Part 8

'It is the symbol of joy redeemed,' he said. 'Put thy lips to the chalice, Galeazzo, and take what thy soul needest--no more.'

The Duke lifted the cup shakily, stumbled at its brim, steadied himself, and sipped. His eyes dilated and grew wolfish--'I am vindicated,' he stuttered: 'O sweet little saint!'--and he drank greedily, ecstatically, and, smacking his lips, put down the vessel.

He was himself again from that draught.

'Bernardo,' he said, in a reassured, half-maudlin confidence, 'canst thou read the stars?'

'Nay,' said the other gravely, 'they are the Sibyls' books.'

'True. Yet some essay.'

'Ay: then flies a comet, cancelling all their sums.'

'An impious vanity, is it not?'

'Truly, I think so.'

'And deserving of the last chastisement.'

'Poor fools, they make their own.'

'What?'

'Why, taking colds instead of rest--cramps, chills, and agues--immense pains, and all for nothing; the dead moon for the living sun; nursing all day that they may starve by night. God gave us level eyes. The star's best resting place for them is on a hill. We need no more knowledge than to read beauty through the wise lens Nature hath proportioned us. Not God Himself can foretell a future.'

'Not God?'

'No, for there is no Future, nor ever will be. The Past but eternally prolongs itself to the Present. Heaven or hell is the road we tread, and must retrace when we come to the brink of the abyss where Time drops sheer into nothingness. Joy or woe, then, to him the returning wanderer, according as he hath provisioned his way. So shall he starve, or travel in content, or meet with weary retributions. O, in providence, hold thy hand, thinking on this, whenever thy hand is tempted!'

Galeazzo was amazed, discomfited. This unorthodoxy was the last to accommodate itself to his principles of conduct. The Future to him was always an unmortgaged reversion, sufficient to pay off all debts to conscience and leave a handsome residue for income. He could only exclaim, again, like one aghast: '_No Future_?'

'Nay,' said Bembo, smiling, 'what is the heresy to reason or religion? To foresee the issues of to-day were, for Omniscience, to suppress all strains but the angels'. What irony to accept worship from the foredoomed! What insensate folly wantonly to multiply the devil's recruits! O Galeazzo, there is no Future for God or Men? Hope shudders at the inexorable word: Evil presumes on it: it is the lodestone to all dogmatism; the bogey, the weapon of the unversed Churchman; the very bait to acquisition and self-greed. Be what, returning, ye would find yourselves--no lovelier ambition. See, we walk with Christ, the human God and comrade, I have but this hour left him bathing his tired feet in the brook. He will follow anon; and all the pretty birds and insects and wildflowers he watched while resting will have suggested to him a thousand tales and reflections gathered of an ancient lore. He can be full of wonder too, but wiser by many moons than we. There is no Future. God possesses the Past.'

The Duke sprang to his feet, and went up and down once or twice. This view of a self-retaliatory entity--of a returning body condemned by natural laws to retraverse every point of its upward flight--disturbed him horribly. He desired no responsibility in things done and gone. Eternity, timely propitiated, was his golden chance. He stopped and looked at Bembo, at once inexpressibly cringing and crafty.

'Bernardino,' murmured he: 'I can never get it out of my head that whenever thou sayest God thou meanest gods. _The gods possess the past?_--why, one would fancy somehow it ran glibber than the other.'

Bembo sighed.

'Well, why not? Nature, and Love, and the Holy Ghost--_Tria juncta in Uno_--why not gods?'

The Duke pressed his hand to his forehead; then ran and clasped the boy about the shoulders.

'Adorable little wisdom,' he cried: 'take my conscience, and record on it what thou wilt!'

'To-morrow,' said Bembo, with a happy smile: 'when its tablets are sponged and clean.'

Galeazzo fawned, showing his teeth. There was something in him infinitely suggestive of the cat that, in alternate spasms of animalism, licks and bites the hand that caresses it. This strange new heresy of a limited omniscience oddly affected him. Could it be possible, after all, that the soul's responsibility was to itself alone? In any case so pure a spirit as this could represent him only to his advantage. Still, at the same time, if God were no more than relatively wiser and stronger than himself--why, it was not _his_ theory--let the Parablist answer for it--on Messer Bembo's saintly head fall the onus, if any, of leaving Capello where he was. For his own part, he told himself, the God of Moses remaining in his old place in the heavens, he, Galeazzo, would have been inclined to consider the virtuous policy of releasing the Monk.

And so he prepared himself to confess and communicate.

*CHAPTER IX*

The Duke of Milan, confessed, absolved, and his conscience pawned to a saint, had, on the virtue of that pledge, started in a humour of unbridled self-righteousness for the territory of Vercelli. With him went some four thousand troops, horse and footmen, a drain of bristling splendour from the city; yet the roaring hum of that city's life, and the flash and sting thereof, were not appreciably lessened in the flying of its hornet swarm. Rather waxed they poignant in the general sense of a periodic emancipation from a hideous thralldom. The tyrant was gone, and for a time the intolerable incubus of him was lifted.

But, for the moment, there was something more--a consciousness, within the precincts of the palace and beyond them, of a substituted atmosphere, in which the spirit experienced a strange self-expansion--other than mere relief from strain--which was foreign to its knowledge. Men felt it, and pondered, or laughed, or were sceptical according as their temperaments induced them. So, in droughty days, the little errant winds that blow from nowhere, rising and falling on a thought, affect us with a sense of the unaccountable. There was such a sweet odd zephyr abroad in Milan. The queer question was, Was the little gale a little mountebank gale, tumbling ephemerally for its living, or did it represent a permanent atmospheric change?

A few days before Galeazzo's departure, Bernardo--by special appointment _custos conscientiae ducalis_--had, while walking in the outer ward of the Castello with Cicada, happened upon the vision of a Franciscan monk, plump and rosy, but with inflammatory eyes, entering with Messer Jacopo through a private postern in the walls. He had saluted the jocund figure reverentially, as one necessarily sacred through its calling, and was standing aside with doffed bonnet, when the other, halting with an expression of good-humoured curiosity on his face, had greeted him, puffed and asthmatic, in his turn:--

'Peace to thee, my son! Can this be he of whom it might be said, "_Puer natus est nobis: et vocabitur nomen ejus, Magni Consilii Angelus_"?'

The Franciscan had rumbled the query at Jacopo, who had shrugged, and answered shortly: 'Well; 'tis Messer Bembo.'

'So?' had responded the monk, gratified; 'the David of our later generation?' and instantly and ingratiatory he had waddled up, and, putting a prosperous hand on Bernardo's shoulder, had bent to whisper hoarsely, and quite audibly to Cicada, into the boy's ear:--

'Child--I know--I am to thank _thee_ for this summons.' Then, before Bembo, wondering, could respond: 'Ay, ay; Saul's ears are opened to the truth. The stars cannot lie. You sent for me, yourself their sainted emissary, to confirm the verdict. What! I might have failed to answer else. We know the Duke, eh? But, mum!'

And with these enigmatic words, and a roguish wink and squeeze, he had hurried away again, following the impatient summons of Jacopo, who was beckoning him towards a flight of open stairs niched in the north curtain, up which the two had thereon gone, and so disappeared among the battlements.

Then had Bernardo turned, humour battling with reverence in his sensorium, and 'Cicca!' had exclaimed, with a little click of laughter.

The Fool's answer had been prompt and emphatic.

'Cracked!' he had snapped, like a dog at a fly.

'Who was he?'

'Nay, curtail not his short lease. He is yet, and, being, is the Fra Capello--may I die else.'

'Well, if he is, _what_ is he?'

'Why, a short-of-breath monk; yet soon destined, if I read him aright, to be a breathless monk.'

'Nay, thou wilt only new-knot a riddle. I will follow and ask the Provost-Marshal, though I love him not.'

'Nor he thee, methinks. Hold back. The butcher looks askance at the pet lamb. Well, what wouldst thou? Of this same monkish rotundity, this hemisphere of fat, this moon-paunch, this great blob of star-jelly, this planet-counterfeiting frog, this astronomic globe stuffed out with pasties and ortolans? Well, 'tis Fra Capello, I tell thee, an astrologer, a diviner by the stars--do I not aver it, though I have never set eyes on the man before?'

'How know'st, then?'

'Why, true, my perspicacity is only this and that, a poor matter of inferences. As, for example, the inference of the fingers, that when I burn them, fire is near; or the inference of the nose, that when I smell cooking fish, it is a fast day; or the inference of the palate, that when I drink water, I am a fool.'

'A dear wise fool.'

'Ay, a wise fool, to know what one and one make. Dost thou?'

'Two, to be sure.'

'Well, God fit thy perspicacity with twins, when thy time comes. One out of one and one is enough for me.'

'Peace! How know'st this holy father is an astrologer?'

'Inference, sir--merely inference. As, for example again, the inference of the ears, that when I mark the substance of his whisper to thee, I seem to remember talk of a certain Franciscan, who, having predicted by the stars short shrift for Galeazzo, and been invited to come and discuss his reasons, did prove unaccountably coy, though certainly seer to his own nativity. Imprimis, the astrologer was reported a Conventual and fat; whereby comes in the inference of the eye. Now, "Ho-ho!" thinks I, "this same swag-bellied monk who babbles of stars! Surely it is our Fra Capello? And hooked at last? By what killing bait?"'

Here he had touched the boy's shoulder swiftly, and as swiftly had withdrawn his hand, an ineffable expression, shrewd and caustic, puckering his face. Bembo had looked serious.

'Cicca! I do believe thou art madder than any astrologer--unless----'

'No!' had cried the Fool; 'I am sober; wrong me not.'

Then Bembo had repented lovingly:--

'Pardon, dear Cicca. But, indeed, I understand thee not.'

'Why,' I said, 'what killing bait had tempted the monk's shyness at length?'

'What, then?'

'Thyself.'

'I?'

'Art thou not a star-child and Galeazzo's protege? O, pretty, sweet decoy, to draw the astrologer from his cloister!'

'Dost mean that the Duke would use me to question the truth of these predictions? Alas! not I, nor any man, can interpret nothingness into a text.'

'Wilt thou tell him so?'

'Who?'

'The Duke.'

'I have told him so.'

'Thou hast? Then God keep the Franciscan in breath!'

'Amen!' had said Bembo, in all fervour and innocence. He had thought the other to mean nothing more than that the Duke was designing, on _his_ authority, to win a faulty brother from the heresy--as he construed it--of divination.

As _he_ construed it. Young and inexperienced as he was, he had yet a prophet's purpose and vision--the vision which, in despite of all traditional beliefs, looks backwards. His soft eyes were steadfast to that end which was the beginning. No sophistries could beguile him from the essential truth of his kind creed. _He_ was an atavism of something vastly remoter than Caligula--than any tyranny. He 'threw back' to the stock of those first angels who knew the daughters of men--to the first fruits of an amazed and incredible sorrow. By so great a step was he close to the God his sires had offended; was close to the parting of the ways between earth and heaven, and with all the lore of the since-accumulated ages to instruct him in his choice of roads. O, believe little Bernardo that his was the true insight, the true wisdom! There is no Future, nor ever will be. The past but prolongs itself to the present; and all enterprise, all yearning, are but to recover the ground we have lost. That truth once recognised, the horror of Futurity shall close its gates; its timeless wastes shall be no more to us; and we--we shall be wandering back, by aeons of pathetic memories, to trace to its source the love that gushed in Paradise.

Three days later the boy--the Duke being gone--was strolling, again with Cicada his shadow, on the ramparts. It had become something his habit to take the air, after hearing the morning causes, on these outer walls, whence the tired vision could stretch itself luxuriantly on leagues of peaceful plain. He liked then to be left alone, or at the most to the sole company of his dogged henchman, the erst Fool. Cicada's gruff but jealous sympathy was an emollient to lacerated sensibilities; his wit was a tonic; his tact the fruit of long necessity. No one would have guessed, not gentle Bernardo himself, how the little, ugly, caustic creature was, when most wilful or eccentric in seeming, watching over and medicining his moods of inevitable weariness or depression.

Perhaps he was in such a mood now--induced by that passion of the irremediable which occasionally must overtake every just judge--as he leaned upon the battlements, his cheek propped on his palm, and gazed out dreamily over the shining campagna.

'Cicca,' he said suddenly, 'what made thee a Fool?'

'Circumstance,' answered the other promptly.

'Ah!' sighed Bembo--'that blind brute force of Nature, wavering out of chaos. No agent of God--His foe, rather, to be anticipated and circumvented. Providence is the true wise name for our Master. He _provideth_, of the immensity of His love, for and against. He can do no further, nor foretell but by analogy the blundering spites of Circumstance. But always He persuades the monster of his interest lying more and more in sweet order--dreams of him sleeping caged, a lazy, satiated chimera, in the mid-gardens of love.'

'Che allegria!' said Cicada; 'I will go then, and poke him in the ribs, and ask him why he made a Fool of me.'

Bembo smiled and sighed.

'There is a proof of his blindness. What, in truth, was thy origin, dear Cicca?'

The Fool came and leaned beside him.

'Canst look on me and ask? I was born in this dark age of tyranny, and of it; I shall die in it and of it. I have never known liberty. Sobriety and reason are empty terms to me. Ask of me no fruit but the fruit of mine inheritance. A drunken woman in labour will bring forth a drunken child. I am Cicada the Fool, lower than a slave, curst pimp to Folly.'

Soft as a butterfly, Bernardo's hand fluttered to his shoulder and rested there. The creature's dim eyes were fixed upon the crawling plain; his face worked with emotion.

'There was a time,' he said, 'I understand, when governments were loyal at once to the individual and the state--when they wrought for the common weal. In those days, it would seem certain, riches--anything above a specified income--must have disqualified a man for office. It is the ideal constitution. Corruption will enter else. Wealth, and the emulation of wealth, are the moth in stored states. That was the age of the republics and all the virtues. I am born, alack, after my time. I have held Esau the first saint in the calendar. I am not sure I do not do so now, Messer Bembo despite.'

'And I, too, love Esau,' said Bernardo quietly.

Cicada, amazed, whipped upon him; then suddenly seized him in his arms.

'Thou dearest, most loving of babes!' he cried rapturously; 'sweet saint of all to me! What! did I twit thee, mine emancipator, with my curse to thralldom? Loves Esau, quotha! No cant his creed. Child, thou art asphodel to that cactus. Put thy foot on this mouth that could so slander thee!'

'Poor Cicca!' said Bembo, gently disengaging himself. 'Thou rebukest sweetly my idle curiosity.'

'Curiosity!' cried the other. 'Would the angels always showed as much! Thou art welcome to all of me I can tell:--as, for example, that my mother--_exitus acta probat_--was a fool, a sweet, pretty, vicious fool; and yet, after all, not such a fool as, having borne, to acknowledge me.'

'Poor wretch! Why not?'

'Why not? Why, for the reason Pasiphae concealed her share in the Minotaur. Motley is the labyrinth of Milan. My father was a bull.'

'Well, I am answered.'

'Ah! thou think'st I jest. Relatively--relatively only, sir, I assure thee. Hast ever heard speak of Filippo Maria, the last of the Visconti?'

'Little, alas! to his credit.'

'I will answer in my person to that. He was uglier than any bull--a monster so hideous as to be attractive to a certain order of frailty. I inclined his way. Perhaps that was my salvation. The child most interests the parent whose features it reflects. It is bad-luck to break a mirror; and so I was spared--for the labyrinth.'

'O infamous! He made thee his jester?'

'And fed me. Let that be remembered to him. When the reckoning comes, the bull, not Pasiphae, shall have my voice.'

'Hideous! Thy mother?'

'Let it pass on that. I need say no more, if a word can damn.'

'Cicca!'

'He was meat and drink to me, I say.'

'Drink, alas!'

'He meant it kindly. When I sparkled, 'twas his own wit he felt himself applauding. That was my easy time. He died in '47, and my majesty's Fooldom was appropriated incontinent to the titillation of these peasants of Cotignola their hairy ears.'

'Hush, and thou wilt be wise!'

'In my grave, not sooner. Francesco, our Magnificent's father, was so-so for humour--a good, blunt soldier, who'd take his cue of laughter from some quicker wit, then roar it out despotically. No sniggerer, like his son, who qualifies all praise with envy. Shall I tell thee how I lost Galeazzo's favour? He wrote a sonnet. 'Twas an achievement. A Roman triumph has been ceded to less--hardly to worse. Lord, sir! there was that applause and hand-clapping at Court! But Wisdom looked sour. "What, fool!" demanded the Duke: "dost question its merit?" "Nay," quoth Wisdom; "but only the sincerity of the praise. Sign thy next with my name, and mark its fate." He did--actually. Poor Wisdom! as if it had been truth the sonneteer desired! Never was poor doxy of a Muse worse treated. This was exalted like the other; but in a pillory. It made a day's sport for the mob, at my expense. Was not that pain and humiliation enough? But Galeazzo must visit upon me the rage of his mortification. Well, when he was done with me, Messer Lanti, high in favour, begged the remnant of my folly, and it was thrown to him. The story leaked out; I had had so many holes cut in me. It had been wiser to seal my lips with kindness. But the Duke, as you may suppose, loves me to this day.'

As he spoke, they turned an angle of the battlements, and saw advancing towards them, smiling and insinuative, the figure of Tassino. Bernardo started, in some wonder. He had not set eyes on this dandiprat since his public condemnation of him, and, if he thought of him at all, had believed him gone to make the restitution ordered. Now he gazed at him with an expression in which pity and an instinctive abhorrence fought for precedence.

The young man was brilliantly, even what a later generation would have called 'loudly,' dressed. He had emerged from his temporary pupation a very tiger-moth; but the soul of the ignoble larva yet obtained between the gorgeous wings. Truckling, insinuative, and wicked throughout, he accosted his judge with a servile bow, as he stood cringing before him. Bembo mastered his antipathy.

'What! Messer cavalier,' he said, struggling to be gay. 'Art returned?'--for he guessed nothing of the truth. Then a kind thought struck him. 'Perchance thou comest as a bridegroom, _bene meritus_.'

Tassino glanced up an instant, and lowered his eyes. How he coveted the frank audacity of the Patrician swashbuckler, with which he had been made acquainted, but which he found impossible to the craven meanness of his nature. To dare by instinct--how splendid! No doubt there is that fox of self-conscious pusillanimity gnawing at the ribs of many a seeming-brazen upstart. He twined and untwined his fingers, and shook his head, and sobbed out a sigh, with craft and hatred at his heart. Bernardo looked grave.

'Alas, Messer Tassino!' said he: 'think how every minute of a delayed atonement is a peril to thy soul.'

This sufficed the other for cue.

'Atone?' he whined: 'wretch that I am! How could a hunted creature do aught but hide and shake?'

'Hunted!'

'O Messer Bembo! 'twas so simple for you to let loose the mad dog, and blink the consequences for others.'

'Mad dog!'

'Now don't, for pity's sake, go quoting my rash simile. Hast not ruined me enough already?'

'Alas, good sir! What worth was thine estate so pledged? I had no thought but to save thee for heaven.'

'And so let loose the Duke, that Cerberus? O, I am well saved, indeed, but not for heaven! Had it not been for the good Jacopo taking me in and hiding me, I had been roasting unhousel'd by now.'

'Tassino, thou dost the Duke a wrong. 'Twas thy fear distorted thy peril. He is a changed man, and most inclined to charity and justice.'

Tassino let his jaw drop, affecting astonishment.

'Since when?'

'Since the day of thy disgrace.'

The other shook his head, with a smile of growing effrontery.

'Why, look you, Messer Bembo,' he said: 'you represent his conscience, they tell me, and should know. Yet may not a man and his conscience, like ill-mated consorts, be on something less than speaking terms?'

He laughed, half insolent, half nervous, as Bernardo regarded him in silence with earnest eyes.

'Supposing,' said he, 'you were to represent, of your holy innocence and credulity, a little more and a little sweeter than the truth? Think'st thou I should have dared reissue from my hiding, were Galeazzo still here to represent his own? If I had ever thought to, there was that buried a week ago in the walls yonder would have stopped me effectively.'

'Buried--in the walls! What?'

'Dost not know? Then 'tis patent he is not all-confiding in his conscience. And yet thou shouldst know. 'Tis said thou lead'st him by the nose, as St. Mark the lion. Well, I am a sinner, properly persecuted; yet, to my erring perceptives, 'tis hard to reconcile thy saintship with thy subscribing to his sentence on a poor Franciscan monk, a crazy dreamer, who came to him with some story of the stars.'

'O, I cry you mercy! I quote Messer Jacopo, who was present. "Deserving of the last chastisement"--were not those thy words? And Omniscience dethroned--a bewildered mortal like ourselves? Anyhow, he held thy saintship to justify his sentence on the monk.'

'What sentence?'

'Wilt thou come and see? I have my host's pass.'

He staggered under the shock of a sudden leap and clutch. Young strenuous hands mauled his pretty doublet; sweet glaring eyes devoured his soul.

'I see it in thy face! O, inhuman dogs are ye all! Show me, take me to him!'

Tassino struggled feebly, and whimpered.

'Let go: I will take thee: I am not to blame.'