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, over-lapping 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.