CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT.
THE BLACK MARKS BECOME MAGICAL.
That journey of Tito's to Rome, which had removed many difficulties fromRomola's departure, had been resolved on quite suddenly, at a supper,only the evening before.
Tito had set out towards that supper with agreeable expectations. Themeats were likely to be delicate, the wines choice, the companydistinguished; for the place of entertainment was the Selva or Orto de'Rucellai, or, as we should say, the Rucellai Gardens; and the host,Bernardo Rucellai, was quite a typical Florentine grandee. Even hisfamily name has a significance which is prettily symbolic: properlyunderstood, it may bring before us a little lichen, popularly named_orcella_ or _roccella_, which grows on the rocks of Greek isles and inthe Canaries; and having drunk a great deal of light into its littlestems and button-heads, will, under certain circumstances, give it outagain as a reddish purple dye, very grateful to the eyes of men. Bybringing the excellent secret of this dye, called _oricello_, from theLevant to Florence, a certain merchant, who lived nearly a hundred yearsbefore our Bernardo's time, won for himself and his descendants muchwealth, and the pleasantly-suggestive surname of Oricellari, orRoccellari, which on Tuscan tongues speedily became Rucellai.
And our Bernardo, who stands out more prominently than the rest on thispurple background, had added all sorts of distinction to the familyname: he had married the sister of Lorenzo de' Medici, and had had themost splendid wedding in the memory of Florentine upholstery; and forthese and other virtues he had been sent on embassies to France andVenice, and had been chosen Gonfaloniere; he had not only built himselfa fine palace, but had finished putting the black and white marblefacade to the church of Santa Maria Novella; he had planted a gardenwith rare trees, and had made it classic ground by receiving within itthe meetings of the Platonic Academy, orphaned by the death of Lorenzo;he had written an excellent, learned book, of a new topographical sort,about ancient Rome; he had collected antiquities; he had a pureLatinity. The simplest account of him, one sees, reads like a laudatoryepitaph, at the end of which the Greek and Ausonian Muses might beconfidently requested to tear their hair, and Nature to desist from anysecond attempt to combine so many virtues with one set of viscera.
His invitation had been conveyed to Tito through Lorenzo Tornabuoni,with an emphasis which would have suggested that the object of thegathering was political, even if the public questions of the time hadbeen less absorbing. As it was, Tito felt sure that some party purposeswere to be furthered by the excellent flavours of stewed fish and oldGreek wine; for Bernardo Rucellai was not simply an influentialpersonage, he was one of the elect Twenty who for three weeks had heldthe reins of Florence. This assurance put Tito in the best spirits ashe made his way to the Via della Scala, where the classic garden was tobe found: without it, he might have had some uneasy speculation as towhether the high company he would have the honour of meeting was likelyto be dull as well as distinguished; for he had had experience ofvarious dull suppers even in the Rucellai gardens, and especially of thedull philosophic sort, wherein he had not only been called upon toaccept an entire scheme of the universe (which would have been easy tohim), but to listen to an exposition of the same, from the origin ofthings to their complete ripeness in the tractate of the philosopherthen speaking.
It was a dark evening, and it was only when Tito crossed the occasionallight of a lamp suspended before an image of the Virgin, that theoutline of his figure was discernible enough for recognition. At suchmoments any one caring to watch his passage from one of these lights toanother might have observed that the tall and graceful personage withthe mantle folded round him was followed constantly by a very differentform, thickset and elderly, in a serge tunic and felt hat. Theconjunction might have been taken for mere chance, since there were manypassengers along the streets at this hour. But when Tito stopped at thegate of the Rucellai gardens, the figure behind stopped too. The_sportello_, or smaller door of the gate, was already being held open bythe servant, who, in the distraction of attending to some question, hadnot yet closed it since the last arrival, and Tito turned in rapidly,giving his name to the servant, and passing on between the evergreenbushes that shone like metal in the torchlight. The follower turned intoo.
"Your name?" said the servant.
"Baldassarre Calvo," was the immediate answer.
"You are not a guest; the guests have all passed."
"I belong to Tito Melema, who has just gone in. I am to wait in thegardens."
The servant hesitated. "I had orders to admit only guests. Are you aservant of Messer Tito?"
"No, friend, I am not a servant; I am a scholar."
There are men to whom you need only say, "I am a buffalo," in a certaintone of quiet confidence, and they will let you pass. The porter gaveway at once, Baldassarre entered, and heard the door closed and chainedbehind him, as he too disappeared among the shining bushes.
Those ready and firm answers argued a great change in Baldassarre sincethe last meeting face to face with Tito, when the dagger broke in two.
The change had declared itself in a startling way.
At the moment when the shadow of Tito passed in front of the hovel as hedeparted homeward, Baldassarre was sitting in that state of after-tremorknown to every one who is liable to great outbursts of passion: a statein which physical powerlessness is sometimes accompanied by anexceptional lucidity of thought, as if that disengagement of excitedpassion had carried away a fire-mist and left clearness behind it. Hefelt unable to rise and walk away just yet; his limbs seemed benumbed;he was cold, and his hands shook. But in that bodily helplessness hesat surrounded, not by the habitual dimness and vanishing shadows, butby the clear images of the past; he was living again in an unbrokencourse through that life which seemed a long preparation for the tasteof bitterness.
For some minutes he was too thoroughly absorbed by the images to reflecton the fact that he saw them, and note the fact as a change. But whenthat sudden clearness had travelled through the distance, and came atlast to rest on the scene just gone by, he felt fully where he was: heremembered Monna Lisa and Tessa. Ah! _he_ then was the mysterioushusband; he who had another wife in the Via de' Bardi. It was time topick up the broken dagger and go--go and leave no trace of himself; forto hide his feebleness seemed the thing most like power that was left tohim. He leaned to take up the fragments of the dagger; then he turnedtowards the book which lay open at his side. It was a fine largemanuscript, an odd volume of Pausanias. The moonlight was upon it, andhe could see the large letters at the head of the page:
MESSENIKA. KB. [In Greek characters.]
In old days he had known Pausanias familiarly; yet an hour or two ago hehad been looking hopelessly at that page, and it had suggested no moremeaning to him than if the letters had been black weather-marks on awall; but at this moment they were once more the magic signs thatconjure up a world. That moonbeam falling on the letters had raisedMessenia before him, and its struggle against the Spartan oppression.
He snatched up the book, but the light was too pale for him to readfurther by. No matter: he knew that chapter; he read inwardly. He sawthe stoning of the traitor Aristocrates--stoned by a whole people, whocast him out from their borders to lie unburied, and set up a pillarwith verses upon it telling how Time had brought home justice to theunjust. The words arose within him, and stirred innumerable vibrationsof memory. He forgot that he was old: he could almost have shouted.The light was come again, mother of knowledge and joy! In thatexultation his limbs recovered their strength: he started up with hisbroken dagger and book, and went out under the broad moonlight.
It was a nipping frosty air, but Baldassarre could feel no chill--heonly felt the glow of conscious power. He walked about and paused onall the open spots of that high ground, and looked down on the domed andtowered city, sleeping darkly under its sleeping guardians, themountains; on the pale gleam of the river; on the valley vanishingtowards the peaks of snow; and felt himself master of them all
.
That sense of mental empire which belongs to us all in moments ofexceptional clearness was intensified for him by the long days andnights in which memory had been little more than the consciousness ofsomething gone. That city, which had been a weary labyrinth, wasmaterial that he could subdue to his purposes now: his mind glancedthrough its affairs with flashing conjecture; he was once more a man whoknew cities, whose sense of vision was instructed with large experience,and who felt the keen delight of holding all things in the grasp oflanguage. Names! Images!--his mind rushed through its wealth withoutpausing, like one who enters on a great inheritance.
But amidst all that rushing eagerness there was one End presiding inBaldassarre's consciousness,--a dark deity in the inmost cell, who onlyseemed forgotten while his hecatomb was being prepared. And when thefirst triumph in the certainty of recovered power had had its way, histhoughts centred themselves on Tito. That fair slippery viper could notescape him now; thanks to struggling justice, the heart that neverquivered with tenderness for another had its sensitive selfish fibresthat could be reached by the sharp point of anguish. The soul thatbowed to no right, bowed to the great lord of mortals, Pain.
He could search into every secret of Tito's life now: he knew some ofthe secrets already, and the failure of the broken dagger, which seemedlike frustration, had been the beginning of achievement. Doubtless thatsudden rage had shaken away the obstruction which stifled his soul.Twice before, when his memory had partially returned, it had been inconsequence of sudden excitation: once when he had had to defend himselffrom an enraged dog: once when he had been overtaken by the waves, andhad had to scramble up a rock to save himself.
Yes, but if this time, as then, the light were to die out, and thedreary conscious blank come back again! This time the light wasstronger and steadier; but what security was there that before themorrow the dark fog would not be round him again? Even the fear seemedlike the beginning of feebleness: he thought with alarm that he mightsink the faster for this excited vigil of his on the hill, which wasexpending his force; and after seeking anxiously for a sheltered cornerwhere he might lie down, he nestled at last against a heap of warmgarden straw, and so fell asleep.
When he opened his eyes again it was daylight. The first moments werefilled with strange bewilderment: he was a man with a double identity;to which had he awaked? to the life of dim-sighted sensibilities likethe sad heirship of some fallen greatness, or to the life of recoveredpower? Surely the last, for the events of the night all came back tohim: the recognition of the page in Pausanias, the crowding resurgenceof facts and names, the sudden wide prospect which had given him such amoment as that of the Maenad in the glorious amaze of her morning wakingon the mountain top.
He took up the book again, he read, he remembered without reading. Hesaw a name, and the images of deeds rose with it: he saw the mention ofa deed, and he linked it with a name. There were stories of inexpiablecrimes, but stories also of guilt that seemed successful. There weresanctuaries for swift-footed miscreants: baseness had its armour, andthe weapons of justice sometimes broke against it. What then? Ifbaseness triumphed everywhere else, if it could heap to itself all thegoods of the world and even hold the keys of hell, it would nevertriumph over the hatred which it had itself awakened. It could deviseno torture that would seem greater than the torture of submitting to itssmile. Baldassarre felt the indestructible independent force of asupreme emotion, which knows no terror, and asks for no motive, which isitself an ever-burning motive, consuming all other desire. And now inthis morning light, when the assurance came again that the fine fibresof association were active still, and that his recovered self had notdeparted, all his gladness was but the hope of vengeance.
From that time till the evening on which we have seen him enter theRucellai gardens, he had been incessantly, but cautiously, inquiringinto Tito's position and all his circumstances, and there was hardly aday on which he did not contrive to follow his movements. But he wishednot to arouse any alarm in Tito: he wished to secure a moment when thehated favourite of blind fortune was at the summit of confident ease,surrounded by chief men on whose favour he depended. It was not anyretributive payment or recognition of himself for his own behoof, onwhich Baldassarre's whole soul was bent: it was to find the sharpestedge of disgrace and shame by which a selfish smiler could be pierced;it was to send through his marrow the most sudden shock of dread. Hewas content to lie hard, and live stintedly--he had spent the greaterpart of his remaining money in buying another poniard: his hunger andhis thirst were after nothing exquisite but an exquisite vengeance. Hehad avoided addressing himself to any one whom he suspected of intimacywith Tito, lest an alarm raised in Tito's mind should urge him either toflight or to some other counteracting measure which hard-pressedingenuity might devise. For this reason he had never entered Nello'sshop, which he observed that Tito frequented, and he had turned aside toavoid meeting Piero di Cosimo.
The possibility of frustration gave added eagerness to his desire thatthe great opportunity he sought should not be deferred. The desire waseager in him on another ground; he trembled lest his memory should goagain. Whether from the agitating presence of that fear, or from someother causes, he had twice felt a sort of mental dizziness, in which theinward sense or imagination seemed to be losing the distinct forms ofthings. Once he had attempted to enter the Palazzo Vecchio and make hisway into a council-chamber where Tito was, and had failed. But now, onthis evening, he felt that his occasion was come.