Chapter 3

He strutted away, a small pompous figure in scarlet and orange, and Giovanni noted the mingled deference and contempt with which he was regarded by the crowd. No more trouble was experienced in getting the donkey along the crowded streets. The fool's discordantly-clashing bells opened a way everywhere. The porter at the castle gate grinned and flung a jest at him, but admitted him and those who followed in his train, without question.

A few steps farther on they were halted by a tall, thin, sour-looking man in the elaborate headgear and robes of a dignitary of the household.

“How now, Master Stephen!” he said sternly. “What foolery is this?”

“Only a showman, Conrad,” grinned the jester. “He has a puppet-show in those fat bags of his. Did you think I was trying to smuggle meat-puddings out of the kitchens for my own solitary meals?”

The steward was not satisfied. “Show me the puppets,” he ordered. Giovanni obeyed.

The steward scrutinized the bride and her maidens, pulled the strings which moved the humpbacked jester, fingered the costumes, and then with a curt nod bade them go on. “But mind you, Master Stephen,” he said, shaking a long finger at the fool, “you are to be responsible for these fellows and keep them in sight from now until the time of the feast. If aught goes amiss you shall be whipt.”

The jester giggled, shook his bells, and began to climb a long flight of stairs in a tower opening on the courtyard, beckoning the two youths to follow him. Up and up they climbed, until at last the fool turned and motioned them to halt.

“Come within,” he said to Giovanni. “Let your servant await you with your baggage on the landing here. He will tell us if any one approaches.”

The room in which Giovanni found himself was a small wainscoted apartment in the top of the tower, furnished in a grotesque fashion well suited to the humped and twisted figure of its master. The jester flung off his tall curved cap and seated himself on the corner of a table. From a flask he poured out a cup of wine and offered it to his guest. “It is not drugged,” he said with a laugh, “you need not fear. No? Ah, well, perhaps you are right. I will drink it myself, though I should keep it for the night--the nights are very long sometimes.”

He set down the cup and leaned forward, peering intently into Giovanni's face. “You gave me a start just now,” he said. “I took you for a ghost--the ghost of a man I once knew--Giovanni Bergamotto.”

This was more than exciting; Giovanni's father had been one of the murdered hostages of Crema, and if his name came to the ears of the Emperor he would never leave the castle.

Searching his impassive face the jester nodded approvingly. “I knew it,” he said. “No one else would have behaved as you did--and it is for Milan. Milan!” He slipped from the table and stood up, the bells jangling a weird undertone to his every movement. “It is better you should know--I am--I was when I was alive--Stefano Baldi.”

Giovanni's eyes blazed, “And you dare ask a Milanese to drink with you?”

“Hear me,” begged the jester. “I sinned a great sin--yes; but I have lived twelve years in torment of body and soul for that sin. I sinned for love of a woman, and when I had betrayed my people she denied me, and her brothers delivered me over to the executioners. They spared my life because they thought it not worth the taking, and left me the wrecked and crooked thing you see. Yet I have served Milan since her fall--I, the traitor,--served her by a thousand petty treacheries and inventions. It was I who sent Henry Plantagenet the news of Barbarossa's plans. I have the favor of the Emperor, and hidden things are freely discussed before me. They know I am Milanese and despise me, but they believe me bought with gold and with the wine which is my besetting sin.”

Giovanni was silent for very amazement. The fool mistook his attitude.

“See,” he pleaded, tearing open his tunic, “here on my heart are the arms of Milan. I kept the badge hidden here under the floor for years, for fear that when I was whipt they would find it. But since I have the Emperor's favor none dare touch me.

“Do you need money? Are you a spy? But nay--tell me not your errand. I might--I might babble in the wine-shop, and then they would torture me to find out the truth, and I might betray you as I betrayed your father. But if you need money--look!”

He knelt above a corner of the hearth and raised a stone, thrusting his hand into the deep hollow under it. He threw out handful after handful of rich gold pieces that winked and gleamed in the pale sunlight. “They are yours--all yours--for Milan.”

Giovanni found his tongue. “When I was but a child,” he said slowly, weighing his words, “my mother taught me to hate and fear Stefano Baldi. Yet in truth I neither hate nor fear you, Stefano, and I will trust you in this matter. I have an errand at the court of Henry the Lion in Saxony, and it was my hope that the Emperor, should he be pleased with our marionettes, might give me safe-conduct that my journey be the sooner ended. Then I shall go southward to fight for Milan.”

Stefano pushed the gold back into the hole and replaced the stone. “I see,” he said. “The Emperor is as easily diverted by shows as the Brocken by its clouds. Yet I think I can find a way to make him serve you. Be ready to-night with your puppets and put your own soul into the jesting and the mummery. That is the only thing for you to do. If that fails we will try the gold.”

Giovanni spent the hours before the banquet in setting his mimic theater in order, trying every cord, pulley and weight to make sure that it worked perfectly, brushing and reshaping the costumes, going over the songs and speeches of the play in his head. Cimarron also was busy tuning his rebeck and trying over the melodies of the songs which Ranulph the troubadour had written for this little drama. It was based on the story of the ten virgins, and contained much by-play and shrewd comment on the follies and fashions of the day. Besides the written text Giovanni was wont to add some patter of his own, improvised according to the mood of his audience and the scene of the performance, but he ventured on very little of this impromptu comedy on such an occasion as this. Too much was at stake.

After what seemed endless waiting the time came. The huge hall was filled with gayly dressed knights, ladies, serving people, soldiers, and half the petty princes of the Empire. The feasting had given place to wine-drinking, songs and jesting. The Emperor, cold and impassive, sat in his chair of state, his mind apparently a thousand miles away. Then there was a great roar of laughter from the doorway, and a lane opened among the audience to let Stefano come prancing through in all his grotesque bravery, his bells chiming a goblin march. After him came Giovanni, and Cimarron bearing the puppet theater. Giovanni made his obeisance and his opening speech, and the play began.

There seemed to Giovanni to be two of him that night. One self was utterly absorbed in the performance, intent on making every speech tell, every song win its meed of applause and laughter, every little figure act with the spirit and gayety of life. The other self hovered somewhere in the air among the rafters of the hall, critically watching the whole scene. He remembered a sensation something like it when he and Cimarron had crossed a mountain torrent in Spain on a log a hundred and fifty feet above the jagged rocks and tearing waters. And as on that occasion, Cimarron did his part as calmly and indifferently as if he were mending a strap in the donkey's harness.

Certainly the play was a success. Giovanni had never met with greater applause or received more substantial rewards. The ladies gathered to inspect his wooden figures after the play, like children at a fair. He was just leaving the hall when a page came to him and directed him to wait in an ante-room until the Emperor should be at leisure.

It was cold and bleak, and Giovanni's tense nerves shivered as he waited. The noise of departing guests and the tramp of hoofs died away. It grew colder and stiller in the small grim room. At last the Emperor came in, and seated himself in a great chair. A servant brought in a brazier full of coals and went away. The ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, a small man with red hair and beard, and cold eyes, looked Giovanni over from head to foot.

“You go,” he said, “to the court of Henry Duke of Saxony?”

“Aye, Sire,” said the youth.

“It is not a very safe journey. There are robbers in the forest.”

“Surely,” said Giovanni humbly, “a poor showman might hope to escape them?”

“I fear not,” said the Emperor with the ghost of a smile. “In their disappointment they might break up your puppets and leave you fastened to a tree for the wolves to devour. Such things have been done. I will give you safe conduct and send you on with a company of merchants and soldiers, if you will carry a message for me. Henry the Lion is delaying too long with his answer. Tell him that the time has passed for trifling.”

“Who,” said Giovanni, wonderingly, “could dream of trifling with your expressed wish?”

“Henry dreams, but he will awake,” said the Emperor curtly. “Hark you--you seem to be a clever mountebank, and I know what power fellows of your sort have over the mob--add to your play lines to be spoken by your puppet King. They should convey this meaning--that although he is a King he is but a puppet incapable of independent action. Puppets that go wrong are broken up and burned in the fire. My will is the law for my realm. Saxony shall be taught that law as Milan was taught, if Henry dares disobey.”

Writing a brief sentence or two on his tablets, the Emperor affixed his signet and gave the missive to Giovanni. “That shall be your proof that you come from me. Stefano tells me that you go on into Lombardy. Forget not the meaning of your puppet-show when you reach those rebellious states. They have been chastised once or twice before.”

Giovanni was left alone. On the morrow he took his departure for Saxony and did his errand. The Duke of Saxony remained at home, and Barbarossa went on without his aid to meet defeat at Legnano. Giovanni met Stefano by chance in Venice when the Emperor went there to sign the peace treaty.

“His armies were doomed from the first,” the jester said in his hoarse guttural sing-song. “They were weighted with the souls of the martyred hostages of Crema. I have lived to see that siege avenged,--and now I must go on livin--and never see Milan again.”

Marveling much at the heights and depths in the soul of a traitor Giovanni went on his way to England. There he discussed with Tomaso the Paduan physician, Ranulph the troubadour and Brother Basil of the Irish Benedictines the astonishing destruction of the Emperor's army. But he said no word of Stefano.

“It is all in the formula on which his power was based,” said the alchemist thoughtfully. “No man--be he duke, prince or kaiser--can pose as the master of humanity. Men are not puppets; they are free souls in a free world. You cannot make even a puppet-player move contrary to its nature.”

“That is true,” said Giovanni. “And I have never had two that behaved exactly alike. Fantoccini have their own ways of acting--and when you pull the strings yourself, you know.”

THE ABBOT'S LESSON

There were twelve good monks and an Abbot who came To found the Abbey and give the name In the early days when the stones were laid, And each of them knew a craft or a trade. Sebastian the shepherd and Peter the smith,

James who made leather, and sandals therewith, Hilarius the cook, of great skill in his art, Anselm whose herbal lay close to his heart, Gildas the fisherman, Paul of the plough, Arnold who looked to the bins and the mow, Matthew the vintner and Mark the librarian, Clement the joiner and John apiarian, Each wise in his calling as craftsmen are made,-- And each deep in love with his own special trade. But the Abbot was canny, and never would raise One above other by blame or by praise.

Now the angel who guarded the Eden gate Had pity in thinking on Adam's fate, And sent him three servants, for earth, air and sea, The sheep, and the fish, and the wise little bee. And thus it has happened that some people know More than the rest of us here below.

There was jealousy, bitterness, wrath and fear Among these reverend brethren here, With their leather and parchment and metal and stone, And the seeds of dissension were freely sown-- Only Sebastian, Gildas and John In their work appointed went placidly on.

The Abbot considered his turbulent flock, And he saw the wicked beginning to mock, And he gathered the craftsmen about him, to see Why there was peace with the other three.

They found Brother John by his bee-skeps brown Watching his bees in their elfin town. “Little folk, little folk all a-wing, More honey is yours when ye do not sting, And that is a very sensible thing,” Said Brother John to the bees.

They found Brother Gildas a-fishing for trout, Oblivious that any one was about. “Finny folk, finny folk, deep in the fen, There's a bait for each fish if we only know when,-- And that is the way to fish for men,” Said Brother Gildas to the fishes.

They found on the moorland bleak and cold Brother Sebastian, far from the fold. “Sheep of my sheepfold, by night and by day I seek ye untiring wherever ye stray,-- For thus ye have taught me the Master's own way,” Said Brother Sebastian the shepherd.

And the brethren were silent. Each prayed in his heart That in all of his doings in craft or in art He might give God the glory. Since Adam's fall The workman is nothing, the work is all. There was peace in the cloisters. The Abbot that night Gave thanks that his children had found the light.

IV

PADRAIG OF THE SCRIPTORIUM

Padraig sat on the side of the hill where the Good People were said to dance rings in the turf, his chin on his folded arms, his, arms resting on his drawnup knees--thinking. He might have been taken for a sheogue himself had any one been there to see. His hair was like a red flame, and his eyes were blue as the sky; his arms and legs were as brown as his young, sharp face, and he wore but one garment, a goatskin tunic. He could run like a hare and climb like a squirrel and swim like a salmon, for he had lived like a savage all his life, among the Irish hills.

Before he could remember, he had lost his father, a clever tinker who could make silver brooches and mend brass kettles and had married an Irish colleen in a seashore village. Then pirates raided the coast, and the Irish girl with her baby escaped only by hiding in a cellar under a ruined house. When the boy was seven years old his mother died, and since then he had gone from one village to another as the fancy took him. For a week or more he might be herding goats or sheep, fishing, or cutting peat for fires; he stayed nowhere longer than he chose and owned nothing in the world except what he wore. Under the tunic there hung a small leather bag with the few relics his mother had left him. He could make a fish-hook of a bit of bone, a boat of reeds, or a snare of almost any material he could find where he happened to be.

From this place where he sat he could see a valley of wet meadow-land, in the midst of which gray stone buildings were massed inside a wall which enclosed also the garden and the cloisters. He knew that this was an abbey.

Years before a company of twelve monks and a Prior had come there to found a religious house. They brought from England an arklike chest containing some manuscript books, and relics, chalices, candlesticks and other treasures, and little else except their long black robes, girdles and sandals. These monks, working in orderly and diligent fashion under their superior's direction, had built a chapel, a dormitory, a dining-hall, store-houses, barns,--and the community grew. The building was done first of rough stone and wattle-work after the manner of the country, but later of good cut stone. Half the countryside had been employed there when the chapel was building. They had drained the marsh for their meadow-land, their young trees were growing finely, their vineyard was thriving in a sunny selected nook, their sheep flecked the hills all about them. A deep fish-pond had been made where now two monks sat fishing. Padraig wondered if they had caught anything as good as the lithe trout he had taken from a mountain stream.

He was hungry, for he had been afoot since daylight, and he was wondering whether to make a fire and cook his trout or offer them to the monks in exchange for a supper. The wind that blew from the eight-side cone-roofed kitchen brought to his nostrils a smell so delicious that he was drawn like a fish on a line to the gates of the abbey.

He had met wandering monks and friars, but this was the first abbey he had entered. When he knocked at the gate and the porter asked him what he wanted, he was a little excited and rather scared.

But the porter, although rheumatic and grumpy, knew good fish when he saw them, and considered them just the thing for the Abbot's supper. He let Padraig in by the wicket gate, the door with a grating in it set in the big door and only about a third as large. Soon the boy was sitting by the kitchen fire eating a bowl of the most delicious broth he had ever tasted. Round-faced Brother Hilarius, who had charge of the kitchens, was in so good a humor over the trout that he suggested to Padraig that he might herd sheep for the Abbey. The monks did a great deal of the work about their farms and in their workshops themselves, but there was still much to do, and they were usually willing to give work to anybody who did not ask for more than food and lodging.

Padraig liked the Abbey, but he would probably have gone on before very long had he not found something which interested him more than anything else ever had. Brother Sebastian, the head shepherd, sent him one day to a part of the buildings he had not before seen. The long stone-walled, stone-floored room had little stalls down one side, each with its wooden bench and reading-desk. On one of these desks lay open the first book Padraig had ever seen.

It was not printed, but written, each letter carefully drawn with a quill pen. The initials of the chapters, and the border around each page, had been painted in an ornamental design like a tangle of leaves and vines, in bright red, green, yellow, brown, black, blue. Twisted vines bore fruits, flowers, tiny animals and birds, here and there a saint, angel or cherub. The monk who was doing this illuminating was too much absorbed in his work to know that any one had come in, at first. When he looked up and saw Padraig standing there he smiled very kindly.

He was a gaunt man with eyes as blue as Padraig's own, black eyebrows and lashes, and a queer dreamy look except when he smiled. His name was Brother Basil. When he saw the bundle of especially fine sheepskins that Padraig had brought his face lit up so that it seemed as if the sun had come into the cloister. “Good!” he said. “I will give you a note to carry back.”

He took a bit of parchment which had once been written upon and had been scraped clean enough to use again, and made some queer marks upon it with his pen dipped in black fluid. That was the first time Padraig had ever seen any one write.

It did not take long for Brother Basil to find out how fascinated the herd-boy was with the work of the scriptorium. Before any one knew it Padraig was learning to read and write. He learned so quickly that the Abbot and Brother Mark, the librarian, thought he might make a scribe. But when he was asked if he would like to be a monk, he shook his head like a colt eager to be off. Writing was great fun; he practiced with a stick in the sand or charcoal on a stone. But it did not suit his idea of life to sit all day long filling books with page after page of writing.

He liked the making of colors even better than writing. In the twelfth century painters could not buy paints wherever they might chance to be. They had to make them. Brother Basil had studied in Constantinople, or Byzantium as he called it, the treasure-house of books and of learning, with its great libraries and its marvelous old parchments illuminated in colors too precious to be used except for the Gospels or some rare volume of the Church. As time went on Padraig learned all that Brother Basil could teach him.

When a man is working on an important and difficult task, it means much to have a helper tending the fires or grinding the paints, who regards the work as the most important thing in the world and gives his whole mind to his occupation. Such a helper may ask as many questions as he likes, and his master will be glad to give him all the instruction he can possibly want.

Most of the people of the Abbey, in fact, liked Padraig. He knew so little that the monks and lay brothers and even the novices knew, and learned so quickly, and was so ready to put his own knowledge at their disposal, that it gave them the very comfortable feeling of being superior persons, whenever he was about. But there was one person who did not like him. This was Simon, a clerk attached to the house of the Irish prince who had given the land for the Abbey. Simon was of the opinion that vagabond urchins from no one knew where were not proper pupils for monastic schools even in Ireland, which was on the extreme western edge of Christendom. But Brother Basil paid no attention to Simon's opinion. In fact, it is doubtful whether he ever knew that Simon had one.

The most serious trouble Brother Basil had in his work was that many of the materials he needed could not be had in Ireland, nor could the Abbey afford to send for them except in very small quantities. The monks were rich compared with most other folk about them. They had food and drink and warm clothing and well-built houses, and productive land. But as yet they could not sell much of their produce at a profit which would make them rich in money. Brother Basil therefore manufactured all the colors he could, from the resources at hand. To make blue, he pounded up a piece of an old stone he had brought from Canterbury. Gilding was done by making gold-leaf out of real gold. The Tyrian purple was made from a gastropod of the seas near Byzantium, and a little snail-like mollusk of Ireland would serve to make a crimson like it. Thinning it, the painter could make pink. There was no vermilion to be had, and red lead must be used for that color and made by roasting white lead. The white lead was prepared by putting sheets of lead in vats of grape skins when the wine had been crushed out of them. Copper soaked in fermenting grape skins would make green, saffron made it a yellower green,--and saffron was grown on the Abbey land--cedar balsam would make it more transparent. Brother Basil was always trying experiments. He was always glad to see a new plant or mineral which might possibly give him a new color.

In all this Padraig was extremely useful. He made friends with a smith who had a forge and furnace miles away, and wheedled him into lending them the furnace for the roasting of metals. He ranged the woods and cliffs all around the Abbey in search of plants, shrubs, trees and minerals. His knowledge of the country saved Brother Basil many a weary tramp, and he always took Padraig with him when he went looking for any especial thing that was needed.