rise to denounce the latter for no better than whores' saturnalia. (O my father! to see fair ladies, the Duchess herself, smile on such shameless bawdry!) Whereon the Duke thunders all to stop, with threats of fury on the actors to mend their ways, making the poor fools gasp bewildered. For how had _they_ presumed upon custom? Bad habit is like the moth in fur, so easily shaken out when first detected; so hardly when established. Once, more to my liking, we have a mummers' dance, with clowns in rams' heads butting; and again a harvest ballet, with all the seasons pictured very pretty. Another day comes a Mantuan who plays on three lutes at once, more curious than tuneful; and after him one who walks on a rope in the court, a steel cuirass about his body. Now happens their festival of the _Bacchidae_, a pagan survival, but certes sweet and graceful, with its songs and vines and dances. Maybe for my sake they purge it of some licence. Well, Heaven witness to them what loss or gain thereby to beauty.