A Jay of Italy/Chapter 16

, we thank you for your trust. We were less than human to abuse it. O, it flew with white wings to shelter in our bosom! Shall we be hawks to such a dove! Take comfort. It hath ruffled its feathers on our heart; it hath settled itself thereon, and hatched out a winged love. Pure spirit of the Holy Ghost, whence came it? From a star, they say, born of some wedlock between earth and sky. I marvel you could part with it. I could never.... The pretty chuck! What angel heresies it dares! "Marry," saith the dove, "I have been discussing with Christ the subtleties of dogmatic definition, and I find he is no Christian." This for intolerance! He finds honesty in schism—speaks with assurance of our Saviour, his discourses with Him by the brook, in the garden, under the trees—but doubtless you know. How can we refute such evidence, or need to? Alas! we are not on speaking terms with divinity. But we listen and observe; and we woo our winsome dove with pretty scarves and tabbards embroidered by our fingers; and some day we too hope to hear the voices. Not yet; the earth clings to us; but he dusts it off. "Make not beauty a passion, but passion a beauty," says he. "Learn that temperance is the true epicurism of life. The palate cloys on surfeit." O, we believe him, trust me! and never his pretty head is turned by our adoring.... "By love to make law unnecessary,"—there runs his creed: the love of Nature's truths—continence, sobriety, mate bound to mate like birds. Only our season's life. He convinces us apace. Already Milan sweetens in the sun. We curb all licence, yield heat to reason, clean out many vanities; have our choirs of pure maidens in place of the Bacchidæ—hymns, too, meet to woo Pan to Christ, of which I could serve thee an example.... All in all, we prepare for a great Feast of the Purification which, at the New Year's beginning, is to symbolise our re-conversion to Nature's straight religion. Then will be 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! which of 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 he answered:—

'Cherish my lamb. The fold yearns for him. He would leave it, despite us all. My daughter, be gracious to our little dreamer, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.'

For years after it was become the dimmest of odd memories, men and women would recall, between laughter and tears, the strange little moral fantasia 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 shepherd of a New Arcadia. The measure had certainly seemed inspiring enough at the 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 her spiritual heart. David dancing before the ark must have exhibited just such an orderly abandonment as was displayed by these sober-rollicking Pantheists of the new cult. Crossness with them was sunk to an impossible discount. There was no market for gallantry, épanchements, or any billing and cooing whatever but of doves. Instead, there came into vogue intercourses between Dioneus and Flammetta of sweet unbashful reasonableness; high-junkettings on chestnut-meal and honey; the most engaging attentions, in the matter of grapes and sweet biscuits and infinite bon-bons, towards the little furred and feathered innocents of the countryside. That temperance really was, according to the angelic propagandist, the true epicurism, experience no less astonishing than agreeable came to prove. Then was the festival of beans and bacon instituted by some jaded palates. Charity and consideration rose on all sides in a night, like edible and nutritious funguses. From Hallowmas to Christmas there was scarce a sword whipped from its scabbard but reflection 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, I see your jostling of me was unavoidable; Sir, your courtesy turns my asps to roses.' Nature and the natural decencies were on all tongues; the licences of eye and ear and lip were rejected for abominations unpalatable to any taste more refined than yesterday's. Modesty ruled the 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 an amazing attractiveness in the pretty dogma which rather encouraged than denounced in them the graceful arts of self-adornment. 'Naked, like the birds,' attested their little priest, 'do we come to inherit our Kingdom. Shall we be more blamed than they for adapting to ourselves the plumages of that bright succession?' Only he pleaded for a perfect adaptation to conditions—to form, climate, environments, constitution. The lines of all true beauty, he declared, were such as both suggested and defended. Could monstrosities of head furniture, for instance, appeal to any but a monster? Locks, thereat, were delivered from their fantastic convolutions, from their ropes of pearls, from their gold-dust and iris-powder, and were heaped or coiled di sua natura, as any girl, according to circumstances, might naturally dispose of them. There was a general holocaust of extravagances, with some talk of feeding the sacrifice with fuel of useless confessional boxes; and, in the meanwhile, the church took snuff and smiled, and the devil hid his tail in a reasonable pair of breeches, and endured all the inconveniences of sitting on it without a murmur.

Alas! 'How quick bright things come to confusion!' But the moment while it held gathered the force of an epoch; and no doubt much moral amendment was to derive from it. Intellect in a sweet presence makes a positive of an abstract argument; and when little Bembo asserted, in refutation of the agnostics, that man's dual personality was proved by the fact of his abhorring in others the viciousnesses which his flesh condoned in himself, the statement was accepted for the dictum of an inspired saint. But his strength of the moment lay chiefly in his undeviating consistency with his own queer creed. He never swerved from his belief in the soul's responsibility to its past, or of its commitment to a retrogressive movement after death. 'We drop, fainting, out of the ranks in a desolate place,' he said. 'We come to, alone and abandoned. Shall we, poor mercenaries, repudiating a selfish cause, not turn our faces to the loved home, far back, from which false hopes beguiled us? Be, then, our way as we have made it, whether by forbearance or rapine.' Again he would say: 'Take, so thy to-day be clean, no fearful thought for thy to-morrow, any more than for thy possible estrangement from thy friend. There is nothing to concern thee now (which is all that is) but thy reason, love, and justice of this moment. 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 in these days of their regeneracy, which, as exemplifying the strengths and weaknesses of his propaganda, is here given:—

It was, I say, popular with the Lotharios. The novelty of this sort of renunciation tickled their sensoriums famously. It suggested a quite new and captivating form of self-indulgence, in the rapture to be gathered from an indefinite postponement of consummations. The sense of gallantry lies most in contemplation. I do not think it amounted to much more. Teresa and Elisabetta enjoyed their part in the serio-comic sport immensely, and were the most cuddlesome lambs, frisking unconscious under the faltering knife of the butcher. Madonna Caterina laughed immoderately to see their great mercy-pleading eyes coquetting with the greatly-withheld blade. But then she had no bump of reverence. The little wretch disliked sanctity in any form; loved aggressiveness better than meekness; was always in her heart a little Amazonian terrier-bitch, full of fight and impudence. It might have gone crossly with Messer Bembo had she been in her adoptive mother's position of trustee for him.

But luckily, or most unluckily for the boy, he was in more accommodating hands. This was the acute period of his proselytising. He had been persuaded back to court, and Bona had received him with moist eyes and open arms, and indeed a very yearning pathos of emotionalism, which had gathered a fataler influence from the contrition which in the first instance must be his. He had stood before her not so much rebuking as rebuked. Knowing her no longer saint, but only erring woman, it added a poignancy to his remorse that he had led her into further error by his abuse of her trust. She had answered his confession with a lovely absolution:—

'What is lost is lost. Thou art the faithfullest warrant of my true observance of my lord's wishes. Only if thou abandon'st me am I betrayed.'

Could he do aught after this but love her, accept her, her fervour and her penitence, for a first factor in the crusade he had made his own? And, while the soft enchantment held, no general could have wished a loyaler adjutant, or one more ready to first-example in herself the sacrifices he demanded. She abetted him, as she had promised, in all his tactics; lent the full force of an authority, which his sweetness and modesty could by no means arrogate to himself, to compel the reforms he sang. She gave, amongst other gifts, her whole present soul to the righting of the wrong done to the girl Lucia and her father; and when all her efforts to discover the vanished Tassino had failed, and she, having sent on her own initiative a compensatory purse of gold to the blind armourer, had learned how Lucia had banged the gift and the door in the messenger's face, was readily mollified by Bernardo's tender remonstrance: 'Ah, sweet Madonna! what gold can give her father eyes, or her child a name!'

'What! it is born?' she murmured.

'I saw it yesterday,' said Bembo. 'It lay in her lap, like the billet that kills a woman's heart.'

And, indeed, he had not, because of his re-exaltation, ceased to visit his friends, or to go to occasional discussion with the crabbed Montano; whose moroseness, nevertheless, was petrifying. Yet had he even sought to interest the Duchess there; though, for once, without avail; for she dared 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 with an infatuation beyond a mother's. Like the Emperor's jewelled nightingale, he was the sweetest bird to pet while his tricks were new. His voice entranced the echoes of those sombre chambers and blood-stained corridors. The castello was reconsecrated in his breath, and the miasma from its fearful pits dispelled. His lute was his psalter and psaltery in one: it interpreted him to others, and himself to himself. Its sob was his sorrow, and its joy his jubilance. He could coax from it wings to expression inexpressible by speech alone. Here is one of his latest parables, or apologues, baldly running, as it appears, on the familiar theme, which, through that vehicle, he translated for his hearers into rapture:—

And what about Messer Lanti and the Fool Cicada during this period of their loved little saint's apotheosis? Were they more advocati diaboli than Bona? Alas! they were perhaps the only two, in all that volatile city, to accept him, with a steadfast and indomitable faith, at his true worth. There was no angelic attribute, which Carlo, the honest blaspheming neophyte, would not have claimed for him—with blows, by choice; no rebuke, nor suggestion, nor ordinance issuing from his lips, which he would not accept and act upon, after the necessary little show of self-easing bluster. It was as comical as pathetic to observe the dear blunderhead's blushing assumptions of offence, when naughtiness claimed his intimacy; his exaggerated relish of spring water; his stout upholding, on an empty stomach, of the æsthetic values of abstinence. But he made a practical virtue of his conversion, and was become frequent in evidence, with his strong arm and voice and influence, as a Paladin on behalf of the oppressed. He and Cicada were the boy's bristling watch-dogs, mastiff and lurcher; and were even drawn, by that mutual sympathy, into a sort of scolding partnership, defensive and aggressive, which had for its aim the vindication of their common love. There, at least, was some odd rough fruit of the reconciliation preached by little Bembo between the God-man and the man-Nature. Such a relationship had been impossible in the old days of taskmaster and clown. Now it was understood between them, without superfluous words, that each held the other responsible to him for his incorruptible fidelity to his trust, and himself for a sleepless attention to the duty tacitly and by implication assigned to be his. That is to say, Messer Carlo's strength and long sword, and the other's shrewd wit, were assumed, as it were, for the right and left bucklers to the little charioteer as he drove upon his foes.

Carlo had a modest conception of his own abilities; yet once he made the mistake of appropriating to himself a duty—or he thought it one—rather appertaining to his fellow buckler. They had been, the Fool and himself, somewhat savagely making merry on the subject of Bona's conversion—in the singleness of which, to be candid, they had not much faith—when his honest brain conceived the sudden necessity of bluntly warning the little Bernardino of the danger he was courting in playing with such fire. His charge, no sooner realised than acted upon, took the boy, so to speak, in the wind. Bembo gasped; and then counter-buffed with angelic fury:—

'Who sleeps with a taper in his bed invites his own destruction? Then wert 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 pagan irreclaimable—right offspring of Vesta and the incestuous Saturn! Is this 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 agent for 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 to wish 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 with deference, 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, says Propriety, made out hands and faces, and whatever else that is not visible was the devil's work. You would be shown, by Monna Beatrice, for all her self-acknowledged parts, just clean hands and a smiling face. She conforms to fashion. For the rest, the devil will attend to his 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 set in our Duchess's little nose, to persuade her from routling in consecrated 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 was darkly and unshakably convinced, this same Lion ring was the pivot upon which all his darling's fortunes turned. That it was not really lost, but was being held concealed, by some jealous spirit or spirits, against the time most opportune for procuring the boy's, and perhaps others', destruction by its means, he felt sure. All Milan was not in one mind as to the disinterested motives of its Nathan. Tassino, Narcisso, the dowager of Casa Caprona, even the urbane Messer Ludovico himself, to name no others, could hardly be shown their personal profits in the movement. They might all, as the world's ambitions went, be excused from coveting the stranger's promotion. And there was no doubt that, at present, he was paramount in the eyes of the highest. That, in itself, was enough to make his sweet office the subject of much scepticism and blaspheming.

Tough, wary work for the watch-dogs, Cicada pondered.

That same 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 thy soul's sake. There are adders in Milan.' Then he bent closer, and whispered: '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 as I. I have not heard of its blabbing.'

'So much the better,' murmured the other, and glided away. But he left Cicada 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 Monna Beatrice. For why? Why, for a purpose that I'll circumvent—when I guess it.'

A passenger going by cursed him under his breath. The oath, profound and heartfelt, was really a psychologic note in the context of this history. Cicada heard it, and, looking round, saw, to his amazement, the form of the very monster of his present deliberations.

Narcisso, the rancorous mongrel, having snarled his hatred of an old associate, who, he verily believed, had once betrayed him, slouched, with a heavier vindictiveness, on his way. The Fool, inspired, skipped into cover, and peeped. He knew that the coward creature, once secure of his distance, would turn round to sputter and glower. He was not wrong there, nor in his surmise that, finding him vanished, Narcisso would continue his road in reassurance of his fancied security. He saw him actually turn and glare; distinguished, as plainly as though he heard it, the villainous oath with which the monster flounced again to his gait. And then, very cautiously, he came out of his hiding, and slunk in pursuit.

It could serve, at least, no bad purpose, he thought, to track the beast to his lair; and, with infinite circumspection, he set himself to the task.

It proved a simple one, after all—the more so as the animal, it appeared, was tenant in a very swarming warren, where concealment was easy. It was into a frowzy hole that, in the end, he saw him disappear—a tunnel, with a grating over it, like a sewer-trap.

And so, satisfied and not satisfied, he was turning away, when he was conscious in a moment of a face looking from the grating.

A minute later, threading his path along a by-alley, he emerged upon a sweeter province of the town, and stood to disburden himself of a mighty breath.

'So!' he muttered: 'He is there, is he! Well, the plot grows complicate.'