Brazenhead in Milan/Chapter 3

must have been in the late afternoon when Captain Brazenhead (who, in the meantime, had dined) received the desired summons from the mouth of a handsome page. Following this resplendent youth, whose scarlet thighs, whose trim green jerkin and cloud of yellow hair lost nothing by earnest scrutiny, he had to admit that he had not understood rulers of states to be so hard to come by. But the Tyrant of Milan, he believed, could be no ordinary monarch. He counted the corridors with doors at both ends of each; in every door a grille, through which he was very conscious of inspection before the bolts were drawn. He commented upon this. "Your Duke Galeass is as coy as a winkle in his shell"; to which the iridescent young man had no more reply than a lively look at the walls about him, and a finger to his lip. Handed on then to a gentleman-at-arms, he was admitted to an anteroom, where he was divested of his two swords, the hanger at his belt, and of another which was found in his trunks. He was then blindfolded and led about and about until, the bandage removed, he found himself standing before the narrow door of a vaulted passage, confronted by two halberdiers in black and a priest with a crucifix.

Captain Brazenhead wished these gentlemen a good day, and made a fine attempt to whistle the air of "In the meadow so green," but the remark was received in silence and the gallantry quenched by the priest, who, holding up his crucifix, administered an oath to the visitor of so dreadful a character that my pen, very properly, refuses to set it down. In effect, it bound him down in fearful penalties, both temporal and eternal, if he ventured anything against the Duke's person—"As if," he said, looking blandly round, "as if I should hurt the little man! I, Brazenhead, to whom the fleas in the bed are playmates!" Adding, however, that hard words would never break his bones, he cheerfully took it, and kissed the crucifix. Then the priest knocked three times at the door. It opened just wide enough to admit a man edgeways; Captain Brazenhead stood up in a dark and long apartment, lit at the further end by swinging lamps. There in that wavering light sat the Duke of Milan in his elbow-chair and furred gown, with his hands stretched out over a charcoal fire, and showed a quick-eyed, white, and beardless face, lively with fear, turned back to watch the visitor. It was to be seen that he was a hunchback, to be guessed that he wore chain-mail. He had three guards by the wall, two by the door. With one hand he now grasped his chair; with the other plucking at his throat, he recoiled and waited. It was very quiet in the room—so much so that you could hear the Duke's breath, fetched short and quickly. Like a rush of south-west wind making havoc in a cloister, the superb figure of Captain Brazenhead—with his six feet two inches, his cloak thrown back, his buoyant moustachios and eagle nose—seemed to fill the presence-chamber. Inspired to utterance, strung taut as he was by the occasion, he broke upon the silence of that churchyard vault with the crash and shatter of a trumpet.

"Hail, Ironsides!" he proclaimed, and the halberdiers backed to the walls. He said no less and added no more—nor need he.