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CHAPTER III

The lady of Casa Caprona had flown her tassel-gentle and missed her quarry. Outwardly she seemed little disturbed by her failure—as insolent as indolent—an imperious serenity in a velvet frame. The occasion which had given, which was still giving, Carlo a tough thought or two to digest, she had already, on the morning following her discomfiture, assimilated, apparently without a pang. 'The which doth demonstrate,' thought Cicada, as he took covert and venomous note of her, 'a signal point of difference between the sexes. In self-indulgent wickedness there may be little to distinguish man from woman. In the reaction from it, there is this: The man is subject to qualms of conscience; the woman is not. She may be disenchanted, surfeited, aggrieved against fate or circumstance; she is not offended with herself. Remorse never yet spoiled her sleep, unless where she desired and doubted it on her account in another. What she hath done she hath done; and what she hath failed to do slumbers for her among the unrealities—among things unborn—seeds in the womb of Romance, which, though she be the first subject for it, she understands as little as she does beauty. From the outset hath she been manoeuvring to confuse the Nature in man by using its distorted image in herself to lure him. Out upon her crimps and lacings! He would be dressing and thinking to-day like an Arcadian shepherd, an she had not warped his poor vision with her sorcery! She wears the vestments of ugliness, and its worship is her religion.'

It must be admitted that he offered himself a cross illustration to his own text. The desperate concession wrung from him last night in a moment of vinous exaltation, had found his sober morning senses under a mountain of depression. He was bitterly aggrieved against fate; yet the only quarrel he had with himself was for that mad vow of temperance, not for the vice which had exacted it of him. The tongue in his head was like a heater in an iron. Tantalus draughts lipped and bubbled against his palate. The parched soil of his heart, he felt, would never again blossom in little lonely oases—never again know the solace of dreams aloof from the world. His traffic being by no means with heaven, God, he supposed, had sent an angel to convert it. And he had succumbed through the angel's calling him—mother!

He struck his hollow breast with a wild laugh. He groaned over the memory of that emotional folly. He damned himself, his trade, his employer, his aching head—everything and every one, in short, but the author of his misery. Him he could not curse—not more than if that preposterous relationship between them had been real. Neither did he once dream of violating his word to him, since it had been given—absurd thought—to his child.

He was none the less savage against circumstance—vicious, desperate, insolent with his master, as cross all over as a Good Friday bun. Messer Lanti, himself in a curiously sober mood, indulged his most acrid sallies with a good-humoured tolerance which, contemptuously oblivious as it was of any late smart of his own inflicting, was harder than the blow itself in its implication of a fault overlooked.

'Rally, Cicca!' said he, as they were preparing to horse; 'look'st as sour as a green crab. What! if we are to ride with Folly, give us a fool's text for the journey, man.'

Cicada dwelt a moment on his stirrup, looking round banefully.

'And who to illustrate it, lord?'

'Why, thy lord, if thou wilt,' said Carlo. 'He will be no curmudgeon in a bid for laughter.'

The Fool gained his mule's saddle, and digging heels into the beast's flanks, drove forward. Lanti, with a whoop, spurred alongside of him. Cicada slowed to a stop.

'Hast overtaken Folly, master?' said he, with a leer. 'I knew you would not be long.'

Carlo scratched his head. The Fool turned and rode back; so did the other. By the brook-side little Bembo was preparing to mount a steed with which he had been accommodated, since the lady had peremptorily declined to ride pillion to him again. Cicada referred to him with a gesture.

'For us,' he said, 'we are two fools in a leash, sith Sanctity, stopping where he was, is at the goal before us.'

Lanti grumbled: 'O, if this is a text!' and beat his wits desperately.

'A text, sirrah!' he roared, 'a text for the journey.'

'I will rhyme it you,' said the Fool imperturbably, pointing his bauble at Madam Beatrice, who at the moment stepped from the green tent:—

'Nothing is gained to start apace,

After another hath won the race.

Shall you and I be jogging, master?'

Lanti raised his whip furiously. Cicada, slipping from his mule, dodged behind Bembo.

'Save me!' he squealed, 'save me! I am sound. It is folly to give a sound man a tonic.'

Carlo burst into a vexed laugh.

'Well,' said he, 'go to. I think I am in a rare mood for charity.'

The little party breakfasted on cups of clear water from the spring, and, in the fresh of the morning, folded its tents and started leisurely on the final stages of its journey. Madonna, lazy-lidded, sat her palfrey like a vine-goddess. Her bosom rose and fell in absolute tranquillity. She bestirred herself only, when Bembo rode near, to lavish ostentatious fondness on her Carlo, a regard which her Carlo repaid with a like ostentation of attention towards his little saint. It was an open conspiracy of souls, bared to one another, to justify their nakedness before heaven; only the woman carried off her shame with an air. Bernardo she ignored loftily; but her heart was busy, under all its calm exterior, with a poisonous point of vengeance.

Presently, the sun striking hot, she dismounted and withdrew into her litter, a miniature long waggon, drawn on rude wheels by a yoke of sleepy oxen, and having an embroidered tilt opening to the side. A groom, walking there in attendance, led her palfrey by the bridle. Lanti and his guest, with the Fool for company, rode a distance ahead. The young nobleman was thoughtful and silent; yet it was obvious that he, with the others, felt the relief of that secession. Bernardo broke into a bright laugh, and rallied Cicada on his glumness.

'Why should I be merry,' said the jester, with a sour face, 'when I was invited to a feast, and threatened with a cudgelling for attending?'

Bernardo looked at him lovingly. He thought this was some allusion to his self-enforced abstinence.

'Dear Cicca,' said he, 'the feast was not worth the reckoning.'

'O, was it not!' cried Cicada with a hoarse crow. 'But I spoke of my lord's brains, which, by the token, are the right flap-doodle.'

He put Bembo between himself and Lanti.

'Judge between us,' he cried, 'judge between us, Messer Parablist. He offered to serve himself up to me, and, when I had no more than opened my mouth, was already at my ribs.'

Carlo, on the further side, laughed loud.

'It is always the same here,' grumbled the Fool. 'They will have our stings drawn like snakes' before they will sport with us. They love not in this Italy the joke which tells against themselves—of that a poor motley must ware. It muzzles him, muzzles him—drives the poison down and in; and you wonder at the bile in my face!'

He fell back, having uttered his snarl, with politic suddenness, and posted to the rear of the litter. The moment he was away, Bembo turned upon his host with a kindling look of affection.

'I am glad to have thee alone one moment,' said he. 'O Carlo, dear! the base bright metal so to seduce thine eyes. Are they not opened?'

Now the tale of madam's discomfiture at her amoroso's hands the night before had not been long in reaching the boy's ears. She had not deigned, equally in confessing her predilections as her shame, to utter them out of the common hearing. Modesty in intrigue was a paradox; and, in any case, one could undress without emotion in the presence of one's dogs.

So Cicada, putting two and two together, had gathered the whole story, and given this spiritual bantling of his a hint as to his wise policy thereon, scarce a sentence of which had he uttered before he was casting down his eyes and mumbling inarticulate under the piercing gaze of an honesty which would have been even less effective had it spoken. Then had he slunk away, blessing all beatitudes whose innocence entailed such responsibilities on their worshippers; and, as a result, here was Master Truth taking his own course with the problem.

Messer Lanti's eyes opened indeed to hear truth so fearless; but he made an acrid face.

'On my soul!' he muttered, glistening, and stopped, and his brow was shadowed a moment under a devil's wing. Then suddenly, with an oath, he clapped spurs to his horse, and galloped a furlong, and, circling, came back at a trot, and falling again alongside, put a quite gentle hand on the boy's bridle arm.

'Dear, pretty Messer Truth,' said he, 'I pray you, on my sincerity, turn your horse's head. Whither, think you, are you making?'

'Why, for heaven, I hope, Carlo,' said the boy with a smile.

'Milan is not the gate to it,' answered the rough voice, quite entreatingly. 'Go back, I advise you. You will break your heart on the stones. Why, look here: dost think I am so concerned to have this intrigue proved the common stuff of passion? I care not the feather in thy cap, Bernardino. Nay, I am the better for it, sith it opens the way to a change. And so with ten thousand others. There is the measure of your task. Now, will you go back?'

'No, by my faith!'

Lanti growled, and grunted, and smacked his thigh.

'Then I cannot help thee: and yet I will help thee. Saint Ambrose! To remodel the world to goodwill, statecraft and all, on the lisp of a red mouth! Wilt be the fashion for just a year and a day, shouldering us, every one, poor gallants, to the wall? Why should I love thee for that? and I love thee nevertheless. There thou goest in a silken doublet, to whip all hell with a lute-string; and I—I had shown less temerity horsed and armoured, and with a whole roaring crusade at my back.'

Bembo smiled very kindly.

'Christ's love was all His sword and buckler,' said he.

'And He was crucified,' said Carlo grimly.

'And died a virgin,' answered the boy, 'that He might make for ever chaste Love His heir.'

'Well,' grumbled Lanti, 'there reigns an impostor these fourteen hundred years or so in His place, that's all. I hope the right heir may prove his title. 'Tis a long tenure to dispossess. Methinks men have forgotten.'

'Yes, they have forgotten,' said the boy; and he began to sing so sweetly as he rode, that the other, after a grunt or two, sunk into a mere grudging rapture of listening.

In the meantime, sombre and taciturn, the Fool rode in the rear. Before him hulked the great shoulders, stoppered with the little round head, of Narcisso, the groom who led Madonna's palfrey. Cicada, regarding this beauty, snarled out a laugh to himself. 'Sure never,' he thought, 'was parental fondness worse bestowed than in nicknaming such a satyr.' The creature's small, bony jaw, like a pike's, underhung, black-tufted, viciousness incarnate; his pursed, overlapping brow, with the dirty specks of eyes set fixedly in the under-hollows—in all, the mean smallness of his features, contrasted with the slouching, fleshly bulk below, suggested one of those antediluvian monsters, whose huge bodies and little mouths and throttles give one a sense of disproportion that is almost like an indecency. Nevertheless, Narcisso was madam's chosen attendant at her curtain side, where occasionally Cicada would detect some movement, or the shadow of one, which convinced him that the two were in stealthy communication. Indeed, he had posted himself where he was, with no other purpose than to watch for such a sign.

Once he saw the hem of the curtain lift ever so slightly, and Narcisso at the same instant respond, with a secret movement of his hand, towards the place. Something glittered momentarily, and was extinguished. Cicada stretched himself in his saddle, and began to whistle.

Presently he pushed ahead once more and joined his master. Opening with some jest, he led him away, and they fell into an amble together. Afterwards it was apparent to some of Messer Lanti's following that, as the morning advanced, their lord's brow darkened from its early rude frankness, and began to exhibit certain tokens of a wakening devil with which they had plenty of reason to be familiar. Perhaps he wanted his dinner. Perhaps the near-approaching termination of his summer idyll—for they were long now in the great Lombardy plain, and the towers of Milan were growing, low and small, out of the horizon—was depressing him. Anyhow, his first condescension was all gone by noon, when they halted, a league short of the city, to rest and dine at the 'Angel and Tower,' a prosperous inn of the suburbs set among mellowing vineyards.

Of all the company Bernardo was perhaps the only one unconscious of the threatening atmosphere. Wonderful thoughts were kindling in him at the near prospect of this, the goal to all his hopes and ambitions. Milan! It was Milan at last—the capital of his promised estate of love. Blue and small, swimming far away in the sun mists of the plains, he felt that he could clasp it all in his arms, and carry it to the foot of the Throne. His eyes brightened with clear tears: this salvage of the dark, dead ages reclaimed to God! 'Domine!' he exclaimed in ecstasy, clasping his hands: 'Emitte lucem tuam et veritatem tuam! O Lord, touch mine eyes, that they may penetrate even where Thy light shineth like a glow-worm in deep mosses!'

Carlo roughly shouted him to their meal. His heart was throbbing with an emotional rapture as he obeyed. The table was served in a trellised alley, under hanging stalactites of grapes. Beatrice flagged on a bench at the end of the board, her shoulders sunk into a bower all crushed of sunshine and green shadows. It was the vine-goddess come home, soft, sensual, making a lust of fatigue. Her lids were half-closed; her teeth showed in a small, indolent smile; light, reflected from the purple clusters, slept on the warm ivory of her skin. Bernardo, coming opposite her, stood transfixed before a vision of such utter animal loveliness. His breath seemed to mount quicker as he gazed. Carlo drummed on the board, where he sat hunched over it. Looking from one to the other, he puffed out a little ironic laugh.

'Wonderest what is passing there, boy?' said he. 'Wilt never know. Not a hair would she turn though, like Althea, she were to find herself in child with a firebrand.'

Bernardo lowered his eyes with a blush.

'Nay,' said he, 'my thoughts of Madonna were more tempered. I coveted only her beauty for heaven.'

'Anon, Messer, anon!' cried the other banteringly: 'be not so free with my property. I hold her yet about the waist, seest, with a silver fetter? If there be a prior claim to mine——'

'Ay, Chastity's,' put in the boy.

Lanti hooted.

'Tempt her, if thou wilt, with such a suitor. She will follow him as she would the hangman. Wilt throw off thy belt, Beatrice? I gave a thousand scudi for it. See what Chastity here will offer thee in its room.'

'I will answer, if I may examine it,' said Bembo gravely. 'Will you tell her to unclasp it, Carlo, and let me look? I see it is all hinged of antique coins. There was a Father at San Zeno collected such things.'

'What, ladies' girdles!'

'Now, Carlo! you know I mean the coins. Methinks I recognise a text in one of them.'

Beatrice shrugged her shoulders, with a little yawn expressive of intolerable boredom.

'Well,' quoth Lanti impatiently, 'let him see it, you and he shall parable us for grace to meat, while these laggard dogs'—he looked over his shoulder, growling for his dinner.

Beatrice unclasped the cincture without a word, and flung it indifferently across the table. She had lain as impassive throughout her own discussing by the others as a slave being negotiated in a market. Not a tremor of her eyelids had acknowledged either her lord's rudeness or Bembo's provisional compliment.

The boy took up the belt and examined it. He was conscious of a sweet perfume that had come into his hands with the trinket. His lips were parted a little, his cheeks flushed. Presently he put it down softly, and looked across at Beatrice.

'It is what I thought,' said he—'the coin, I mean—a denarius of Tiberius, in the thirty-first year of Our Lord Shall I tell you what it says to me, Madonna?'

She did not take the trouble to answer.

'Yes,' roared Carlo.

Bembo slung his lute to the front, and began coaxing forth one of those odd, shy accompaniments of his, into which, a moment later, his voice melted:—

'When Tiberius was Emperor,

For thirty silver pieces bearing his image

Did Judas betray his Lord;

Then, himself betrayed to blood-guilt, cast them ringing

On the flags of the Temple, and maddened forth and died.

But the Jew elders eyed askance

The sleek, round coins, accurst and yet no whit

Depreciated as currency,

And ogling them and each other, were silent, till one spoke:

"Ill come; well sped. We need a place to bury the dead.

Let the Potter take these, and in return

Change us his field, o'er which we long have haggled.

So shall this outlay bring us two-fold profit,

Yet leave us conscience-clean before the Lord."

Thus, gentles dear, was bought "The Field of Blood";

And thus the wicked, damned price returned

Into the veins of traffic, there to circulate

And poison where it ran.

One piece found Hope, and changed was for Despair;

And Charity one led to hoard for self;

And one reached Faith, and Faith became a whore.

But, most of all, what had betrayed Love sore,

Sweet Love was used to betray for evermore.'

His voice broke on a long-drawn wailing chord. A little silence succeeded. Then, like one spent, he took up the belt and offered it to Beatrice.

'O Madonna!' he said, 'it is a denarius of the Cæsar that betrayed Love. Take back thy wages.'

She dragged down a spray of vine-leaves, and fanned herself furiously with it, making no other response.

'So! I am Judas!' cried Carlo; and began to bite his moustache, mouthing and glowering.

'Love!' he sputtered, 'love! Is there no love in nature? You talk of the human God, you——'

Beatrice broke in scornfully:—

'It is the world-wisdom of the monastery. He shall sing you love only by the Litany. His queen shall be a virgin immaculate, and her bosom a shrine for the white lambs of chastity to fold in. A fine proselyte for passion's understanding! I would not be so converted for all Palestine.'

Carlo laughed, with some fierce recovery to good-humour.

'Hearest her, Bernardo? Thou shalt not prevail there, unless by convincing that thou speak'st from experience.'

Bembo had sunk down upon the bench, where, resting languidly, he still fingered the strings of his lute. Now suddenly, steadfastly, he looked across at the girl, and began to sing again:—

'Love kept me an hour

From all hours that pass;

In her breast, like a flower,

She stored it, sweet, fragrant,

Of all time the vagrant,

Alas, and alas!

Of all time the flower,

Of all hours that pass,

For me was that hour,

When I cared claim it,

And kiss it and shame it,

Alas, and alas!

I dared not, sweet hour—

I let thee go pass;

And heaven is my dower.

My crown is stars seven:

I am a saint in heaven,

Alas, and alas!'

He never took his eyes, while he sang, off the wondering face opposite him. It was strangely transformed by the end—flesh startled out of ivory—the face of a wakened Galatea. Narcisso coming at the moment to place the first dishes of the meal before the company, she sat up, her hands to her bosom, with a quick, agitated movement.

'It is well,' she said. 'I am thy convert, saint in heaven!' She lifted the dish before her, and held it out with a nervous smile. 'Let us exchange pledges, by the token. Give me thy meat, and take mine.'

Carlo, watching and listening, knitted his brow in a sudden frown, and his hand stole down to his belt.

'Give me thy dish,' said Beatrice, almost with entreaty.

Bernardo laughed. With the finish of his madrigal he had pushed his lute, in a hurry of pink shame, to his shoulder.

'Nay, Madonna,' he protested. 'Like the simplest doctor, I but spoke my qualifications. Feeling is half-way to curing, and the best recommended physician is he who hath practised on himself. I ask no reward but thy forbearance.'

'Give it me,' she still said. She was on her feet. She kissed the rim of the dish. 'Wilt thou refuse now? Bid him to, Carlo.'

'Not I,' said Lanti. 'Hath not, no more than myself, been whipped into the classics for nothing? Quod ali cibus est aliis fuat acre venenum. We know what that means, he and I.'

She seemed to turn very pale.

'Nay,' said Bernardo, jumping up, 'if Madonna condescends?' and the exchange was made, and the men fell to.

In a moment or two Lanti looked up.

'What ails thee, Beatrice?'

'I am not hungry.'

The word had scarcely left her lips before, leaping to his feet, and sprawling across the table, he had snatched the untasted dish from under her hands, turned, and dashed it with its contents full in the face of Narcisso, who waited, with others, behind. Fouled, bleeding, half-stunned, the man crashed down in a heap, and in the same instant his master was upon him, poniard in hand.

'Confess, wretch, before I kill thee!' he roared. 'It was meant for my guest! Thou wouldst have poisoned him.'

'Mercy!' shrieked the creature, through his filthy mask. 'O lord, mercy!'

The girl, risen in her place, stood panting as if she had been running. She had voice no more than to gasp across, 'Bernardo! For the love of God! Bernardo!' and that was all.

'No mercy, beast!' thundered Carlo. 'Down with thee to hell unshriven!'

His strenuous lifted arm was caught in a baby grasp.

'Carlo! forbear! The right is mine! Give me the knife! Nay, I am the stronger!'

With the blood-lust halted in him for one moment, the powerful creature turned upon his puny assailant with a roar:—

'The stronger! Thou!'

Nevertheless he rose, though he held the reptile crushed under his foot, while the company, landlord and all, stood huddled aghast. His breast was heaving like the pulse of a volcano.

'The knife!' he gurgled hoarsely; 'well, the right is thine, as thou sayest. Take it—under with thee, dog!—and drive in.'

Bembo seized and flung the dagger into the thick of the vines; then threw himself on his knees, and, with all his strength, tore the heavy foot from its victim.

'Narcisso,' he said, 'is it true? wouldst have slain Love! Ah, fool, not to know that Love is immortal!'

'Now, Christ in heaven,' roared Carlo, 'if that shall save him!'

Bernardo rose, and sprang, and cast himself upon his breast, writhing his limbs about him.

'Fly!' he shrieked, 'fly! while I hold him!' Then to Lanti: 'Ah, dear, do not hurt me, who owe thee so much!'

The fallen scoundrel was quick to the opportunity. He rose and fled, bloody and bemired, from the arbour. Madonna, seeing him escape, sunk, with a fainting sigh, upon her bench.

Carlo mouthed after his vanishing prey; yet he was tender with his burden.

'Love!' he groaned: 'Thou ow'st me? Not this—so damned to folly! There, let go. He was but the tool—and, for the rest——'

He glowered round.

'Hush!' said Bembo. 'It is but the fruits of her teaching. Blame not thy pupil, Carlo.'

'My pupil!'

'Is she Christ's—or art thou? Love gives life, Carlo; and all life is God's, since Christ redeemed it.'

'What then?'

'Why, is not thine honour thy life?'

'I would die at least to prove it.'

'Alas! and thou hast dishonoured love, which is life, which is God's. Wouldst eat thy cake and have it, great schoolboy?'

'Pish! Art beyond me.'

'Why, if love is life, and life is honour—ergo, love is honour.'

'Is it? I dare say.'

'But thou must know it.'

'I know nothing but that thou hast balked my vengeance; and with that, and having exercised thy jaw, let us go back to dinner.'

'Domine, emitte tuam lucem!' sighed Bembo.

CHAPTER IV

Galeazzo Maria Sforza, third Duke of Milan of his line, was very characteristically engaged in a very characteristic room of his resplendent castello of the Porta Giovia, which dominated the whole city from the north-east. This room, buried like a captivating lust in the heart of the Rocca, or inner citadel of the castello, swarmed with those deft procurers to the great, panders between Art and emotion, who are satisfied, by contributing, each his share, to the glorification of a sensual despotism, to partake a rediffused flavour of its sum. They were poets, painters, and musicians, sculptors and learned doctors, and every one, despite his independent calling, a sycophant. Before the power, central and paramount, which alone in their particular orbit could amass within itself the total of their lesser lights, they prostrated themselves as before a God. It is so in all ages of man. He will contribute, of choice, to the prosperous charity; he will lay his gifts at the opulent shrine. The worldling, says Shakespeare, makes his testament of more to much. 'Ah! c'est le plus grand roi du monde!' once cried Madame de Sévigné of Louis XIV., who had danced with her. 'He is the finest gentleman I have ever seen!' cried Johnson enthusiastically at a later date, after an interview with Farmer George; and though—perhaps because—the stout old Colossus was as independent as reason itself, he spoke the general moral. Professors were here, too, who did not blush to proclaim the exalted scion of Condottieri, the blood-lusting monster, the infernal atavism of Caligula, for the first gentleman in Italy, or to prostitute their erudition in his service.

It was Madonna Beatrice who had drawn that analogy, and there was plenty of justification for it; as also, it must be said, plenty of more immediate precedent for the abominations of this Galeazzo. If, like the grand-matricidal Roman, he had poisoned his mother, the Visconti, his predecessors, with their atrocious blood-profanations and exaltations of bastardy, were responsible for the conditions which had made so dreadful an act conceivable. If, emulating Caligula's treatment of frail vestals, he had buried alive some too-accommodating virgin of the cloister, whom he had first debauched, he could quote the Visconti precedent of carnality indulged till it became a very ecstasy of fiend-possession. Between old Rome and modern Milan, indeed, there was little to prefer. Caligula used to throw spectators in the theatres to the beasts, having first torn out the tongues of his victims, lest his ears should be offended by their articulate appeals. Bernabo Visconti and his brother, with whom he shared the duchy, agreed upon an edict subjecting State criminals to a scale of tortures which was calculated to culminate in death in not less than forty days. Giovanni Maria and Filippo Maria, last of the accursed race, organised man-hunts in the streets of their capitals, and fed their hounds on human flesh.

To starve his victims to death, and, when they complained (it was an age of practical jokes), to stuff their mouths with filth, was a pet sport with Galeazzo. Once, for a wretch who had killed a hare, a crime unpardonable, he procured a death of laughable, unspeakable torment by forcing him to devour the animal, bones and fur and all.

It is enough. They were all madmen, in fact, moral abortions of that 'breeding-in' of demi-gods which sows the world with chimeras. It is not good for any man to be subject to no government but his own, and least of all when a vicious heredity has imposed a sickness on his reason. Blood affinities on the near side of incest, power unquestioned, unbridled self-indulgences—these are no progenitors of temperance and liberality. Amongst savages, generations of inter-marryings will but refine exquisitely on savagery; and the despots of this era were little more than the last expressions of a decadent barbarism. Galeazzo, and such as Galeazzo, were, it is true, to project the long shadows of their lusts and cruelties over the times forthcoming; yet it is as certain that with him the limits of the worst were reached, and hereafter peoples and rulers were to grow to some common accord of participation in the enlightenments of their ages.

One might have fancied in him, in his apparent reachings to foreclose on such a state, to appropriate to himself not its moral but its material accessories, some uneasy premonition of the truth. He stood on the line of partition, his sympathies with the past, his greed for the opulent future, and, hesitating, was presently to drop between. That paradox of the lusts of savagery and the lusts of intellect hobnobbing in the individual, which characterised so many of his contemporaries, cried aloud in him. He was superstitious and a sceptic. Like Malatesta of Rimini—who could enshrine beneath the shadow of one glorious church the bones of a favourite mistress and those of an admired heathen philosopher which he had brought expressly from Greece for the purpose—he would make a compromise between Paganism and Christianity. He worshipped God and the devil, as if his arrogance halted at nothing short of reconciling two equal but antagonistic powers. He surrounded himself with monks and infidels; acclaimed impartially an illuminated psalter or a painting for a bagnio, a Roman canticle or a hymn to the Paphian Venus; sobbed in the soft throbbings of a lute, and went sobbing to witness a captive's torturing; conceived himself an enlightened patron of the arts, and, in a mad caprice, ordered his craftsmen, under penalty of instant death, to paint and hang with portraits of the ducal family in a single night a hall of the castello. He groped and grovelled in bestiality; founded a library and peopled a university with erudition; encouraged profligacy and printing; was covetous and lavish, and splendid as the clusters of diamonds on a Jewess's unclean fingers. His palaces swarmed with cutthroats and physicians, philosophers and empirics, pimps and theologians, heaven-commissioned artists and pope-commissioned agents for indulgences, who would sell one absolution beforehand for the foulest excesses in lust or violence. His crowded halls were the very stage of the ante-renaissance, where the priest, the poisoner, the romantic hero and the sordid villain, the flaunting doxy and the white dove of innocence, rubbed shoulders with the scene-painter and conductor in a disordered rehearsal of the melodrama to come. And so we alight on him in this Rocca, sinister and lonely, the protagonist of the piece to which he was in a little to supply the most tragic dénouement.

He lay sunk back in pillows on a couch set in an alcove high and apart. One long, jewelled hand caressed the head of a boarhound. Judged by the swift code of his times, he was already mature, a sage of thirty-one. His eyes were small and deep-seated under gloomy thatches, his forehead narrow and receding, his cheeks ravenous, his nose was hooked. But in contrast with this pinched hunger of feature were the bagging chin and sensual neck, as well as the grossness of the body, which attenuated into feeble legs. One could not look on him and gather from crown to foot the assurance of a single generous youthful impulse. The curse of an inherited despotism had wrinkled him from his birth.

An effeminate luxury, which was presently to make Milan a byword among the austerer principalities, spoke in his dress. His short-skirted tunic, puff-shouldered, and pinched and pleated at the waist within a gem-encrusted girdle, was of Damascene silk, rose-coloured and lined with costliest fur. His hose were of white satin; his slippers, of crimson velvet, sparkled with rosettes of diamonds and rubies. On his head he wore a cap of maintenance, also of red velvet, and sewn with pearls; and a short jewelled dagger hung at his waist.

By his side, a very foil to his magnificence, stood one in a sad-coloured cloak. This was Lascaris, a Greek professor, whom he had invited to Milan for his learning, and used, like Pharaoh, to expound him his dreams. For he was subject to evil dreams, was this Galeazzo—hauntings and visions which wrought in him that state that he would become a very madman if so little as the shadow of an opposition crossed his imagination. And even now such a mood was working in him, as he lounged darkly conning the life of the hall from his eyrie.

That was a deep, semi-domed alcove, approached from the main chamber by a short avenue of square-sided pillars, and roofed with a mosaic of ultramarine and gold, into which were wrought the arms of the Sforzas and Viscontis, the lilies of France and the red cross of Savoy. Entablatures of white marble carved into bas-reliefs filled the inter-columniations of this approach; while the pillars themselves, of dark green panels inlaid on white, were sprayed and flowered with exquisite mouldings in gold. The capitals, blossoming crowns of gilt foliage and marble faces, supported a white cornice, which at the alcove's mouth ran down into twin fluted shafts, between which rose a shallow flight of steps to a sort of dais or shrine within. And thence, from a carved marble bench, Galeazzo looked down on the soft surging motley of the throng in the hall below.

Every sound there was instinctively subdued to the occasion: the laughter of girls, the thrum of lutes, the ring of steel and rustle of silk. Not so much as a misdirected glance, even, would venture to appropriate to the company's cynic merriment the figure of a solitary captive, who stood bound and guarded at the foot of the dais. Yet it was plain that this captive felt the enforced forbearance, and mocked it with a bitterer cynicism than its own.

He was a small, ill-formed, harsh-featured man, very soberly dressed, and with a cropped head—a feature sufficiently disdainful of the bushed and elaborately waved locks of those by whom he was surrounded. Lean-throated and short-sighted, his face was a face to scorn falsehood without loving truth, a face the mouthpiece of dead languages for dead languages' sake, a face the contemner of the present just because it was the present and alive. As he stood, loweringly phlegmatic as any caged hate, his peering eyes and snarling lip would occasionally lift themselves together, not towards the glittering lord of destinies on the dais, but towards his henchman, the Greek, who would answer the challenge with a stare of serene and opulent contempt. And so a long interval of silence held them opposed.

Suddenly the Duke stirred from his black reverie, his lips sputtering little inarticulate blasphemies. His knee peevishly dismissing the hound, he gripped an arm of the bench, and turning gloomily on Lascaris, uttered the one impatient word, 'Well?'

The Greek, temporising for the moment, inclined his smooth, black-bearded face, so that the oily essence on his hair, which was foppishly crimped and snooded, was wafted to the Sforza nostrils, offending their delicacy. Galeazzo, momentarily repelled, rallied to a harsher frown, and demanded: 'The fruit, man, the fruit of all this meditation? Jesu! it should be rotten-ripe by its smell!'

Lascaris expanded his chest, unoffended, and, caressing his beard, answered impassively:—

'Thou questionest of this vision, Theosutos? I answer, How many changes can be rung on a carillon of eight bells? By such measure shalt thou imagine, an thou canst, the changes possible to the myriad of particles that go to the composition of a single human eye. Now, in the unthinkable dispersements and readjustments of Infinity, shall it not sometimes happen that two particles, or two thousand particles, or two billion particles, out of the sum of particles which were that eye, shall chance together again, and recover, because of that meeting, some very ancient, very remote impression which they once absorbed in common? These, Theosutos, be the ghosts, haphazard, indefinable, visible to one and unseen of all the rest, which make the solitary seer; these be the lonely hauntings of the ages—dust blown over desolate places, to commingle a moment at some cross roads, and weave a phantom wreath of memory, and so again be cast and scattered among the cycles. Thy vision is but a shadow of old dead years.'

An ill-repressed stutter of laughter from the prisoner at the foot of the steps greeted the finish of this exegesis. Lascaris flushed scarcely perceptibly. The Duke took no more notice of man or sound than he would have of a whimpering dog. Once or twice he stammered an oath, gnawing his finger, and frowning up, and down, and up again at the Greek. Finally he broke out, in a fury:—

'Now, by the Host, thou consolest me—now, by the Host! To reconcile to this spectre by arguing it perpetual! To——'

Grinding his teeth, he clipped his long fingers on the bench arm, as if he were about to spring. Lascaris forestalled him with a placid word:—

'Not perpetual. The mood invokes these shadows, as the mood shall lay them.'

Galeazzo snarled.

'The mood! What mood, fool? You shift and shift. God! it will be the mood of the mood next. Hast thou no master-key to all? Go to, then!'

He sank back into his cushions, glooming and panting. The sleek olive mask of the face near him yielded no sign of perturbation.

Gradually a very deadly expression came to usurp in the Duke's eyes that blinder madness of desperation. An indolent smile relaxed his features. He yawned, it was because, the soul horror being temporarily withdrawn, the incontinent devil was supplanting in him the tempestuous one. He rolled lazily about, addressing his creature once more:—

'You doctors—all the same! Big words to little cures. Treat a State's constitution or a man's—'tis the word's the thing. Ye woo not the truth, but her raiment. Hear'st me? I had a tutor once, a crabbed fellow called Montano.'

He yawned again. The prisoner below (Cola Montano himself) gasped slightly, and shot one stealthy glance his way. Lascaris sniggered.

'Surely, lord,' he said, 'we need no reminding while the man himself keeps his tongue.'

A half-suppressed snarl broke from the prisoner. Galeazzo, hunched on his cushions, stared vacantly before him.

'Ah!' he said, 'he could talk. I remember him, a midwife to the wind—as ye all be—as ye all be. What of the fellow?'

Lascaris wondered.

'Little, in truth, Magnificence, save in so far as your Magnificence was pleased to introduce his name.'

'Did I? I had forgot. What was the connection? Empty words, was it not, and vainglory and presumption?'

'And discontent. Add it thereto, Illustrious.'

'Discontent? Of what? The man prospers, I understand, on his school of all the virtues. Discontent? Why, hath he not risen to that independence of power that he dares lampoon his prince? Discontent?'

'Like Alexander, thou standest in his light, Theosutos.'

'Discontent?'

'Ay, that he should be twitted with having schooled a despot.'

'Why, true; he taught me how to score a lesson with a scourge. My shoulders could tell.'

'Gods! did he dare?'

'He dared. 'Twas a fellow of Roman mettle.'

'He would dare more now.'

'What?'

'A republic, so they say.'

'Ah! he should be the man for visions—a seer, an exorcist.'

'Short-sighted for a seer, Illustrious. The man cannot see the length of his own nose.'

'Yet may he see far. I would he were here.'

The prisoner, wrought at last beyond self-control, turned on the Greek and squirted a little shriek of venom—

'Yet through and through thee, thou loathsome, envious pimp!'

Then he whipped upon the other—

'And why not a republic, Galeazzo? Thy father Francesco was a republican at heart, else had he never given his son's leading-strings into my hands. There was a confederacy dreamed of in his day—Genoa, Milan, and Venice; Florence, Sienna, and Bologna. One rampart to the rolling Alps, one wall on which barbarian hordes might burst and waste themselves in foam. Northwards, a baffled sea; south, all Italy a tranquil haven, a watered garden, where knowledge with all its flowers should find space, and breathing-space to grow. Dost thou love Italy? Then why not a republic, Galeazzo?'

The Duke, as utterly impassive as if he were deaf, turned musingly to Lascaris.

'I heard one talk once,' said he, 'of a confederacy of republics, as who should say, An army all serfs. Words! The tails must obey the heads. Every ox knows it.'

'Saving the frog-ox,' giggled the Greek, 'who bursts himself in emulation.'

'Ah!' murmured the Duke, 'the frog-ox: see us tickle his self-puffery.'

He feigned to catch sight all at once of Montano. His eyes opened wide in astonishment: he held out his hands.

'What!' he cried, 'the man of visions! the very man! Come hither, old friend. I was but now speaking of thee.'

His guards permitting him, Montano sullenly mounted the steps, and stood facing the tyrant. His arms hung very plainly fettered before him; but the other never took his languid, smiling eyes from his face.

'Galeazzo,' said the scholar, harsh and quick, 'I did not write the epigrams; but no matter. You seek to make an example; I submit myself. It is the despot's part to lay hands on order and sobriety. Despatch, then. Thou wilt serve my ends better than thine own. Every blow to freedom is a link gone from thy mail.'

The Duke listened to him as if in bland wonder.

'Epigrams! An example!' he exclaimed. 'O, surely there is some mistake here.'

The thick brows of the prisoner contracted over his leaden eyes. He set his teeth, breathing between them. Galeazzo appealed to Lascaris:—

'Know'st aught of this?'

The Greek shook his head ineffably, licking his lips.

'No,' said Galeazzo, 'nor is it conceivable that my old friend and reprover should condescend to that meaner scourge. Jesu! for one of his learning and condition to incur the fate of the common lampooner. Why, I mind me how one was invited to a ragout minced of his own tongue.'

'Yes, Illustrious.'

'And another to having his couplets scored in steel on the soles of his feet.'

'Yes, Illustrious.'

'And yet another to boiling eggs under his arm-pits, since he was clever at hatching those winged epigrams'—he turned smoothly again to the tutor—'but not clever, as thou art, at reforming constitutions.'

He fell back, with a sleek and hateful smile; then, sighing suddenly, advanced his body again.

'I am troubled, Montano, I am troubled, and, since you chance to be here——'

He yielded the explanation to Lascaris.

'I weary of relating. Tell him of my symptoms, thou'—and he sunk once more into his cushions.

The Greek diagnosed, his shifty eyes refusing to encounter the hard inquisition of the other's:—

'His Magnificence is of late ever conscious of a face behind him, mournful and threatening. And still, if he turns to challenge it, it is behind him; and still behind, maddening him with a thought of something he can never overtake.'

Galeazzo fixed his burning eyes on the prisoner, as if, through all his mockery, the hunger of a hopeless hope betrayed his soul.

'Canst thou strike it away,' he whispered hoarsely, 'or at least tell me what it is?'

Montano growled:—

'Ghosts, and dead years, and eye-particles! This trash of pseudo-science—a saltimbanco braying in a doctor's skin! Less licence, Galeazzo, and more exercise—'tis all contained in that. This vision is but a swimming blot of bile.'

He was really half-deceived, half-convinced. The Duke seemed to listen reassured, then slowly rose, and, with an ingratiatory smile, patted his erst tutor's shoulder.

'Old honest friend,' he said, 'and ever true to the Roman in thee! Thou hast spoken as one might expect. Bile, is it—bile? and little wonder in this upset of constitutions. Ebbene! we will take instant means to throw it off.'

He made a sign to the chief of the guard below.

'Andrea!'

Lascaris slunk back with a little gloating smile. The officer brought up his men about Montano. The Duke murmured softly:—

'Take good Messer Cola, and—' he paused a little, gazing winningly into his captive's surprised, splenetic face—'and have him soundly flogged before the gate-house—to the bone, Andrea, tell Messer Jacopo.'

Before the luring treachery of this stroke the prisoner stood for one moment shocked, aghast. The next, as the guard seized him, he broke into a storm of vituperations and blasphemies, calling upon all the gods of Rome to protect him from a monster. Andrea crushed his mailed hand down on his writhing lips; he was dragged away struggling and screaming. As he disappeared Galeazzo descended mincingly to the hall, bent on pursuing the show. A cloud of courtiers, male and female flocked, like rooks following a plough, in his wake. As he left the citadel and was crossing the outer ward, two ladies—one a young woman in her late twenties; the other a slim, pale girl of thirteen—broke from a group of attendants, and came, wreathed in one embrace, to accost him. The elder, looking in his face with a certain questioning anxiety, spoke him with a propitiatory smile and sigh:—

'Galeazino, O thou little sweetest burden on my heart!'

The endearment was really an inquiry, a warning; for there was a foreboding madness in his eyes. He made as if he would have struck her from his path. Her child companion caught his wrist with a merry cry:—

'My little father, whither sportest thou without thy women?'

He changed the direction of his hand and flipped the younger's cheek.

'Come, then, chuck,' said he. 'There is a frolic toward that will speed an idle hour.'

She caught up her skirts and followed him, as did the other, but less closely.

The gatehouse commanded from its battlements an open panorama of the town as far as the piazza of the duomo. Immediately to its front, in a bare extended space, stood the whipping-post, a stout beam set on end on a stage and furnished with hooks and chains. Already on the ground beside this (by preconcerted arrangement indeed) was a certain functionary, much respected of Milan. This was Messer Jacopo, the high court executioner—one, by virtue of his dealings in blood, almost on an equality with the master herald himself. Immobile and voiceless, he stood there like a model in an armoury. A short shirt of mail, and over it a scarlet jerkin with a plain dagger at the waist; hose of sober grey; a bonnet and shoes of black velvet, the first adorned with a red quill, the second with red rosettes; gorget and steel gauntlets—such was the whole of Messer Jacopo, save for the wooden, inessential detail of his face and its fixed eyes of glass. There was something painfully human, by contrast, in his understrappers, two or three of whom stood at hand in leathern aprons—men of a rich, moist physique and greasy palms, and jocund, slaughter-house expression. These were on bantering terms with the mob, with all that loose raff of the neighbourhood, which had come streaming and pushing and chattering to witness the sport. It was not often that the rats of the quarter Giovia had a master of philosophy to desert.

They had not long to wait. Almost simultaneously a little surging group appeared at the gates, and a throng of gay heads above the ramparts. The jostle and delighted whisper went among the crowd. What proportion would the scourging of a prince's tutor bear to the punishment it avenged? It surely would not be allowed to lose by procrastination. They craned their necks to catch an early sight of the victim. One of the assistants whipped experimentally through his fingers a thick, cruel thong of bullock-hide. It clacked a dry tongue.

'Be quiet, thirsty one,' he cried boisterously. 'In a moment thou shalt drink thyself to a sop.'

Up on the ramparts the ladies, with bright, inquisitive eyes, stood by their lord. The girl Catherine, petted love-child of her father, hugged confidingly to his arm.

'Padre mio,' she said, 'how sweet the world looks from here! I could fancy we were all Lazaruses, laughing down on that wicked Dives!'