Читать книгу The Carnival of Florence - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 8

Table of Contents

Aprilis De Fiorivanti sat in the loggia of her father's house and watched the Carnival go by; she wore a black velvet mask, and held across the lower part of her face a fine silver veil. Behind her stood Astorre della Gherardesca, to whom she had that day been betrothed, her father and his guests. Aprilis thought she was happy; she felt that her long schooling and preparation for life were nearly over, and soon she would be free; she regarded her marriage as her charter of liberty; she was glad she was marrying a nobleman and she admired Astorre; for the rest, she did not think much of her future husband. Ever since she had been able to understand anything she had been taught and trained to desire and expect what had now befallen, a brilliant marriage arranged by her father, and rendered possible by his money and her beauty.

This beauty had been the one interest of her enclosed, guarded life; she had been given neither learning nor accomplishments—she had merely been told to cherish and value her loveliness.

All the women's talk that had flowed round her since her mother's death gave her into the hands of her father's relatives had turned on this topic—beauty, and the power of beauty over the weakness of men. Aprilis was not stupid, she learnt her lesson thoroughly; she learnt more than she was ever taught, namely, that this beauty might obtain for her something more than the patrician marriage so dear to her father's heart.

She had read romances, she had heard tales, she had listened to the gossip of her guardians and friends, she knew something of what women did and what women could do in Florence.

Neither was she the colourless creature she seemed in her quiet aloofness; she was level-headed, intelligent, and ambition and passion and recklessness were all latent in Aprilis.

She had just passed her seventeenth year and was in everything completely womanly; indeed she was considered old for a Florentine bride, but her father in his caution had waited rather than take a husband beneath his ambitions for her.

Slightly leaning against one of the stone pillars of the loggia she looked up the Via Larga and felt her whole being tremble with nameless excitement.

The gaiety, the abandon, the licence of the Medicean Carnival, combined with the voluptuous softness of the June night, wove enchantment over Florence.

All commonplace sights of the day were lost in the lovely moonlit dark and the rays of the festival lamps; the Via Larga seemed an approach to lands of magic.

Music and laughter and songs, mingled curiously, rilled the scented air; fantastic figures flashed into sight and disappeared again; revellers, hand in hand like a chain of living flowers, danced across the spaces of the lamplight, then broke and scattered.

From the upper windows and terraces of the palaces, and from the open loggias looking on the street, came more lights, voices, the passing of women and men in and out the shadow, the sound of lute and viol da gamba. Nothing was clearly seen, all was mysterious, songs from unseen singers, music from hidden musicians, figures flitting from shade to shade, masked, disguised, grotesque. Aprilis rose above the calm happenings of her life; she would have liked to have been free to go into the street and join the elusive crowd, to mingle with the festival that laughed through the dark streets and palaces of the city. Not for the first time did she feel irksome the strictness of the control exercised over her; she wondered if it would be different when she was married.

Removing her mask that was hot and heavy, she glanced round at Astorre della Gherardesca. He was talking to Ser Rosario; she caught fragments of their conversation. They spoke of the growing influence of Fra Girolamo, of his terrible prophecies of the destruction of Italy, his unpopularity at the Vatican and with the Medici, the feeble government of Piero, and how the great family had fallen in glory since the death of Lorenzo.

Astorre hated the Medici as they hated him; he was more than suspected of having been implicated in the famous Pazzi conspiracy, in which Guiliano, Lorenzo's brother, had lost his life.

Indeed, Astorre, in his hatred of the ruling family, was inclined to champion the Prior of San Marco, little as he had ever troubled about the tenets Fra Girolamo preached. Ser Rosario, servile to the noble, agreed, praising Savonarola's sermons, and blaming the excesses of Piero dei Medici. Aprilis was not interested; she looked at Astorre critically through the fine meshes of her silver veil. He was handsome, dark, fiery, erect and thin, a bold, flashing hawk-like type, swarthy as a Moor, and with eyes of Oriental brightness and fire. Aprilis wished he would trouble to court and caress her; her indifference to him might have changed if he had not been so indifferent to her; she sighed, looking at him curiously and wondering if he loved some one else.

She began to feel vaguely discontented with her marriage—what was a woman's life without love? She hoped that she could make Astorre love her, or else that she would find some cavalier to love her in the prevailing fashion of Platonic love—the beautiful way in which the murdered Guiliano had loved Simonetta, the wife of his dear friend.

Uncertain longings stirred Aprilis; her present happiness seemed faint compared to what it might have been; the words of the Medicean Carnival song beat in her heart—to-night every one seemed singing them with a kind of desperate joyousness that was akin to pain:—

"Quant e Delia giovinezza

Ma si fugge tuttavia

Chi ruol esser lieto, sia

Di doman non c'e certezza!"

It was the creed of Aprilis; she had been taught to cherish youth and beauty, the power of to-day, and to dread the passing of time, the uncertainty of to-morrow. She took the veil from her lovely face and leaned out from the pillar of the loggia; a certain wistfulness touched her expression with melancholy.

One of the revellers stepped noiselessly from the engulfing shadow of the street into the trembling patch of light flung by the lanterns fixed in iron frames either side the door of the Palazzo Fiorivanti.

He wore a green robe and a mask fashioned in the shape of a wolf's muzzle; on his head was a pointed scarlet cap; his figure was tall and powerful, his hands concealed in his sleeves, he looked like a great beast of prey cloaked in man's attire.

Aprilis gazed at him fascinated; there was something both sinister and dominant in his grotesque appearance, which was heightened by the fact that he was alone and seemed apart from the festival, for he walked slowly and silently, instead of with the usual shouts and antics. And presently he stopped altogether and stood facing the loggia.

Aprilis suddenly knew that he was looking at her; she smiled.

A crowd of dancers surrounding a chariot in which was a half-naked girl dressed as Bacchus and two gilded children astride a wine butt swept by, obscuring the wolf mask from Aprilis; but when they had passed he was still there with his animal's face, so horribly expressionless, turned towards Astorre, came to take his leave; Aprilis wondered if he was going to join the Carnival; she wished he would take her with him. She would have liked to run over the Ponte Vecchio and along the Lung' Arno, linked arm in arm with others, waving a coloured lantern and singing to the full of her strength.

She stood up, dropping the silver veil and showing her loose white gown, which hung in close fine folds, and was embroidered all over with pale pink carnations and the falling petals of faded blossoms; a mantle of a dull rose colour hung from her shoulders; her fine curls were fluttering over her shoulders in front, and bound with a white ribbon in a thick sheaf between her shoulders from which they escaped again and blew round her waist.

Astorre murmured some words of compliment and looked into her face which care had made as perfect as a complete flower.

Her skin was whitened, her lips and cheeks faintly stained with rose pulp, the delicate line of her eyebrows darkened, all accomplished with an exquisite art; between the gilded tendrils of hair on the low, smooth brow hung the single pearl on the gold thread.

Astorre was pleased with her; he pressed her hand tenderly and even with a certain reverence, and drew the sign of the cross over her bent head, giving her the benediction for the night.

He left the loggia, and Aprilis, without a word, was turning away to her cool bedroom overlooking the courtyard—her quiet bedroom where she would not be even able to hear the distracting sounds of the Carnival festivities.

But first she gave a sideway look into the lamplight without.

The man with the wolf mask was now leaning against the wall of the opposite palace; human hands, the strong brown hands of a soldier or an athlete, now showed beneath the animal's face.

He held a delicate little theorbo on the dark wood of which showed the whiteness of ivory, and from the tinkling strings he picked the eternal burden of the Carnival:—

"Quant e bella giovinezza Ma si fugge tuttavia Chi vuol esser lieto, sia Di doman non c'e certezza!"

He sang in a deep and pleasant voice.

Aprilis lingered as she passed out of the loggia into the house.

She thought perhaps it was poor Andrea Salvucci whom she knew adored her, or one of her other lovers who sighed at a distance and never came nearer than offering the holy water in church.

A feeling of regret seized her; she wondered if he could see her dress, which was copied from one of Messere Sandro di Botticelli's pictures, and if he knew that her wistful, remote, trembling smile was for him. Suddenly the melodious sounds of the Carnival were interrupted; harsh shouts and frightened shrieks rose from the direction of the Medici palace; mingled with these came the cries of "Palle! palle!" the rallying cry of the Medici. Aprilis came back into the loggia; Ser Rosario, in his excitement, forgot to order her to her room.

"It must be a brawl between the Medici's partisans and the party of the friar," he said. "Messere della Gherardesca said that we might all come to being ruled by Fra Girolamo—and rather he than Piero dei Medici, say I!"

The tumult increased, the sounds of blows and the meeting of swords could be clearly heard; people in Carnival dresses and masks, but with bare daggers in their hands, began to run up the street towards the Medici palace and the Duomo.

Still the masquer in green leant against the wall and pulled at the strings of his theorbo, and still he seemed to Aprilis to be looking at her and at nothing else through the increasing confusion. Astorre came running back to the Fiorivanti loggia.

He explained that two of the merrymakers had insulted a Dominican returning to San Marco, that a party of the Piagnoni had taken the friar's part, and that now a tumult was in progress before the gates of the Medici palace.

"There may be a revolt this very night," said Gherardesca. He had his hand on his sword, and his face was keen and eager.

"Santa Anna preserve us all!" murmured Ser Rosario.

"Where is Piero dei Medici?"

Astorre gave a short, excited laugh.

"At Castello or Cafaggiuolo—wasting himself in some debauchery while the city slips from him."

Ser Rosario was uneasy; he had no wish for revolts nor conspiracy; he had always lived very easefully under the Medici, and at heart the moneylender could have no real desire for the triumph of the friar who regarded all worldly things as sinful.

"The Medici have too firm a seat," he muttered, reassuring himself. "The Medici—"

The sentence was broken on his lips; with a mighty and sudden rush forward, Piagnoni and Mediceans swept in a great tumult up out of the darkness and swayed, struggling hand to hand, before the Fiorivanti palace.

"Get the women in!" shouted Astorre; and, drawing his sword, he leapt from the loggia into the fight.

Ser Rosario drove and hustled the women into the house.

"And Aprilis?" he asked; for some time he had not seen his daughter.

"Aprilis is in bed this hour," gasped the fat cousin, who was pale with fright.

But Aprilis was not—she had crept on to the step to have a better view of the tumult and a closer glance at the impassive stranger in the green robe and wolf's mask. For a second she had a sense of almost delirious pleasure in standing alone and free in the street; then when Astorre had come running back she had been afraid, and had crept into the shadow, so that he might not see her. When he had entered the loggia, she had tried to slip back into the house, but the sudden rush of the combatants had swept her away from her own doorstep. She cried out and hid her face, and ran before the crowd.

The wolf mask dropped his theorbo and hurried up to her; he seized her arm in a grip firm enough to hurt, and drew her away into the dark doorway of the palace opposite. "Take me back—please take me back," said Aprilis, frightened and angry.

For answer he skilfully twisted her rose-red mantle tightly round her face, so as to blind, silence and almost stifle her; then lifting her and throwing her over his shoulder, he hurried down the first back turning he came to; the struggles of Aprilis were of no more avail than the struggles of a bird in a trap.