*CHAPTER XVI*
'Father Abbot, we thank you for your trust. We were less than human toabuse it. O, it flew with white wings to shelter in our bosom! Shallwe be hawks to such a dove! Take comfort. It hath ruffled its featherson our heart; it hath settled itself thereon, and hatched out a wingedlove. Pure spirit of the Holy Ghost, whence came it? From a star, theysay, born of some wedlock between earth and sky. I marvel you couldpart with it. I could never.... The pretty chuck! What angel heresiesit dares! "Marry," saith the dove, "I have been discussing with Christthe subtleties of dogmatic definition, and I find he is no Christian."This for intolerance! He finds honesty in schism--speaks with assuranceof our Saviour, his discourses with Him by the brook, in the garden,under the trees--but doubtless you know. How can we refute suchevidence, or need to? Alas! we are not on speaking terms with divinity.But we listen and observe; and we woo our winsome dove with prettyscarves and tabbards embroidered by our fingers; and some day we toohope to hear the voices. Not yet; the earth clings to us; but he dustsit off. "Make not beauty a passion, but passion a beauty," says he."Learn that temperance is the true epicurism of life. The palate cloyson surfeit." O, we believe him, trust me! and never his pretty head isturned by our adoring.... "By love to make law unnecessary,"--thereruns his creed: the love of Nature's truths--continence, sobriety, matebound to mate like birds. Only our season's life. He convinces usapace. Already Milan sweetens in the sun. We curb all licence, yieldheat to reason, clean out many vanities; have our choirs of pure maidensin place of the Bacchidae--hymns, too, meet to woo Pan to Christ, ofwhich I could serve thee an example.... All in all, we prepare for agreat Feast of the Purification which, at the New Year's beginning, isto symbolise our re-conversion to Nature's straight religion. Then willbe a rare market in doves--let us pray there be at least--which all,conscious of the true virgin heart, are to bring. Doves! Alack! whichof us would not wish to be worthy to carry one that we know?'
So wrote the Duchess of Milan to the Abbot of San Zeno, and heanswered:--
'Cherish my lamb. The fold yearns for him. He would leave it, despiteus all. My daughter, be gracious to our little dreamer, for of such isthe Kingdom of Heaven.'
For years after it was become the dimmest of odd memories, men and womenwould recall, between laughter and tears, the strange little moralfantasia which, during a month or two of that glowing autumn of 1476,all Milan had been tickled into dancing to the pipe of a small shepherdof a New Arcadia. The measure had certainly seemed inspiring enough atthe time--potential, original, weaving an earnest purpose with joy,revealing novel raptures of sensation in the seemliness of postures,which claimed to interpret Nature out of the very centre of herspiritual heart. David dancing before the ark must have exhibited justsuch an orderly abandonment as was displayed by these sober-rollickingPantheists of the new cult. Crossness with them was sunk to animpossible discount. There was no market for gallantry, _epanchements_,or any billing and cooing whatever but of doves. Instead, there cameinto vogue intercourses between Dioneus and Flammetta of sweet unbashfulreasonableness; high-junkettings on chestnut-meal and honey; the mostengaging attentions, in the matter of grapes and sweet biscuits andinfinite bon-bons, towards the little furred and feathered innocents ofthe countryside. That temperance really was, according to the angelicpropagandist, the true epicurism, experience no less astonishing thanagreeable came to prove. Then was the festival of beans and baconinstituted by some jaded palates. Charity and consideration rose on allsides in a night, like edible and nutritious funguses. From Hallowmas toChristmas there was scarce a sword whipped from its scabbard butreflection returned it. It was no longer, with Gregory and Balthazar,'Sir, do you bite your thumb at me? Sir, the wall to you,' but 'Sir, Isee your jostling of me was unavoidable; Sir, your courtesy turns myasps to roses.' Nature and the natural decencies were on all tongues;the licences of eye and ear and lip were rejected for abominationsunpalatable to any taste more refined than yesterday's. Modesty ruledthe fashions and made of Imola an Ippolita, and of Aurelio an Augustine.The women, as a present result, were all on the side of Nature.Impudicity with them is never a cause but a consequence. They found anamazing attractiveness in the pretty dogma which rather encouraged thandenounced in them the graceful arts of self-adornment. 'Naked, like thebirds,' attested their little priest, 'do we come to inherit ourKingdom. Shall we be more blamed than they for adapting to ourselvesthe plumages of that bright succession?' Only he pleaded for a perfectadaptation to conditions--to form, climate, environments, constitution.The lines of all true beauty, he declared, were such as both suggestedand defended. Could monstrosities of head furniture, for instance,appeal to any but a monster? Locks, thereat, were delivered from theirfantastic convolutions, from their ropes of pearls, from their gold-dustand iris-powder, and were heaped or coiled _di sua natura_, as any girl,according to circumstances, might naturally dispose of them. There wasa general holocaust of extravagances, with some talk of feeding thesacrifice with fuel of useless confessional boxes; and, in themeanwhile, the church took snuff and smiled, and the devil hid his tailin a reasonable pair of breeches, and endured all the inconveniences ofsitting on it without a murmur.
Alas! 'How quick bright things come to confusion!' But the momentwhile it held gathered the force of an epoch; and no doubt much moralamendment was to derive from it. Intellect in a sweet presence makes apositive of an abstract argument; and when little Bembo asserted, inrefutation of the agnostics, that man's dual personality was proved bythe fact of his abhorring in others the viciousnesses which his fleshcondoned in himself, the statement was accepted for the dictum of aninspired saint. But his strength of the moment lay chiefly in hisundeviating consistency with his own queer creed. He never swerved fromhis belief in the soul's responsibility to its past, or of itscommitment to a retrogressive movement after death. 'We drop, fainting,out of the ranks in a desolate place,' he said. 'We come to, alone andabandoned. Shall we, poor mercenaries, repudiating a selfish cause, notturn our faces to the loved home, far back, from which false hopesbeguiled us? Be, then, our way as we have made it, whether byforbearance or rapine.' Again he would say: 'Take, so thy to-day beclean, no fearful thought for thy to-morrow, any more than for thypossible estrangement from thy friend. There is nothing to concern theenow (which is all that _is_) but thy reason, love, and justice of thismoment. They are the faculty, devotion, and quality to which, blended,thy soul may trust itself for its fair continuance.'
There was a little song of his, very popular with the court gentlemen inthese days of their regeneracy, which, as exemplifying the strengths andweaknesses of his propaganda, is here given:--
'Here's a comrade blithe To the wild wood hieth-- Follow and find! Loving both least and best, His love takes still a zest From the song-time of the wind.
The chuckling birds they greet him, The does run forth to meet him-- Follow and find! Strange visions shall thou see; Learn lessons new to thee In the song-time of the wind.
Couldst, then, the dear bird kill That kiss'd thee with her bill? Follow and find How great, having strength, to spare That trusting Soft-and-fair In the song-time of the wind.
He is both God and Man; He is both Christ and Pan-- Follow and find How, in the lovely sense, All flesh being grass, wakes thence The song-time of the wind.
It was, I say, popular with the Lotharios. The novelty of this sort ofrenunciation tickled their sensoriums famously. It suggested a quitenew and captivating form of self-indulgence, in the rapture to begathered from an indefinite postponement of consummations. The sense ofgallantry lies most in contemplation. I do not think it amounted tomuch more. Teresa and Elisabetta enjoyed their part in the serio-comicsport immensely, and were the most cuddlesome lambs, friskingunconscious under the faltering knife of the butcher. Madonna Caterinalaughed immoderately to see their great mercy-pleading eyes coquett
ingwith the greatly-withheld blade. But then she had no bump of reverence.The little wretch disliked sanctity in any form; loved aggressivenessbetter than meekness; was always in her heart a little Amazonianterrier-bitch, full of fight and impudence. It might have gone crosslywith Messer Bembo had she been in her adoptive mother's position oftrustee for him.
But luckily, or most unluckily for the boy, he was in more accommodatinghands. This was the acute period of his proselytising. He had beenpersuaded back to court, and Bona had received him with moist eyes andopen arms, and indeed a very yearning pathos of emotionalism, which hadgathered a fataler influence from the contrition which in the firstinstance must be his. He had stood before her not so much rebuking asrebuked. Knowing her no longer saint, but only erring woman, it added apoignancy to his remorse that he had led her into further error by hisabuse of her trust. She had answered his confession with a lovelyabsolution:--
'What is lost is lost. Thou art the faithfullest warrant of my trueobservance of my lord's wishes. Only if thou abandon'st me am Ibetrayed.'
Could he do aught after this but love her, accept her, her fervour andher penitence, for a first factor in the crusade he had made his own?And, while the soft enchantment held, no general could have wished aloyaler adjutant, or one more ready to first-example in herself thesacrifices he demanded. She abetted him, as she had promised, in allhis tactics; lent the full force of an authority, which his sweetnessand modesty could by no means arrogate to himself, to compel the reformshe sang. She gave, amongst other gifts, her whole present soul to therighting of the wrong done to the girl Lucia and her father; and whenall her efforts to discover the vanished Tassino had failed, and she,having sent on her own initiative a compensatory purse of gold to theblind armourer, had learned how Lucia had banged the gift and the doorin the messenger's face, was readily mollified by Bernardo's tenderremonstrance: 'Ah, sweet Madonna! what gold can give her father eyes, orher child a name!'
'What! it is born?' she murmured.
'I saw it yesterday,' said Bembo. 'It lay in her lap, like the billetthat kills a woman's heart.'
And, indeed, he had not, because of his re-exaltation, ceased to visithis friends, or to go to occasional discussion with the crabbed Montano;whose moroseness, nevertheless, was petrifying. Yet had he even soughtto interest the Duchess there; though, for once, without avail; for shedared not seem to lend her countenance to that banned, if injured,misanthrope.
So she led the chorus to his soloing, and helped and mothered him withan infatuation beyond a mother's. Like the Emperor's jewellednightingale, he was the sweetest bird to pet while his tricks were new.His voice entranced the echoes of those sombre chambers andblood-stained corridors. The castello was reconsecrated in his breath,and the miasma from its fearful pits dispelled. His lute was hispsalter and psaltery in one: it interpreted him to others, and himselfto himself. Its sob was his sorrow, and its joy his jubilance. Hecould coax from it wings to expression inexpressible by speech alone.Here is one of his latest parables, or apologues, baldly running, as itappears, on the familiar theme, which, through that vehicle, hetranslated for his hearers into rapture:--
'Down by a stream that muttered under ice-- Winter's thin wasted voice, straining for air-- Lo! Antique Pan, gnawing his grizzled beard.
Chill was the earth, and all the sky one stone, The shrunk sedge shook with ague; the wild duck, Squattering in snow, sent out a feeble cry. Like a stark root the black swan's twisted neck Writhed in the bank. The hawk shook by the finch; The stoat and rabbit shivered in one hole; And Nature, moaning on a bedded drift, Cried for delivery from her travail:--
"O Pan! what dost thou? Long the Spring's delayed! O Pan! hope sickens. Son, where art thou gone?"
Thereat he heaved his brows; saw the starved fields, The waste and horror of a world's eclipse; And all the wrong and all the pity of it Rushed from him in a roar:-- "I'm passed, deposed: call on another Pan! Call Christ--the ates foretel him--he'll respond. I'm old; grown impotent; a toothless dog. New times, new blood: the world forgets my voice. This Christ supplants me: call on him, I say. Whence comes he? Whence, if not from off the streets? Some coxcomb of the Schools, belike--some green, Anaemic, theoretic verderer, Shaping his wood-lore from the Herbary, And Nature from his brazen window-pots. The Fates these days have gone to live in town-- Grown doctrinaires--forgot their rustic loves. Call on their latest nominee--call, call! He'll ease thee of thy produce, bear it home, And in alembics test and recompose it. Call, in thine agony--loud--call on Christ: He'll hear maybe, and maybe understand!"
"No Pan," she wailed: "No other Pan than thou!"
"What!" roared he, mocking: "Christ not understand? Your loves, your lores, your secrets--will he not? Not by his books be master of your heart? Gods! I am old. I speak but by the woods; And often nowadays to rebel ears. He'll do you better: fold your fogs in bales; Redeem your swamps; sweep up your glowing leaves; People his straight pastures with your broods; Shape you for man, to be his plain helpmeet; No toys, no tricks, no mysteries, no sports-- But sense and science, scorning smiles and tears."
Raging, he rose: A light broke on the snow: The ice upon the river cracked and spun: Long milky-ways of green and starry flowers Grew from the thaw: the trees nipped forth in bud: The falcon sleeked the wren; the stoat the hare; And Nature with a cry delivered was.
Pan stared: A naked child stood there before him, Warming a frozen robin in his hands. Shameless the boy was, fearless, white as milk; No guile or harm; a sweet rogue in his eyes. And he looked up and smiled, and lisped a word:--
"Brother, _thou_ take and cure him, make him well. Or teach _me_ of thy lore his present needs."
"_Brother!_" choked Pan. "_My_ father was a God. Who art thou?" "Nature's baby," said the child. "Man was _my_ father; and my name is Christ."
He slid his hand within the woodman's palm:-- "Dear elder brother, guide me in my steps. I bring no gift but love, no tricks but love's-- To make sweet flowers of frost--locked hearts unfold-- The coney pledge the weasel in a kiss. Canst thou do these?" "No, by my beard," said Pan.
Gaily the child laughed: "Clever brother thou art; Yet can I teach thee something." "All," said Pan.
He groaned; the child looked up; flew to his arms:-- "O, by the womb that bore us both, do love me!"
A minute sped: the river hushed its song: The linnet eyed the falcon on its branch: The bursting bud hung motionless--And Pan Gave out a cry: "New-rooted, not deposed! Come, little Christ!" So hand in hand they passed, Nature's two children reconciled at last.'
And what about Messer Lanti and the Fool Cicada during this period oftheir loved little saint's apotheosis? Were _they_ more _advocatidiaboli_ than Bona? Alas! they were perhaps the only two, in all thatvolatile city, to accept him, with a steadfast and indomitable faith, athis true worth. There was no angelic attribute, which Carlo, the honestblaspheming neophyte, would not have claimed for him--with blows, bychoice; no rebuke, nor suggestion, nor ordinance issuing from his lips,which he would not accept and act upon, after the necessary little showof self-easing bluster. It was as comical as pathetic to observe thedear blunderhead's blushing assumptions of offence, when naughtinessclaimed his intimacy; his exaggerated relish of spring water; his stoutupholding, on an empty stomach, of the aesthetic values of abstinence.But he made a practical virtue of his conversion, and was becomefrequent in evidence, with his strong arm and voice and influence, as aPaladin on behalf of the oppressed. He and Cicada were the boy'sbristling watch-dogs, mastiff and lurcher; and were even drawn, by thatmutual sympathy, into a sort of scolding partnership, defensive andaggressive, which had for its aim the vindication of their common love.There, at least, was some odd rough fruit of the reconciliation preachedby little Bembo between the God-man and the man
-Nature. Such arelationship had been impossible in the old days of taskmaster andclown. Now it was understood between them, without superfluous words,that each held the other responsible to him for his incorruptiblefidelity to his trust, and himself for a sleepless attention to the dutytacitly and by implication assigned to be his. That is to say, MesserCarlo's strength and long sword, and the other's shrewd wit, wereassumed, as it were, for the right and left bucklers to the littlecharioteer as he drove upon his foes.
Carlo had a modest conception of his own abilities; yet once he made themistake of appropriating to himself a duty--or he thought it one--ratherappertaining to his fellow buckler. They had been, the Fool andhimself, somewhat savagely making merry on the subject of Bona'sconversion--in the singleness of which, to be candid, they had not muchfaith--when his honest brain conceived the sudden necessity of bluntlywarning the little Bernardino of the danger he was courting in playingwith such fire. His charge, no sooner realised than acted upon, tookthe boy, so to speak, in the wind. Bembo gasped; and thencounter-buffed with angelic fury:--
'Who sleeps with a taper in his bed invites his own destruction? Thenwert thou sevenfold consumed, my Carlo. O, shame! she is my mother!'
'Nay, but by adoption,' stammered the other abashed.
'Her assumption of the name should suffice to spare her. O, thou paganirreclaimable--right offspring of Vesta and the incestuous Saturn! Isthis my ultimate profit of thee? Go hide thy face from innocence.'
Lanti, thus bullied, turned dogged.
'I will hide nothing. Abuse my candour; spit on my love if thou wilt,it will endure for its own sake,' and he flung away in a rage.
But he had better have deputed the Fool to a task needing diplomacy.Cicada laughed over his grievance when it was exploded upon him.
'Shouldst have warned Bona herself, rather,' he said.
'How!' growled the other: 'and been cashiered, or worse, for my pains?'
'Not while her lost ring stands against her; and thou, her private agentfor its recovery.'
'True; from the mud.'
'Well, if thou think'st so.'
'Dost thou not?'
'Ay; for as mud is mud, Narcisso is Narcisso.'
'Narcisso!'
He roared, and stared.
'Has _he_ got it?'
'I do not say so.'
'I will go carve the truth out of him.'
'Or Monna Beatrice.'
'What!'
The great creature fairly gasped; then muttered, in a strangled voice:'Why should she want it? What profit to her?'
'What, indeed?' whined the Fool. 'She fancies Messer Bembo too well towish to injure him, or through him, Bona--does she not?'
Carlo's brow slowly blackened.
'I will go to her,' he said suddenly. The Fool leapt to bar his way.
'You would do a foolish thing,' he said--'with deference, always withdeference, Messer. This is my part. Leave it to me.'
Carlo choked, and stood breathing.
'Why,' said the Fool, 'these are the days of circumspection. God, saysPropriety, made out hands and faces, and whatever else that is notvisible was the devil's work. You would be shown, by Monna Beatrice,for all her self-acknowledged parts, just clean hands and a smilingface. She conforms to fashion. For the rest, the devil will attend tohis own secrets.'
The other groaned:--
'I would I could fathom thee. I would I had the ring.'
'I would thou hadst,' answered Cicada. ''Twould be a good ring to setin our Duchess's little nose, to persuade her from routling inconsecrated ground: a juster weapon in thy hands than in some other's.Well, be patient; I may obtain it for thee yet.'
He meant, at least, to set his last wits to the task. Somehow, he wasdarkly and unshakably convinced, this same Lion ring was the pivot uponwhich all his darling's fortunes turned. That it was not really lost,but was being held concealed, by some jealous spirit or spirits, againstthe time most opportune for procuring the boy's, and perhaps others',destruction by its means, he felt sure. All Milan was not in one mindas to the disinterested motives of its Nathan. Tassino, Narcisso, thedowager of Casa Caprona, even the urbane Messer Ludovico himself, toname no others, could hardly be shown their personal profits in themovement. They might all, as the world's ambitions went, be excusedfrom coveting the stranger's promotion. And there was no doubt that, atpresent, he was paramount in the eyes of the highest. That, in itself,was enough to make his sweet office the subject of much scepticism andblaspheming. Tough, wary work for the watch-dogs, Cicada pondered. Thatsame evening he was walking in the streets, when a voice, Visconti's,muttered alongside him:--
'Good Patch, hast been loyal so far to thy bargain. Hold to it for thysoul's sake. There are adders in Milan.' Then he bent closer, andwhispered: 'A word in thy ear: is the ring found yet?'
The Fool's hard features did not twitch. He shook his head.
'Marry, sir,' answered he, as low, 'the mud is as close a confidant asI. I have not heard of its blabbing.'
'So much the better,' murmured the other, and glided away. But he leftCicada thinking.
'It was not for them, then, the conspirators, that Narcisso stole it.And yet he stole it--that I'll be sworn. For whom? Why, for MonnaBeatrice. For why? Why, for a purpose that I'll circumvent--when Iguess it. A passenger going by cursed him under his breath. The oath,profound and heartfelt, was really a psychologic note in the context ofthis history. Cicada heard it, and, looking round, saw, to hisamazement, the form of the very monster of his present deliberations.
Narcisso, the rancorous mongrel, having snarled his hatred of an oldassociate, who, he verily believed, had once betrayed him, slouched,with a heavier vindictiveness, on his way. The Fool, inspired, skippedinto cover, and peeped. He knew that the coward creature, once secureof his distance, would turn round to sputter and glower. He was notwrong there, nor in his surmise that, finding him vanished, Narcissowould continue his road in reassurance of his fancied security. He sawhim actually turn and glare; distinguished, as plainly as though heheard it, the villainous oath with which the monster flounced again tohis gait. And then, very cautiously, he came out of his hiding, andslunk in pursuit.
It could serve, at least, no bad purpose, he thought, to track the beastto his lair; and, with infinite circumspection, he set himself to thetask.
It proved a simple one, after all--the more so as the animal, itappeared, was tenant in a very swarming warren, where concealment waseasy. It was into a frowzy hole that, in the end, he saw himdisappear--a tunnel, with a grating over it, like a sewer-trap.
And so, satisfied and not satisfied, he was turning away, when he wasconscious in a moment of a face looking from the grating.
A minute later, threading his path along a by-alley, he emerged upon asweeter province of the town, and stood to disburden himself of a mightybreath.
'So!' he muttered: 'He is there, is he! Well, the plot growscomplicate.'