CHAPTER II
They travelled on till sundown through the green plains; and, for one good hour dating from their start, not a word would Madam Beatrice utter. Then she gave out—Messer Carlo being a distance in advance—but with no grace at all.
'You are an ill horseman, Saint. I am near jogged from my seat.'
'Put thine arms about me.'
'Nay, I am not holy enough.'
She was silent again, for five minutes.
'Your lute bangs my nose.'
He shifted it. She held her peace during two minutes.
'Who taught you to play it, Saint?'
'It was one of the fathers. What would it profit you to know which?'
'Nothing at all. I trow he was a good master to that and your gospel.'
'My gospel?'
'Ay, of love. He has made you worldly-wise for a saint. Hast ever before been beyond thy walls?'
'Of course.'
'And studied this and that? Experience, methinks is the right nurse for such a creed. What made you accuse me of dishonour?'
'I did not.'
'Nay, is that to be a saint?'
'Whom the shoe fits, let her wear it.'
'Bernardo! Where got you the shoe?'
'Does it fit, I say?'
'I fear me 'twas in some bagnio.'
'Where you had dropped it? For shame!'
A rather long pause.
'I will not be angry—just yet. Where got you the shoe, I say? An eavesdropper is well equipped for a prophet.'
'I am no eavesdropper.'
'Who enlightened you?'
'Your cicisbeo.'
'Under that title?'
'Nay; it is not the devil's policy to call himself devil.'
A shorter pause.
'But you had heard of me?'
'Nothing escapes the Church's hearing. Besides, Messer Lanti's summer lodge is within call, one may say of San Zeno.'
'You are daring. Dost know in what high favour he stands with the Duke?'
'Else how could he have compassed Uriah's dismissal to the wars?'
Silence, and then a sigh.
'Whom do you mean by Uriah?'
'Thy lord, the Count of Casa Caprona.'
'He is a soldier, and an old man.'
'Didst covenant with his age in thy marriage vows?'
'Bernardino, I am very sleepy.'
'Sleep, then, and forget thyself, and awake, another.'
She sighed, and put her arms softly about him and her cheek against his shoulder. Messer Lanti, falling back, saw her thus, with closed eyes; and laughed, and then frowned, and cried boisterously—
'Hast converted her, Parablist? Art a saint indeed?'
He spurred forward again, with a discontented look, and madam opened her eyes.
'What gossips are thine old monks, Bernardino; and what hypocrites, denouncing the licence they example!'
'I know not what you mean.'
'Are they all saints, then, in San Zeno?'
'That is for Rome to say. It is a good law which lays down this wine of sanctity to mature. In a hundred years we shall know what stood the test.'
'Ah me! And I am but seventeen. Will you speak for your Abbot?'
'Ay, like a dear son.'
'Is he your father, Bernardo?'
'Is he not the father of us all?'
'Maybe. But 'tis of Benjamin I ask. Now, he is a strange father, methinks, to bid his Benjamin, thus apparelled, on a wild goose chase.'
'He could not discount the voices.'
'What voices?'
The boy lifted his face and eyes to the heavens, and lowered them again with no answer but a sigh of rapture.
'So? And did the voices bid thee wear a velvet mantlet and roses to thy shoes?' whispered the girl, with a tiny chuckle.
'They said, "Not in cockle shells, but a plume, goes the Pilgrim of Love,"' answered Bembo. 'As I am and have been, God finds me fitting in His sight.'
'And the Father Abbot, I wot?'
'Yes: "Since," says he, "Christ bequeathed His Kingdom to beauty."'
'And you have inherited it? I think I will be your subject, Bernardo.'
'I hope so, Madonna.'
He spoke perfectly gravely, and made her a little courtly gesture backwards.
'Well,' said she, 'had I been Father Abbot, I had put this pet of my fancy in a cage.'
'You know not of what you speak,' he answered seriously. 'God works great ends with little instruments. The puny bee is yet the very fairy midwife of the forests, I should have broke my heart had he denied me.'
'It would have saved others, alack!'
'What do you mean?'
'Nothing at all. Will you sing me another parable, Bernardo?'
'Ay, Madonna; and on what subject? The woman taken in adultery?'
'If you like; and whom Christ forgave.'
'And He said: "Go, and sin no more"'
She began to weep softly.
'It is shocking to be so abused for a little thing. I would you were back with your monks.'
He sighed.
'Ah!' she murmured, still weeping, 'that this bee had been content to remain a pander to his flowers! To dup hell's door with a reed! You know not to what you have engaged yourself, my poor boy.'
'To Christ, His service of Love,' he said simply.
'Go back, go back!' she cried in pain. 'There are ten thousand sophisters to interpret that word according to their lusts. Convert Galeazzo? Convert the brimstone lake from burning! Dost know the manner of man he is?'
'Else why am I here?'
'Ay, but his moods, his passions, his nameless, shameless deeds? He hath no pity but for his desires; no mercy but through his caprices. To cross him is to taste the rack, the fire, the living burial. He is possessed. Some believe him Caligula reincarnate—an atavism of that dreadful stock. And dost think to quench that furnace with a parable? Unless, indeed—Go back, little Bembo, and waste thy passion for reform on thy monks.'
'Madonna,' he said, 'I obey the voices. I shall not be let to perish, since Christ died to save His world to loveliness.'
It was the early rapture of the renaissance, penetrating like an April song into these newly reclaimed lands. The wind blew from Florence, and all the peaceful vales, so long trodden into a bloody mire, were awakening to the ecstasy of the Promise. That men interpreted according to their lights—lights burning fast and passionate in most places, but in a few quiet and holy. The breed of German bandits, of foreign mercenaries, was swept away. Gone was the whole warring race of the Visconti, and in its place the peasant Sforza had set a guard about the land of his fierce adoption, that he might till and graft and prosper in peace. Italy had asserted itself the inheritance of its children, the Court of God's Vicegerent, the chosen land of Love's gospel. That, too, men interpreted according to their lights. 'We are all the vineyard of Rome,' said the little Parablist. Alas! he thought Rome the Holy of Holies, and his father a saint. But his father, who adored him, had committed him, with his blessing, to this mad romance! Such were the paradoxes of the Gospel of Love.
Beatrice spoke no more, and they rode on in silence. About evening they came into a pleasant dell, where there was a level sward among rocks; and a little stream, running down a stairway of stones, dropped laughing, like a child going to bed, into the quiet of a rushy pool. Great chestnuts clothed the slopes, and made a mantle, powdered with stars, to the setting sun. It was a very nest for love.
Messer Lanti, halting, commanded the green tents to be pitched on the grass. Then, with a stormy scowl and a mockery of courtesy, he came to dismount his lady.
'Now,' says he, as he got her aside, 'if I do not show thy saint to be a petticoat, my hug of thee is like to prove a bear's.'
'What!' she said, amazed: 'Bernardo?'
He ground his teeth.
'I do not mark his pink cheeks for nothing.'
'Well, an he be,' she retorted coldly, 'I am liker, than if he be not, to lose my gallant.'
'That depends,' he growled, 'upon whom your fickleship honours with that title'; and he strode away, calling roughly to Bembo, 'Art for a bath, saint, before supper?'
'Why, gladly, Carlo,' said the boy, 'so we may be private.'
They went down to the pool together, and stripped and entered. Lanti saw a Ganymede, and was not pleased thereat. He came to supper in a very bad humour, which no innocent artifice of his guest could allay. The kill that day of their falcons—partridges, served in their own feathers, and stuffed with artichokes and truffles—was tough; the pears and peaches were sour; the confetti savourless and of stale design. He rated his cook, cursed his servitors, and drank more than he ate. When the disagreeable meal was ended, he strode ruffling away, saying he desired his own sole company, which it were well that all should respect. Bembo saw him go, with a sigh and a smile.
'Good, honest soul,' quoth he, 'that already wakes to the reckoning!'
Madam misunderstood him, and pressed a little closer, with a happy echo of his sigh. Her eyes were soft with wine and passion. She had no precedent for doubting her influence on the moment she chose to make her own.
'The reckoning!' she murmured. 'But I am wax in thy hands, pretty saint. Shalt confess me, and take what toll thou wilt of my sins?'
Her hand settled light as a bird on his.
'Sing to me, Bernardino,' she whispered wooingly, 'sith the cloud is gone from our moon, and I am in the will to love.'
He shot one little startled glance her way; then slowly slung round his lute, and, touching the strings pensively, melted into the following reproach:—
'Speak low! :::What do you ask, false love? Speak low!
Sin cannot speak too low.
The night-wind stealing to thy bosom,
The dead star, dropping like a blossom,
Less voiceless be than thou!
Low, lower yet, false love, if to confess
What guilt, what shameful need?
God, who can hear the budding grass,
And flake kiss flake in the snowy pass,
Your secret else will heed.
Ah! thou art silent, not from love, but fear,
And true love knows no fear.
Creeping, soft-footed, in the dust,
It is not love, but conscious lust,
Which dreads that God shall hear.'
He rose swiftly beside her, while she sat, dumbly biting a lock of her own hair. The frown of outraged passion was in her eyes. What had the fool dared in rejecting her!
To touch the perfumed essence of sin with a rebuke which was like a caress—that, pace his monks, was Bernardo's rendering of the Gospel; and who shall say that, in its girlish tenderness, its earnest emotionalism, it was not the most dangerous method of all? Not every adulterous woman is fit to meet the gentle fate of Christ's. It is not always well to doctor too much kindness with more. Surfeit, surely, is not safely cured, unless by a God, with sugar-plums.
'For shame!' he said quietly; 'for shame! Christ weeps for thee!'
She looked up with a frozen, insolent smile.
'Yet there is no tear in all the night, prophet.'
He raised his hand. A star trailed down the sky, and disappeared behind the trees. It startled her for a moment, and in that moment he was gone, striding into the moonlight. She saw a sword gleam in the shadow of the tent.
'Carlo!' she hissed; 'Carlo! follow and kill him!'
Messer Lanti came out of his ambush, sheathing his blade. His teeth grinned in the white glow. He sauntered up to her, and stood looking down, hand on hip.
'Not for all the bona-robas in the world,' he said, and struck his hilt lightly. 'This I dedicate to his service from this day. Let who crosses my little saint beware it.'
He burst out laughing, not fierce, but low.
'Thou art well served in thy confessor, woman. Wert never dealt a fitter penance.'
It was significant enough that he had no word but mockery for her discomfiture. He might have spitted the seduced on a point of gallantry; for the siren, she was sacred through her calling.
In the meanwhile Bernardo had left the green, had passed the low, roistering camp pitched at a respectful distance beyond, and had thrown himself upon his knees in the wide fields.
'Sweet Jesus,' he prayed, 'O justify Thy Kingdom before Thy servant! Already my young footsteps are warned of the bitter pass to come. Be Thou with me in the rocky ways, lest I faint and slip before my time.'
He remained long minutes beseeching, while the moon, anchored in a little stream of clouds, seemed to his excited imagination the very boat which awaited the coming of One who should walk the waters. He stretched out his arms to it.
'Lord save me,' he cried, 'or I sink!'
He heard a snuffle at his back, and looked round and up to find the fool Cicada regarding him glassily.
'Sink!' stuttered the creature, swaying where he stood. 'Lord save me too! I am under already—drowned in Malmsey!'
Bembo rose to his feet with a happy sigh. 'Exultate Deo adjutori nostro!' he murmured, 'I am answered.'
His clear, serene young brow confronted the fuddled wrinkles of the other's like an angel's.
'Cicada mio,' he said endearingly; 'judge if God is dull of hearing, when, on the echo of my cry, here is one holding out his hand to me!'
The Fool, staring stupidly, lifted his own lean right paw, and squinted to focus his gaze on it.
'Meaning me?—meaning this?' he said.
Bembo nodded.
'A return, with interest, on the little service I was able to render thee this morning. O, I am grateful, Cicada!'
The Fool, utterly bemused, squatted him down on the grass in a sudden inspiration, and so brought his wits to anchor. Bernardo fell on his knees beside him.
'What moved you to come and save me?' he said softly. 'What moved you?'
Cicada, disciplined to seize the worst occasion with an epigram, made a desperate effort to concentrate his parts on the present one.
'The wine in my head,' he mumbled, waggling that sage member. ''Tis the wet-nurse to all valour. I walked but out of the furnace a furlong to cool myself, and lo! I am a hero without knowing it.'
He looked up dimly, his face working and twitching in the moonlight.
'Recount, expound, and enucleate,' said he. 'From what has the Fool saved the Parablist?'
'From the deep waters,' said Bembo, 'into which he had entered, magnifying his height.'
The Fool fell a-chuckling.
'There was a hunter once,' said he, 'that thought he would sound his horn to a hymn, and behold! he was chasing the deer before he had fingered the first stops. Expound me the parable, Parablist. Thou preachest universal goodwill, they say?'
'Ay, do I.'
'Thou shalt be confuted with thine own text.'
'How, dear Fool?'
'Why, shall not every wife be kind to her friend's husband?'
'Ay, if she would be unkind to her own.'
The Fool scratched his head, his hood thrown back.
'And so, in thy wisdom, thou step'st into a puddle, and lo! it is over thy ears. Will you come out, good Signor Goodwill, and ride home in a baby's pannier?'
Bembo caught one of the wrinkled hands in his soft palms.
'Dear Cicada,' he said, 'are there not tears in your heart the whiles you mock? Do you not love me, Cicada, as one you have saved from death?'
Some sort of emotion startled the harsh features of the Fool.
'What better love could I show,' he muttered, 'than to warn thee back from the toils that stretch for thy wings?'
'Ah, to warn me, to warn me, Cicada!' cried the boy, 'but not home to the nest. How shall he ever fly that fears to quit it? Be rather like my mother, Cicada, and advise these my simple wings.'
The Fool caught his breath in a sudden gasp—
'Thy mother! I!'
A spasm of pain seemed to cross his face. He laughed wildly.
'An Angel out of a Fool! That were a worthy parent to hold divinity in leading-strings.'
'Zitto, Cicca mio!' said Bembo sweetly, pressing a finger to his lips. 'Do I not know what wit goes to the acting of folly—what experience, what observation? If thou wouldst lend these all to my help and aid!'
'In what?'
'In this propaganda to govern men by love.'
'Thou playest, a child, with the cross-bow.'
'I know it. I have been warned; direct thou my hand.'
'I!' exclaimed the Fool once more in a startled cry. And suddenly, wonder of wonders! he was grovelling at the other's knees, pawing them, weeping and moaning, hiding his face in the grass.
'What saint is this?' he cried, 'what saint that claims the Fool to his guide?'
'Alas!' said the boy, 'no saint, but a child of the human God.'
'And He mated with Folly,' cried Cicada, 'and Folly is to direct the bolt!'
He sat up, beating his brow in an ecstasy, then all in a moment forbore, and was as calm as death.
'So be it,' he said. 'Be thou the divine fool, and I thy mother.'
With a quick movement Bembo caught the Fool's cheeks between his palms.
'Ay, mother,' said he, with a little choking laugh, 'but see that thy hand on mine be steady, lest the quarrel fly wide or rebound upon ourselves.'
It was the true mark indeed to which the cunning rascal had all this time been sighting his bow. He watched anxiously now for the tokens of a hit.
The Fool sat very still awhile.
'Speak clearer,' he muttered; then of a sudden: 'What wouldst ask of me?'
'Ah! dear,' sighed Bembo; 'only that thou wouldst justify thyself of this new compact of ours.'
'I am clean—as thou readest love. Who but God would consort with Folly? The Fool is cursed to virginity.'
'Cicada, dear, but there is no Chastity without Temperance.'
The Fool tore himself away, and slunk crouching back upon the grass.
'I renounce thy God!' he chattered hoarsely, 'that would have me false to my love, my mistress, my one friend! Who has borne me through these passes, stood by me in pain and madness, dulled the bitter tooth of shame while it tore my entrails? Cure wantonness in women, gluttony in wolves, before you ask me to be dastard to my dear.'
'Alas!' cried Bembo, 'then am I lost indeed!'
A long pause followed, till in a moment the Fool had flung himself once more upon his face.
'Lay not this thing on me,' he cried, clutching at the grass; 'lay it not! It is to tear my last hope by the roots, to banish me from the kingdom of dreams, to bury me in the everlasting ice! I will follow thee in all else, humbly and adoringly; I will try to vindicate this love which has stooped from heaven to a clown; I will perish in thy service—only waste not my paradise in the moment of its realisation.'
Bembo stooped, kneeling, and laid one hand softly on his shoulder.
'Poor Cicada,' he said, 'poor Cicada! Alas! I am a child where I had hoped a man, and my head sinks beneath the waters. Tired am I, and fain to go rest my head in a lap that erst invited me. Return thou to thy bottle, as I to my love.'
The Fool, trailing himself up on his knees, caught his hands in a wild, convulsive clutch.
'Fiend or angel!' he cried, 'thou shall not!—The woman!—The skirts of the scarlet woman! Go rest thyself—not there—but in peace. From this moment I abjure it—dost hear, I abjure it? I kill my love for love's sake. O! O!'
And he fell writhing, like a wounded snake, on the grass.
'Salve, sancta parens!' said Bembo, lifting up his hands fervently to the queen of night. The pious rogue was quite happy in his stratagem, since it had won him his first convert to cleanness.