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+Project Gutenberg's Little Novels of Italy, by Maurice Henry Hewlett
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Little Novels of Italy
+       Madonna Of The Peach-Tree, Ippolita In The Hills, The
+       Duchess Of Nona, Messer Cino And The Live Coal, The Judgment
+       Of Borso
+
+Author: Maurice Henry Hewlett
+
+Release Date: March 29, 2007 [EBook #20929]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Thierry Alberto, Juliet Sutherland, Martin
+Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY
+
+BY
+
+MAURICE HEWLETT
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE FOREST LOVERS," "PAN AND THE YOUNG
+SHEPHERD," "EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY," ETC.
+
+New York
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
+1899
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1899,
+By MAURICE HEWLETT.
+
+
+Norwood Press
+J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
+Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
+
+
+TO
+
+HIS FRIEND
+
+AND
+
+ITALY'S
+
+MAJOR-GENERAL JOSEPH BONUS, R.E.
+
+THE AUTHOR DEDICATES HIS BOOK
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                  PAGE
+MADONNA OF THE PEACH-TREE            1
+
+IPPOLITA IN THE HILLS               67
+
+THE DUCHESS OF NONA                137
+
+MESSER CINO AND THE LIVE COAL      225
+
+THE JUDGMENT OF BORSO              254
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY
+
+
+
+
+MADONNA OF THE PEACH-TREE
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+VANNA IS BID FOR
+
+
+Not easily would you have found a girl more winning in a tender sort
+than Giovanna Scarpa of Verona at one and twenty, fair-haired and
+flushed, delicately shaped, tall and pliant, as she then was. She had to
+suffer her hours of ill report, but passes for near a saint now, in
+consequence of certain miracles and theophanies done on her account,
+which it is my business to declare; before those she was considered (if
+at all) as a girl who would certainly have been married three years ago
+if dowries had not been of moment in the matter. In a city of maids as
+pretty as they are modest--which no one will deny Verona to be--there
+may have been some whose charms in either kind were equal to hers, while
+their estate was better in accord; but the speculation is idle.
+Giovanna, flower in the face as she was, fit to be nosegay on any
+hearth, posy for any man's breast, sprang in a very lowly soil. Like a
+blossoming reed she shot up to her inches by Adige, and one forgot the
+muddy bed wondering at the slim grace of the shaft with its crown of
+yellow atop. Her hair waved about her like a flag; she should have been
+planted in a castle; instead, Giovanna the stately calm, with her
+billowing line, staid lips, and candid grey eyes, was to be seen on her
+knees by the green water most days of the week. Bare-armed, splashed to
+the neck, bare-headed, out-at-heels, she rinsed and pommelled, wrung and
+dipped again, laughed, chattered, flung her hair to the wind, her sweat
+to the water, in line with a dozen other women below the Ponte Navi; and
+if no one thought any the worse of her, none, unhappily, thought any the
+better--at least in the way of marriage. It is probable that no one
+thought of her at all. Giovanna was a beauty and a very good girl; but
+she was a washerwoman for all that, whose toil fed seven mouths.
+
+Her father was Don Urbano, curate of Santa Toscana across the water.
+This may very easily sound worse than it is. In Don Urbano's day, though
+a priest might not marry, he might have a wife--a faithful, diligent
+companion, that is--to seethe his polenta, air his linen, and rear his
+children. The Church winked at her, and so continued until the Jesuits
+came to teach that winking was unbecoming. But when Can Grande II.
+lorded in Verona the Jesuits did not, and Don Urbano, good, easy man,
+cared not who winked at his wife. She gave him six children before she
+died of the seventh, of whom the eldest was Giovanna, and the others, in
+an orderly chain diminishing punctually by a year, ran down to
+Ferrantino, a tattered, shock-headed rascal of more inches than grace.
+Last of all the good drudge, who had borne these and many other burdens
+for her master, died also. Don Urbano was never tired of saying how
+providential it was that she had held off her demise until Giovanna was
+old enough to take her place. The curate was fat and lazy, very much
+interested in himself; his stipend barely paid his shot at the "Fiore
+del Marinajo," under whose green bush he was mostly to be seen. Vanna
+had to roll up her sleeves, bend her straight young back, and knee the
+board by the Ponte Navi. I have no doubt it did her good; the work is
+healthy, the air, the sun, the waterspray kissed her beauty ripe; but
+she got no husband because she could save no dowry. Everything went to
+stay the seven crying mouths.
+
+Then, on a day when half her twenty-first year had run after the others,
+old Baldassare Dardicozzo stayed on the bridge to rest from the burden
+of his pack--on a breezy March morning when the dust filled his eyes and
+the wind emptied him of breath. Baldassare had little enough to spare as
+it was. So he dropped his load in the angle of the bridge, with a
+smothered "Accidente!" or some such, and leaned to watch the swollen
+water buffeted crosswise by the gusts, or how the little mills
+amid-stream dipped as they swam breasting the waves. In so doing he
+became aware, in quite a peculiar way, of Vanna Scarpa.
+
+Baldassare was old, red-eyed, stiff in the back. Possibly he was
+rheumatic, certainly he was grumpy. He had a long slit mouth which
+played him a cruel trick; for by nature it smiled when by nature he was
+most melancholy. Smile it would and did, however cut-throat he felt: if
+you wanted to see him grin from ear to ear you would wait till he had
+had an ill day's market. Then, while sighs, curses, invocations of the
+saints, or open hints to the devil came roaring from him, that hilarious
+mouth of his invited you to share delights. You had needs laugh with
+him, and he, cursing high and low, beamed all over his face. "To make
+Baldassare laugh" became a stock periphrasis for the supreme degree of
+tragedy among his neighbours. About this traitor mouth of his he had a
+dew of scrubby beard, silvered black; he had bushy eyebrows, hands and
+arms covered with a black pelt: he was a very hairy man. Also he was a
+very warm man, as everybody knew, with a hoard of florins under the
+flags of his old-clothes shop in the Via Stella.
+
+Having spat into the water many times, rubbed his hands, mopped his
+head, and cursed most things under heaven and some in it, Master
+Baldassare found himself watching the laundresses on the shore. They
+were the usual shrill, shrewd, and laughing line--the trade seems to
+induce high mirth--and as such no bait for the old merchant by ordinary;
+but just now the sun and breeze together made a bright patch of them,
+set them at a provoking flutter. Baldassare, prickly with dust, found
+them like their own cool linen hung out to dance itself dry in the wind.
+Most of all he noticed Vanna, whom he knew well enough, because when she
+knelt upright she was taller and more wayward than the rest, and because
+the wind made so plain the pretty figure she had. She was very
+industrious, but no less full of talk: there seemed so much to say! The
+pauses were frequent in which she straightened herself from the hips and
+turned to thrust chin and voice into the debate. You saw then the sharp
+angle, the fine line of light along that raised chin, the charming turn
+of the neck, her free young shoulders and shapely head; also you marked
+her lively tones of _ci_ and _si_, and how her shaking finger drove them
+home. The wind would catch her yellow hair sometimes and wind it across
+her bosom like a scarf; or it streamed sideways like a long pennon; or
+being caught by a gust from below, sprayed out like a cloud of litten
+gold. Vanna always joined in the laugh at her mishap, tossed her tresses
+back, pinned them up (both hands at the business); and then, with square
+shoulders and elbows stiff as rods, set to working the dirt out of Don
+Urbano's surplice. Baldassare brooded, chewing straws. What a clear
+colour that girl had, to be sure! What a lissom rascal it was! A fine
+long girl like that should be married; by all accounts she would make a
+man a good wife. If he were a dozen years the better of four and fifty
+he might--Then came a shrug, and a "Ma!" to conclude in true Veronese
+Baldassare's ruminations. Shrug and explosion signalled two stark facts:
+Baldassare was fifty-four, and Vanna had no portion.
+
+Yet he remained watching on the bridge, his chin buried in his knotty
+hands, his little eyes blinking under stress of the inner fire he had.
+So it befell that La Testolina saw him, and said something shrill and
+saucy to her neighbour. The wind tossed him the tone but not the sense.
+He saw the joke run crackling down the line, all heads look brightly
+up. The joke caught fire; he saw the sun-gleam on a dozen perfect sets
+of teeth. Vanna's head was up with the rest, sooner up and the sooner
+down. Even from that height the little twinkling beacons from the bridge
+shot her through. He saw her colour deepen, head droop; she was busy
+long before the others had wrung their joke dry. "Soul of a cat!"
+grunted Baldassare between his teeth, "what a rosy baggage it is!" He
+waited a little longer, then deliberately passed the bridge, rounded the
+pillar by the steps, and went down to the women like a man who has made
+up his mind. Lizabetta of the roving eye caught the first hint of his
+shadow. Her elbow to Nonna's ribs, Nonna's "Pst!" in Nina's ear, spread
+the news. Vanna's cheeks flew the flag.
+
+"Buon' giorno, Ser Baldassare!" shrilled La Testolina, plump and
+black-eyed leader of mischief.
+
+"Giorno, giorno, La Testolina," growled the old man.
+
+Vanna, very busy, grew as red as a rose. The others knelt back on their
+heels; compliments of a homely sort flew about, sped on by flashing
+teeth. Baldassare's own were black as old channel-posts in the Lagoon,
+but in tongue-work he gave as sharp as he got. Then a wicked wind blew
+Vanna's hair like a whip across her throat, fit to strangle her. She had
+to face the day. Baldassare pondered her straight young back.
+
+"When Vanna's a nun she'll have no more trouble with her hair," quoth La
+Testolina, matchmaker by race.
+
+"When Vanna's a nun the river will be dry," said Vanna from between her
+elbows.
+
+"When Vanna's a nun the river, on the contrary, will be in flood." This
+from Baldassare.
+
+"Hey! what's this?" Caterina cried; and Nonna pinched her arm.
+
+"Adige will go crying that she comes no more to dip her arms," said the
+old man, with the utmost gravity and a broad grin. The women screamed
+their delight, slapped their knees, or raised witnessing hands to
+heaven; La Testolina caught Vanna round the waist and gave her a
+resounding kiss.
+
+"Compliments, my little Vanna, compliments!" Her voice pealed like a
+trumpet.
+
+"Vi ringrazio, signore," said Vanna under her breath, and La Testolina
+held up a tress of her long hair to the light.
+
+"When Vanna's a nun you would bid for that, eh, Baldassare?"
+
+"I will bid for whatever she will sell me," says he, with a blink.
+Whereupon the matchmaker made no more music. The scent was too hot for
+that.
+
+Yet for all his adventuring he got little reward; she turned him no more
+than the round of her cheek. Vanna never stayed her work, and he,
+ordinarily a silent man, paid no more compliments--yet ceased not to
+look.
+
+Going up the street at dinner-time, he made his bid. He limped by the
+tall girl's side without speech from either; but at the door he looked
+up queerly at her and pinched her ear.
+
+"Go in and feed the youngsters, my chuck," said he; "I know where to
+meet Don Urbano, and please Madonna you shall feed your own before
+long."
+
+"Yes, Ser Baldassare," says pretty Vanna in a twitter.
+
+The conference between the high contracting parties was wordy, bristled
+with the gesticulations of two pair of hands, and was commented on by
+all the guests in the "Fiore del Marinajo." The girl, said Don Urbano,
+was the very pride of his eye, prop of his failing years, a little
+mother to the children. She had had a most pious bringing-up, never
+missed the Rosary, knew the Little Hours of the Virgin, could do sums
+with notches in a stick, market like a Jew's housekeeper, sew like a
+nun, and make a stew against any wife in the _contrada_. Dowry, dowry!
+What did such a girl as that want with a dowry? She was her own dowry,
+by Bacchus the Thracian. Look at the shape of her--was that not a dowry?
+The work she could do, the pair of shoulders, the deep chest, the long
+legs she had--pick your dowry there, my friends! A young woman of her
+sort carried her dowry on her back, in her two hands, in her mouth--ah!
+and in what she could put into yours, by our Lord. Rather, it should be
+the other way. What, now, was Ser Baldassare prepared to lay out upon
+such a piece of goods? Baldassare shivered, grinned fearfully, and shook
+his head many times. Money was money; it was limited; it bore its value
+in plain figures upon its face: you knew where you were with money. But
+you could get wives cheaper than ducats, and find them cheaper value,
+soul of a cat! Besides, what was he? A poor pedlar, by his faith! At
+this he spread out his arms and dropped them with a flop upon his knees.
+The priest sat back in his chair and cast appealing looks at the
+rafters; the company chuckled, nudged each other, guffawed. Baldassare
+was made to feel that he had over-coloured his case. True, he admitted,
+he had a roof over his head, shared fortune with the rats in that. But
+look at the thing reasonably, comrades. Vanna would make another to
+keep; a girl of her inches must be an eater, body of a dog! Had his
+reverence thought of that? His reverence made a supreme effort, held up
+one pudgy forefinger, and with the other marked off two joints of it.
+"Of mortadella so much," he said; "of polenta so much"--and he shut one
+fist; "of pasta so much"--and he coupled the two fists; "and of wine, by
+the soul of the world, not enough to drown a flea! I tell you,
+Baldassare," he said finally, emboldened by the merchant's growing
+doubt--"I tell you that you ask of me a treasure which I would not part
+with for a cardinal's hat. No indeed! Not to be Bishop of Verona,
+throned and purfled on Can Grande's right hand, will I consent to
+traffic my Vanna. Eh, _sangue di Sangue_, because I am a man of the
+Church must I cease to be a man of bowels, to have a yearning, a tender
+spot here?" He prodded his cushioned ribs. "Go you, Ser Baldassare
+Dardicozzo," he cried, rising grandly in his chair--"go you; you have
+mistaken your man. The father stands up superb in the curate's cassock,
+and points the door to the chafferer of virgins!"
+
+The tavern-room, on Don Urbano's side to a man, beat the tables with
+their glasses; Baldassare had to surrender at discretion. The bargain,
+finally struck, was written out by an obliging notary on the
+scoring-slate. In the name of the holy and undivided Trinity it was
+declared to all men living and to be born, that Baldassare Dardicozzo,
+merchant of Verona, was obliged to pay to the reverend father in God,
+Urbano, curate of Santa Toscana in the Borgo San Giorgio, the sum of
+sixty florins Veronese and two barrels of wine of Val Pulicella, under
+condition that if within thirty days from those presents he did not lead
+in marriage Giovanna, daughter of the said reverend, he should be bound
+to pay the sum of one hundred and twenty florins Veronese, and four
+barrels of wine of Val Pulicella.
+
+The notary executed a monstrous flourish at the bottom--a foliated cross
+rising out of steps. On the last step he wrote his own name, Bartolo de
+Thomasinis; and then Baldassare, smiling as he should, but feeling as he
+should not, stuck his seal upon the swimming wax, and made a cross with
+the stile like the foundations of a spider's web.
+
+The affair was thus concluded; before the thirty days were up Vanna was
+taken to church by her father, and taken from it by her new master.
+Within a week she appeared at the doorway of Baldassare's little shop,
+very pretty, very sedate, quite the housewife--to sit there sewing and
+singing to herself from grey dawn to grey dusk.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+_TERTIUM QUID_
+
+
+A year passed, two years passed. Vanna was three and twenty, no more
+round but no less blooming in face and figure; still a reedy,
+golden-haired girl. But Baldassare was fifty-seven, and there was no
+sign of issue. The neighbours, who had nudged each other at one season,
+whose heads had wagged as their winks flew about, now accepted the
+sterile mating as of the order of things. Pretty Vanna, mother as she
+had been to her brothers and sisters, was to be a mother no more. There
+was talk of May and December. Baldassare was advised to lock up other
+treasure beside his florins; some, indeed, of the opposite camp gave
+hints none too honest to the forlorn young wife. The Piazza Sant'
+Anastasia at the falling-in of the day, for instance. Thus they put it.
+All girls--and what else was Vanna, a wife in name?--walked there arm in
+arm. Others walked there also, she must know. By-and-by some pretty lad,
+an archer, perhaps, from the palace, some roistering blade of a
+gentleman's lackey, a friar or twinkling monk out for a frolic, came
+along with an "Eh, la bellina!" and then there was another arm at work.
+So, for one, whispered La Testolina, dipping a head full of confidence
+and mystery close to Vanna's as the girl sat working out the summer
+twilight. The Via Stella was narrow and gloomy. The tall houses nearly
+met in that close way. Looking up you saw the two jagged edges of the
+eaves, like great tattered wings spread towards each other. When the
+green sky of evening deepened to blue, and blue grew violet, these
+shadowing wings were always in advance, more densely dark. There it was
+that Vanna worked incessantly, sewing seam after seam, patching,
+braiding, and fitting the pieces. By no chance at all did a hint of the
+sun fall about her; yet she always sang softly to herself, always wore
+her pretty fresh colours, and still showed the gold sheen in her yellow
+hair. Her hair was put up now, pulled smoothly back over her temples;
+she spoke in a low, sober, measured voice, and to La Testolina's sly
+suggestions responded with a little blush, a little shake of the head,
+and a very little sigh. "Ser Baldassare is good to me," she would say;
+"would you have me do him a wrong? Last Friday he gave me a silver piece
+to spend in whatsoever I chose. I bought a little holy-water stoup with
+a Gesulino upon it, bowered in roses. On Sunday morning he patted my
+cheek and called me a good girl. To say nothing of the many times he has
+pinched my ear, all this was very kind, as you must see. With what do
+you ask me to reward him? Fie!" La Testolina snorted, and shrugged
+herself away. Vanna went on with her sewing and her little song----
+
+
+     "Giovanottin, che te ne vai di fuora,
+     Stattene allegro, e così vo' far io.
+
+     Se ti trovassi qualche dama nuova,
+     L'ha da saper che tua dama son io."
+
+
+So sang she, innocently enough, whose sweethearting went no farther than
+her artless lips. There was not a spice of mischief in the girl. What
+she had told La Testolina had been no more than the truth: Master
+Baldassare was good to her--better than you would have believed possible
+in such a crabbed old stub of a man. He was more of a father to her than
+ever Don Urbano had been to anything save his own belly; but it was
+incontestable that he was not father to anything else. That alone might
+have been a grievance for Vanna, but there is no evidence that it was.
+Baldassare was by nature gruff, by habit close-fisted: like all such
+men, the more he felt the deeper he hoarded the thought under his ribs.
+The most he would venture would be a hand on her hair and a grunt when
+she did well; so sure as she looked up gratefully at him the old man
+drew off, with puckered brows and jaws working together. He may have
+been ashamed of his weakness; it is dead certain that no one in Verona,
+least of all Vanna herself, suspected him of any affection for his young
+wife. Mostly he was silent; thus she became silent too whenever he was
+in the house. This was against nature, for by ordinary her little songs
+bubbled from her like a bird's. But to see him so glum and staring
+within doors awed her: she set a finger to her lips as she felt the tune
+on her tongue, and went about her business mute. Baldassare would go
+abroad, stooping under his pack: she took her seat at the shop-door,
+threaded her needle, her fingers flew and her fancy with them. The
+spring of her music was touched, and all the neighbours grew to listen
+for the gentle cadences she made.
+
+So passed a year, so two years passed. Vanna was twenty-three, looking
+less, when along there came one morning a tall young friar, a Carmelite,
+by name Fra Battista, with a pair of brown dove's eyes in his smooth
+face. These he lifted towards Vanna's with an air so timid and so
+penetrating, so delicate and hardy at once, that when he was gone it was
+to leave her with the falter of a verse in her mouth, two hot cheeks,
+and a quicker heart.
+
+This Fra Battista, by birth a Bergamask, accredited to the convent at
+Verona by reason of his parts as a preacher, was tall and shapely, like
+a spoilt pretty boy to look at, leggy, and soft in the palm. His frock
+set off this petted appearance--it gave you the idea of a pinafore on
+him. He did not look manly, was not manly by any means, and yet not so
+girlish but that you could doubt his sex. His eyes, which, as I say,
+were soft as a dove's pair, he was not fond of showing; and this gave
+them the more searching appeal when he did. His mouth, full and fleshy
+in the lips, had a lovely curve. He kept it very demure, and, when he
+spoke, spoke softly. This was a young man born to be Lancilotto to some
+Ginevra or other; and, to do him justice, he had had his share of
+adventure in that sort at an early age. He had learned more out of Ovid
+than from the Fathers of Divinity, you may believe. Very popular he was
+in whatsoever convent he harboured, as a preacher famous all over
+Lombardy and the March,--in Bergamo, in Brescia, even as far as Mantua
+he had been heard of. The superior at Verona did his best to spoil him
+by endearment, flattery, and indulgence; but this was difficult, since
+he had been spoilt already.
+
+He passed down the Via Stella morning and evening for a week. Morning
+and evening his eyes encountered Vanna's. The third evening he smiled at
+her, the fourth morning he saluted her; the fifth evening he stopped and
+slipped in a gentle word; the first evening of the second week he
+stopped again, and that night, La Testolina being by, there was quite a
+little conversation.
+
+La Testolina had black eyes, a trim figure, and a way of wriggling which
+showed these to advantage. Fra Battista's fame and the possibility of
+mischief set her flashing; she led the talk and found him apt: it was
+not difficult to aim every word that it should go through and leave a
+dart in Vanna's timid breast. The girl was so artless, you could see her
+quiver, or feel her, at every shot. For instance, was his sanctity very
+much fatigued by yesterday's sermon? _Eh, la bella predica!_ What
+invocations of the saints, what heart-groping, what reachings after the
+better parts of women! It was some comfort to know that a woman had a
+better part at all--by the Saviour! for their handling by men gave no
+hint of it. Let Fra Beato--ah, pardon, Fra Battista she should have
+said--send some such arrows into men's hides! See them, for the
+gross-feeding, surly, spend-all, take-all knaves that they were! One or
+two she might name if she had a mind--ah! one or two in this very city
+of Verona, in this very Street of the Star, who--But there! Vanna must
+go and hear the Frate's next sermon, she must indeed. And if she could
+take her old curm-- Pshutt! What was she saying? How she ran on! She did
+indeed. Fra Battista, leaning against the lintel, kept his eyelids on
+the droop, seemed to find his toes of interest. But now and again he
+would look delicately up, and so sure as he did the brown eyes and the
+grey seemed to swim towards each other, to melt in a point, swirl in an
+eddy of the feelings, in which Vanna found herself drowning and found
+such death sweet. La Testolina still ran on, but now in a monologue. Fra
+Battista looked and longed, and Vanna looked again and thrilled. It grew
+quite dark; nothing of each other could they see and little know, until
+the friar put out his foot and found Vanna's. A tremor, beginning at her
+heart, ran down to her toes; Battista felt the flutter of it and was
+assured.
+
+When he left her that night he kissed her cold hand, then La
+Testolina's, which he found by no means cold, and moved off leisurely
+towards the Piazza dell' Erbe. Neither woman spoke for a while: La
+Testolina was picking at her apron, Vanna sat quietly in the dark
+holding her heart. She was still in a tremble, so ridiculously moved
+that when her friend kissed her she burst out crying. La Testolina went
+nodding away; and the end of the episode may be predicted. Not at one
+but at many sermons of the tall Carmelite did Vanna sit rapt; not for
+one but for every dusk did he stoop to kiss her hand. All Verona saw
+her devotion,--all Verona, that is, but one old Veronese. The essence of
+comedy being that the spectators shall chuckle at actors in a fog, here
+was a comedy indeed.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE SEED OF DISCORD
+
+
+When Vanna announced her condition the neighbours looked slyly at each
+other; when her condition announced Vanna, they chattered; the gossip
+sank to whispering behind the hand as time went on, and ceased
+altogether when the baby was born. That was a signal for heads to shake.
+Some pitied the father, many defended the mother: it did not depend upon
+your sex; sides were taken freely and voices were shrill when neither
+was by. Down by the river especially, upon that bleached board below the
+bridge, _ci_ and _si_ whistled like the wind in the chimneys, and the
+hands of testimony were as the aspen leaves when storms are in. Some
+took one side, some another; but when, in due season, it was seen what
+inordinate pride Baldassare had in the black-eyed _bambino_ there was no
+question of sides. He had ranked himself with the unforgivable party:
+the old man was an old fool, a gull whose power of swallow stirred
+disgust. Vanna had the rights of it, they said; such men were made to be
+tricked. As for Fra Battista's pulpit, it was thronged about with
+upturned faces; for those who had not been before went now to judge what
+they would have done under the circumstances. Having been, there were
+no two opinions about that. Messer Gabriele Arcangelo, some said,
+judging by the honey-tongue; San Bastiano, others considered him, who
+went by his comely proportions; and these gained the day, since his
+beardless face and friar's frock induced the idea of innocence, which
+Sebastian's virgin bloom also taught. The quality of his sermons did not
+grow threadbare under this adventitious criticism: he kept a serene
+front, lost no authority, nor failed of any unction. There was always a
+file at his confessional; and at Corpus Christi, when in the pageant he
+actually figured as Sebastian, his plump round limbs roped to a
+pine-stock drew tears from all eyes.
+
+Unhappily you have to pay for your successes. There were other preachers
+in Verona, and other eloquent preachers who, being honest men, had had
+to depend upon their eloquence. These were the enemy--Franciscans, of
+course, and Dominicans--who got wind of something amiss, and began to
+nose for a scandal. What they got gave them something besides eloquence
+to lean on: there were now other sermons than young Fra Battista's, and
+the moral his person pointed had a double edge. In fact, where he
+pointed with his person, the Dominicans pointed with their sharp
+tongues. The Franciscans, more homely, pointed with their fingers. Fra
+Battista began to be notorious--a thing widely different from fame; he
+also began to be uncomfortable, and his superior with him. They talked
+it over in the cloister, walking up and down together in the cool of the
+day. "It has an ugly look, my dear," said the provincial; "send the
+young woman to me."
+
+What of the young woman, meantime? Let me tell the truth: motherhood
+became her so well that she was brazen from the very beginning. No
+delicacy, no pretty shame, no shrinking--she gloried in the growing
+fact. When she was brought to bed she made a quick recovery; she
+insisted upon a devout churching, an elaborate christening of the
+doubtful son (whereat, if you will believe me, no other than Fra
+Battista himself must do the office!); thenceforth she was never seen
+without her _bimbo_. While she worked it lay at her feet or across her
+knee like a stout chrysalis; the breast was ever at its service, pillow
+or fount; when it slept she lifted up a finger or her grave eyes at the
+very passers-by; her lips moulded a "Hush!" at them lest they should
+dare disturb her young lord's rest. The saucy jade! Was ever such
+impudence in the world before? It drew her, too, to old Baldassare in a
+remarkable way. This the neighbours--busy with sniffing--did not see.
+She had always had a sense of the sweet root under the rind, always
+purred at his stray grunts and pats, taking them by instinct for what
+they were really worth; and now to watch his new delight filled her with
+gratitude--and more, she felt free to love the man. For one thing, it
+unlocked his lips and hers. She could sing about the house since Cola
+had come--they had christened him after good Saint Nicholas--because
+Master Baldassare was so talkative on his account. The old man sat at
+home whenever he could, in his shiny armchair, his cup of black wine by
+his side, and watched Vanna with the baby by the hour together, poring
+over every downward turn of her pretty head, every pass of her fingers,
+every little eager striving of the sucking child. There were, indeed, no
+bounds to his content: to be a father--poor old soul!--seemed to him the
+most glorious position in the world. Can Grande II. in the
+judgment-seat, the bishop stalled in his throne, the Holy Father himself
+in the golden chambers of his castle at Avignon, had nothing to offer
+Ser Baldassare Dardicozzo, the old-clothes man.
+
+Though the neighbours knew nothing of this inner peace, they could not
+deny that Monna Vanna, brazen or no, was mightily become by her new
+dignity or (as you should say) indignity. She was more staid, more
+majestic; but no less the tall, swaying, crowned girl she had ever been.
+She was seen, without doubt, for a splendid young woman. The heavy child
+seemed not to drag her down, nor the slant looks of respectable
+citizens, her neighbours, to lower her head. She met them with level
+eyes quite candid, and a smiling mouth to all appearance pure. When she
+found they would not discuss her riches, she talked of theirs. When she
+found them over-satisfied with their children, she laughed quietly as
+one who knew better. This was a thing to take away a woman's breath,
+that she should grow the more glorious for her shame. Party feeling had
+been stormy, like crossing tides, between those who held Baldassare for
+a gull and those who resented Vanna's unruffled brows. But now there was
+but one party. It was very well to hoodwink an old skinflint; but, by
+the Mass, not honest to flaunt your methods in the world's face. And
+since our own dignity is the skin upon which we rely for all our
+protection, while contempt for our neighbours is but a grease we put
+upon it for its ease, it was self-defence which brought it about that
+the party against Vanna grew ominously large, while Baldassare gained
+quite a host of sympathizers. The girl was now shunned, ostentatiously,
+carefully shunned. Even La Testolina was shy of her. But, bless you, she
+saw nothing of it--or cared nothing. She chattered to her grossly
+deceived husband, went (nominally, you may be sure!) confessing to the
+grossly deceiving friar, she cooed to her baby, warbled her little
+songs, looked handsome, carried herself nobly, as if she were the
+Blessed Virgin herself, no less. This could not be endured: a thousand
+tongues were ready to shoot at her, and would have shot but for fear of
+old Baldassare's grim member--reputed forked. While he was in the way,
+fat-headed fool, there was no moral glow to be won by a timely word. The
+tongues lay itching; two or three barren women in the Via Stella were
+hoarding stones.
+
+Then, just about the time when the prior of the Carmelites bid Fra
+Battista send him the young woman, Baldassare took the road for a round
+of chaffer which might keep him out of Verona a week. The Via Stella
+felt, and Fra Battista knew, that the chance had come.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE HARVEST OF LITTLE EASE
+
+
+Verona, stormy centre of strife, whose scarred grey face still wears a
+blush when viewed from the ramp of the Giusti garden, was in those times
+a place of short and little ease. The swords were never rusty. A warning
+clang from the belfry, two or three harsh strokes, the tall houses
+disgorged, the streets packed; Capulet faced Montague, Bevilacqua caught
+Ridolfi by the throat, and Della Scala sitting in his hall knew that he
+must do murder if he would live a prince. It seems odd that the suckling
+of a little shopkeeper should lead to such issues; but so it was. And
+thus it was.
+
+On the morning of Baldassare's setting-out for the Mantuan road, La
+Testolina--at that time much and unhealthily in Fra Battista's
+hire--came breathless to the Via Stella. Craning her quick head round
+the door-post, she saw Vanna sitting all in cool white (for the weather
+was at the top of summer), stooped over her baby, happy and calm as
+always, and fingering her breast that she might give the little tyrant
+ease of his drink. That baby was a glutton. "Hist, Vanna, hist!" La
+Testolina whispered; and Vanna looked up at her with a guarded smile, as
+who should say, "Speak softer, my dear, lest Cola should strangle in
+his swallow."
+
+But La Testolina's eyes were like pin-points, centring all her alarms.
+
+"You must come to the Carmelites, Vanna. There is a great to-do. The
+warden of San Francesco has been to the bishop, and the bishop is with
+Can Grande at this moment. You must come, indeed, at
+once--_subitissimo_!"
+
+Vanna laughed--the rich quiet laugh of a girl whose affairs are in good
+train, and all other affairs the scratch of a flea.
+
+"Why, what have I to do with the bishop and Can Grande, La Testolina?"
+says she. "My master is out, and I must mind the shop. There is baby
+too."
+
+"By Saints Pan and Silvanus, my girl, it will be the worse for you if
+you come not," said La Testolina, with a tragic sniff. "Eh, you little
+fool, don't you know that it is you and your brat have set all Verona by
+the ears?"
+
+Vanna had never thought of the ears of Verona, and knew not how to think
+of them now; but she saw that her friend was in a fever of suppressed
+knowledge. Therefore she shawled her head and her baby in her sea-blue
+cloak, locked the shop-door, and followed La Testolina.
+
+The sealed gates in the white convent wall were barred and
+double-locked. A scared brother cocked his eye through the grille to see
+who was there.
+
+"It is she," hissed La Testolina.
+
+"_Dio mio_, the _causa causans_!" cried he, and let them in through a
+cranny. "Follow me, mistresses, and God give good ending to this
+adventure," he prayed, as he slippered up the court.
+
+Vanna, blank and smiling, La Testolina with wandering, fearful eyes,
+followed.
+
+They found the prior sitting well back in his ebony chair and in
+meditation, his chin buried in his hand. Behind him (and behind his back
+his hands) was Fra Corinto the pittanciar, pockmarked, thin, and
+mortified. He looked the prior's reproach, and was.
+
+"Now, women," said the prior, testily--a fat and flabby old man with a
+sour mouth--"now, women, which of you is at the bottom of this accursed
+business? Where is the baby? Let me judge for myself."
+
+La Testolina, protesting her remarkable innocence by every quiver of her
+head, edged Vanna to the front. Vanna stood up, straight as a candle,
+and unveiled her bosom.
+
+"Do you want to see my little son, reverend prior?" she said. "Behold
+him here (_Eccololì_)." She held him out proudly in her arms, as if he
+were monstrance and she priest.
+
+Now whether it was that motherhood had fired a comely girl with the
+beautiful seriousness of a woman, so that she was transfigured before
+him; or whether some chance passage of the crossing lights played tricks
+with his vision--which it was, or whether it was both, I know not. He
+saw, or thought he saw, a tall, smiling lady, hooded in blue over white,
+holding up a child; he saw, or thought for a moment that he saw, the
+Image of all Mothers displaying the Image of all Sons. His fingers
+pattered over his scapular. "Eh, my Lady the Virgin! What dost thou
+here, glorifying this place?" As soon as he had said it he might have
+known that he was a fool; but Vanna's large grey eyes loomed upon him to
+swallow him up, her colour of faint rose glowed over him and throbbed.
+_Vera incessu patuit dea!_ "By her presence ye shall judge her," quoth
+the prior to himself, and hid his eyes.
+
+There was a hush upon all the group in the chamber, during which you
+could have heard afar off the nasal discords of the brethren in choir
+droning through an office. No one spoke. The prior's lips moved at his
+prayers; Fra Corinto looked frowningly before him; La Testolina was
+fidgety to speak, but dared not; Vanna, her long form like a ripple of
+moonlight in the dusk, cooed under her voice to the baby; he, unheeding
+cause of so much strife in high places, held out his pair of puckered
+hands and crowed to the company. So with their thoughts: the prior
+thought he had seen the Holy Virgin; Fra Corinto thought the prior an
+old fool; La Testolina hoped his reverence had not the colic; and Vanna
+thought of nothing at all.
+
+Fra Corinto it was (looking not for Madonna in a baggage), who, by
+discreetly coughing, brought his master back to his senses. The prior
+cleared his throat once or twice, looked at the young woman, and felt
+quite himself. Ridiculous what tricks a flicker of sunlight will play on
+the wisest of men!
+
+"Monna Vanna," said he, "I have not brought you here to judge between
+you and my brother Battista, now at discipline in his cell. The flesh,
+which he should have tamed, has raised, it appears, a bruised head for
+one last spite. My brother was bitten, and my brother fell into sin.
+Whether, as of old, the tempter was the woman, it is sure that, as of
+old, the eater was a man. I will not condemn you unheard, lest I incur
+reproach in my turn. But our order is in peril; the enemy is abroad,
+with Envy, Hatred, and Malice barking on their leashes. What can the
+poor sheep do but scatter before the wolves? Fra Battista, his penance
+duly done, must leave Verona; and you, my sister, must do penance, that
+God be not mocked, nor the Veronese upraised to mock Him."
+
+Of this solemn appeal, Vanna, to all seeming, understood not one word.
+True, she blushed a little, but that was because a prior was talking to
+her: her honest grey eyes were quite untroubled, her smile as tender as
+ever. She spoke as one deprecating temerity--that she should speak at
+all to so great a man--and by no means any judgment.
+
+"I am only a poor girl, reverend prior," said she, "most ignorant and
+thick-witted. Pray, what have I and my baby to do with these high
+matters of Fra Battista's error?"
+
+The prior grew angry. "Tush, my woman," he grunted, "I beg you to drop
+the artless. It is out of place here. Let me look at the youngster."
+
+"Yes, yes, mistress, let us see the child," said Fra Corinto, who
+croaked like a nightingale in June.
+
+Vanna moved forward on a light foot. "Willingly, reverend fathers," said
+she. "He is a fine child, they all say, and reputed the image of his
+father." A sublime utterance, full of humoursome matter, if it had been
+a time for humours.
+
+But it was not. La Testolina could not contain her virtuous
+indignation--for who is so transcendently righteous as your rascal for
+once in the right?
+
+"Hey, woman!" she cried shrilly, "what grossness is this? Do you think
+the whole city don't know about you?"
+
+Vanna turned quivering. "And what is it that the whole city knows but
+does not say, if you please?"
+
+The prior wagged helplessly his hands. Like Pilate, he would have washed
+off the business if he could. He looked at the two women. Eh, by the
+Lord! there would be a scene. But the whole thing was too impudent a
+fraud: there must be an end of it. He caught Fra Corinto's eyes and
+raised his brows. Fra Corinto was his jackal--here was his cue. He went
+swiftly to the door, set it open, came back and caught Vanna roughly by
+the shoulder. He turned her shocked face to the open door, and his dry
+voice grated horribly upon her ears.
+
+"Out with you, piece!" was what he said; and Vanna reeled.
+
+For a full minute she gaped at him for a meaning; his face taught the
+force of his words only too well. She sobbed, threw up her high head,
+bent it, like Jesus, for the cross, and fled.
+
+The old porter leered by his open gates. "He! he! They are all outside,"
+he chuckled--"Magpies and Dusty-hoods, Parvuses, Minors and Minims,
+Benets, and Austins, every cowl in Verona! Come along, my handsome
+girl, you must move briskish this day!"
+
+She heard the hoarse muttering of the men, and, a worse poison for good
+ears, the shrill venom of the women. Out of the gates she blindly went,
+and all the pack opened their music upon her. Stones flew, but words
+flew faster and stuck more deep. The mob, as she blundered through the
+streets, shuffling, gasping, stumbling at her caught gown, dry-eyed,
+open-mouthed, panting her terror, her bewilderment, her shame and
+amaze--the mob, I say, dizzied about her like a cloud of wasps; yet they
+had in them what wasps have not--voices primed by hatred to bay her mad.
+There was no longer any doubt for her: the pittanciar's word (which had
+not been "piece") was tossed from pavement to pavement, from balcony to
+balcony, out at every open door, shot like slops from every leaning
+casement, and hissed in her ears as it flew. It was a mad race. The
+Franciscans tucked up their frocks and discarded stones, that they might
+run and shout the more freely. The Dominicans soon tired: their end was
+served. The cloistered orders were out of condition; the secular clergy
+came to weary of what was, after all, but a matter for the mendicants.
+The common people, however, had the game well in hand. They headed her
+off the narrow streets, where safety might have been, and kept her to
+the Lung' Adige. Round the great S the river makes she battled her blind
+way, trying for nothing, with wits for nothing, without hope, or
+understanding, or thought. She ran, a hunted woman, straight before her,
+and at last shook off the last of her pursuers by San Zeno. Stumbling
+headlong into a little pine-wood beyond the gates, she fell, swooned,
+and forgot.
+
+It was near dark when she opened her loaded eyes--that is, there was no
+moon, but a great concourse of stars, which kept the night as a long
+time of dusk. The baby was awake, too, groping for food and whimpering a
+little. She sat up to supply him: though in that act her brain swam, it
+is probable the duty saved her. Fearing to faint again, she dared not
+allow herself to think; for children must be fed though their mothers
+are stoned from the gates. Vanna nursed him till he dropped asleep, and
+sat on with her thoughts and troubles. Happily for her, he had turned
+these to other roads than the Lung' Adige. She knew that if he was to be
+fed again she must feed also.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE MIRACLE OF THE PEACH-TREE
+
+
+Directly you were outside the Porta San Zeno the peach-trees began--acre
+by acre of bent trunks, whose long branches, tied at the top, took
+shapes of blown candle-flames: beyond these was an open waste of bents
+and juniper scrub, which afforded certain eatage for goats.
+
+Here three herd-boys, Luca, Biagio, and Astorre, simple brown-skinned
+souls, watched their flocks all the summer night, sleeping, waking to
+play pranks with each other, whining endless doggerel, praying at every
+scare, and swearing at every reassurance. Simple puppyish folk though
+they were, Madonna of the Peach-Tree chose them to witness her epiphany.
+
+It was a very still night, of wonderful star-shine, but without a moon.
+The stars were so thickly spread, so clear and hot, that there was light
+enough for the lads to see each other's faces, the rough shapes of each
+other. It was light enough to notice how the square belfry of San Zeno
+cut a wedge of black into the spangled blue vault. Sheer through the
+Milky Way it ploughed a broad furrow, which ended in a ragged edge. You
+would never have seen that if it had not been a clear night.
+
+Still also it was. You heard the cropping of the goats, the jaws' champ
+when they chewed the crisp leaves; the flicker of the bats' wings. In
+the marsh, half a mile away, the chorus of frogs, when it swelled up,
+drowned all nearer noise; but when it broke off suddenly, those others
+resumed their hold upon the stillness. It was a breathless night of
+suspense. Anything might happen on such a night.
+
+Luca, Biagio, and Astorre, under the spell of this marvellous night, lay
+on their stomachs alert for alarms. A heavy-wheeling white owl had come
+by with a swish, and Biagio had called aloud to Madonna in his agony.
+Astorre had crossed himself over and over again: this was the Angel of
+Death cruising abroad on the hunt for goats or goat-herds; but "No, no!"
+cried Luca, eldest of the three, "the wings are too short, friends. That
+is a fluffy new soul just let loose. She knows not the way, you see. Let
+us pray for her. There are devils abroad on such close nights as this."
+
+Pray they did, with a will, "Ave Maria," "O maris Stella," and half the
+Paternoster, when Biagio burst into a guffaw, and gave Luca a push which
+sent Astorre down.
+
+"Why, 'tis only a screech-owl, you fools!" he cried, though the sound of
+his own voice made him falter; "an old mouse-teaser," he went on in a
+much lower voice. "Who's afraid?"
+
+A black and white cat making a pounce had sent hearts to mouths after
+this: though they found her out before they had got to "Dominus tecum,"
+she left them all in a quiver. It had been a cat, but it might have been
+the devil. Then, before the bristles had folded down on their backs,
+they rose up again, and the hair of their heads became rigid as quills.
+Over the brow of a little hill, through the peach-trees (which bowed
+their spiry heads to her as she walked), came quietly a tall white Lady
+in a dark cloak. Hey! powers of earth and air, but this was not to be
+doubted! Evenly forward she came, without a footfall, without a rustle
+or the crackling of a twig, without so much as kneeing her skirt--stood
+before them so nearly that they saw the pale oval of her face, and said
+in a voice like a muffled bell, "I am hungry, my friends; have you any
+meat?" She had a face like the moon, and great round eyes; within her
+cloak, on the bosom of her white dress, she held a man-child. He, they
+passed their sacred word, lifted in his mother's arms and turned
+open-handed towards them. Luca, Biagio, and Astorre, goat-herds all and
+honest lads, fell on their faces with one accord; with one voice they
+cried, "Madonna, Madonna, Madonna! pray for us sinners!"
+
+But again the Lady spoke in her gentle tones. "I am very hungry, and my
+child is hungry. Have you nothing to give me?" So then Luca kicked the
+prone Biagio, and Biagio's heel nicked Astorre on the shin. But it was
+Luca, as became the eldest, who got up first, all the same; and as soon
+as he was on his feet the others followed him. Luca took his cap off,
+Biagio saw the act and followed it. Astorre, who dared not lift his
+eyes, and was so busy making crosses on himself that he had no hands to
+spare, kept his on till Luca nudged Biagio, and Biagio cuffed him
+soundly, saying, "Uncover, cow-face."
+
+Then Luca on his knees made an offering of cheese and black bread to
+the Lady. They saw the gleam of her white hand as she stretched it out
+to take the victual. That hand shone like agate in the dark. They saw
+her eat, sitting very straight and noble upon a tussock of bents.
+Astorre whispered to Biagio, Biagio consulted with Luca for a few
+anxious moments, and communicated again with Astorre. Astorre jumped up
+and scuttled away into the dark. Presently he came back, bearing
+something in his two hands. The three shock-heads inspected his burden;
+there was much whispering, some contention, almost a scuffle. The truth
+was, that Biagio wanted to take the thing from Astorre, and that Luca
+would not allow it. Luca was the eldest and wanted to take it himself.
+Astorre was in tears. "_Cristo amore!_" he blubbered, "you will spill
+the milk between you. I thought of it all by myself. Let go, Biagio; let
+go, Luca!" So they whispered and tussled, pulling three different ways.
+The Lady's voice broke over them like silver rain. "Let him who thought
+of the kind act give me the milk," she said; so young Astorre on his
+knees handed her the horn cup, and through the cracks of his fingers
+watched her drink every drop.
+
+That done, the cup returned with a smile piercingly sweet, the Lady
+rose. Saints on thrones, how tall she was! "The _bimbo_ will thank you
+for this to-morrow, as I do now," said she. "Goodnight, my friends, and
+may the good God have mercy upon all souls!" She turned to go the way
+she had come, but Astorre, covering his eyes with one hand, crept
+forward on three legs (as you might say) and plucked the hem of her
+robe up, and kissed it. She stooped to lay a hand upon his head. "Never
+kiss my robe, Astorre," said she--and how under Heaven did she know his
+name if she were not _what she was_?--"never kiss my robe, but get up
+and let me kiss you." Well of Truth! to think of it! Up gets Astorre,
+shaking like a nun in a fit, and the Lady bent over him and, as sure as
+you are you, kissed his forehead. Astorre told his village next day as
+they sat round him in a ring, and he on the wellhead as plain to be seen
+as this paper, that he felt at that moment as if two rose-leaves had
+dropped from heaven upon his forehead. Slowly then, very slowly and
+smoothly (as they report), did the Lady move away towards the
+peach-trees whence she had come. In the half light there was--for by
+this it was the hour before dawn--they saw her take a peach from one of
+the trees. She stayed to eat it. Then she walked over the crest of the
+orchard and disappeared. As soon as they dared, when the light had come,
+they looked for her over that same crest, but could see nothing
+whatever. With pale, serious faces the three youths regarded each other.
+There was no doubt as to what had happened--a miracle! a miracle!
+
+With one consent then--since this was plainly a Church affair--they ran
+to their parish priest, Don Gasparo. He got the whole story at last;
+nothing could shake them; no detail was wanting. Thus it was: the
+Blessed Virgin, carrying in her arms the Santissimo Bambino Gesù, had
+come through the peach-trees, asked for and eaten of their food, prayed
+for them aloud to Messer Domeneddio himself, and kissed Astorre on the
+forehead. As they were on their knees, she walked away, stopped, took a
+peach, ate it, walked on, vanished--_ecco_! The curate rubbed his head,
+and tried another boy. Useless: the story was the same. Third boy, same
+story. He tucked up his cassock with decision, took his biretta and
+walking-staff, and said to the three goat-herds:--
+
+"My lads, all this is matter of miracle. I do not deny its truth--God
+forbid it in a simple man such as I am. But I do certainly ask you to
+lead me to the scene of your labours."
+
+The boys needed no second asking: off they all set. The curate went over
+every inch of the ground. Here lay Luca, Biagio, and Astorre; the belfry
+of San Zeno was in such and such a direction, the peach-trees in such
+and such. Good: there they were. What next? According to their account,
+Madonna had come thus and thus. The good curate bundled off to spy for
+footprints in the orchard. Marvel! there were none. This made him look
+very grave; for if she made no earthly footprints, she could have no
+earthly feet. Next he must see by what way she had gone. She left them
+kneeling here, said they, went towards the peach-garden, stayed by a
+certain tree (which they pointed out), plucked a peach from the very top
+of it--this they swore to, though the tree was near fourteen feet
+high--stood while she ate it, and went over the brow of the rising
+ground. Here was detail enough, it is to be hoped. The curate nosed it
+out like a slot-hound; he paced the track himself from the scrub to the
+peach-tree, and stood under this last gazing to its top, from there to
+its roots; he shook his head many times, stroked his chin a few: then
+with a broken cry he made a pounce and picked up--a peach-stone! After
+this to doubt would have been childish; as a fact he had no more than
+the boys.
+
+"My children," said he, "we are here face to face with a great mystery.
+It is plain that Messer Domeneddio hath designs upon this hamlet, of
+which we, His worms, have no conception. You, my dear sons, He hath
+chosen to be workers for His purpose, which we cannot be very far wrong
+in supposing to be the building of an oratory or tabernacle to hold this
+unspeakable relic. That erection must be our immediate, anxious care.
+Meantime I will place the relic in the pyx of our Lady's altar, and mark
+the day in our calendar for perpetual remembrance. I shall not fail to
+communicate with his holiness the bishop. Who knows what may be the end
+of this?"
+
+He was as good as his word. A procession was formed in no time--children
+carrying their rosaries and bunches of flowers, three banners, the whole
+village with a candle apiece; next Luca, Biagio, and Astorre with larger
+candles--half a pound weight each at the least; then four men to hold up
+a canopy, below which came the good curate himself with the relic on a
+cushion.
+
+It was deposited with great reverence in the place devoted, having been
+drenched with incense. There was a solemn mass. After which things the
+curate thought himself at liberty to ruffle into Verona with his news.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE VISITATION OF THE GOLDEN FISH
+
+
+When a beast of chase--hart-royal, bear, or wolf--has been bayed and
+broken up, the least worthy parts are thrown to the curs which always
+come in at the heels of the pack. So it is with a kingly seat: the best
+of the meats, after the great officers of the household have feasted, go
+to the dependants of these; the peelings and guttings, the scum and
+scour of the broth, are flung farther, to the parasites of the
+parasites, the ticks on ticks' backs. Round about the Castle of Verona,
+where Can Grande II. misused the justice which his forefathers had set
+up, lay the houses of his courtiers; beyond them the lodgings of the
+grooms; beyond them again, down to the river's brink, were the stews and
+cabins and unholy dens, whose office was to be lower than the lowest,
+that there might still be degrees for the gentlemen of gentlemen's
+gentlemen. And since even cockroaches must drink, in this fungus-bed of
+misery there flourished a rather infamous tavern by the sale of _vino
+nostrano_, black and sour, of certain sausages, black also and nameless,
+speckled with white lumps, and of other wares whom to name were to
+expose. This was the tavern of the Golden Fish.
+
+On the evening of the day of the Translation of the Peach-stone, this
+tavern was full to suffocation. Stefano, the purple-faced host, in shirt
+and breeches, stood dealing the liquor from a tub. Two outlaws lay under
+the benches, partly for fear of a visit from the watch, partly because,
+having already fallen there once, they feared to fall there again if
+they rose. In one hand each held his knife, in the other his empty mug.
+Two ladies, intimates of theirs, Robaccia and Crucciacorda, sat
+immediately above them, with petticoats ready to make ambush the moment
+a staff should rattle at the door; round the table half a dozen shabby
+rogues bickered over their cards; Picagente, the hairy brigand, lay
+snoring across the threshold, and his dog on him; on a barrel in a
+corner a gigantic shepherd in leather, with bandaged legs and a patch
+over one eye, shut the other eye while he roared a hymn to Bacchus at
+the top stretch of his lungs. The oil-lamp flickered, flared, and
+gloomed, half drowned in the fumes of wine. A smell of wicked bodies,
+foul clothes, drink, and bad language made the air well-nigh solid. The
+hour was at the stroke of ten; outside the streets seemed asleep.
+
+In the middle of the uproar Stefano the host looked up sharply,
+listening.
+
+"Stop your devil's ferment, Malabocca!" he thundered at the shepherd;
+"stop it, or I'll split your crown."
+
+
+     "Bacco trionfante,
+     Amante e spumante,
+     Evviva l'ubbriacchezza!"
+
+
+roared Malabocca, screwing up his eye.
+
+Stefano brought down a mug full of wine upon his pate, which gave him a
+red baptism.
+
+"Mum, you blockhead, mum!" said his host "There is a stir outside the
+door I tell you!"
+
+The shepherd grew sober in a moment.
+
+There was a brief scramble in the room--then silence. The ladies'
+petticoats went farther than they were ever intended to go; Picagente
+rolled over and over till he reached cover under the table; the cards
+were hidden, all the players' heads buried in their elbows. Stefano blew
+out the light. Then they heard distinctly a fluttering knock at the
+door, timid but continuous.
+
+Feigning a yawn, Stefano growled, "Who's there at this hour?"
+
+The answer came in a woman's voice, saying, "Open, open, in the name of
+high God." It brought every head into the air again, but hushed every
+breath.
+
+The shepherd broke the silence with a groan. He brought his hand
+splashing on to his wet head, then fell to his knees and began to
+confess his sins.
+
+"My fault, my fault, my exceeding great fault! O Mary! O Jesus! _O nobis
+peccatoribus!_"
+
+Thus the shepherd, voicing the suspicions of the rest. So he became
+their prophet as well as their priest. He towered in the room.
+
+"I tell you, comrades, that the hour of our visitation is come. Not Can
+Grande and his hounds are hunting us this night; not the tumbril, the
+branding-irons, nor the cart's tail, are for us; but the pains of death,
+the fire eternal, the untirable worm, the trumpet of the Last Things!
+Who comes knocking in high God's name? Who saith 'Open'?--I will tell
+you: it is She who last night lit upon my village and my own sister's
+son. Eh! bodies of all dogs, what will become of us sinners?" Here the
+shepherd beat the drum of his breast as a signal before he fell flat on
+the floor.
+
+From behind his wailful voice the gentle knocking was heard running on.
+It had never ceased; it was insistent! Crossing himself desperately,
+Stefano slid back the bolts, then paused, then turned the key, then
+paused again to breathe hard, his hand upon the latch. He threw his head
+forward with a gesture of abandonment to what must be, flung wide the
+door, and dropped upon his two knees.
+
+Against a mild radiance, softer than any lamp could shed, was a tall
+shrouded woman's figure. They saw the round of her cloaked head, they
+saw the white stream of her under-robe run from a peak at her bosom in a
+broadening path to her feet. They saw the pure grey moon of her face,
+guessed by the dark rings where her eyes should be, watched with quicker
+awe the slow movement of her arms, lifted their own to what she held up,
+and to the running under-current of the two sobbing drabs muttered in
+one voice their remembered adoration.
+
+The tall shepherd rose up by the help of the table, swayed and spoke. No
+one knew his voice again, hollow as it was like the sea-grumble.
+
+"O Holiest, O Rose, O Stem of Sharon, O Tree of Carmel!" said he. "What
+wouldest thou with us sinners?"
+
+And the woman at the door said, "My friends, I have no roof to my head;
+will you take me in? I am hungry; have you no meat for my child and me?"
+
+The host in Stefano jogged the sinner to speak. "Surely, surely, sweet
+Lady! Surely, surely. I entreat your Graciousness to enter, to step in,
+to accommodate, to sit down, to be pleased to be easy, to--to--to--"
+inspiration failed him--"to sit down, in short," was his lame
+conclusion. His sweat (as he said next day) would have blinded any other
+man.
+
+Through the backing ranks of the scared company--Robaccia leaning face
+to the wall, sobbing her heart out; Picagente, the hairy brigand,
+breathing short and hard; the shepherd, glorified, exalted, bursting
+with prophecy; two thieves at their prayers and a wanton taking the
+words from them--through such an assembly the Lady of the Peach-Tree
+(who else, pray?) walked to the table. A soft grey light from without
+filled the room; there was no need of a lamp, nor did any eye then on
+watch fail to see all that followed. Bread and wine were served by
+Stefano on bent knee; bread and wine (but sparingly) did the Lady eat
+from cup and platter. That cup, that platter, encased in gold leaves and
+crusted with turquoise, are to this day in the Treasury. Crutches have
+been cast before them, hearts innumerable burn about them. When she had
+finished she sat a little while with her white cheek against her hand,
+whispering words in an unknown tongue (they said, who knew no baby
+language) to the child on her lap. He lifted up a little hand, and, "Eh,
+my son, my son," she said, "wilt thou take of me?" Then she gave him
+the breast, while not a soul said anything but prayers for half an hour.
+
+When the child slept the Lady folded up her dress, covered him with her
+cloak, and rose up in their midst.
+
+"Only the poor love the poor," said she, in those low tones which all
+Verona came to know by heart, "and only they who have little to eat give
+to them that have less. My little son will bless you for your charity;
+and I, good friends, will pray my Master to reward you when He comes.
+_Addio, addio_, be with God."
+
+Then she would have gone and left them crying had not Robaccia, the
+blowsy wench and good-for-naught, wailed aloud and caught her by the
+knees.
+
+"Mother, mother, mother!" whimpered this hardy rascal, "bless me a
+little more than the others, a very little more! I am bad--eh, God, I am
+vile, enough!--but I will never let thee go save thou kiss me."
+
+You could have heard the roomful of them catch breath together.
+Crucciacorda, the other woman, laughed horribly; the shepherd made a
+step forward to drag the slut away. But no! The light seemed to swell
+and grow towards that point where it threatens to be music, so charged
+with messages it is--it came undoubtedly from the heart of the Lady
+through her smile. For smile she did, as sweetly, as tenderly, as a
+breaking cloud. The sun of her smile was like a clean breath in the
+stivy den; and, behold, she took Robaccia by the hand and lifted her up,
+she encircled her with a mothering arm, and drew her close to her own
+breast. Her lips touched the bad girl's cheek, lingered for a moment
+there, wistfully withdrew; and Madonna of the Peach-Tree, none staying
+her now, went out into the dead street, and was seen no more of that
+company.
+
+The sun at noon looked down upon Verona at peace, upon her citizens at
+their prayers. Never was such a scene in the stormy little city before.
+All the bells of all the churches pealed all day--with no lack of arms
+to pull them. Men and women ran to and fro kissing whom they met, with a
+"Save you, brother!" "Save you, sister! well met, well met!" The Grey
+Brethren, the Black Brethren, the White Brethren of Carmel, held hands,
+and confessed to each other as many sins as they had time to remember.
+Can Grande went unarmed about his own city, Bevilacqua unbarred his
+door, Giusti married his mistress, the bishop said his prayers. The
+cripples at the church doors had no need to whine. As for the tavern of
+the Golden Fish, it smelt of lavender and musk and bergamot the day
+through. At one time there were eight litters with their bearers, eleven
+stallions, trapped and emblazoned, held by eleven grooms in livery,
+outside its door. The ladies of the litters were in the room upon their
+knees; the knights of the horses, their great helmets on their backs,
+knelt in the kennel praying devoutly. The wail of "Dies Iræ" went down
+the Corso and up again, "Salve Regina" wavered over the sunny spaces of
+the Brà. In the amphitheatre, after an open-air mass, the
+Cardinal-Legate solemnly exposed the relics of last night's miracle,
+and a bodyguard of twenty noble youths, six chaplains, and a Benedictine
+abbot went to the suburb to escort into the city the curate with the
+Peach-stone. It was a glorious day, never to be forgotten in the annals
+of Verona. Charity and the open heart went side by side with compunction
+and the searching of the heart. Tears were shed and kissed away; kisses
+induced the fall of gentler tears. It might be stoutly questioned
+whether Verona held one unshriven soul, one sin unspoken, or one solace
+unawarded.
+
+It might be reasonably questioned, yet it must be denied. Within the
+walls of the friars of Mount Carmel were two uneasy spirits. Fra
+Sulpicio, the fat prior, was extended face downwards before the high
+altar; Fra Battista, the eloquent preacher, chewed his thumb in his
+cell. The pittanciar, on the other hand, was of the common mind. He was
+ambling down the Via Leoni with Brother Patricio of the Capuchins on one
+arm and Brother Martino of the Dominicans on the other, singing "In
+Exitu Israel" like a choir-boy. But the prior, who had half believed
+before, was sobbing his contrition into the pavement, and Fra Battista
+was losing faith in himself, the only faith he had.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+LAST CONSIDERATIONS OF CAN GRANDE II
+
+
+You are not to suppose that the spectacle of Verona garbed in a gown of
+innocence, singing hymns and weaving chaplets of lilies, was to go
+unnoticed by the ruling power. Can Grande II. was lord of Verona, a most
+atrocious rascal, and one of many; but, like his famous ancestor and
+namesake, he had a gibing tongue, which was evidence of a scrutiny
+tolerably cool of the shifts of human nature. Human nature, he had
+observed, must needs account to itself for itself. If it met with what
+it did not understand, it was prompt to state the problem in a phrase
+which it could not explain. The simplicity of the plan was as little to
+be denied as its convenience was obvious. It was thus that Can Grande
+II. understood the emotions of Verona; it was thus, indeed, that he
+himself, confronted with statements and an explanation which did not
+satisfy him, accounted to himself, like any mother's son of his lieges.
+He explained their explanation, but only by another inexplicable
+formula. The energy with which he expounded his own view to those about
+him betrayed, perhaps, a lurking uneasiness in the burly tyrant.
+
+"Pooh, my good lord," said he to the bishop, who had come full of the
+day's doings and night's report, "don't you know your own flock better
+than this? Did you ever hear a man with a broken limb attribute his
+mishap to other than Domeneddio? However drunk he may have been, however
+absurdly in a hurry--act of God! If it thunder and lighten of a summer
+night, if it turn the milk--a judgment! Luckily Monsignore has broad
+shoulders by all accounts; _per Bacco!_--He had need. Now then, look at
+this case. A belated woman with a baby stumbles upon a company of
+shepherds all in the twittering dark. Hearts jump to mouths, flesh
+creeps, hairs stand tiptoe--Madonna, of course! Whom else could they
+call her, pray? They don't know the woman: name her they must. Well! Who
+is there they don't know whose name comes readiest to the tongue?
+Madonna, of course. Good: _Ecco Madonna!_"
+
+This was very eloquently reasoned, but the bishop shook his head. "It
+was not a brace of goat-herds last night, Excellency, but a roomful of
+brigands and their trulls in the Golden Fish. The worst company in
+Verona, Excellency--the most brazen, the most case-hardened. But the
+story is the same from their mouths as from the lads'; not a detail is
+wanting; not one point gives the lie to another. Excellency, I would bow
+to your wit in any case but this. The affair is inexplicable short of a
+miracle."
+
+Can Grande knit his black brows; he objected to be crossed, and the more
+so when he had a sneaking thought that he was rightly crossed.
+
+"I should like to see my Lady this night with my own eyes, bishop," said
+he.
+
+"Hey, Excellency," cried the other, "there are many devout souls in the
+same case."
+
+Can Grande pished. "Devout jellyfish," he grunted; and then--"She seems
+to haunt one quarter, eh?"
+
+"It is so, Excellency, save that yesterday she must have passed through
+the Porta San Zeno unseen of the guard."
+
+"Have you interrogated the guard?" asked the tyrant, sharply.
+
+"It was done, Highness. Nothing entered between Compline and Prime but a
+couple of bullock-carts and a cavalcade of merchants from Brescia."
+
+"What was in the bullock-carts, bishop?"
+
+"Birch-bark, Excellency, for the yards."
+
+"H'm!" was all Can Grande had to say to this.
+
+He changed the conversation. "I have had the warden of the Minorites and
+the provincial of the Dominicans here this morning," he said, "about
+that accursed business of the rag-picker's wife. It is another example
+of what I told you just now, that these people attribute what they
+cannot understand to persons they can only dream about. They put down
+the whole of your miracles to a special reward for their zeal in
+hounding down the Carmelite and his mistress. They want the order
+expelled; I think they would like the house razed and the church washed
+out with holy water, or Fra Battista's blood--the latter for choice.
+Now, I cannot pull down religious houses, lord of Verona though I be,
+because a herd of frightened peasants have gone capering over the city
+singing, 'Salve festa dies.' I must really do the parties the honour of
+an interview before I draw the sword. Let me be sure which back I am
+going to score before I begin to carve. You had better bring the prior
+and Fra Lancillotto-Battista to me, and if you can collect the young
+woman and her brat, so much the better."
+
+"Alas! Excellency, I fear the young woman is in pieces," said the
+bishop. "She has never been heard of since the day of her expulsion."
+
+The advice, however, was good, the judgment good enough; but before it
+could be followed a stroke more telling than any Can Grande's sword
+could have made was wrought by Madonna of the Peach-Tree.
+
+On the night of that same day Can Grande was sitting in the palace with
+two chosen companions, as dare-devil as himself, waiting the hour of an
+assignation. It was about ten o'clock: at half-past the hour they were
+to go out cloaked into the streets, bent upon the lifting of a decent
+burgess's wife from her bed. Hence they were not in the castle, which is
+near San Zeno, but in the Della Scala Palace, in the very heart of the
+city. The two accomplices were Baldo Baldinanza, a grey villain, and
+young Francesco della Rocca Rossa. All three were armed with swords and
+daggers; the cloaks lay with the masks on the table. A servant came to
+the door, knocked, and waited. Can Grande, who (to be just) feared no
+eye upon his goings, shouted him into the room.
+
+"Well, son of a pig," was his greeting, "and what is it now?"
+
+The fellow, whose teeth chattered in his head, announced a veiled lady,
+very tall, who would not be denied. Baldinanza, grizzled and scarred as
+he was, took a quick breath and glanced at Rocca Rossa. The younger man
+was at no pains to conceal his emotions. His face ran the gamut from
+white to red, from red back again to white. It ended ashen. Neither
+looked at his master.
+
+"Let her in," said Can Grande; and each noticed how laboriously he
+spoke.
+
+The servant turned to obey: there in the doorway stood the Lady.
+
+Tall enough she was, her head seemingly about a foot from the cross-beam
+of the door. She was cloaked from crown to foot; nothing but the oval of
+her face, colourless white with lips very wan, and a droop to them
+inexpressibly sad, showed out of the dark column she made. The servant
+shrank into the passage and stayed there praying; of the three men at
+the table only one, Can Grande himself, had the spirit left to be
+courteous. He got up; the other two remained seated, Francesco with his
+face in his arms.
+
+"Madonna," began the tyrant; but she uncloaked her hand and put a finger
+to her sad lips.
+
+"I may not stay," she said, in a voice so weary that it drew tears to
+Baldinanza's wicked old eyes--"I may not stay; but I must warn you, Can
+Grande, before I go. Walk not in the streets this night, walk not by the
+Piazza, pass not the arched way; peril lies there. No sword shall help
+you, nor the royal seat you have,--enter it not. Now I have warned you;
+let me go."
+
+She put back her lifted hand under her cloak. Can Grande saw the round
+head of the Babe asleep. For five minutes after her disappearance no
+one spoke.
+
+Francesco was the first. He groaned, "God have mercy upon me a sinner,"
+between his hands. Then Baldinanza began to swear by all devils in
+Christendom and Jewry, not blasphemously, but in sheer desperate search
+for a little courage. Can Grande shook his head like a water-clogged
+hound, as if to get the ring of that hollow voice out of his ears. The
+first to rise was the eldest of the three. His eyes were very bright,
+and you could see the long scar plainly shining on his cheek.
+
+"I am a sinner too," said he, "but this night I will sleep clean." He
+made to go.
+
+"Do you desert me, comrade?" Can Grande asked.
+
+The old dog turned upon his master.
+
+"Mother of Pity!" he said in a whisper, "you are never going after
+this?"
+
+"I am going, good sir. What of you?" Baldinanza blinked hard. "I am your
+servant, Can Grande," he said shortly; "where you go I follow. That is
+how I read the Book of the Law."
+
+"Well, Checco," the tyrant went on, turning to the youngster still at
+the table, "what of you?"
+
+Francesco threw up his arms. "Never, Excellency, never!" he groaned in
+his anguish. "I dare not, I dare not!" He concealed neither his tears,
+nor his despair, nor his bodily fear.
+
+Can Grande shrugged. "Are you ready, Ubaldo?" he asked.
+
+Baldinanza bowed his head. The two men cloaked and masked themselves,
+and went out of the palace. The moon shone broad over the Piazza; it was
+a cold white night. They crossed at the farther corner, went up a few
+steps, and then were lost in the glooms of the arched way.
+
+They never came out alive. Six hired daggers hacked the life out of them
+and their hearts from their bodies. To this day the unwholesome place is
+called for a testimony the "Volto Barbaro," the horrid entry. So died in
+his sin Can Grande II., a man who feared nothing and won nothing but
+fear, and Can Signorio his son reigned in his stead. You might trust the
+cloth-white lackey and the stricken conscience of Francesco della Rocca
+Rossa to spread the news they had.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE REPROACHES
+
+
+A scared city of blank casements, a city of citizens feverishly asking
+questions whose answers they knew beforehand, a city of swift feet and
+hushed voices, was Verona on the morrow of Can Grande's murder. They
+carried the two torn bodies covered with one sheet to Sant' Anastasia,
+and laid them there, not in state but just huddled out of sight, while
+the bishop and his canons sang a requiem, and "Dirige" and "Placebo"
+went whining about the timbers of the roof. Nobody mourned the man, yet
+he had his due. His yellow-skinned wife knelt at his feet; Can Signorio,
+the new tyrant, frozen rigid, armed in mail, knelt at his head. The
+mercenaries held the nave, the bodyguard the door, archers lounged in
+the Piazza. All this parade of force was mere superfluity; Verona had no
+desire to revolt. The Veronese were for rending their hearts and not
+their rulers that day.
+
+In the afternoon the show of a trial-at-law was made. The depositions of
+the lackey, of Rocca Rossa, of the finders of the murdered, and the
+hunters for the murderers, were taken and recorded by the _Podestà_ in
+the presence of the council. After that the six unknown dastards were
+publicly condemned to death by the civil power from the loggia of the
+palace, and as publicly excommunicated by the bishop from the steps of
+the cathedral. It was felt on all hands that on this occasion the bishop
+had wielded the heavier arm: at least, in the absence of the criminals,
+he had brought his chances level. But what gave him most weight was that
+which had made the testimony of Francesco and the lackey overshadow
+every event of a week full of events--the interposition of Madonna of
+the Peach-Tree. Not a soul in the city was left to doubt; it might be
+said that not a soul was left to save, if faith can save you. The
+churches were packed from dawn to dark, not an altar in a chapel went
+bare of a mass. There were not enough of them. Altars were set up in the
+squares, and the street-ends blocked by a kneeling, bowing, weeping,
+adoring crowd. The bishop spoke the common mind when at Vespers that
+night he gave notice that he should go forthwith to purge the Carmelite
+church of the stain upon it, "at the request of my reverend brother the
+Prior Provincial of the Order." He set out then and there in solemn
+procession of the whole cathedral chapter. Rank formed on rank behind
+him till his ordered following trailed across Verona like a host.
+
+Now, although, as it has been said, and truly said, there was no soul in
+the city who doubted, there was one soul very much in doubt. That was
+Fra Battista's. The offer of purgation had come in frenzy from the lips
+of his prior; by its acceptance Fra Battista saw himself driven to one
+of two courses. He must destroy his reputation for obedience to
+heavenly commands which it had been rank heresy in him to overlook, or
+that other reputation he had won, for being a desperate lover, upon
+which he shrewdly surmised some of his fame depended. He may have been
+right about that--I am not here to defend him. If he admitted his guilt,
+he would be unfrocked; he would show like a chanticleer stripped of his
+hackles before his hens. If he denied it, he could never preach to the
+women again. Admit it? Be degraded? Eh, that would be a nasty shift!
+Deny it? Oh, preposterous! The whole day he battled with himself, voice
+crying against voice, without result. Observe, it was a mere case of
+expediency: he had no thought to own a fault or repudiate a slander--the
+fellow had no conscience at all. Expediency, indeed, was his conscience,
+his attention to it the ladder whereby he hoped to climb to the only
+heaven he knew. No imagination had he, but very tender senses.
+Applause--the hushed church, the following eyes, the sobered mouths, a
+sob in the breath--stood him for glory. He had worked for this, and, by
+the Lord! he had won it. And now he must lose it. Eh, never, never!
+Stated thus, he knew the issue of his battle. He knew he could not give
+up these things--eye-service, lip-service, heart-service--of which he
+had supped so thirstily. Rather be unfrocked, driven out of the city,
+reviled, and spit upon, than admit such a shame as that other: to prove
+himself a vapourer before his slaves, to be pricked like a bulging
+bladder, slit open like a rotten bag--God of the love of women, never,
+never in life! The other course, then? He pictured himself, the tall
+and comely youth, standing up alone before the grim assembly of elders,
+flinty old men who knew nothing of my Lord Amor, how he rides afield in
+a rose-coloured garment, throwing a flower and a dart to boy or girl as
+he goes. He saw a dewy-eyed Battista owning himself Love's priest. The
+women called him Sebastian for his beauty. A Sebastian he was, _per
+Dio!_ stuck all over with Amor's fiery darts. Like Sebastian, by his
+persecutors he would be stripped bare; like that martyr's enemies, they
+would wound his tender flesh; like Sebastian he would endure, casting
+his eyes upwards; and like Sebastian he would infallibly be wept by the
+women.
+
+If women will weep for you they will bleed for you; the fount of tears
+feeds a river as well as betrays a hidden well. Good, then; good, then!
+He saw a future in all this. From the other spike of the dilemma he saw
+nothing but his impaling; in this case, if he was impaled, balm at least
+would be laid upon his wounds. Fra Battista determined to brazen it out
+before Verona.
+
+They lit the tapers in the sanctuary betimes; and then all the brethren
+in their hoods sat in choir awaiting the bishop. With him and his clergy
+should come the reverend prior. Fra Battista was to stand on the
+rood-step to make his purgation. He would be backed by the light. So
+much of grace they would do him, that he should face a sea of dark, and
+be seen but in outline by it.
+
+The bishop's procession, long announced by the indefinable hum a great
+crowd breeds, swept up the nave with a slippering of countless feet.
+The bishop in purple, his canons in scarlet, his cross-bearer, his
+chaplains and singing-men, the bearer of his mitre, his ring on a
+cushion; after these the archdeacon and his chaplains, the clergy of the
+city, heads of religious orders, representatives of the civil arm, Can
+Signorio with the officers of his household; finally, the silent, eager
+people, edging past each other, whispering, craning their heads to see
+what there was and what there was not to be seen. So came Verona in a
+multitude to the great business of Fra Battista and the rag-picker's
+wife, in reality thrilling with but one thought: Madonna of the
+Peach-Tree was in the city, for any waking soul to see!
+
+After the penitential psalms, a litany, and the office appointed, the
+bishop stood with his back to the altar, and spoke _urbi et orbi_ from
+the text, "God, who in divers times and in divers places," etc. I cannot
+do more than report the sum of his discourse, which was that, as it was
+plain these late marvels had some root in the hidden ways of men's
+hearts, so it behoved him as a father to lay all such ways bare. That
+for himself, if he might speak as a man only, he was conscious of no sin
+unpurged which the apparitions might condemn, and certainly (alas!) of
+no graces of his own which they could have been designed to reward. Let
+each speak for himself. If there was any man in that vast assembly
+unshriven, let him confess now what his fault was; so that instant
+prayer might be made to their glorious Visitant for forgiveness by
+intercession. If, on the other hand, there was some Christian virtue
+blossoming in secret, let them (brethren) find it speedily out, that
+thanks might be given for mercies vouchsafed. It was noticed afterwards
+that the death by butchery of the feudal lord was passed by without a
+comment. There might have been reason for this in the circumstance that
+Can Grande II. had been warned of his sin, had nevertheless set out to
+commit it, and had died in the act, as it had been foretold. To discuss
+all this in the hearing of Can Signorio, his successor, might have been
+a task too delicate for the bishop. But I believe that the scent of the
+miraculous, which was all about him, was too much for him. He could nose
+out nothing beyond the line which that fragrance seemed to point. All
+his thoughts, with those of his auditors, were upon Madonna of the
+Peach-Tree, whom there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to connect with
+Fra Battista, his doings and undoings. No one detected this, so Can
+Grande may have been inspired. A great to-do, which no one had the
+rights of, was followed by mysterious appearances which no one pretended
+to understand. What more natural than that one mystery should be allowed
+to explain the other?
+
+The bishop having ended, the prior (who was very nervous) began. There
+were certainly foxes here and there in the vineyard, wild grapes on the
+vines as well as grapes. No community was so holy but that, through
+excess of zeal, over-inflamed by charity, it might nurture upon its
+bosom a fanged snake. Might he not allude to the detestable and
+never-enough-to-be-condemned sin of simony which, as they knew only too
+well, had fattened in the Dominican convent at B----? What should he
+say of that Friar Minor, the famous preacher of S----, who had been
+found dead of a surfeit of melons and white wine? Alas! he brought the
+taint of gluttony--a deadly sin--upon his order! Wonderful, then, would
+it be in such days as these if the most renowned of all orders and most
+venerable, that of Mount Carmel, should pass unscathed through the
+tempting fires! Not only wonderful, but in itself a snare. What a
+temptation to the sin of pride in the order! What a drawing on of others
+(too disposed already) to the sin of envy, to uncharitable speaking--ah,
+and to unlovely dealing! Let sin be owned, therefore, since men were
+born sinners; but let purgation be done, the wicked member plucked out,
+etc.
+
+He passed to the sin of Fra Battista--that promising young
+apostle--handled it soberly yet gingerly, hinted extenuating
+circumstances--the pride of life, young blood, the snares of women,
+Satan's favourite sitting-places, etc.--drew a tear or two from his own
+eyes and floods from La Testolina; and then called Fra Battista to come
+forth that he might purge himself or be purged by the canon law.
+
+Thus exhorted, Fra Battista, becomingly tonsured, delicately combed,
+with an aspect most meek and hands at a pretty droop, came demurely out
+of the friars' door into the full light of the chancel. To the bishop he
+bowed, to the altar he bent a knee, to his father in religion he bent
+both, to the hush in the nave he cast a glance of wistful appeal. It was
+truly aimed. They could see nothing of his face, nothing but the shape
+of him, yet the women were sure he made a wistful appeal. Many were
+affected; the anxiety to hear him was intense, the squeezing fearful. An
+enormous fish-seller from the Lago di Garda, who had come in express,
+leaned over La Testolina and ground a braized heel into her toes.
+"_Achi!_" whimpered the little laundress; but "Snakes of Purgatory!"
+said the other, "what's a toe more or less when Madonna is round the
+corner with a blessing for us in her maunch?"
+
+In a rapt silence, with no preface at all, Fra Battista made direct
+confession to all his gods (whether remote or throned within the
+sanctuary-rail) that he had committed the sin whereof he was accused. A
+perceptible shiver of sensation swept over the church, although
+everybody in it was sure, before he had uttered a word, what that word
+ought to be. Indeed he had never denied it; but not to deny is different
+from bold affirmation. The prior, whose avowal had also been tacit,
+looked pained: avowals are painful things. The bishop, more used to
+avowals, did his best to look shocked; the archdeacon (professionally
+enough) thought avowal the most indecent part of an indecent business.
+The Dominicans looked at each other, frankly delighted; the Friars Minor
+told each other what they had always said. What the people thought can
+only be guessed, for the nave was in darkness; but when Battista had
+made an end, a shuddering sigh came from a woman far down the church,
+and then stopped, hidden in some hasty new movement there which could
+not be accounted for. There seemed to be a stampede, a sudden rush to
+the side, the surging of some great unsuspected wave, which broke, as
+it were, in the midst of the throng, and washed an open space to right
+and left. Up in the choir, after the first surge of this wave (which
+made every heart beat), all ears heard the long-drawn following
+"Ah!"--not fear only, not expectation made real, but rather awe,
+expectation shown just. It began low and hollow, ran up to a hiss: then
+the silence was such that the cracking of a man's ankle-bone by the door
+sounded like a carter's whip to him upon the bishop's throne. In that
+deathly state the whole body of people remained breathless, waiting what
+was to ensue.
+
+Out of the dark, stealing (it appeared) from the middle of the nave and
+floating down the church upon a bodily silence, came a cold voice. Like
+a wind from the snow-mountains it came in a thin stream, before which
+Fra Battista shrivelled visibly.
+
+"O thou craven!" it said, "thou wicked man! what sin can be greater than
+thine? If thou hadst done this thing thou ownest to, it had gone better
+with thee than now, when thou standest a liar and boaster in a filthy
+cause. Wilt thou foul thyself, Battista, and think it honour? I tell
+thee that it was more tolerable for that stoned simple wretch than it
+shall be for thee; and it were better that men should go unsouled like
+the dogs, committing offence with their bodies, than souled horribly
+like thee, thou sinner of the mind, idolater of thine own image! Dost
+thou yet make slippery the ways of Mount Carmel, Battista? Dost thou yet
+hang the pearls which are the tears of Mary about thy neck? It shall be
+in such case that Carmel will be her holy hill no more, and those same
+pearls turned to leaden bulls to seal thee in Tophet. There is no mercy
+for the coward, and none for him that serves false gods. Go forth, thou
+groper after vainglory, kennel with the swine!"
+
+The voice ceased. Fra Battista, who had been rocking under its chill
+breath, fell with a thud. The bishop adored the altar; the
+rest--priests, monks, people alike--broke into "Salve Regina," so loud,
+so wild, the very church seemed to shake. At that time the west doors
+flung open of themselves, and a roaring wind swept round, disastrous to
+candles. A quick flicker of blue flame jagged across the nave; the
+thunder came instant, pealing, crackling, braying ruin, fading at last
+to a distant grumble; and then the rain. No one got home that night with
+a dry skin; but it was Madonna who had quenched the doubting of Fra
+Battista, and washed fragrant the memory of Vanna to whomsoever had
+loved her once. As her lovers in early days had been many, it follows
+that they all forgot in the delight of reminiscence any harsh judgments
+she had received.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE CROWNING PROOF
+
+
+The week went its way without further miracle; but Verona had supped
+full of miracles, and had need to digest. The signs and wonders she had
+witnessed, as one soul, in the church of the Carmelites had been so
+astonishing that you will easily understand how all little differences
+between order and order were forgotten. The root of disturbance--Vanna
+and her baby, Fra Battista and his luxurious imaginings, Baldassare and
+his addition--were also forgotten. Baldassare was at Mantua, Vanna had
+been stoned to death ("martyred" was now the word)--all was well. Fra
+Battista had been quietly ridded the very next morning: unfrocked, he
+took the way of the Brenner and the mountains, and Veronese history
+knows nothing further certainly of him. It is thought he may have got so
+far as Prague, where at any rate a perfervid preacher called Baptist von
+Bern was burnt for heresy in the year 1389--a spreader of anabaptistical
+doctrines he was, Gospels of the Spirit, Philadelphianism, and what not.
+Everything settled down to routine: Can Signorio to tyranny and
+coquetting with Visconti of Milan (who finally swallowed him up), the
+bishop to accommodating the claims of God, the Pope, and his temporal
+lord, to those of salvation and his stomach; and in like manner did
+every person in this narrative after his kind.
+
+Then, on a bright morning in early September, old Baldassare came
+limping up the Ponte Navi with his pack on his back, paused a minute on
+the bridge, as his habit was, to look down on the busy laundresses by
+the water, spat twice, and so doing was observed, threw a cracked "Buon'
+giorno, La Testolina!" over the side, and went on his slow way to the
+Via Stella.
+
+It was still very early, but not so early that Vanna was not in her
+shop-door sewing and crooning to the baby on her lap. She heard his step
+the moment he rounded the bottom corner of the street, blushed prettily
+from neck to temples, caught up the child, and went out to meet her
+lord. Standing before him in her cool cotton gown, there was no sun in
+the dusky place but what her halo of hair made, no warmth but that of
+her welcoming mouth. Half shyly she stopped, holding up the baby for him
+to see: it was not for her to make advances, you must understand; but it
+needed no magic to make one believe that what a man's wife should be to
+a man that was young Monna Vanna to her rag-picker. Baldassare blinked
+and tried to look harassed; the next minute he had pinched Vanna's
+cheek. She put the baby into his wiry old arms--a very right move of
+hers.
+
+"Eh, _bambinaccio_," he muttered, highly pleased, "it is good to see
+thee! So thou art come out to meet thy old dad--thou and thy little
+rogue of a mother? Come, the pair of ye, and see what my pack has in
+store."
+
+The baby crowed and bubbled, Vanna nested her arm closer in his ribs,
+and the trio went into the house.
+
+A keen shot from one eye sufficed to assure the old fellow that as well
+as a little beauty he had a domestic treasure to wife. The house was as
+fresh as her cheeks, as trim as her shape. "Now the saints be good to
+this city of Verona," said he, "as to me they have proved not amiss."
+This was great praise from Baldassare; his generosity gave it point.
+From his pack came a pair of earrings--wagging, tinkling affairs of
+silver and coral; next some portentous pins, shining globes like prickly
+pears; a coral and bells for Master Niccolà, and a _scaldino_ of pierced
+brass for the adornment of the house. "Thank you, Baldassare," said
+Vanna to her blinking old master; then she kissed him. Before she knew
+where she was, before she could say, "Già!" he put his arm round her and
+whispered in her ear. Then she clung to him, sobbing, laughing,
+breathing quick; and the rest it were profanation to report.
+
+Verona rubbed its eyes as it came out yawning to its daily work. There
+was the open shop, ever the first in the street; there the padrone;
+there, by the manger of Bethlehem, were the padrona and the baby, whom
+they had last seen huddling from their stones. Vanna wore her colours
+that morning; she was rosy like the dawn, she was smiling, she had very
+bright eyes. But there was a happy greeting for man or wife who looked
+her way; and when La Testolina came peeping to behold the discomfiture
+of Baldassare, Vanna's gay looks found her out, and "Buon' giorno, La
+Testolina," came more cheerfully from her than it had come from her
+husband on the bridge. All the little woman could do was to squat upon
+the threshold at her friend's feet and pretend that she was troubled
+with spasms.
+
+The crowning proof remains to be told. As La Testolina (who blazed the
+story abroad) is reported to have said, you might have drummed the guard
+out with her heart-beats. Vanna, by way of weaning her baby, it seems,
+was tempting him with gobbets of peach from a wine-glass. She bit a
+corner from the peach and tendered it in her lips to the youngster on
+her lap. The baby (a vigorous child) made a snap at it like a trout at a
+fly, and a gulp so soon as he had it. The peach was hard, the morsel had
+many corners,--went down bristling, as it were. Cola had his first
+stomach-ache, was hurt, was miserable, prepared to howl. At that moment
+La Testolina happened to look at him: she stared, she gasped, she reeled
+against the door-post.
+
+"Hey, Mother of Jesus!" she cried; "look at the baby!"
+
+"It was a corner-piece, I'm afraid," said Vanna, with great calmness;
+"but the natural juices will thaw it."
+
+"No, no, no! It is not that, woman," her friend went on feverishly--"it
+is not that! Look at his face, look at his face!"
+
+Vanna looked. "Well," she asked, "what of his face?"
+
+The _bambino_, to express his agony, was _grinning from ear to ear_.
+
+This was the last miracle wrought by Madonna of the Peach-Tree.
+
+
+
+
+IPPOLITA IN THE HILLS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE GLORIOUS IPPOLITA
+
+
+Almighty God, that supreme Architect, Who, alone among craftsmen, knows
+when to give and when to stay the rein, has chosen the Plain of Emilia
+to be, as it were, the garden of Italy, a garden set apart betwixt Alp
+and Apennine to be adorned within a garden; has filled it with every
+sort of fruit and herb and flowering tree; has watered it abundantly
+with noble rivers; neither stinted it of deep shade nor removed it too
+far from the timely stroke of the sun; has caused it, finally, to be
+graced here and enriched there with divers great and grave cities. Man,
+who has it not in him to be thrifty in so prodigal a midst, has here
+also thought it lawful to go free. Out of that lake of rustling leaves
+rise, like the masts of ships crowding a port, church towers, the
+belfries of pious convents, the domes and turrets of great buildings
+walled into cities. Among which, prized as they all are and honourably
+additioned,--Vicenza, Treviso, Mantua, Verona, Ferrara,--there is none
+more considerable than Padua, root of learning and grey cupolas, chosen
+to be the last resting-place of Antenor, King Priam's brother, and the
+first of Titus Livy.
+
+It is of Padua that I am now called upon to report certain matters which
+may seem strange to one who does not know her well: to the others,
+_verbum satis_. Whether it is their University (too famous, perhaps, for
+so quiet a place) or the suspiration of their greatest citizen which has
+kindled their wits; whether that cauldron of brick, the _Santo_,
+bubbling with silver domes, is the stem or flower of their exaltation;
+whether their seat at the head of a sun-steeped marsh (at whose mouth is
+Venice) hath itself unseated them; whether Petrarch set boiling what
+Saint Antony could not allay; what it was, how it was, who gave them the
+wrench, I know not--but the fact is that the people of Padua have been
+as freakish a race as any in Italy; at the mercy of any head but the
+aggregate's, pack-mules of a notion, galley-slaves of a whim, driven
+hither and thither in a herd, like those restless leaves (souls once)
+whose nearer sight first made Dante pitiful. Not that they, for their
+part, asked for pity or got it. Mostly they paid their tavern bills when
+the last cup had been drained and the last chorus led. When Ezzelin was
+master of the revels they paid in blood: that tower of his by the river
+is dark with it yet. Petrarch from his mountain-vineyard at Arquà tipped
+them a brighter stave: they broke their hearts for pretty women and had
+every one the comfort of a swanlike end, since sonnets are a knack. With
+Antony they flagellated, with Carrara defended walls, with Gattemelata
+knocked them down. Then Venice took what Padua could never keep; the
+Euganeans hailed on either side the Lion of Saint Mark; the Arts
+flourished; Squarcione cut out small-clothes and taught anatomy none the
+worse; Mantegna dreamed of Julius Cæsar, smouldering while he dreamed;
+and Ippolita, the stone-mason's daughter, from too much courting fled in
+breeches to the hills. She, like all the Padovani, paid her score
+without flinching. It may have been run up without leave asked, but it
+was run up in her name. The rule in Padua was so; I never heard that she
+repined. Maybe that she had her money's worth; but of that you will be
+able to judge as well as I.
+
+Padua is a city set in meadows full of light; it is well spaced,
+plentifully watered, arcaded, green with gardens. The streets are like
+cloister-walks; as in Lucca, the plane is the sacred tree, and next to
+that flag of green on a silver staff, the poplar shows the city blushful
+in the spring and thrilling all a summer with the memory. It is a place
+of brick and marble, painted orange, brown, yellow, and warm white,
+where every cornerstone and every twig is printed sharply on a sky of
+morning blue.
+
+
+     "Quivi le mura son fatte con arte,
+     Che parlano, e rispondono a i parlanti."
+
+
+A tale of Padua should have the edge of a cut gem. So let Ippolita's be
+told.
+
+In her day--that day when, at sixteen years old or so, the sun briefly
+lit upon her golden head and showed her for the lovely girl she
+was--Padua was passing through a time of peace. Novello was dead at
+last, poor heroic gentleman, Verona was shaken off; Venice was
+supreme--easy, but unquestionably mistress of the Emilia. There was time
+to make madrigals, to make eyes, to make love, to imagine portraits.
+Mantegna was painting giants in the Eremitani and Bellini picking his
+brains, but not as yet a quarrel. The classics, the ingenuous arts,
+lovely woman--always interwoven when times are happiest--flourished in
+that sunny place: it was not really wonderful that Ippolita the
+stone-cutter's daughter, classically fair, indisputably a beauty, should
+win all seeing eyes and be the despair of all rhymers. Given the vision
+to the visionary (and both came in their time), she might be trusted
+with the rest; for she was remarkable by contrast; there were none like
+her. The Paduan girls are all charming, and mostly pretty. Ippolita was
+neither: she was beautiful, and when you came to know her face, lovely.
+They are brown, she was fair; they are little, she was very tall. They
+have eyes like a dove's, glossed brown; hers were deeply blue, the
+colour of the Adriatic when a fleeting cloud spreads a curtain of
+hyacinth over the sheeted turquoise bed. Beautifully hued in mingled red
+and white, delicately shaped, pliant, supple, and shy, such as she was
+(an honest, good girl, Heaven knows!) she might have lived and died in
+her alley--sweetheart of some half dozen decent fellows, wife of the
+most masterful, mother of a dozen brats, unnoticed save for her
+qualities of cheerful drudge and brood-mare; beautiful as a spring leaf
+till twenty, ripe as a peach on the wall till thirty, keen-faced and
+wise, mother and grandmother, at forty; and so on--such she might have
+lived and died, and been none the worse for her reclusion, had she not
+leaned more than half out of her window in the _Vicolo_ one bright April
+morning of her sixteenth year, to exchange lively banter with a friend
+below, and been seen by Messer Alessandro del Dardo, who within the
+cuirass of Sub-Prefect of Padua nourished the heart of an approved Poet;
+been seen of him for the miracle of young beauty she really was. Chance
+sparks kindle chance tinder; and so here. I am far from alleging the
+heart of Messer Alessandro to be dry tow; but I do repeat it, Padua was
+a freakish cityful, Ippolita lovely exceedingly, amorous poetry in the
+air.
+
+He, then, passing by, saw her stoop flushed and sparkling from above
+him; the sun caught her shining hair; a loose white smock revealed so
+much of her neck as to picture him the snowy rest. Snow and rosebuds--O
+ye little gods! As he stood in ecstasy she saw him at the end of the
+lane, and blushing drew back with a finger in her mouth, to thrill and
+giggle at ease. She saw a great gentleman stare; he saw a rosy goddess
+stoop and laugh, then blush and hide. _Vitas hinnuleo me similis,
+Chloe!_ Away he went, his heart leaping like a wood-fire, to report to
+Meleagro de' Martiri and Stazio Orsini, to Donna Euforbia, Donna
+Clarice, and Donna Simpatica--friends and poets alike--that he had had a
+most rare vision.
+
+"To me it seems," he said, "that that fair-haired daughter of the
+Greeks, Madonna Elena, the slim, the rosy-fingered disturber of the
+repose of cities, hath appeared to distract this our city of Padua. Me
+at least she hath distraught. Fair friends, sister and brother poets,
+you shall understand that henceforth I devote myself to this lady and
+her praise. More, I vow a vow, and call upon you to register it in the
+Golden Book of the Amorous Gests of Padua, that I will never cut my
+nails again until I have enthroned her sovereign lady of me, and of you
+all, and of this our humane Commonwealth. By golden Venus and her son,
+by Mars armipotent powerless in such toils, and by Vulcan in chains too
+cunning for his pincers; by Saints Ovid and Sappho, the Chian, the
+Mantuan, and the Veronese, I swear this oath."
+
+"It is well done, Alessandro," assented the listening company.
+
+That evening in his fellowship, Meleagro and Stazio, cloaked and lurking
+under the arcades, saw Ippolita walk down the Via Pozzo Depinto arm in
+arm with two shawled friends, transparently in the ranks of the _popol
+basso_, but as obviously not of them. Her golden head was bare; also by
+a head she sailed above them. They followed her by the Via Zitelle, over
+the Ponte della Morte, further yet, between garden walls topped with
+lilac, into the Prato della Valle. There the three unconscious girls
+mingled with the concourse of those who took the air under the still
+trees. Ippolita, that slim, tall marvel, seemed not to be remarked by
+any; Alessandro, swooning on his friend's arms, could scarcely believe
+it.
+
+"Edge up, Alessandro, edge up--accost, accost!" said Meleagro; but--
+
+"Do you think I would profane the _aura_ of her by my abhorred
+presence?" cried the lover. "Ah, God of Love, I would die sooner! I
+feel, indeed, my Dæmon at work. Let me sit upon this bench--my tablets,
+ha!" He sat. Finely disordered verse, _rime sciolte_, resulted; but
+Ippolita was so far unperturbed.
+
+Gradually, however, it came to her notice that she was watched. There
+was singing under her windows at night; the day brought parties of noble
+youths into the _Vicolo_ scarlet-capped, feathered, slashed, and booted
+youths; ladies were with them as often as not; garlanded ladies with
+square-cut bodices showing half their bosoms; flowers came, verses,
+platters of Urbino, Gubbio, Faenza. She was saluted in the street,
+followed to the church door, waited for at the coming out from mass. It
+came, more or less, to this, that whenever she went abroad by ways where
+the honourable might pass, her going resembled that of the processional
+Host rather than of a respectable young woman. Her friends were no
+protection: the girls thought it fun, courted it, found stuff in it for
+giggling and peering with the eyes into dark corners; the lads of her
+station shrugged at it, then sulked, and at last fairly fought shy of
+such a conspicuous mate.
+
+Ippolita herself tried to laugh it off, but failed absurdly. She became
+plaintive.
+
+"What do these signori mean by their my-ladying?" she cried to Annina,
+her bosom friend. "Why do they send me these things? Platters! What use
+are platters to the likes of us, who as often as not have nothing to put
+on them?"
+
+Annina looked demurely. "It is easy to see what they want of thee,
+dearest. What does a gentleman always want of a poor girl that takes his
+fancy?"
+
+Ippolita tossed her high head.
+
+"Eh!" she snapped. "They may fill the house with crockery at that rate.
+I'm not rubbish!"
+
+She was not; but she wronged her adorers, who neither thought it nor
+hoped it of her. Messer Alessandro was not growing his nails for that
+sort of ware; nor could he have treated the Pope with more respect. He
+had never ventured to speak, though he had never failed to salute her.
+What he wrote was chiefly in verse, and as Ippolita could not read, it
+really did not much matter what his letters contained. Meleagro had
+opened his mouth to pay her a compliment: he won a frightened look out
+of her blue eyes, a fine blush, and lived upon them for a week. The
+ladies were bolder. Some of them had walked with her once in the Prato.
+There was very little to say, except that they loved her and thought her
+like a goddess. Ippolita was rather scared, laughed nervously, and said,
+"Chi lo sa?" Donna Euforbia then told her the story of the original
+Ippolita, the Scythian queen; of King Theseus, and the child born to
+them in sea-washed Acharnæ. The Paduan Ippolita said "Già!" several
+times, and asked if her namesake was a good Catholic. Finding she was
+not, she took no further interest in her fortunes than to suppose her
+deep in hell for her pains. The ladies asked her to come and be their
+queen; she said she couldn't leave her father. They offered her jewels
+for her hair, neck, fingers, wrists, ankles; she laughed, and said that
+they were not for the likes of her. They spoke of Alessandro, the Poet.
+She asked if he were any relation to the Signor Sotto-Prefetto. He was
+that same, said they.
+
+"Dio buono!" cried Ippolita. "Is he the gentleman who wants to undo me?"
+
+They were shocked. "He asks no more than to sit at your feet, Ippolita,
+and read the secrets of your beautiful eyes. It is your soul he loves;
+he asks nothing of your body." "They never do, Madonna," said Ippolita;
+"but I am a poor girl, so please you, who have to look every way at
+once, as the saying is. Domeneddio is the only Signore I ever heard tell
+of who could get on with people's souls. Men want more of us than that."
+
+Protests were wasted, and Alessandro, watchful of his nails, went mad in
+numbers. This it was to be tall out of common, this to lift up in
+dark-browed Padua a brave golden head; this to carry the bosom of an
+Oread beneath the smock of a girl in her teens; this, merciful Heaven,
+to be a vortex when poets are swirling down the stream of Time.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+MESSER ALESSANDRO THINKS TO CUT HIS NAILS
+
+
+Not to weary you, it is clear that Ippolita was the fashion. The poets,
+the courtiers, the painters, of whom in that age of peace Padua was
+full, were wild about this glowing girl, this sumptuous nymph of the Via
+Agnus Dei; they were melodiously, caperingly, symphonically wild,
+according to their bents. She saw herself on plates of faience, where
+the involutions of a ribbon revealed "Ippolita Bella" to the patient
+eye; she found herself (or they found her) an inordinate tri-syllable
+for a canzone, saw her colours of necessity reproduced on her lover's
+legs and shoulders as colours of election. One by one she could appraise
+her own possessions, and those they fabled of her. Her hair was
+Demeter's crown of ripe corn--she knew nothing of the lady, but hoped
+for the best. Her eyes were dark blue lakes in a field of snow--this she
+thought very fine. Her lips were the amorous petals of a rose that needs
+must kiss each other; kissing, they made a folded flower--ah!
+
+
+     "La virtù della bocca,
+     Che sana ciò che tocca,"
+
+
+sighed the poets. But, bless her good innocence! that sweet mouth had
+touched nothing more mannish than her father's forehead or the feet of
+the Crucified. Her cheeks, said they, were apple-blossoms budded, her
+neck the stem of a chalice, her breast--but I spare your blushes, though
+they never spared hers. There is a book, "Gli Ornamenti delle Donne,"
+which will tell you what that bastion of a fair girl should be; and what
+it should be those Paduan lyrists will more than assure you Ippolita's
+was. Thus passionately they fingered every part, dwelling here, touching
+there, with no word that was not a caress. What she had not, too, they
+gave her--the attributes she sowed in them. She was "vagha," since they
+longed; "lontana," since she kept them at a distance; "nascosa," since
+they drove her to it; cold, since she dared not be warm.
+
+The painters, not to be behind, expressed what the others hinted. She
+saw herself, first, as _Daphne_ behind a laurel-bush--the artist,
+kneeling in the open, offered his heart smoking upon a dish; second, as
+_Luna_, standing in shrouded white on a crescent moon--the artist, as
+_Endymion_, asleep in a rocky landscape, waiting to be kissed; third, as
+_Leda_, naked in reeds beside her pair of eggs--the plumed artist near
+by, ruffling and flapping his wings. Luckily, their allusiveness escaped
+her; she knew nothing of the diversions of the ancient gods.
+
+But of all the vantage she gave them, none equalled that for which her
+gossips should have answered, her most commendable name of Ippolita. The
+verses she received on that theme would have made a _Theseid_, those she
+had to hear would have kept the rhapsodists for a twelve-month, those
+she saw the very Sala del Consiglio could not have contained. Ippolita
+at war with the Athenian, or leading her Amazons afield; Ippolita
+turning her unmaimed side to an adoring warrior (the painter) and you,
+or suckling Ippolita (with the artist's strongly marked features) in an
+ivied ruin with peacocks about it; Ippolita in a colonnade at Athens on
+the right hand of the king--thus she saw herself daily; thus the old
+palace walls of Padua, if they could yield up their tinged secrets
+through the coats of lime, would show her rosy limbs and crowned head.
+Mantegna has her armoured, with greaves to the knee and spiked cups on
+her breastplate. Gian Bellini carried her to Venice, to lead Scythians
+in trousers against Theseus in plate-armour and a blazoned shield.
+Giorgione set her burning in the shade, trying to cool her golden flank
+in deep mosses by a well.
+
+All this, and much more, Ippolita endured because she was a good as well
+as a beautiful girl. Sometimes she wept in a friend's arms, sometimes
+(really frightened) she sought her parish priest; mostly it was the
+wonder-working Virgin in Sant' Antonio or, at the greatest stress, the
+Saint's own black sarcophagus in the lighted chapel, to lay upon it a
+feverish palm or hot, indignant cheek. By some such aids as these she
+preserved entire her head, her heart, all her precious store, so that no
+flattery ever tarnished the clear glass of her mind, no assaults,
+however fierce, could bruise the root of modesty within her.
+
+Her father, vexed man, at first felt the glory of his daughter, shone
+by her reflected light, guessed (and had reasonable grounds for
+guessing) the profit it might be; but lastly, seeing the suitors sought
+not to marry her, and she would do no less, he grew disgusted with so
+windy a business, beat her for what was no fault of hers, and bade her
+be sold or begone. Ippolita, who began her day's processioning with
+music and flowers, ended it mostly in tears and stripes. There seemed no
+escape. If she went to draw water at the well the courtiers jostled for
+her first salutation; if she went to mass in the grey of the morning,
+so, blinking, did they. The priest who confessed her paid her
+compliments, the blind beggar at the church door looked at her out of
+one eye. She was incredibly the fashion; and the women, far from being
+jealous, were as wild about her as the men. She could have had a Court
+of Virgins, or gone like Artemis, buskined through the thickets, with a
+hundred high-girdled nymphs behind her, all for her sake locked in
+chastity. They also made her presents, which her father sold, until
+(learning to fear the Greeks, their brothers), she gently forbore them.
+Whereupon, the honest stone-mason had fresh cause for chastisement of so
+incalculably calculating a child.
+
+The hunted fair at last came to a point where she must stand or deliver.
+From three desperate lovers there seemed no sure road. All that was
+possible she did. She consulted her priest; he patted her cheek. A very
+old woman of her intimacy advised her to look in the glass; she did, and
+blushed at her own distressful face. A friar of the order of Saint
+Francis plumply told her to choose the most solid of her pursuers and
+make the most of him. "Such roses as yours, my daughter," said he,
+"should be early to market. You are sixteen now; but remember that by
+the mercy of Heaven you may live to be six and sixty. That's the time
+when the pot wants lining. If you have not the experience, pray how are
+you to direct the young in the way they should go? Yet that is the trade
+for an old lady whose life has been an easy one. For my part, I regret
+that the rules of our convent do not allow me to open the gate."
+
+She pouted, and went out into the sun again, to find her way to the
+Santo barred. The three poets, with three lutes, were singing a madrigal
+in her honour. They were understood to say that her going was over the
+tired bodies of lovers, that she went girdled with red hearts, that her
+breast was cold ivory, and her own heart carved in ice. _Nymph_ rhymed
+with _lymph_ and _Ippolita_ with _insolita_; the whole, ingenious as it
+was, was not _ad rem_; and as for the poor subject of it all, her heart
+(far from being ice) was hot with mutiny. She knew herself for a
+simpleton--just a poor girl; she knew herself made ridiculous by this
+parade; could see herself as she was. Her crisping hair was over her
+ears and knotted behind her neck, without garland or fillet or so much
+as a brass pin; her green dress, though it was low in the neck, was
+tightly drawn over her bust; for what were glorious to be shown in a
+great lady, in her had been an immodesty. When she lifted her skirt out
+of the gutter you could see some inches of bare leg. Her hands were
+brown with work, though her neck was like warm marble in the sun. Eh,
+she knew herself through and through just a low-born wench; and "O Gesù
+Rè!" her heart cried within her, "why can they not leave me alone!"
+
+The three poets--Stazio Orsini in white and yellow, Alessandro del Dardo
+in white and green, and Meleagro de' Martiri in a plum-coloured
+cloak--accompanied her down the Via Pozzo Depinto to her poor house in
+the quarter of Santa Caterina; she lived in the Vicolo Agnus Dei. To
+their florid exercises in the language of courts she replied in
+monosyllables--"Sissignore," "Grazie, Signore," or "Servo suo"; the
+humble words were as much her daily use as _Padre nostro_ or _Ave
+Maria_. At the door she must have her hand kissed three times in face of
+the nudging neighbours; and to each salute her honesty prompted a fresh
+"Grazie, Signore," a curtsy, and a profound blush. Meleagro beat his
+forehead to see her so lovely and so unapproachable; Orsini bit his lip;
+but Alessandro, mindful of his nails, and not to be Sub-Prefect for
+nothing, went away to find the girl's father.
+
+This worthy bowed to the earth before his visitor. In what way could His
+Excellency be served? By the acceptance, on Matteo's part, of twenty
+ducats? Benissimo, e tante grazie!
+
+"Matteo," said the Sub-Prefect when this little transfer was
+accomplished, "your daughter is the most beautiful lady in all this city
+of Padua."
+
+"She is a choice thing, I own it," said the good Matteo; "and how dear
+to her old father your honour hath no notion."
+
+"I can very well imagine it," returned Messer Alessandro; "and, indeed,
+I remember that you are twenty ducats in hand."
+
+"Oh, va bene, va bene!" cried Matteo. "I am your Excellency's humble
+servant. You shall take her when you like and as you like."
+
+"All will be done scrupulously," Alessandro said with fervour. "We shall
+crown her Queen of our College of the Muses; she shall be priestess,
+sacred image, and oracle; and most honourably served."
+
+"Honour of course," said Matteo, "comes into the game. I have played it
+myself, and know what I am talking about. There was Beppina, that fat
+Venetian hussy--to see her eat! But she always had her whack. Eh, I have
+been a blade in my day!"
+
+To this testimony the Sub-Prefect had no comments ready. He returned to
+the object of his thought.
+
+"We shall in turn contemplate her excellence," he explained, "and derive
+inspirations in turn. A fine body of devotional rhyme should be the
+result of this."
+
+"The result," Matteo broke in, "will be a fine one, I warrant your
+Excellency, if such things as that are in your mind--and call it what
+you will, she's as healthy as ever her mother was. And _she_ had
+seventeen of 'em, one way with another, before I buried her."
+
+"She shall be crowned with stars, rest upon beds of roses, walk in
+flowery meadows, hide from the heat in thickets where water is--"
+Alessandro went lilting on. "We will sing to her all day, and of her all
+night. The saloon of the Villa Venusta shall depict the story of her
+glorious arising."
+
+"Pretty, pretty!" cried Matteo, "I see that your honour knows the rules
+of play. Now when shall the game begin?"
+
+"My honest friend, the litter will be at your door come daybreak," said
+Alessandro. "Three noble ladies will attend Madonna to bathe and dress
+her. After that, you shall leave her safely in our keeping."
+
+Matteo bowed. "Excellency, I am your servant. Everything shall be as you
+wish."
+
+He did not add, though he might well have added, that it was more than
+himself had dared to hope for.
+
+At time of sunset home he came, but not to beat his beautiful daughter.
+On the contrary, he made much of her. Fuddled he was, but not drunk. He
+took her incontinent upon his knee and began to deal in rather liberal
+innuendo. Divining him darkly, she went to work with such arts as she
+had to wheedle the worst out of him.
+
+"Carissimo padre,"--so she coaxed him, with hands interwoven about his
+scrubby face,--"tell me more of this gallantry of young blades."
+
+"Chuck, chuck, chuck," he babbled, oozing wine, "come and feed out of my
+hand. Bill me, sweeting, and I bill thee. Ho, ho! Two doves on a branch!
+What, turtle? Wilt thou mope for ever?"
+
+She trembled. "Nay, nay, I'll mope no more, father," says she. "But do
+thou tell me who my mate is to be."
+
+Slyly he looked at her burning face and slyly kissed it. Then he began
+to sing--
+
+
+     "Quell' drudo, Messer Amore,
+     Ha scelto un Dardo per cuore!
+     Dardo acerbo, ardente,
+     Che fa gridare le genti--
+     Ohimè! Dolce dolore!"
+
+
+She had been a fool indeed to miss such a rebus. So the peril was worse
+than her dread! The lees of twenty ducats shabby in his fist told her
+how near the peril was.
+
+Going to bed, he folded her in his arms, making her prop while he
+mumbled comfort.
+
+"It is all for the best, my beauty-bright," he hiccoughed, "all clearly
+for the best. Messer Alessandro is a lover in ten thousand. I shall be
+as good as a father-in-law any day of the week. Why, it's 'My honest
+friend' that he hails me already! That is what a man may call climbing
+up, I hope, when a poetical roaring blade cuts out your 'servo suo' in
+that fashion. And he's Sotto-Prefetto, remember. That means all Padua
+yours for the asking. Sleep sound, my pretty bird, Ippolita bella! After
+this night you shall sleep by day." So he found, by good luck, his bed,
+and she a time for tears.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE JEW IN THE VIA DELLA GATTA
+
+
+If there is not much to be said for the Via della Gatta in these days,
+there was even less when Ippolita was the reigning toast. It was
+cloistered (as now), it was cobbled, shabby-white, secret, blind; it
+echoed silence, was a place for slippering crones, for furtive cats, and
+the smell of garlic and charcoal fires. Of nights, by the same token, it
+was not the place to choose for an after-supper walk. The watch used to
+go through it with swords before and daggers behind. Lanterns were
+little use save to reveal the cut-throat blackness all about.
+
+Now, on the very night when Matteo was fuddled, Ippolita in tears,
+Alessandro in a fever, and the more reputable Padovani turning down
+their beds, the watch came rattling at the Sub-Prefect's door to report
+a dead Jew in the Via della Gatta. Of all nights in the year, this, the
+eve of the Glorious Ippolita's home-bringing, to be vexed by a dead Jew!
+Messer Alessandro was exceedingly annoyed.
+
+"Take your accursèd Jew," he said to the lieutenant, "and stuff him
+underground. I am busy, I am absorbed in work. When I have leisure I
+will attend to him. You can dig him up again. And I take this
+opportunity to tell you, Lieutenant, that your visit is most
+inopportune. For six months you have brought me nothing of the sort, and
+to-night, for example, you plump a Jew on my doorstep. Bury your beastly
+Jew and leave me in peace."
+
+"But, Excellency," stammered the Lieutenant, "your Excellency will see
+that I have no control over the assassins of Padua. This Jew has not
+died happily. There is a great hole under his ribs. He is scarcely cold
+yet."
+
+"That is soon remedied," said Alessandro; "put him in the ground."
+
+"But, Excellency, a murdered Jew, a Jew in holes--"
+
+"The Jews have been damned from the beginning of our dispensation,"
+cried the Sub-Prefect in a rage. "Well, I add my malediction. I say,
+Damn your Jew!" And he shut the door in the face of the watch.
+
+The Lieutenant was hungry. If his chief could damn the Jews, so could
+he.
+
+"Corporal," says he, "I am going to supper. Do what you like with the
+Jew, so long as you put him decently away when you have finished. Good
+night."
+
+The Corporal conferred with his men. Here was the Jew--what should they
+do with him? One of the archers suggested a source of profit. He might
+be shown in the wine-shops at a quattrino a head. Agreed. Off they set.
+
+They showed him at the Codalunga--there were some low-browed hovels
+there, as was usual about the gates: the Jew did well. Thence they
+skirted the walls by the Riviera Santa Sofia, tried him at the outer
+gate of the Carmine, worked their way from tavern to tavern, till they
+came to the Vicolo Agnus Dei. It was a thousand pities Matteo was drunk
+in his bed; he had quattrini enough and would not have missed the treat
+for the world. Ippolita, whimpering in hers, wondered what the buzzing
+and sliding of shoes in the street below could be about. She had
+troubles of her own, poor girl, but she could not stand this. Up she
+got: a single glance out of window was enough. She shuffled on a shift
+and a petticoat, snatched a shawl, and tiptoed out. Annina, her bosom
+friend, had no troubles. She was half undressed, but she too slipped a
+shawl over her head and went peering into the alley. There she met
+Ippolita, and joined hands. Flaring torches, a swarm of eager black
+heads, whispers, grunting, the archers' plumed helmets--"Madonna! What's
+all this?" cried the two girls together in a stew of curiosity. A dead
+Jew? A murdered Jew? O Gesù! They borrowed a quattrino apiece from a
+neighbour and were richly rewarded. Ah, the blood, the staring, his grey
+old fingers! There was a something, if you like, to talk about at the
+house door; and a something to dream of, per Bacco! I believe the Jew
+engulfed all her annoyances of the past and all her fret over the
+immediate future.
+
+When they had done with him, came the question of his interment. It was
+the small hours, very near the time to relieve guard. The Jew's hosts
+found themselves out by the Porta Santa Croce--an empty quarter of the
+town, abounding in gardens.
+
+"Over the wall with him," said the Corporal; "we'll plant him here." It
+was done. The Jew, who, by the look of him, had earned more money an
+hour after death than in all the years of his life, was put a foot and a
+half underground among the pumpkins in a garden of the Via di Vanzo.
+Padua went to sleep.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+IPPOLITA LIFTS UP HER EYES TO THE HILLS
+
+
+Waking from a late troubled sleep, Ippolita found her little room
+possessed by three noble ladies--Emilia Malaspina, Euforbia di
+Ponterotto, and Domenica di Campodarsego--dressed all in saffron and
+white (her sacred colours, they told her), who announced themselves,
+with much kneeling and folding of arms over breasts, as her handmaids.
+"Sagro cuor di Gesù!" thought poor Ippolita, "what a way to undo me!"
+But aloud she only murmured, "Tante grazie, gentildonne," and got out of
+bed.
+
+They had prepared for her a scented bath, into which, in her dazed
+condition, she entered without overmuch persuasion. True, she thought to
+find her death in so much water, and crossed herself vehemently when
+first it touched her back; but there might be worse deaths (she
+supposed) than drowning for a poor girl bought and sold, and not so very
+long ago a Jew had been baptized in Santa Giustina in water up to his
+neck. Nothing, however, would induce her to sit down. They dressed her
+then in silk, tied and garlanded her hair, put a gold chain round her
+neck, silken shoes on her feet--talking in quick whispers to each other
+all the time; and so announced with curtsies that she might enter the
+litter as soon as she would. She was at the disposition of these ladies,
+was her faltered reply. Emilia waved her hand out of the little window;
+chords of music sounded from the street; the voices of men and ladies
+rose upon a madrigal--
+
+"Fior' di Maggio--Soave, pio e saggio--Salve, Ippolita!"--the work of
+Alessandro's muse upon that night of discord from the Jew. So she went
+downstairs.
+
+The Vicolo Agnus Dei--a blind alley of low jutting houses over arcades,
+full of squalor, pink wash, children, and cats--was on this early
+morning ablaze with colour and music. From wall to wall (and eight feet
+will measure that) it seemed packed with the nobility. Tousled heads
+from above looked down curiously on heads elaborately frizzed, on
+scarlet caps, on plumes, on garlands, on jewelled necks. Poverty and
+riches touch at their extremes, like houses in the South. The shoulders
+of the ladies at play were no barer than those of the slatterns who
+gaped at them playing; but for Ippolita, who had always been a decent
+girl, let us hope her blushes were a cloak. She felt naked. And the
+bath, remember, had unnerved her.
+
+What these neighbours of hers may have thought is no concern of ours,
+since the actors in the play took no concern in it. Twenty pieces of
+silver had bought an incomparable peg for their conceits. They were
+rescuing, they said to each other, a lily from the gutter, taking a
+jewel from a dirty finger, glorifying the glories--a pious act which
+could not fail of returning honour to those who took honour in doing
+it. The people! Sacks to be filled with garlic and black wine, liver and
+blood-puddings--grunting hogs, let them keep their sty. Let them not
+dare (and in truth it never occurred to them to dare) interfere with the
+diversions of the great. Yet as the veiled sacrifice went to mount the
+litter, one brown-eyed rascal from an upper window, holding a towel over
+her neck, shrilled out in homely patois, "A vederti, 'Polita mia!" and
+Ippolita turned her lovely head and showed for a moment her shining wet
+eyes to those who watched. She smiled tenderly at the send-off, but
+"Addio, Annina, addio!" she said softly, and turned bowing to her bowing
+gaolers.
+
+As the swaying litter of gold and white went out into the Pozzo Depinto
+and turned up towards the Pontecorbo Gate; as the music and
+chanting--"Candida Ippolita, premio d'Amore! Grazia insolita del sommo
+Fattore!"--died away to a murmurous underflow of sound, perhaps a tongue
+or two was thrust into a cheek or two, perhaps a bare shoulder shrugged
+or one shock-head wagged to another. The air was sharp, beds still
+warm--whose business was it? The street was left to the rats and
+snuffing dogs again.
+
+But Annina had sparks of fire in her brown eyes, and panted as she
+tugged at her staylaces. It was not long before she clattered downstairs
+on her clacking heels, and went to mark the cage they had gilded for her
+dear Ippolita.
+
+Those hierophants, that Collegio d'Amore (as the new style ran), bearing
+in their midst the garlanded victim--Goddess at once and
+Sacrifice--awoke the echoes of the streets without comment. The city
+gates were open, it is true; in some churches the doors stood wide for
+the first mass; they passed a priest or so just up, a friar or so,
+furtive truants from their beds; then, at the edge of the Piazza del
+Santo, Ippolita peeping through her curtains saw a little company of
+goatherds, blanketted, brown-legged, shabby rogues, their feet white
+with country dust, new in from the hills with their flocks. They blinked
+to see the gay procession; but wistfully, longingly, she looked after
+them from her cage. They were not so much market-stuff, per Dio! They
+walked at large over bright hillsides, singing to the sky and the winds.
+They were not pestered with love or fine buzzing ladies or capering
+signori, who larded poor girls with compliments, and showed their teeth
+most when they meant least. Ah, if she could run away! If she could hide
+with them, lie on the hillsides while the goats cropped about her; lie
+on her back, her hands a pillow, and sing to the sky and the winds
+because she was so happy! The thought possessed her; she ached for
+freedom; felt the water of desire hot in her mouth. The sleepy shepherds
+huddled in their rags watched her go by; they little knew what a craving
+the sight of their dusty ease had stirred in a heart whose covering was
+fine silk and strung pearls. Her wrongs came back upon her like heaped
+waters of a flood. That shameful bath--ah, Soul of Christ, to strip one
+naked, and let souse in hot water, like a pig whose bristles must come
+off! More than songs which she did not understand, more than
+compliments which made her feel foolish and pictures which made her
+look so, was this refined indignity. Seethed in water like a dead
+pig--ah, Madonna! She arrived sulky--if so humble-minded a girl could be
+sulky; defiant, suspicious, at least.
+
+The place chosen for the new Collegio d'Amore was the Villa Venusta,
+whose shady garden can still be seen from the Riviera Businello. This
+garden is full of trees, myrtle, wisteria, lilac, acacia--flowering
+trees--with a complement of firs and shining laurel to give a setting to
+so much golden-green and white. It has a canal on two sides, is a deep,
+leafy place, where nightingales sing day and night; it abounds in grass
+lawns, flowers, weeping trees, and marble _hermæ_. The villa itself is
+very stately, a three-storied house in the Venetian style, from whose
+upper windows you can command a fine stretch of country; below you on
+either hand the Piazza del Santo, the Prato della Valle, with their
+enormous churches, pink and grey; beyond these the city walls, the green
+plain; lastly, the ragged outline of the far distant hills. It has a
+courtyard with lemon trees, long, dim rooms empty of all but coolness,
+shuttered against the glare of noon; above, a great saloon coffered in
+the ceiling, frescoed on the walls, with a dais and a throne; an open
+loggia full of flowers; above all this again, raftered bedrooms smelling
+of lavender. A roomy, stately place for those whose lives move easily in
+such surroundings; for Ippolita, the girl of the people, happy in her
+dark tenement in the Vicolo, gossip of the upper windows, shy beckoner
+to the street, burnisher of doorposts at sundown--for Ippolita this
+windy great house was a prison, neither more nor less.
+
+It was a prison, at least, conducted according to the best rules of
+gallantry then obtaining. They bowed her up the staircase to the
+refectory: they sat her down and plied her on their knees with fruit and
+cups of wine. They led her to the throne room, where, high above them
+all, she was to sit, and (being crowned) hear them contend in verse and
+prose for the privilege of her love for the day. It was all arranged.
+She was to have a favourite every day, man or maid. Favour was to go by
+merit among her slaves. The theme was always to be her incomparable
+virtues--her beauty, discretion, wit (poor dumb fish!), her shining
+chastity, power of binding and loosing by one soft blue ray from her
+eyes, etc. They displayed her emblems on the walls--the peacock, because
+her beauty was her pride, her pride her beauty; doves, because they were
+Aphrodite's birds; rabbits, because the artist understood rabbits; the
+beaver, that glorious witness of virtue, who makes himself less
+certainly a beaver that he may be more safely a saint; the beaver, I
+say, in white on a green field. Other symbols--the lily of her candour,
+the rose of her glowing cheeks, the crocus of her hair, the pink
+anemones which were her toes, the almond for her fingers: she saw
+herself articulated; her fauna, her flora, her moral and physical
+attributes cried at her from the four walls.
+
+Ippolita sat very scared on her throne, and endured what she could by
+catching firmly to the knobs of it and blinking her eyes. One by one
+they came creeping, these silken ladies, these slashed and curled young
+lords, to kiss her hand. "Dio mio!" thought she. "What is all this
+about? And are maids courted this way among the great?" She knew very
+little about it, yet was quite sure they were not. She wondered when
+Alessandro's business was going to begin. As a matter of fact, it _had_
+begun. He was now removing several inches of superfluous finger-nail
+with a sword.
+
+For the first day that same Alessandro del Dardo won her to himself by
+his descant upon the theme, "How a gentleman may dismember himself
+without dishonour for a lady's love; and how not."
+
+"Now he has me," thought poor Ippolita, and set her teeth. But he lay at
+her feet most of the day, and though at night he led her into the
+garden, if you will believe me, he never even kissed her hand.
+
+"Who is mad?" thought she to herself, staring from her bed into the
+shadowy angles of the room. "Am I mad? Are these signori all mad? Is
+this a mad-house? Dio! it soon should be at this rate." She cried
+herself to sleep at last.
+
+Next day it was Meleagro who won her by a careful consideration of the
+question, "Whether or no, when a gentleman has served a lady for ten
+years, and she falls sick of the small-pox, he is _ipso facto_ absolved
+of his vow?" Meleagro decided that he was not, and was accepted by
+Ippolita, not because she admired his reasoning but because she thought
+it part of the game.
+
+Next came the turn of Donna Emilia, a very burning poetess, for a
+Sapphic ode; and so on and so on. After three days Ippolita found
+herself yawning her head off; the longing for freedom returned, for the
+open country, the hills, the goatherds. Not for her home in the Vicolo:
+this everlasting love-making with its aftertaste of stale sugar had
+turned her sick of Padua. The whole city, to her mind, reeked of
+bergamot; she guessed a fawning lover at every street corner, a pryer at
+every window--basta, basta, la città!
+
+No: it was to the hills she lifted up her eyes, to the hills and the
+swart goatherds free of their mystery. That _riviera_ across the canal,
+where the budding planes made a mist of brown and rose, was a favourite
+haunt of theirs. There they assembled and milked their goats, thence set
+out homewards at night. Sitting in the pleached arbours, with two
+adoring ladies at her feet and a little cluster of youths behind and
+beside her, she used to peer long and earnestly through the branches to
+see them collect their flocks and start for the hills at dusk. Lithe,
+brown, sinewy lads they were! What long legs they had, with what bravery
+wore their ragged cloaks! One carried a great bulging skin under his
+arm--bagpipes! She was sure they made good music to each other in the
+green country places. Very early in the morning she heard them come in;
+they were known by their bells. She jumped out of her luxurious bed at
+the first tinkle, and was at the shutter watching for them before ever
+they rounded the angle of the Ponte della Morte. There they came! colour
+of dust, with the straggling goats following after in a cloud of it. Her
+impulse was to fling wide the casement, hold out both her arms, call to
+them with all her might, "Ha! help, in the name of the Trinity! Take me
+with you to the green hills. I am weary of life in this place!" Then,
+knowing she could not, she would hold herself back by main force, stare
+about her, run back, throw herself on the bed, lie there sobbing wildly,
+and so be found by her ladies who came to put her in that detestable
+bath. She was sure her skin was being rotted by so much water; she used
+to feel her arms and thighs secretly to see if they were palpably more
+flabby. It stood to reason that the water must soak in--where else could
+it go to! She thought that she walked like a bladder, supposing a
+bladder were to take itself legs. The whole affair was clean abominable;
+but she saw no way out.
+
+The way came.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+ANNINA AS DEMIURGE
+
+
+They held a tournament in the courtyard of the villa; quite a concourse
+thronged the painted lists. Ippolita, a miracle of rose and gold, in a
+white gauzy robe, her hair crowned with daisies, was Queen of Love and
+Beauty, fanned by ladies in red. Del Dardo tilted with Vittore
+Marzipane, Gottardo de' Brancacci with Giacomo Fèo, a young lion from
+the Romagna. Messer Meleagro very nearly fell off his horse. They were
+all in gilt armour, their steeds blazoned with peacocks; but there was
+no dust, for the ground had been wetted with rosewater; no bones were
+broken and no blood drawn. The gallants of the Quattrocento could not
+abide what gave the salt to their grandfathers' feasts. They had other
+ways of deciding issues which appeared satisfactory; and when at the end
+the conquering champion went down on his two knees before the throne,
+when Ippolita, with deprecating hands and downcast eyes rose timidly to
+crown him, the silver trumpets pealed as shatteringly as ever over a
+blood-fray, and the company cried aloud to the witnessing sky, "Evviva
+Ippolita bella!" They could have done no more for a sheaf of broken
+necks.
+
+This was a great day; but at the close of it its glorious Occasion
+locked herself into her chamber with breathless care, and sat tearful by
+the window, with crisping hands and heaving bosom, watchful of the happy
+idlers she could see afar off in the broad green Prato. Under the
+shimmering trees there walked mothers, whose children dragged at their
+skirts to make them look; handfasted lovers were there; a lad teased a
+lass; a girl hunched her shoulder to provoke more teasing. An old priest
+paused with a finger in his breviary to smile upon a heap of ragged
+urchins tumbling in the dust. The air breathed benevolence, the peace of
+afternoon, the end of toil. Round about, so still and easeful after the
+day's labour, were the white houses, green-shuttered, half hidden in the
+trees, the minarets, the domes, the coursing swallows: over them the
+golden haze of afternoon, a sky yellowing at the edge, beams of dusty
+sunlight coming slantwise, broad pools of shadow; further still, the far
+purple shoulders of the hills. Ah, those velvet-sided, blue-bathing,
+bird-haunted, wind-kissed hills!
+
+But what was that? The jangle of little bells--the goatherds were going
+out of the city! This poor prisoner then, this watched and weary beauty,
+whispered to herself of her despair. "Oh, Madonna, Madonna, Madonna,"
+she fretted, "let me go!"
+
+As by miracle they announced a visitor: one Annina, a girl of the town.
+Would her Majesty see her?
+
+Ah, Heaven! but her Majesty would! In came, staring and breathing hard,
+a brown-eyed girl with a shawl over her head, below it a blue stuff
+gown, below all a pair of sturdy bare legs. "Corpaccio! that's a lady;
+that's never my 'Polita," she stammered when she saw the white silk
+wonder of the room, the jewels in her neck, the chains of gold, the
+bosom.
+
+"Oh, Annina! Annina! it is, it is your poor Ippolita," panted the
+beauty, and fell into the red arms of her friend.
+
+"Sakes! dear sakes! Thou'lt spoil thy glory, my lovely dear," cried the
+other; "but there then, but there then, there's nothing to wail about.
+Tell me the trouble, tell thy good Nannina!" So she petted her, like a
+mother her child.
+
+Donna Euforbia stood confused, but dutiful ever. "Has her Majesty any
+further commands?"
+
+"Grazie, grazie," said her kissing Majesty, "niente!" and so was left
+alone with all that she held true in Padua.
+
+"Oh, come, Nannina, come and sit with me; come to the window--let us
+have the air." She led her there. "O lasso!" said she then, and sighed;
+"how good it is to see thee, child!"
+
+Before the other could let out a "Madonna!" she began her plaint. "They
+give me no rest, Nannina, no rest at all. Day long, night long, they are
+at their postures. I am dressed, undressed, put to bed, taken out, fed,
+watered, like a pet dog. They put me in a bath, they do my hair out
+every day: to get me up in the morning according to their fancies is an
+hour and a half's work for three ladies. Figure it!"
+
+"Christian souls!" cried Nannina, "what's the meaning of this? A bath?
+What, water."
+
+"Full to the brim with water, on the faith of a Catholic. Of course, if
+this continues I must die."
+
+"Oh, sicuro, sicurissimo!" she agreed. "This is very serious, Ippolita.
+Eh, let me feel you. Are you ever dry, my poor child?"
+
+"Dry to the touch, Nannina, dry to the touch. But it is within my body I
+fear it. I must be sodden, dearest."
+
+"Send for a priest, Ippolita, that is the only chance. But, remember,
+when they have washed you, they put clothes upon you like these. Ah, but
+it is worth a girl's while to have silk upon her, and these chains, and
+these pearls. Corpaccio! there is no Madonna in Padua with such stones
+as these, nor any bishop either, upon my faith!"
+
+Ippolita shook her beautiful head. "They are not worth the price of all
+that smelling water," she complained. "Try it, Nannina, before you
+speak. Seriously, I am very unhappy. Let me tell you something."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"No--come nearer. I'll whisper."
+
+The two heads were very close together. Nannina's eyes became a
+study--attention, suspicion, justified prophecy, hopefulness; then
+saucerfuls of sheer surprise to smother every other emotion.
+
+"Ma! Impossibile! And they have never--?"
+
+"Never so much as a finger."
+
+"But what? Are they--? Don't they--?"
+
+Ippolita shrugged, pouting. "Chi lo sa? I tell you, Nannina, I shall go
+mad in this place."
+
+"And why not?" cried the other, with a snort. "You have examples enough
+about you, my conscience! What is all their singing and stuff about?"
+
+"I think it is about me, Nannina."
+
+"And their disputing?"
+
+"It is about me."
+
+"And the rhymes?"
+
+"They are about me."
+
+"And you have never--?"
+
+"Never, never, never!"
+
+"What, not in the garden even?"
+
+"No, never, I tell you. Only my hand."
+
+"Your hand--pouf! The nightingales sing there, I suppose."
+
+"All night."
+
+"And there is moonlight?"
+
+"Floods of moonlight."
+
+"Dio! Dio santissimo!" cried Nannina, striking her friend on the knee,
+"you must be out of this, Ippolita! This is unwholesome: I like not the
+smell of this. Faugh, fungus! Mawkish! I will see your father this very
+night."
+
+Ippolita shook her head again. "My father is paid by these signori."
+
+"Then the priest must do it. Father Corrado must do it."
+
+"He dare not."
+
+"A convent--?"
+
+"No, never! That is worse than this. But--oh, Nannina! if I dared I
+would do such a thing."
+
+"Well, let me hear. If it can be done it shall be done."
+
+"Ah," sighed Ippolita, with a hand on her heart, "ah, but it cannot be
+done!"
+
+"Then why speak of it?"
+
+"Because I want so much to do it. Listen."
+
+Then Ippolita, clinging to her friend's neck, whispered her darling
+thought. The goatherds on the hills! There was freedom--clean,
+untrammelled freedom! No philandering, for no one would know she was a
+girl; no ceremony, no grimacing, no stiff clothes; no hair-tiring--she
+must cut off her hair--no bathing, ah, Heaven! If she might go for a few
+months, a few weeks, until the hue and cry was over, until the signori
+had thought of a new game; then she would come back, and her father
+would be so glad of her that he would not beat her more than she could
+fairly stand. It was a great scheme; indeed it was the only way. But how
+to do? How to do?
+
+"I suppose it is a dream of mine," sighed she, knotting her fingers in
+and out of the gold chains.
+
+Annina said nothing, but frowned a good deal. "I see that you are not
+safe in Padua," she said in the end. "You are really too handsome, my
+child. You couldn't show your nose without being known and reported. You
+must go outside if you are to be in peace."
+
+"But I can't go, Nannina; you know it as well as I do."
+
+"I am not so sure. Do you mean what you say, Ippolita?"
+
+"Ah, Nannina!"
+
+"Then you shall go. It so happens that I know one of those goatherds--a
+rough lout of a fellow called Petruccio. I could tell him that a
+youngster had got into trouble in the city and wanted to lie quiet for a
+week or two. I can do it, Ippolita."
+
+"Oh! And will you, will you?"
+
+"Corpaccio! If you mean business."
+
+"I mean nothing else."
+
+"Then it is done."
+
+They clung together and kissed. Annina was to return the next evening at
+the same hour.
+
+That night it was remarked on all sides that Ippolita's beauty had never
+been so disastrous, her eyes so starry bright, her colour so
+fire-flushed. Messer Alessandro, who loved her like a maniac, went
+shivering out alone into the moonlit garden to expostulate with Nature.
+"Thou hast formed, most cruel Mother," cried he, "an image of thy fatal
+self, whose eyes are sharp swords, and her breath poison of ineffable
+sweetness; whose consummate shape killeth by mere splendour; to whose
+tint of bright fire every arm must stretch as moth to flame, and by it
+be blasted. All this thou hast done, and not yet content, hast set this
+glory so low that all may reach for it, and yet so remote that none can
+touch. Burning-pure is my Beloved, at whose approach I faint. What hard
+miracle is this of thine, Goddess, that all must love and none be found
+worthy?" Thus we may reflect, as Alessandro beat his resounding
+forehead, to what a pass poetry may bring a youth, who buys for twenty
+ducats what twenty thousand cannot give him the use of. Pygmalion made a
+woman one day, moulding all her gracious curves as his experience
+taught him. There went his twenty ducats. But not he could warm that
+image into glowing flesh, however much he sang to it and hymned. That
+was another's affair. So here.
+
+Annina came on the morrow full of secrecy and other things more
+equivocal still in appearance. Her burden proved, however, to be a
+bundle of rags which, she assured Ippolita, represented all that was
+necessary to the perfect goatherd.
+
+"We will do what we can here, child," said she, "in the way of staining
+your skin, cutting off your hair, and such like. Then you shall veil and
+come into the garden with me; but whereas you shall come in as the
+Madonna of these heathens, you shall leave, per Dio, as Silvestro, who
+murdered the Jew in the Via della Gatta and has to hide in the hills. Do
+you remember him, Ippolita?"
+
+"Of course I do," said Ippolita. "Have I killed that Jew, Annina?"
+
+"It is to be understood, my dear. Now come, there is everything to
+arrange."
+
+There was indeed. Del Dardo would have swooned to see how Annina handled
+his Unapproachable. Her burnished hair was off with a clip or two of the
+great shears; a mixture of soot and walnut-juice hid up her roses, and
+transformed her ivory limbs to the similitude of a tanner's. Ippolita
+did not know herself. Veiled up close, she crept into the garden with
+her confidante, and in a bower by the canal completed her
+transformation. Not Daphne suffered a ruder change. A pair of ragged
+breeches, swathes of cloth on her legs, an old shirt, a cloak of patched
+clouts, shapeless hat of felt, sandals for her feet, shod staff for her
+hand--behold the peerless Ippolita, idol of half Padua, turned into a
+sheepish overgrown boy in tatters, whose bathing could only have been in
+sweat, and the scent of his garments the rankness of goats. On the floor
+in a shining heap lay the silk robes, the chains and jewels, only
+witness with Annina of what had been done. That same Annina clasped in
+her arms the tall boy.
+
+"Oh, my dear, my dear!" she said, half sobbing, "if any ill should come
+of this I shall kill myself."
+
+"No ill will come, Nannina, believe me," replied Ippolita, quite calm.
+"You are sure they expect me?"
+
+"I see them on the riviera now. Slip into the boat. I will put you
+across."
+
+On the other bank, Ippolita was received by the herd-boys, all agog to
+see the champion who had killed the Jew.
+
+"Addio, Silvestro," said Annina, keeping up the play.
+
+"Addio, Nannina," said Silvestro, with a chuckle.
+
+"Are we ready, boys?" Petruccio called out, turning about him. "We must
+be careful what we're doing."
+
+"Hist, Silvestro," whispered one, with a nudge; "did he bleed much?"
+
+"Cosa terribile--a flood!" Silvestro spread out his hands.
+
+"Cristo! The glory of it!"
+
+"Valentino, I scrag you, my man, if you speak of the Jew till we are out
+of the Porta San Zuan," growled Petruccio, the leader: "Avanti!" And the
+drab-coloured crew moved off towards the sunset.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+SILVESTRO
+
+
+The guard at the Porta San Zuan let them go unheeded; one ragamuffin
+more or less made no odds. The heart of the new-born Silvestro gave a
+great bound as they cleared the gate, and she saw before her the
+straight white road with its border of silver stems and the spreading
+tent-roof of golden green. These stems were so obviously like the
+pillars of a church that Silvestro ventured to remark as much to her
+neighbour--a broad-faced, thick fellow, not quite her own height, but
+twice as big in the girth. His mouth was large, his eyes were small and
+rather hot. He blinked a good deal, was very sulky, and met her advances
+with a grunt. "Chi lo sa?" was as far as he would go along with her in
+the matter of tree-trunks.
+
+It was annoying. Every one had seemed friendly at first. But being free,
+she could not feel daunted long; and at the second bend of the road the
+hills sailed into full vision--the solemn hills in a long line of peak
+and hollow, velvety, dark, and brooding sleep, like a bank of cloud
+edging the pale sky. The frogs were singing vespers in the ditches, the
+sharp chorus of the cicalas shrilled on all sides. At the sight of this
+enormous calm Silvestro forgot rebuffs. For a murderer he was in a very
+cheerful humour; he began to sing; soon he had all the boys (except that
+blinker) rapt to attention. Andrea slewed round his bag and pipes and
+began upon a winding air; they all sang, going at a trot. The goats
+pricked up their ears; they too began to amble; it became a stampede.
+The sun went down behind Monte Venda, the bats came flickering out, the
+great droning cockchafers dropped on the road like splashes of rain. The
+night found them still far from Abano, but still talking and nearly all
+friends. Silvestro was hand in hand with Petruccio and another boy,
+called Mastino because he was heavy-jowled and underhung. Their tongues
+wagged against each other about nothing at all. Silvestro strengthened
+his position by hints and shrewd winks, but it was decided that the Jew
+should be kept for the night fire. That was too choice a morsel to be
+eaten on the road; that must be rolled on the palate, to get the
+flavours. It was a pity, certainly, about the pig-eyed boy, who snorted
+whenever the exploit was mentioned--but "Never mind him," thought
+Silvestro; "I have all the others."
+
+They passed through Abano; Monte Ortone was ahead, a spur of the great
+body of the hills.
+
+"There's the hermit's candle," said Petruccio. A twinkling light showed
+deep in the trees. "There was a most excellent miracle there--the
+Blessed Virgin in a tree. Two girls saw her and thought she was a kite
+entangled. But they fetched a priest from Abano, and he knew better. So
+then they built an oracle or some such place, and paid a hermit to pray
+there. And now, whoever has ague, or is with child, or hath bandy-legged
+children, or witch-crossed cows, always goes there; and the hermit cures
+them. That was money well laid out, I suppose."
+
+"Per Bacco!" cried Andrea, "I'll tell you some more. Did you ever hear
+of Monna Betta's short leg?"
+
+Petruccio cuffed him well. "A palsy on her leg, and a palsy strike
+thee," he thundered, "if with thy old women's tales we miss the path! Go
+drive the goats in, thick-chops, and stay that clapper of thine till
+they ask for a crow-keeper. Move now, be off!"
+
+"'Tis a hard thing, Petruccio," blubbered Andrea, "if one may not tell
+the honour of his own land to a stranger."
+
+But Petruccio sent him flying with grit in his ear.
+
+By a brambly path they climbed Monte Ortone--Petruccio first, the others
+after him, the newcomer as best might be, then musically the goats. That
+round-faced, blinking boy, whom they called Castracane, was behind
+Silvestro now, much diverted by her panting efforts to go up without
+panting what he could rise on with closed mouth and scarcely any sharper
+whistling at the nose.
+
+"Hey, comrade," said he, grinning, "one sees that the Jew's stair was
+easier going for thee than Ortone." And he prodded her with his staff.
+
+This was not friendly. Ippolita did her best to humour him. "I go up as
+well as I can, Castracane," she said. "But do you go first, if you
+will."
+
+"Nay, nay," he replied, with a chuckle; "I make very good practice in
+the rear." So saying he caught her ankle in the crook of his staff, and
+brought her down into the bushes like a running ram.
+
+Silvestro was hurt in his feelings; all the rest laughed; his late-won
+empire seemed slipping. And it was very strange treatment for the Queen
+of the Collegio d'Amore, if wholesome. She arrived wet and breathless at
+the top, feeling moreover that she must by all means make a friend of
+this ugly fellow.
+
+The fire was made, the pot put on, the pot boiled. Then for a time,
+though jaws worked like mill-clappers, it was to better purpose than
+words. But when the last shred of garlic or last gobbet of pork had been
+fished up, when the wine-skin was flabby, the last crust's memory faded
+from the toothpick, Petruccio slapped Silvestro on the knee.
+
+"Now, comrade," cried he, "we'll have the Jew for dessert."
+
+"The Jew, the Jew! Now for the Jew!" went the chorus.
+
+Silvestro coloured. "The Jew? Eh, well, I killed him--ecco!"
+
+The flaming logs lit up a ring of tense, pale faces--not one of which,
+Silvestro saw, would rest content with that. The interrogatories began,
+a dropping fire of them.
+
+"How did you do it?"
+
+"With my knife, of course."
+
+"Where did you strike?"
+
+"Under the ribs. I took him by his great goat's beard, the old dog, and
+jerked up his head--so. Then I drove in between his ribs--ping!"
+
+Surely that would do? Not at all.
+
+"The left ribs?"
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"Did he gurgle?"
+
+"Didn't he!"
+
+"Blood choked him--eh?"
+
+"Per Bacco!"
+
+"You stabbed him on the stair?"
+
+"Già!"
+
+"Did he roll down?"
+
+"No, no; he just lay where he fell."
+
+"Why did you kill him?" said Castracane, suddenly--bolt upright.
+
+This was awkward. Silvestro fenced. "Eh, corpo di Bacco, why does one
+kill the Jews?"
+
+The others at first took the same side. Why, indeed? The question seemed
+absurd. Did they not crucify young children, and eat them afterwards?
+Did they not kill Gesù Cristo? Everybody knows that they did; and, as
+for proof, look at them with a dish of pork. Ugh!
+
+But Castracane blinked his small eyes, and held to it.
+
+"Did you kill him because of Gesù Cristo?" he asked.
+
+Silvestro shrugged. "It was partly that, of course."
+
+"What else?"
+
+Silvestro grew hot--desperate. Why, after all, would one kill a Jew?
+Something must be urged, something solid.
+
+"There was Annina, you know," said Silvestro, at his wit's end.
+
+"Annina--that girl you were with? What of her?" Castracane licked his
+lips.
+
+"Well, this Jew, you must understand, was a limber young fellow--"
+
+"Young!" shouted the other. "You told me he had a great grey beard like
+a goat."
+
+"It wasn't very grey--not so grey as a goat's. Well, he was always
+following Annina about, making her presents, cadging for favours.
+Accidente! I couldn't stand it, you must know. So, thinking of Annina,
+and of Gesù Cristo, and one thing and another, I decided to follow him
+back to the Via Gatta--and so I did."
+
+Andrea leaned forward, hoarsely whispering (blessed diversion!)--
+
+"Say, Silvestro, what colour was the Jew's blood?"
+
+Silvestro opened wide those blue eyes, which had wrought such havoc
+among the Paduan nobility.
+
+"Black, Andrea!" he whispered again; "black as pig's blood!"
+
+Andrea crossed himself. "Pio Cristo," he prayed, "let me kill a Jew some
+day!"
+
+Even then Castracane, the sceptic, was not satisfied. "All I know is,"
+said he, "that I saw a Jew cutting bread at the _Albero Verde_ last
+Martinmas, and he slipped into his own thumb, and came off as red as a
+dog's tongue. Bah!"
+
+"Damn the Jew," said Petruccio, yawning; "let's go to sleep, boys."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+CASTRACANE
+
+
+She woke early, with the full light of day in her eyes. She felt tired,
+but not inert, languid and luxurious, rather, and explored to the full
+the happiness of stretching. Round about her were huddled the drowsy
+boys; on the slopes of the steep place where she lay she could see the
+goats browsing on lentisk and juniper, acanthus, bramble, mountain-ash.
+Misty on the blue plain lay Padua, a sleeping city, white and
+violet--remote now and in every sense below her and her concerns. The
+sky was without cloud, very pale still, glowing white at the edge; the
+sun not yet out of the sea. The freshness of the air fanned her
+deliciously; larks were climbing the sky singing their prick-song,
+scores of finches crossed the slopes, dipping from bush to bush.
+Ippolita clasped her hands behind her head, and looked lazily at all
+this early glory. The freedom of her heart seemed explicit in that of
+her limbs. What she could do with her legs, for instance! How she could
+sprawl at ease! She was just like all the others--as ragged, as dirty,
+at least; and soon she would be as brown. Dio buono, the splendid life
+of a goatherd!
+
+Then she found that Castracane was watching her out of one wicked eye.
+He had rolled over on to his belly, his face lay sideways on his hands;
+one eye was shrewdly on her. She considered him, rather scared, out of
+the corner of hers. Decidedly he was a sulky boy--you might say an
+enemy. As unconcernedly as she could she got up, stretched herself with
+elaborate ease, and strolled off along the edge of the hill. Castracane
+followed her; she affected not to know it; but her heart began to
+quicken, and when he was close beside her she found that she had to look
+at him.
+
+"Good morning, Castracane," says Silvestro.
+
+He grunted. "Look here, Silvestro," he began, "about that Jew--"
+
+The accursed Jew, who, so far from denying the resurrection of the dead,
+seemed a standing proof of it! Was she never to have done with the Jew?
+
+"Well, what about him?"
+
+"Did you kill him or not? That's what about him."
+
+"I told you last night."
+
+"Yes, but I don't believe it."
+
+"What!"
+
+"I don't believe it. Now then?"
+
+Silvestro looked about for help: they were out of sight of the others,
+and there lay Padua, slumbrous in the plain. It seemed as if Castracane
+meant quarrelling. Well, what must be, must be.
+
+"I don't care whether you believe it or not. Now then?" The blue eyes
+were steady enough on the black by this time.
+
+"Look here," said Castracane after a pause, "I'll fight you if you
+like. That'll settle it."
+
+Silvestro laughed nervously. "Why should we fight, Castracane? Besides,
+we have no knives. How can we fight?"
+
+"Like this," said the other between his teeth. His left arm whipped out,
+like a lizard's tongue, and Silvestro lay flat on his back among the
+cistus flowers, seeing ink and scarlet clouds.
+
+"Stick a Jew indeed!" cried Castracane. "Stick a grandmother! Why,
+you're as soft as cheese!"
+
+Silvestro's shoulders told a tale. He had turned on his face, but his
+shoulders were enough. Lord, Lord, look at that! Scorn in his conqueror
+gave way to amazement, amazement to disgust, disgust to contempt. Last
+came pity. Who'd have thought such a leggy lad such a green one? He was
+crying like a girl. Castracane had no malice in him: he was sorry for
+those sobbing shoulders. He stooped over the wreck he had made, and
+tried to put it together again.
+
+"Come, Silvestro," he said gruffly, "I never meant to hurt you."
+
+The wet face was up in a moment--red and wet and angry.
+
+"It's not that! It's not that! I never killed the Jew--there! But I was
+a stranger, and I tried to be friendly, and you hated me. I hate being
+hated. Why should you hate me? What have I done?"
+
+This was too subtle for the youth. "The trouble was," he said, "that I
+hit you in the right place. That's the knock-out blow, that one. Morte
+di Ercole, and down you went! Well, I'm sorry; will that do?"
+
+"Yes, yes--I want no more. Let us be friends, Castracane."
+
+"Benissimo."
+
+He helped his late enemy up; they kissed each other, then sat together
+on the grass--admirable friends.
+
+"So you didn't kill the Jew?" Castracane began. "I knew it! But what did
+you do to run away?"
+
+"Ah, you mustn't ask. Indeed, I can't tell you. It was rather bad."
+
+Castracane looked keenly at his new friend. "Was it a girl?" he said.
+
+Silvestro blushed. "Yes, it was a girl."
+
+"Ah, ah! Then I say no more. I like girls myself. But they get you into
+trouble quicker than anything. You would rather not tell me any
+more--quite sure?"
+
+"No, I can't indeed. Let's talk of something else. How old are you?"
+
+"Seventeen."
+
+"I'm not sixteen yet. Is Castracane your real name?"
+
+Castracane looked pleased.
+
+"I'm glad you asked. No; they call me that among ourselves, because of a
+little knack I have; but my name is Pilade."
+
+"That's a very nice name," said Silvestro.
+
+"I believe you--it's a splendid name. There's no better. It's the name
+of a Roman--Emperor of Rome and Sultan of Padua he was--who killed a
+giant called Oreste, having first caused him to become a Christian."
+
+"But why did he kill him when he had made a Christian of him?" asked
+Silvestro, greatly interested; "or why did he make him a Christian, if
+he was going to kill him?"
+
+"Pouf! What questions!" cried Castracane. "He made him a Christian
+because he was a good Catholic himself, and killed him for being a
+giant, of course. Or take it this way. If he hadn't been a Christian,
+how could he have made a good death? He couldn't, naturally. So the
+Emperor christened him first and killed him afterwards--ecco! It's
+always done like that, they tell me."
+
+"I see it now," said Silvestro; "it was very fine. I like your name of
+Pilade best. I shall always call you that, if you will let me."
+
+"Call me what you like," says Pilade. "Let's go and wake the others. I'm
+as hungry as the devil with all this talking."
+
+The result of this was that Silvestro became Pilade's foot-boy, his
+slave. The lout was in clover; nothing could have suited him so well. No
+more goats to herd in the heat of the day--Silvestro would do it; no
+share of foraging for him; no more milk to carry into the valley; no
+more fires to make up; nor strays to follow; nor kids to carry to new
+pastures--Silvestro would do it. The luxurious rascal lay out the
+daylight stretched on his back with his hat over his eyes; he woke only
+for his meals. He would not be at the pains even to swathe his own legs
+or strap his own sandals. Silvestro, bathed in sweat, his fair skin
+burnt and blistered, his delicate hands and smooth legs scratched by
+brambles, his slender neck bowed beneath the weights he carried on
+shoulders stretched to cracking point--Silvestro worked from dawn to
+dusk, rejoicing in the thankless office. Thankless it was, since Master
+Pilade took no sort of notice; yet Silvestro gave thanks. Pilade allowed
+the other to stoop to his shoe-ties, to wind the swathes about his
+sturdy calves, to carry his very cloak and staff, while he slouched
+along with hands deep in breeches pockets, and his hat pulled down to
+his nose. Silvestro would proudly have carried him, too, had that been
+possible. Most unmanly of Silvestro, all this; but the rogue he petted
+was too snug to consider it. At the falling-in of night, having his
+belly full of meat and drink (which Silvestro had prepared and served
+him with), he might, if the mood took him, pull out his reed pipe.
+
+"Silvestro," he might say, "you have been useful to-day; perhaps I'll
+play you something."
+
+And the beautiful Silvestro (tanned counterpart of the Glorious
+Ippolita) would hang upon the melancholy noise, and observe with adoring
+interest every twitch and distension of the fat-cheeked hero; and at the
+end sigh his content, saying--
+
+"Ah, thank you, Pilade; you have been very kind to me."
+
+"The truth is," Pilade would allow, "I am a good-natured devil if you
+take me the right way. I'll tell you what, Silvestro; you have pleased
+me to-day. You may sleep at my feet if you like: it will keep them warm,
+to begin with, and you'll be near me, don't you see?"
+
+"Thank you, thank you, dear Pilade," cried the enraptured Silvestro.
+
+The world is a very odd one, and it is most true that the man who is
+for taming hearts should pursue, ostensibly, any other calling. Not that
+Pilade had that in view. He only sought to be comfortable, good lad.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+RESURRECTION OF THE JEW
+
+
+This idyllic state of things might have lasted no one knows how long,
+with Ippolita-Silvestro finding joy in unreasonable service, and Pilade
+both ease and reason. Where either partner was so admirably suited it
+might have been interesting to see what would have happened: whether
+Ippolita would have betrayed herself or Pilade found her out. She was
+over head and ears in love, but he was vastly well served; and there is
+nothing like content for drugging the wits.
+
+Things, however, fell out otherwise. The Jew, to begin with, fell out of
+the grave to which he had been hastily recommended, and most insecurely
+at that. He made himself felt in a variety of ways, was discovered by
+the gardener in the Via di Vanzo, and stuck into a gutter in the Via Man
+di Ferro. He was discovered again by some one who had either less to do
+among Christians or more among Jews than the generality in Padua; and
+this time he was carried to the Guard House. Being reported (reporting
+himself, indeed) to the watch, he was reported on to the Capitano, by
+him to the Prefect. The Prefect put the Sub-Prefect, who had met him
+before, upon the look-out.
+
+"The Most Serene Republic," said that authority, "cannot have unburied
+Jews adrift in the city without finding out why the cemetery does not
+hold them and why the gutter does. Inquire, Alessandro mio, inquire!
+There was a wound in the man's ribs big enough for a nest of rats."
+
+Alessandro bowed, but raised his fine eyebrows. He was at that hour most
+happily unhappy over the late disappearance of his Glorious Lady. The
+peerless beauty of Padua, the incomparable Ippolita, was gone. His
+business was to devise dirges, monodies, laments, _descortz_ in the
+Provençal manner; to cry "Heigho!" and "Well-a-day!" not "Ban!" or "Out,
+haro!" To have these high frenzies, these straining states of the soul,
+disturbed by the unclaimed remains of a resolving Jew, was a cruel test.
+Yet, he reflected within himself, if his piercing love survived this
+inquiry, it was founded on rock. And, indeed, Alessandro believed that
+his heart was slowly turning to stone. He felt a curious chill there
+when he got up in the morning, a dead weight, a mass to lift with every
+choked beat. Perhaps the Jew would end what Ippolita had begun. If so,
+well. But, ah, Ippolita, Ippolita bella, Ippolita crudel! Ah, ohimè!
+
+Habit set him to work. He instructed his officers, he visited the gates,
+questioned, took notes, inspected the gutter in the Via Man di Ferro,
+even inspected the Jew. He went to the Via della Gatta, to the fatal
+staircase; he bullied two or three landlords of two or three low
+taverns; went to the stews, to the Ghetto; talked very loud, flourished
+his sword, drove his men this way and that--in fine, did everything
+that becomes a young official of spirit. The result of his labours was
+that the Jew got posthumous fame out of all proportion to his merits.
+The city fairly hummed with him; nobody talked of anything but the dead
+Jew.
+
+The goatherds, coming in by the Porta San Zuan a day later, were
+shrewdly scrutinised by the Guard. They were numbered off, their names
+taken; they were pulled about and flustered, asked questions,
+contradicted before they had time to answer, and then called
+prevaricators because they said nothing; they were, in fact, brought to
+that state of breathless hurry in which a boy will say anything you
+choose. This, as everybody knows, is the only way of getting at the
+truth.
+
+"There were more of you fellows the other night," said the Corporal of
+the Guard. "Where are the rest of you? Come now, out with it; no lies
+here!"
+
+Petruccio, who had some sense, shammed to have none; but Andrea, less
+happy, was a real fool. At this invitation he looked wise.
+
+"Castracane is not here--true, but it wasn't Castracane," he muttered,
+and found his neck in a vice.
+
+"Who was it then, son of a pig? Who was it?"
+
+"Mercy, mercy, my lord! I will tell the truth!" he whined as he twisted.
+
+"Gesù morto! Tell anything else and I cut thy liver out, hound!" swore
+the man who held him.
+
+"Ah, Dio! I will! I will! It was Silvestro who killed the Jew!"
+
+"You shall come with me to the Signor Sotto-Prefetto," said his holder.
+"There's a ducat for me in this affair." The poor little company were
+driven into the gatehouse and there pent; but Andrea went off between
+two archers to be examined at greater length by Messer Alessandro, and
+to give blubbering confirmation of the fact. All the unfortunate
+particulars wrung out of Silvestro on his first night of Monte
+Ortone--the stab under the ribs, the Jew's beard, his black blood, etc.,
+etc.--were now screwed out of Andrea and went to prove his story.
+
+"By the twenty-four ears of the Twelve Apostles," swore the Corporal,
+"we've got him at last, Messere."
+
+The Sub-Prefect felt that he must act upon this news. So much insistence
+had been laid upon the affair by his chief, he dared not send his
+lieutenant: he must go himself. This is what comes of neglecting
+new-killed Jews! he might have thought. He little knew what was to come
+of it.
+
+Two mounted men, Andrea with a rope round his neck, himself very
+splendidly booted and cuirassed, made up a sufficient cavalcade to fetch
+home one snivelling goatherd. It was four by the time they were off,
+seven before they were at Abano, eight when they reached the foot of
+Monte Ortone and faced the deep chestnut woods in which that precipice
+dips his flanks. But though it was getting dusk there were eyes sharp
+enough on the top of the mountain to watch for what sharp ears had
+heard--a most unaccustomed sound in those leafy solitudes--trotting
+horses and jingling steel. Castracane from the summit saw it all; and
+what is more, guessed at once what Andrea in a halter meant.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+PYLADES FINDS HIS ORESTES
+
+
+"Silvestro," he called softly, without moving from his ambush or turning
+his eyes from those he watched, "Silvestro, come here!"
+
+The obedient stripling came eagerly, and knelt as close to his master as
+he dared--just so as to touch him.
+
+"Eccomi, Pilade," says he.
+
+"Get back over the brow as fast as you can," said his friend, "and hide
+in the cave. Wait there till I come. Go now; do as I bid you."
+
+Silvestro went at once.
+
+Castracane squared his jaw and waited. Every now and then he muttered to
+himself, with lazy lifted eyebrows. It was too much trouble to shrug.
+"Poor little devil--it would be a shame! And I knocked him down for
+nothing. And he loves me, per Bacco! Certainly, I have never been loved
+before--by a man, I mean--except by my big old mother out yonder, and
+she is a woman. She'll be sorry--she's old--eh, she's horribly old!
+Accursed, most rotten ass, Andrea! The whole story out of him--and a lie
+at that. Cospetto! I can't let the poor lad swing. And I did knock him
+down--and he cried like a girl; but not because I grassed him. By my
+soul, I'll do it--there, then!" Then he mortised his chin in his brown
+hands and blinked while he waited.
+
+He had not so very long; but you might have given him an hour, it would
+have made no difference to Castracane then. The guard came reeking to
+the brow of the hill; Andrea, haltered, was with them. Alessandro,
+mopping his head and cursing the flies, came last.
+
+"Look yonder, Marco," said one. The other said "Ha!" and pounced upon
+his treasure. He had him by the ear and was pricking him with his sabre
+in the fleshy parts.
+
+"Easy, friend," said Castracane; "I'm not running away."
+
+He went like a sheep to the Sub-Prefect. Andrea watched him twittering.
+
+"What is your name, fellow?" said that heated officer.
+
+Andrea's eyes yearned for his mate's. Castracane gave him a terrible
+look.
+
+"Silvestro is my name, Signore," says he; and Andrea knew his game.
+
+"We have found our bird, I think," said Alessandro, turning to his men.
+
+"Yes, Excellency, this is the lad we want. There was another of
+them--Castracane they call him."
+
+"Ah, yes. Where is Castracane, fellow?"
+
+"He is over Venda. Gone to Noventa, to his mother," replied Castracane.
+
+"Well, we don't want him so far as I know. Now, attend to me. You are
+suspected of that business in the Via della Gatta."
+
+Castracane shrugged. "Chi lo sa?" says he.
+
+"We shall see about that. Meantime, what have you to urge?"
+
+Castracane scratched his head. "What would you have me say, Messere? I
+am a poor lad. You are many, and I am one."
+
+Alessandro turned to his archers. "Bring him down to the hermitage," he
+said. "I am going to eat something. Tie him up and wait for me there.
+You can let the other go. This is the lad, fast enough. Avanti!"
+
+So the shackles were taken off Andrea's raw wrists, and transferred to
+Castracane's; the neck halter was shifted; Castracane was bond, Andrea
+free. Then Messer Alessandro went down the hill to what supper the
+hermit could afford.
+
+In about half an hour Silvestro, who had been fidgeting in the cave,
+came out, restless to have stayed so long beyond sight or hearing of his
+Pilade. His reception by Andrea was shocking. The gaping boy sprang
+forward with his arms out.
+
+"Ha! Here is a terrible affair," he wailed.
+
+"Our Castracane is taken, and for your fault; he will be hanged, and for
+you! Make your supper of it, you Jew-jerker. What sacrifice, Dio mio!
+There has been nothing like it, I suppose, since Giulio Cesare kissed
+Brutus, or Judas Gesù Cristo. You kissed him this morning; you know you
+did! You always do, you blush-faced sneak! And for that kiss he has
+taken your sins upon him, and is to be hanged. Fie, Judas, fie! Oh,
+Madonna Maria, the terrible affair!"
+
+So ending as he began, he danced about the hill-top, wringing his hands.
+
+But Silvestro, very pale, came quickly up, and laid hold of him.
+
+"Tell me all, Andrea," says he; "for I know nothing except that I love
+Castracane and will save him. Who has taken him?"
+
+"It is a lord--the Sotto-Prefetto--the hook-nosed gentleman with thin
+eyebrows; him they call Messer Alessandro. Castracane is tied like a
+netted calf--his hands behind him, and them to his neck. What's the good
+of his strength? He is as strong as the town bull; but if he writhes his
+hands he strangles, and if he thrusts his neck he chokes. Ecco!"
+
+Silvestro was staring down into the valley. "Where is Messer Alessandro,
+Andrea? Tell me quickly, for I can save Castracane."
+
+"He is eating with the hermit in the wood. But what can you do?"
+
+"You stay here," said Silvestro with decision; "that's what you can do.
+I'll go down."
+
+The sound of breaking through undergrowth was followed by rapping at the
+hermit's door.
+
+"What do you want, boy?" said the pious man to the ragged figure in the
+dark.
+
+"Messer Alessandro, my reverend--Messer Alessandro at once."
+
+"Are you come about the Jew? He will bear no more. He is eating. He
+tells me he knows more about the Jew than he does about our holy
+religion--which is a dangerous state of things, except that he is sick
+to death of him."
+
+"It is not about the Jew, father," said Silvestro, out of breath. "Tell
+him it is about--Ippolita."
+
+"Va bene," said the hermit. "Stay where you are."
+
+Messer Alessandro dropped his tools with a clatter, wiped his mouth,
+beat his breast, and began to walk up and down the cell.
+
+"Send him in, hermit, send him in! Forty ducats if he has any news, ten
+ducats in any case for bringing my thoughts from Jews on earth to
+Ippolita in Paradise. Despatch, despatch, send me the goatherd."
+
+The pale apparition of a fair-haired boy, timid in rags, cloaked in
+rusty black, with bandaged legs, and his old felt hat crushed against
+his breast, stood in the doorway.
+
+"Oh, boy!" cried Alessandro, gesticulating with one hand, "may you be my
+Hermes, my swiftfoot messenger. Tell me what you know of the divine
+Ippolita."
+
+"I know where she is, Signor Sotto-Prefetto," says Silvestro huskily.
+
+"Tell me, by Venus and all her doves!"
+
+For answer the blushing boy looked appealingly at Alessandro, with eyes
+so deeply, limpidly, searchingly blue, with lips so tenderly parted,
+with a smile fluttering so timidly, and limbs so drooping under their
+disguise, yet so quickly transformed from frightened lad's to bashful
+beauty's, that--
+
+"Saints of the Heavenly Court--ah, God of Love!" cried Alessandro; and
+the Sub-Prefect fell upon his knees before the goatherd.
+
+Later you might have seen that same goatherd enthroned in the hermit's
+armchair, his hands locked in his lap, his legs modestly disposed, his
+head gracefully bowed, a blush on his burnt cheeks, his long lashes
+casting a shade, his breath coming and going with a pretty haste--and
+at his feet a splendid gentleman, booted and cuirassed, who poured out
+voluble assurances of eternal respect, of love undying, of the sovranty
+of Venus Urania, and the communion of beautiful minds.
+
+"I will see you again; yes, I will certainly see you again, since you so
+desire it," said Silvestro, after a good deal of this. "And I will give
+you what you ask, if it is in my power. But you must trust me so far:
+you must go away from here, and wait till I send word. I shall owe you
+every gratitude, every reward I can give you. Now, however, you must let
+me go; and I must take with me the goatherd, who is as innocent of the
+Jew's death as I am."
+
+"Ah, I will do all that you wish," sighed Alessandro. "Sacred lady, I
+will do it. But surely you will have pity upon a humble slave who has
+served you long and faithfully, and now is putting himself in peril for
+your pleasure. Pay me my poor fee, lady. Enrich me boundlessly with what
+costs you so little."
+
+So he urged, until--
+
+"Well," says Silvestro, "I will do it. Rise up, Messere; take what you
+will."
+
+Messer Alessandro shut his eyes, and slowly rose to his feet. Having
+kissed the goatherd's hand, he very delicately kissed the goatherd's
+proffered cheek. "I am paid immeasurably, most holy one," he said. "Lead
+now; I will do what you desire."
+
+Out sped Silvestro into the wood, the Sub-Prefect bareheaded behind him.
+In a glade not far from the hermitage sat the two archers. The horses
+were tethered to one tree, Castracane to another. Seeing their chief,
+the men sprang to attention; their astonishment at what followed was no
+greater than Castracane's. Silvestro (that timid slave), now as bold as
+brass, walked straight to him, the Sub-Prefect tiptoeing behind.
+
+"Loose him, Signore," says Silvestro.
+
+The Sub-Prefect with a knife cut his bonds. "Your will is done."
+
+"Thank you, Signor Alessandro: God be with you. Come, Pilade."
+
+Silvestro took Castracane by the hand, but not before the gentleman had
+kissed his own with profound respect. Then Silvestro led his friend away
+through the trees, and the Sub-Prefect was understood to say--
+
+"We have been on the wrong scent, men. Mount. To the city--Avanti!"
+
+"What's all this? Whither now?" stammered Castracane.
+
+Silvestro squeezed his hand. "Oh, dearest, let us go to the cave--let us
+go to the cave on the hill!"
+
+Castracane felt his friend trembling. Trembling is infectious; he began
+to tremble too.
+
+"Yes, yes, we will go to our cave," he agreed in a quick whisper.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+CYMON FINDS HIS IPHIGENIA
+
+
+They struggled upwards through the bushwood and starry flowers. It was a
+scented night, the air heavy with the burden of midsummer. The fireflies
+spread a jewelled web before their faces, great white moths flapped and
+droned about them. On they pushed, their hands locked through all
+hazards of brake or briar: neither would let go for a whole world, but
+Silvestro was always in front, leading Castracane for this once. One
+knew the way as well as another; but Silvestro led it. They rounded the
+hill-top.
+
+"Here we are at last," said Silvestro. "Let us sit here, and look at the
+splendour of the night. Oh, Pilade! Oh, dear friend! How couldst thou do
+so much for me?"
+
+"What else could I do?" said he gruffly. "You never killed the pig-Jew."
+
+"Nor did you, Pilade. Tell me why you gave yourself up."
+
+"Because you didn't do it, of course."
+
+"But you didn't do it either?"
+
+"Well, but I knocked you down."
+
+"Did you do it because of that; or because--because you like me?"
+
+Pilade grunted. "Suppose I did?"
+
+Silvestro sighed, and leaned his head on his friend's shoulder.
+
+"O wondrous night!" said he, whispering. "Look, the stars are like
+moons."
+
+It was certainly a wonderful night--a night of enormous silence, of
+great steady stars, of gold-dusted air, of a sky like a purple dome
+encrusted with jewelled lights. The two boys sat together, blinking at
+so much speechless glory. Castracane's arm was round his fellow's
+shoulder; that fellow's lips parted, and his breath came soft and
+eager--yet too quickly for ease. It was certainly a night of wonder.
+
+Castracane's arm slipped down to Silvestro's waist; Silvestro sighed,
+and snuggled into the haven it made.
+
+"O holy night!" said he. "Now might miracles happen, and we be by."
+
+"Ah," said Castracane, "the miracle of choice would be an angel with a
+basket of bread and cheese--or a beautiful maiden to come and lie in
+one's arms."
+
+Silvestro thrilled. Castracane gave a responsive squeeze, and went on.
+
+"I am not too sure, you must know, that one has not happened already. To
+see you lead that signore by the nose! You came swimming among the
+tree-stems like an angel. You might have knocked me down with a feather.
+And how he kissed your hand! Miracles! Why, if you had been the maiden I
+dream about, he couldn't have been more respectful. If you want
+miracles, for example!"
+
+"I do want them, Pilade. I want them very much." Silvestro sighed again,
+and leaned his cheek till it touched his friend's.
+
+A shock transfused Castracane; he was caught by the starry influences.
+Suddenly he turned his mouth towards that blushing flower, and kissed
+Silvestro. Silvestro thrilled but lay close.
+
+"Buon' Dio, ecco miracolo!" said Castracane hoarsely, and kissed again.
+
+Again his nestling companion gave no sign but a quiver.
+
+Castracane surveyed the stars. "A miracle has certainly happened," he
+said. "I feel very queer. My head swims, fingers and toes tingle; I seem
+to have hot lead in my legs. It may be that I am empty. I think it is a
+miracle; but as yet I see no angel."
+
+Some quicker thrill of what he held made him look at Silvestro. At the
+same moment Silvestro slowly turned his head, and looked at him. What
+each saw in the other's face beyond a white moon-shape, what shining of
+truth in the eye, what expectancy, what revelation in the lips, I know
+not. Two pair of lips, at least, met and stayed together.
+
+"O Dio!"
+
+"Oh, Pilade! Oh, carissimo!" She abandoned herself to joy.
+
+"_You_ are the angel, the miracle! You are--"
+
+"No, no, I am not an angel; but oh, I love you, dearly!"
+
+"Ah, la Madonna!"
+
+"I am Ippolita! I love you!"
+
+"You love me? You are mine then--come."
+
+"Andrea," said Castracane next morning, "I think the others will be back
+before noon. You must wait here till they come. I am going to take
+Silvestro over La Venda to see my mother, and confess to our curate. It
+is good for the soul."
+
+"Silvestro looks well this morning," said Andrea, with his mouth full of
+bread. "What a colour of dawn! What shining eyes! He would make a proper
+Madonna for a Mystery--eh?"
+
+"He would," said Castracane laconically; "a most proper Madonna. With a
+_Bambino_ on his lap--eh, Silvestro."
+
+Silvestro blushed; Castracane pinched his cheek, which made matters
+worse.
+
+They took the road together through the deep hedges of the valley. Monte
+Venda rose before them, dark with woods. Castracane's arm was round
+Silvestro's waist: every twenty yards they stopped.
+
+"To think of it!" cried Castracane, on one of these breathless halts.
+"You to be like any one of us--breeched, clouted, swathed--and a lovely
+lass within your shirt--Madonna!"
+
+"Do you think me lovely?" asked Ippolita devoutly. "I have heard that
+till I have been sick to death of it; but from you I shall never be
+tired of knowing it."
+
+"Blessed Angel!"
+
+"Oh, Pilade, my love!"
+
+They loitered on.
+
+"You see that I am not what you thought me," said Ippolita, with an arch
+look. "You thought I had killed a Jew."
+
+"Never, per Bacco!" cried Castracane. "That I'll swear to."
+
+"You thought I was a boy, even last night, dearest."
+
+But that he denied. "Santissimo! Did I treat you like a boy, I ask
+you?"
+
+"You knocked me down once, Pilade."
+
+"Every honest man knocks his wife down once," said Pilade gravely.
+
+"And then you kissed me."
+
+"I can kiss you again," said Pilade; and did.
+
+I repeat, Padua is a freakish city. The Sub-Prefect writes madrigals in
+vain. Castracane, the goatherd, sends Silvestro sprawling, and wins the
+golden Ippolita for a willing bride. What are we to make of it? _Deus
+nobis hæc otia fecit._
+
+
+
+
+THE DUCHESS OF NONA
+
+     "L'Anima semplicetta, che sa nulla,
+     Salvo che, mossa da lieto fattore,
+     Volentier torna a ciò che la trastulla."
+                             --_Purg._ xvi. 88.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+BOCCA BACIATA
+
+
+"Not unprosperous is your Erasmus in England," wrote that man of wiles
+to one Faustus, a poet; and then--"To touch upon one among many
+delights, there are girls in this land divinely fair--soft, easy, and
+more wooing than any of your Muses. Moreover, they have a custom which
+cannot be too much honoured. Wheresoever you go a-visiting, the girls
+all kiss you. With kisses you come in, with kisses depart; returning,
+they kiss you again. Cometh one to you, the kisses fly between; doth she
+go away, with kisses you are torn asunder; meeting in any place, kisses
+abound. Go where you will, it is all kisses. Indeed, my Faustus, had you
+but once tasted of lips so fragrant and so soft, not for a time only,
+but to your end of days, you would choose to be a pilgrim in this
+England." By no means the only stranger to be charmed by our welcoming
+girls was Erasmus. Amilcare Passavente, of a darker blood, found such
+kisses sweet: those of one at least he vowed to call his own. What he
+made of them, what they of him, what other diverting matter appertains
+to the kisser and the kissed, you shall understand who care to read.
+
+Mary was her name in our Lord, Lovel that of her father in the flesh, a
+respectable wharfinger of Bankside. Molly, Mawkin, Moll Lovel, "Long
+Moll Lovel," and other things similar she was to her kinsfolk and
+acquaintance, who had seen her handsome body outstrip her simple mind.
+Good girl that she was, she carried her looks as easily as a packet of
+groceries about the muddy ways of Wapping, went to church, went to
+market, gossiped out the dusk at the garden gate, or on the old wharf,
+after the 'prentices had gone, linked herself waist to waist with maiden
+friends. Up river or down, she trafficked in a wherry, and took the
+waterman's tender glances as part receipt for his hire. In a word, this
+winsome, rosy creature, grown hardy in a kind soil, adventured herself
+at ease among them that might have been her poets, adorers, or raveners,
+nor thought to be cheapened by the liberty she employed. She was rather
+shy with strangers, conscious of her height, awkward under observation,
+blushing to know she blushed; but simple as the day, pleased with
+flattery, pleased with other trifles,--trinkets, snatched kisses, notes
+slipped into the prayer-book, etc. She told her mother everything before
+she went to bed, sat on her father's knee when she was too old and much
+too tall for it, dreamed of lovers, hid trembling when they came, had
+palpitations, never told a fib or refused a sweetmeat; she was, in fact,
+just the honest, red-cheeked, pretty, shy simpleton of a lass you will
+meet by the round dozen in our country, who grows into the plump wife of
+Master Church-warden-in-broadcloth, bears a half-score children, gets
+flushed after midday dinner, and would sooner miss church than the
+postman any day in the year. Such was Molly Lovel at nineteen, honestly
+handsome and honestly a fool, whom in Bankside they knew as Long-legged
+Moll.
+
+To Amilcare Passavente, the young merchant-adventurer from Leghorn,
+ravished as he was by the spell of her cool lips, she became at once "La
+divina Maria," or shorter, "La Diva"; and in a very light space of time,
+when his acquaintance with her and hers with his tongue had ripened, she
+had quite a nosegay of names: Madonna Collebianca (my Lady Whitethroat),
+Donna Fiordispina, La Bella Rosseggiante, were three among three dozen
+flowers of speech, picked from a highly scented garden of such for her
+adorning. Amilcare translated them in his hoarse, eager voice, helped on
+by his hands (which were rapid) and his beseeching eyes (which had the
+flattery of deference), not only to Molly apart, but to all or any of
+her acquaintance who could listen without giggling. Molly pressed her
+bosom; her friends, as they loitered home, said in each other's ears,
+"Blessed Lord, what will become of Gregory Drax?" Gregory Drax was the
+broad-girthed young master of a trading-smack which coasted between
+London and Berwick, and was even at that hour in Kirkley Roads, standing
+off Yarmouth.
+
+All a summer this endured, but went no further while Amilcare, new to
+the blunt ways of the English, was unable to stomach their cropped
+speech any better than their sour beer. Those who heard his florid
+paraphrase took it gravely, yet held by their "Moll Lovel." They wished
+that Gregory Drax might have a fair wind home; they wondered what Master
+Lovel was about; trusted that the black-eyed rascal (whose speech was
+too glib, surely, to be honest) would not make a fool of the girl. He
+very soon showed them that, whatever else he did, he intended to make a
+woman of her. Let them hold, said he (for once expressing his contempt),
+to their "Molly Lovel"--the name was the Shadow. He would hold, as at
+that moment he was very devoutly holding, Molly herself--aha! the
+blessed Substance. And when the young Molly let herself go whither her
+soft desires had long since fled; when she felt the heart of Amilcare
+jumping against hers, his cheek, his lips, his soft syllabling, her own
+breathless replies--then at last Amilcare, quite enraptured, finding
+everything about her wonder and delight, made shift to catch up some
+waft of her very tongue, closer savour of her very home, and called her
+on high his adorable, his unending, his altogether soul-devastating,
+destroying mistress, "Madonna Mollavella." Good Master Lovel the
+wharfinger neither knew his daughter nor his father's name in this
+long-drawn compound of liquids; he was troubled, very doubtful, anxious
+for Gregory Drax; but all Lombardy and the Emilian March came to know it
+in time. Amilcare rode down opposition. Eloquence! Were ever such cries
+to great Heaven, such invitations to Olympus, slappings of the
+forehead, punchings of ribs, in Wapping before? Molly in tears on her
+mother's breast, Amilcare on his knees, the neighbours at the door:
+Master Lovel, good man, abominated such scenes. Father Pounce married
+them at St. Saviour's in Southwark; money abounded, the dowry passed
+from hand to hand. On a gusty November morning there sailed out of the
+London river the barque _Santa Fina_ of Leghorn, having on board
+Amilcare Passavente and Donna Maria his wife, bound (as all believed)
+for that port, and thence by long roads to their country of
+adoption--not Pisa, nor Lucca, nor any place Tuscan; but Nona in the
+March of Emilia. No; Erasmus was not the only traveller whirled about by
+English kisses, nor Molly Lovel the only simple witch in turn bewitched.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+AMILCARE: COMMERCE AND THE AFFECTIONS
+
+
+Molly was a handsome fool: let there be no doubt about that. There was
+no romance in her, though sentiment enough. She lacked the historic
+sense; and if she thought of Rome at all, supposed it a collocation of
+warehouses, jetties, and a church or two--an unfamiliar Wapping upon a
+river with a long name. Her sensations on the voyage were those of
+sea-sickness, on the golden-hazy Campagna those of home-sickness
+unaffected. Affectation of any sort was far from her. If she was happy
+she showed her white teeth, if wretched she either pouted or cried; if
+she liked you there were kisses, if she distrusted you she grew red. But
+she distrusted no one. Why should she? Since every act of hers was, in
+seeming, a caress of personal intention, every one loved her. As for her
+husband, when he was not sacramentally engaged, he mutely raved to the
+stars, protesting by his dimmed eyes, moving lips, and strained-out arms
+how every breath she took was to him also an inspiration. Her frankness,
+the truth lucent in her eyes, her abounding receptivity,--for she
+believed everything she was told and objected to nothing,--her sweet
+long body, the tired grace with which she carried her lovely head, her
+tender, stroking ways, the evenness of her temper (which only that of
+her teeth could surpass),--all this threatened to make of Amilcare a
+poet or a saint, something totally disparate to his immediate proposals.
+His nature saved him for the game which his nature had taught him.
+
+In that great game he had to play Molly (though he loved her dearly)
+must be, he saw, his prime counter. Coming to England to negotiate bills
+of exchange, he had Molly thrown in. She would do more for him than
+rose-nobles. He ecstatised over his adorable capture; but saw no reason
+in that why he should not lay it out to advantage. It would not cheapen
+in the chaffer; on the contrary, give him the usufruct for a few years,
+and he would be not only the happiest but the most considerable of men.
+Triumphant Bacchus! (so he mused to himself) what had he not gained? A
+year's pay for his men, the confidence of the "Signori" of Nona, the
+acclamations of the Piazza and the Council Chamber at once--and Molly
+Lovel. Hey! that was best of all. For her sake, and by her means, he
+would be Capitano del Popolo. What else? That would do for a beginning.
+If Molly could turn his head, she could turn other heads, he supposed. A
+turned head meant a disponable body, a bending back, an obsequious knee,
+even a carcase at a quick hand's discretion; votes in Council, delirium
+in the Piazza, _Te Deum_ in the Church. Amilcare knew his countrymen: he
+that knows them half as well will have no trouble in conceiving how
+these trade-calculations can consist with a great deal of true love.
+And what was Amilcare's trade? His trade was politics, the stock whereof
+was the people of Nona, the shifty, chattering, light-weight spawn of
+one of those little burnt-brick and white cities of the Lombard
+Plain--set deep in trees, domed, belfried, full of gardens and fountains
+and public places--which owed their independence to being too near a
+pair of rival states to be worth either's conquering. There were some
+score of these strewn over Southern Emilia and Romagna in those days,
+and the time was almost at hand, and with it the man, to sweep them all
+into one common net of wretchedness. But Amilcare had no clear thought
+of that. For the moment Nona was as peaceful as Forlì, or Rimini, or
+Pesaro, or Faenza, thanks to him and his "Centaurs"--that famous band of
+free riders he had levied from the Tuscan hills. Very much at his mercy,
+safe under the eye of his trusted Secretary, awaiting his return, he
+fully intended that peace to continue when she fell huddling to him. It
+would, indeed, be his care; for it was a maxim of Italian politics that
+no man willingly stirs after dinner.
+
+The situation was still pretty delicate; he had done little more than
+win foothold. In the late struggles with Parma he had intrigued with
+great address; sold himself and his Centaurs to Farnese, brought that
+thick-necked hero up to the very walls of Nona, then (in the nick of
+time) resold himself at double the price to the city he was besieging,
+and routed his yesterday's master by an attack in flank just as the
+Nonesi were carrying the trenches in front. In the excitement of that
+wonderful hour--Farnese in full flight, himself borne on men's shoulders
+round the Piazza, thanksgiving in the cathedral, clouds of incense,
+clashing bells, wine running in the Fontana delle Grazie--he had for a
+moment been tempted to believe the times ripe for a proclamation:
+"Amilcar, Dei Gratia, Nonarum Dux," etc. He had his treble wages in his
+pocket, the hearts of the whole city throbbing at his feet. He was a
+young man: tempted he certainly was. But Grifone (the Secretary) touched
+his elbow and showed a straightened lip. He would not risk it. He
+contented himself with a footing, the Palazzo Bagnacavallo rent-free,
+and the title of "Gonfalonerius Populorum Libertatis," which looked
+passably well about a broad seal. "Pater Patriae," "Nonarum Dux," the
+control of the bread-tax,--all should be added to him in time, if only
+the Borgia could be fed elsewhere. At the thought of that hearty eater
+stalled in the Vatican, he felt that he might indeed thank God for his
+lovely Molly. With her for decoy even that game-bird might be lured.
+Lying on the poop of the _Santa Fina_, his dark eyes questing over her
+face, her hands among his curls, he seemed to Molly the wonder of the
+world. So of her world he was; but he meant to be that of his own--a
+very different world.
+
+He was a lithe, various creature, this Amilcare Passavente, his own
+paradox. Quick as a bird of prey he was, and at times as inert; dark as
+night, eagle-faced, flat-browed, stiff and small in the head,
+clean-featured, with decisive lips. A very fluent speaker, hoarse in
+voice, but cunning in the vibrations he could lend it, he was in action
+as light and fierce as a flame; at rest as massive as a block of stone,
+impervious to threats or prayers or tears. Women loved him easily, men
+followed him blindly, and both for the same reason--that they believed
+him ruthless to all but themselves. Ruthless, indeed, he had been, and
+was to all and sundry. Molly was the one apparent exception, and in her
+eyes he was perfect. For her immediate comfort this may have been true
+of him. He was a brave lover.
+
+He taught her to falter endearments in his own tongue: he was _carino,
+caro amico, anima mia, sovrano del mio cuor_, and many other things yet
+more intimate. In return he gave her a homage which was not without a
+certain depth because it was done with foresight. He taught her to be
+his slave by professing himself hers, and so touching her generosity as
+well as her humility. At all this she was very apt. There was a fund of
+deep affection in the girl, the makings of an excellent wife, a devoted
+mother--far more stuff than should go to serve as toy for a man's idle
+hours. Also she was very demonstrative, by no means averse (quite the
+contrary, indeed) to demonstrations on his part. She loved to walk
+belted by his arm, loved to put her head on his shoulder, or have her
+chin lifted that eyes or lips might be kissed. These favours, which his
+nation was accustomed to keep at home, she wore without
+self-consciousness abroad. It enchanted Amilcare, not only as a thing
+beautiful in itself, but as a clear source of profit in his schemes. He
+pictured the havoc she would work in a hall full of the signori--keen
+men all--when she sailed through the rooms offering her lips to whoso
+would greet them "English fashion." Why, the whole city would be her
+slave--eh, and more than the city! Bentivoglio of Bologna, Il Moro of
+Milan, Ordelaffi, Manfredi, Farnese, the Borgia, the Gonzaga, D'Este of
+Ferrara, Riario, Montefeltro, Orsini--by the Saint of Padua, he would
+face them each with his beautiful wife; charm them, turn their heads,
+and then--_ping_! Let the neatest wrist win the odd trick. Very pleasant
+schemes of witchery and silent murder did he make as the _Santa Fina_
+drove him through the dark blue waters on his honeymoon, and at last
+brought him up to point out to his adoring instrument a low golden
+shore, a darker line of purple shadow beyond, and in the midst a white
+tower which gleamed like snow. "Civitavecchia, my queen among ladies!
+Rome beyond it; beyond that Nona--Nona and glorious life for thee and
+me!" he cried, as he waved her towards these splendid things.
+
+But Molly snuggled closer to him and sighed.
+
+He, very sensitive to alien moods, was conscious of the jar. "You are
+sad, beloved?" he asked her softly. "You are thinking of your own land?"
+
+"No, no, dearest; not that now. I was thinking only--but it is
+foolishness of a fool," said Molly, hiding her face.
+
+"You cannot be a fool, blessed one, since you are not so much as human
+as I see you now," he whispered, holding her close. "You are a rosy god
+at this moment, my treasure. You are all colour of dawn, auroral, colour
+of tender fires. Tell me your thought, my holy one."
+
+She whispered it back. "It was--that you will be full of business at
+Nona, Amilcare. You will have no time to love your poor Molly."
+
+The rogue was fishing for protestations, and got them.
+
+"Love you!" he cried. "Ah, tell me how long I have to live, and I will
+tell you the hours of my love, O my soul!"
+
+"But you will be abroad, a-horseback, with your captains, in the
+tents--"
+
+"Why, yes, that must be so," he owned. "But I shall love you the more
+for that, Molletta."
+
+She pretended to pout, fidgeted in his arm, arched her neck.
+
+"But how shall I know it, Amilcare, if I am not there?"
+
+"By what I do to you when I return, dearest love," cried he; and
+thereafter, speaking by signs, was better understood.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+MARKET COVERT
+
+
+They made Rome a day or two after that little tender and exchange of
+vows, having disembarked amid a crowd of clamorous Amilcares in
+rags--she could see some dear trait of him in each; trailed across the
+bleached marches (with the Sabine Hills like a blue hem beyond); caught
+the sun at Cervetri, and entered the dusty town by the Porta
+Cavalleggieri on one of those beaten white noons when the shadows look
+to be cut out of ebony, and the wicked old walls forbidden to keep
+still. The very dust seems alive, quivering and restless under heat. St.
+Peter's church, smothered in rush mats, was a-building, the marble
+blocks had the vivid force of lightning; two or three heretic friars
+were being hailed by the Ponte Sant' Angelo to a burning in the Vatican;
+Molly was almost blind, had a headache, a back-ache, and a heart-ache.
+Amilcare, who had fallen in with a party of lancers by the way, had
+ridden for a league or two in vehement converse with their lieutenant.
+To him there seemed more to say than ever to her. She felt hurt and
+wanted to cry.
+
+At their inn they learned the news--that is, Amilcare learned it, for
+Molly was languishing upon a bed, forgotten and mercifully forgetting.
+Pretty news it was. Don Cesare, it appeared, had stabbed the Duke of
+Gandia, his brother, three nights ago, and thrown him into the Tiber.
+The body had only been fished out yesterday; it had nine wounds in it,
+including one in the throat big enough to put your fist in. It was a
+sieve, not a body: perforated! His Holiness? Ah, he could be heard even
+here, howling in the Vatican, like a bitch in an empty house. Don Cesare
+was in hiding, reported at Foligno. To-morrow there was to be a Holy
+Conclave--all the Cardinals. God knew what Alexander had or had not in
+his mind, the conscience-stricken old dog. It was known what he had not
+in his house, at least. Vannozza had been thrice refused admission; so
+also La Bella Lucrezia. Think of it!
+
+This was very grave news to Amilcare's private ear. Cesare was his
+deadly enemy, the one man he honestly feared; the one man, consequently,
+he wanted to meet. He was still brooding over it when the broad-backed
+butcher they call Il Drudo slammed him on the back.
+
+"Fortune is with you, Passavente--the slut! She gives you time to
+breathe. The Borgia had a sinking of the stomach; he hankered after a
+filling of Lombard sausage a little while since. Gandia cut in, and
+Cesare cut in, _per Bacco_! But mark my words, Amilcare, the appetite
+will return. You will have the Duke in your March before many days.
+Therefore my advice to you is--Avoid Foligno; fortify Nona."
+
+Amilcare looked his man in the face. "And my advice to myself, Galeotto,
+is--Seek Foligno, and so fortify Nona. _Addio._" He went out like a man
+who has found his way.
+
+"Now, what the devil did the fellow mean by that?" cried Il Drudo, with
+his thick fingers out.
+
+"Devilry expresses it," said a sly secretary in black.
+
+Molly in dreams, soft as a child and glossy with sleep, looked too
+beautiful for a disturbing hand to dare anything that night. It would
+have been the act of a brute, not Amilcare's act. In small things he was
+all gentleness. He crept into bed like a cat, fearful of waking her, and
+next morning contrived, by a fit of coughing, to waken her no more than
+half. The rest he did by methods equally adroit, until by imperceptible
+degrees she learned that Rome might give no ease to her feet. He had her
+in the saddle and all the baggage-mules away an hour after the sun.
+
+Arrived at Foligno, he found that his great enemy was at sanctuary in
+the Convent of Olivet, biting his nails in a red fume there. Hidden
+behind spires of cypress, Olivet stood outside the walls, a sun-dyed
+white building deep under brown eaves. Cesare, it was reported, was
+quite alone with his moods, now consumed by fidgety remorse for what he
+might have lost in his brother's blood, now confident and inclined to
+blusterous hilarity, now shuddering under an obsession of nerves. In any
+guise he was dangerous, but worst of all when the black fit of suspicion
+was upon him. So he now seemed; for being told who waited upon him, he
+refused point-blank to see anybody. Amilcare, at the door, heard his
+"Vattene, vattene! Non seccami!" ("Out, out! Don't pester me!") rocking
+down the dim passages of the house; and Molly, whom this sudden new
+expedition had bereft of what wit she had, turned pale to hear the
+roaring beast.
+
+"Ah, love, love, love, let us run away! I like not this empty place,"
+whimpered the girl, holding her husband's arm; but he gently removed her
+hand, kissed it, and held it.
+
+"Courage, dear one; I shall be by thy side. Much depends upon this
+adventure," he urged in fervent whispers, knowing how much to a tittle.
+
+To the monk who came out, distended with Cesare's explosives, he
+addressed himself in a vernacular too fluid for Molly to catch up.
+
+"I pray you, reverend brother, recommend me yet once more to the feet of
+his Resplendency, saying that not I alone supplicate his favours. Add
+that I have with me, to present, my most beautiful wife, that she may
+assure him with her own lips how very much she is his slave."
+
+The pantomime of piteous beseeching hands, of eyebrows exquisitely
+arched, told more than his words. They showed to a hair's breadth how
+far he expected, how far was prepared, to tempt his customer. No pedlar
+before a doorful of girls' sidelong heads could more deftly have
+marketed his wares. The monk, too, sidled his head; he pursed his mouth,
+furrowed with a finger in his dewlap, tried to appraise the wares. But
+to allow this would have been to forestall the market.
+
+"Ah, for love of the saints, go, my brother!" he was entreated, with
+gentle persistence; and so worked upon, he waddled away.
+
+Amilcare let fall a hearty sigh, and considered Molly with anxiety. He
+had not dared to say a word to her of what her entertainer was, or what
+her part should be. Premeditation might throw her out of balance,
+conscious art might exhibit her a scheming courtesan; just in her
+artlessness lay all her magic. No, no; he trusted her. She was still
+adorably English--witness her on the ship! He could see how she would
+do, how the sight would ravish him, lover as he was; for the rest, he
+must trust to his early calculations. Yes! he was ready to stake
+everything upon this move. The Borgia would be at her feet: so at his
+feet also. Oh, wise, wise Amilcare!
+
+"His Eminence the Duke will receive your Lordship," said the returning
+monk, and turned once more to lead the way.
+
+"My saint, my lamb, my meek burnished dove!" breathed Amilcare in a
+glow, and pressed her to his heart behind the frate's broad back.
+
+Cesare, magnificently tawny in black velvet, was in a window, raking
+with a white hand at his beard, a prey evidently to cross-tides of
+fever. When his visitors were announced he looked sharply round; but
+Molly was hooded, her face deep in the shade. Of Passavente he had not
+the slightest concern. That hero was prostrate, bowing and chattering,
+and explaining with his hands.
+
+Molly stayed twittering by the door, wonderful because she saw her King
+of Men cringing like a footboy before a shorter than himself. True, it
+was case of a duke; but she had not known such dealings in Wapping.
+There men doffed caps to my Lord or his Grace; they gave and took their
+due, but did not writhe on the floor. And then this particular duke's
+blockish inattention to what her lord was saying filled her with
+concern. There he leaned, and there he looked out of window at the
+twinkling acacias, and there he picked his beard. Amilcare's tact must
+have deserted him, since he could let this simple slave turn critic. But
+the part, in any case, was difficult. Presently the Duke threw him a
+hasty phrase, a sort of _pish, man_! which cut him off in the midst of a
+period, and walked towards Molly in the doorway. Amilcare flew before on
+tenterhooks. Cesare came graciously on--it was curious to see how his
+face had cleared. Molly dropped a curtsy, covering herself closer with a
+hand at the hood's tie. Cesare showed his teeth, held out both his
+hands. Passavente, with a displaying air full of alacrity and deference,
+unveiled his wife, and she went forward to greet his Grace.
+
+She had been uncovered as by a dealer, but even so thrilled to feel his
+touch upon her shoulders, and showed herself blushing with the emotion,
+lovelier for love. Cesare was really startled to see how vividly
+beautiful she was; but, with more command of himself than the other
+trafficker, was careful not to show it. He smiled yet more sunnily; his
+words were some pleasant, friendly compliment. Molly, guessing it so,
+came nearer, took his open hands, and put up her face for his kiss.
+Cæsar Borgia took a deep breath before he accepted of the rest. Then he
+did kiss her, twice. He was ridiculously pleased, very much in
+confusion for a little while. Since he could say nothing and she had
+nothing to say, the pair of them stood hand-clasped, smiling, dim-eyed
+and red in the face, like two glad children--Amilcare, anxious mothering
+hen, clucking about them. The Duke, having recovered himself, murmured
+some courtesy, and led his captive to a seat in the window. His
+half-dozen English words and her six Italian, his readiness, her
+simplicity, put matters on a friendly footing: very soon Molly was
+chattering like a school-girl. Cesare was enchanted; he recovered his
+gaiety, forgot his bloody hands, his anxieties, schemes, fret at
+inaction. He ordered a meal to be served at once, kept Molly close to
+his side, heaped her plate, pledged her in wine. He went so far as to
+forget all common precautions and eat whatsoever was put before him.
+
+Be sure Amilcare missed nothing. He saw all, perhaps more than all: he
+was used to deal with men. Thought he to himself, "Hey! If this was my
+house of Nona, _amico_, and the time six months hence, you would sleep
+where you supped." But Cesare had no thought of Amilcare until the end.
+Then he clapped him on the shoulder.
+
+"My Passavente," he cried, "you have gone far on your pearl-fishing and
+dived deeper than most of us, but by our hope of salvation you have
+found a jewel of price! And ah, Madonna," he said, with his burning eyes
+on the girl, "you have brought the sun into Italy. You shall be called
+_Principessa della Pace_, who heal all sorrow and strife by the light of
+your face."
+
+"I humbly thank your Grace," said Molly, very grateful; but Amilcare
+dropped upon one knee.
+
+"Splendour," says he, "deign to visit our poor house in Nona, if you
+would learn what willing service is."
+
+"My friend, be sure of me," said the Borgia, and meant it. "Do you bid
+me come, Princess?" His looks ate her up.
+
+Molly hung her head. "I shall in all things serve your Grace," said she,
+with a curtsy. She kissed him again, and then Amilcare took her away.
+
+The Borgia wrote sonnets that night.
+
+"Mollavella, pearl of ladies," whispered her ardent husband, when they
+were on the North Road and in the thick of the violet Roman night,
+"never have I felt such joy in you as this day." He looked up at the
+massed company of the stars. "Fiery in all that galaxy, yonder I see my
+own star!" he cried in a transport. "Behold, it points us dead to the
+North. O Star, lit by a star! 'Tis you have set it burning clear, my
+glorious Princess."
+
+"Dearest heart, I shall die of love," sighed swooning Molly, out of
+herself at such praise. "But indeed I have done little enough for you as
+yet."
+
+"More than you think, or can dream," he answered, and spoke truly; for
+the girl saw nothing in their late visit but a civility done to a great
+lord.
+
+"If the Duke comes to Nona, Amilcare, I will try to put him at his
+ease," she said after a little.
+
+"Try, try, dear soul; it is all that I wish."
+
+"He seemed not so to me when first we went to him, Amilcare."
+
+Amilcare shrugged. "Eh, per la Madonna--!" he began, as who should say,
+"Being known for his brother's butcher, how should he be?" But he stayed
+in time. "He has many enemies," he added quietly.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+MARKET OVERT
+
+
+Nona, little city of domes and belfries and square loggias, all in a
+cluster behind brown walls; with gates of Roman masonry, stolid Lombard
+church, a piazza of colonnades and restless poplar trees; of a splayed
+fountain where the Three Graces, back to back, spurt water from their
+breasts of bronze--Nona, in our time, is not to be discerned from the
+railway, although you may see its ranked mulberry-trees and fields of
+maize, and guess its pleasant seat in the plain well enough. It is about
+the size of Parma, a cheerful, leisurely place, abounding in shade and
+deep doorways and _cafés_, having some thirty churches (mostly baroque),
+a fine Palazzo della Ragione in the principal square, and the remains of
+a cathedral of the ninth century glooming behind a monstrous façade of
+the seventeenth, all whitewash, cornucopias, and sprawling Apostles.
+Thus it seems now to the strayed traveller who, breaking his journey at
+Castel Bolognese, simmers for four hours in an omnibus along with
+priests, flies, fleas, and old women. The _cortège_ from Papal territory
+saw a vastly different city of it when it approached the gates in the
+early spring of 1494. The young leafage shimmered like a veil of golden
+gauze, the poplar buds were pink and brown, the chestnuts had all their
+candles afire; larks by dozens were abroad in the clear sky. Below the
+old Rocca del Capitan Vecchio--a grizzled and blind block of masonry on
+a spur of limestone, which held not a few of Ezzelin's secrets--two
+miles from Nona, stood a company of boys and girls in white garments,
+their laps full of flowers. Their shrill song of welcome hailed the
+riders, and to the same hopeful music they went on. The towers were all
+standing in those days, the battlements intact; at every gate stood a
+guard. The Cathedral of the Santi Apostoli had no Apostles; its great
+front was a cube of unfinished brick; but colonnades ran in all the
+streets, row after row of beautifully ordered arches; over them were
+jutting cornices enriched with dancing children, sea monsters, tritons,
+dolphins, nymphs blowing conches, Nereus, Thetis, and all their sleek
+familiars, moulded in red clay. The fountain shone, the displayed Graces
+jetted their crystal store; from every window hung carpets, on every
+tower a gonfalon, from every church belfry came the riot of bells. The
+people were massed at the gates, at the windows, on roofs and loggias
+and balconies--a motley of orange and blue, crimson and green. Soldiers
+lined the ways, priests with banners were on the steps of their
+churches. "Evviva, Amilcare! Evviva, Madonna Inglese!" ran like a river
+of sound from the gates about the streets, until, in the Piazza Grande,
+where the Signoria waited in the solemn estate of brocade and ermine,
+the volume of it had the throbbing roll of breakers on a cliff. Thud
+upon thud came "Evviva!" each with a shock which made pale Molly catch
+her breath; more than once or twice her eyes swam, and she felt herself
+wag helpless in the saddle. But Amilcare, snuffing wine, was in his
+glory, idol of a crowd he despised and meant to rule. Proud he looked
+and very greatly a ruler, firm-lipped, with a high head, and a flush on
+his dark cheeks.
+
+At the steps of the Palazzo della Ragione he halted, cap in hand. The
+trumpeters shrilled for silence, the Secretary of the Republic read a
+Latin speech; everybody applauded what nobody understood. Amilcare, at
+the end of it, swung off his horse and ran up the steps. He embraced the
+orator, embraced the signori one after another; greetings flashed about,
+tears, laughter, clappings on the back. But he kept his head throughout:
+it was seen that he wished to present his wife. Present her! Enthusiasm
+grew frenzied; he had to battle his way down the steps to regain her
+side. He lifted her lightly down; hand in hand they went up the steps
+again. Molly excelled herself, was the wonder of the whole city. How she
+curtsied to their lordships--what a figure she had for that grace--how
+tall, how supple, and how slim! When she gave her rosy cheek to each in
+turn, there was a kind of caught sob audible in the crowd. The
+simplicity of the act brought tears to tender eyes: men laughed or
+looked haggard, according as the trouble took them; women, more at home
+with tears, clung to each other as they cried. A marvel all believed
+her--an angel clean from heaven; the kiss of peace, _la bocca della
+Carità_! A young Dominican became inspired; he showed the whites of his
+eyes, he spumed at the lips, began to mutter, with gurglings in the
+throat. At last his words broke strangling from him--"O mouth of
+singular favour! O lips of heavenly dew!" he stuttered, with a finger on
+high seesawing to the rhythm: "O starry eyes conversant with the aspect
+of angels!" He dropped down plump in a fit, barely heard at the palace
+door; but all the square surged with his cry--"O mouth of singular
+favour! O starry eyes! Evviva Madonna!"
+
+Men and women all told, Molly must have been forty times kissed. Twice
+forty times would not have sufficed for the candidates who jostled,
+strained, and prayed between the soldiers' pikes below the steps. It
+would be difficult to say which sex her pretty artlessness pleased the
+more: she made the women cry, the old men prophesy, the young men dream
+dreams. Certainly, there was nobody who thought ill of her for a
+performance so glaringly counter to Italian ways, whose men kiss each
+other while they keep their women at home. The thing was so transparent,
+done in such pure good faith, there was no room for judgment in it. She
+went among that people as, in these days, a child still might go. To
+those bullet-headed captains, grim and shaven close; to those painted
+great ladies, whose bare necks looked the more naked for their jewels;
+to those cruddled, be-robed old men; to the dapper sons of them; to
+their stiff-laced daughters--Molly went blushing, smiling, shy, and
+glad, and to each she gave her fresh cheek and the balm of her English
+lips. O mouth of singular favour! O starry eyes! She bereft them of
+compliments by her speechless welcome, overcame policy by having none,
+led captivity captive. Amilcare might hover behind her with plots, a
+delighted and forgotten shade: Molly Lovel of Bankside was Duchess of
+Nona, and might have been Queen of Italy, if all Italy had stood in the
+Piazza Grande. She was throned at a banquet, escorted home by the
+Signoria bareheaded; she was serenaded all night by relays of citizens,
+by straining poets, by all kinds of music. She had not a wink of sleep
+till morning, nor the faintest idea what it was all about.
+
+There was no withstanding the popular voice; the Nonesi went mad to be a
+Duchy, with Molly for Duchess. Amilcare might be thrown in. They
+besieged the Bagnacavallo _Cortile_; they wrote sonnets and madrigals,
+and sang them day in, day out. Amilcare, acting with admirable
+discretion, kept very much to himself; he sent his beautiful wife on to
+the balcony twice a day to be saluted, and (more sparingly) let her work
+for him among the higher sort with her lips, her blushes, and her
+friendly grey eyes. He was humble in the Council, sober beneath the
+heaped-up honours of the popular voice, stern only with his mercenaries.
+A fortnight of this swept him to the top of his hopes. A deputation,
+with a laurel crown and the title of _Dux_ in a casket, waited upon him.
+He had expected it for a week, and carefully dragooned his Molly.
+
+"I must refuse the thing," he told her, "for your dear sake, my angel.
+The fatigues, the affairs of a Ruler of State are incredible. I will
+never let you bear them. The signori may pluck their beards out by the
+roots. I am resolved." Molly wept to hear him.
+
+When the great morning came--a luminous April day of showers and warm
+wind--he was as good as his word. Molly, shining with pride in him
+(herself wearing the day's "uncertain glory"), saw him fold his arms in
+face of the pompous line of men his seniors, compress his mouth, shake
+his cropped head. The deputation was much taken aback, the crowd drove
+hither and thither; she saw head turned to head, guessed at wounds which
+certainly any one there was incapable of feeling. She, however, felt
+them, rose up from her chair, laid a hand upon her lord's arm: they saw
+her plead with him. Oh, lovely sight! with her they too began to plead:
+"Pietà di Nona, Signore! Pietà di noi, Madonna!" She was their graceful
+choragus; or rather, she, like some slim daughter of the
+Greeks--Iphigenia or another--voiced the protagonist's part; and they
+wailed after her, a chorus of elders. Finally, she knelt to him, wound
+her arms about his hips, put up her entreating face. The comedy was
+played out. Amilcare showed himself shaken; he stooped to her, lifted
+her in his arms, embraced her. "O mouth of singular favour!" etc. The
+convocation broke up in sobs, psalmody, and kisses on the cheek.
+Amilcare and his wife were led to the broad window and out on to the
+loggia. There stood Molly in all the glow of her happy toil,
+quick-breathing, enraptured, laughing and afire. The crown was on her
+head, by her side her sceptred lord; and below the people cheered and
+howled. "Udite, citt adini, il vostro Capitano!" cried the heralds.
+"Duca! duca! Evviva Amilcare, Duca!" cried the throng. Then Amilcare
+pointed to the crowned girl. "Evviva la Madonna di Nona!" he brayed like
+a tube of brass. So as Madonna di Nona they knew her to the end.
+Amilcare was crowned with his laurel wreath in the Santi Apostoli; _Te
+Deum_ was sung. Nona started on her new career--benevolent despotism
+tempered by a girl's kisses.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+GRIFONE--AMATEUR OF SENSE
+
+
+Grifone must now be lifted into the piece, Grifone the grey-eyed,
+self-contained little Secretary, whose brain seemed quicksilver, whose
+acts those of a deliberate cat, whose inches were few, whose years only
+tender. One of Amilcare's rare acts of unpremeditated humanity had been
+to snatch him, a naked urchin of nine, from Barga, when (after a night
+surprise) he was raining fire and sword and the pains of hell upon that
+serried stronghold of the hills.
+
+"Eh, Signore, Signore!" had whined the half-famished imp, padding by the
+condottiere's stirrup.
+
+"Va via, vattene al diavolo!" a musketeer growled at him, and tried to
+club him down.
+
+Amilcare looked, as one might idly glance at a shrew-mouse in the path.
+He saw a brown body pitifully lean, a shock black head, a pair of
+piercing grey eyes. Further, he saw that the child had not on a stitch
+of clothing, and that he was splashed to the knees with drying blood.
+
+"What now, Baby?" he asked.
+
+"Lift me into the saddle, Signore," said the boy, with a propitiating
+grin; "I am getting my feet wet."
+
+The little dog had a humorous twist to his eyebrow, and it was true
+enough that the kennels were running red.
+
+"Whose blood is that on your legs, my lad?" Passavente stayed his
+charger.
+
+Grifone shrugged. "Misericordia! Who knows? My father's perhaps; my
+mother's more certainly, since my father ran away. My mother would have
+run too, but she had no time. Eh, take me up, Signore! I cannot swim."
+
+Amilcare swung him up by the hand, so saved his life. Next day Grifone
+saved his.
+
+They burnt a monastery in the plain and ransacked a chestful of
+correspondence.
+
+"Death of Christ!" swore Passavente, "I can't read this Latin. Go and
+fetch me a monk and a rope."
+
+The monk, a plausible rogue, began to read: little Grifone stood by the
+table. At a certain point he broke into the recital with an emphatic
+word: "Liar!"
+
+"What the deuce does this mean?" fumed Amilcare in a rage.
+
+"The monk is deceiving your Lordship," said Grifone; "the sense is the
+opposite of what he reports."
+
+It seemed that the boy knew Latin--at any rate enough to hang a few
+monks. Hanged the poor devils were, and after that very much was made of
+Grifone. Amilcare took him through all his campaigns, had him well
+taught, gave confidence for confidence, and found by the time he was at
+Nona, making his "Gran Tradimento" of Farnese, that he could not get on
+without him. The accepted remedy for such a state of the case was to
+kill the youth at once. Amilcare did not do that, and at first was able
+to bless himself for his second forbearance. Grifone was privy to all
+his master's hopes and safeguards; Grifone wrought upon the Signoria,
+cajoled the clergy, bamboozled the _popolani_, descended even to the
+ragamuffins in the gutters, and taught them how to shout "Duca! Duca!"
+when his master went proudly a-horseback, or to scribble his effigy in
+great chalk circles on the city walls. Though it may be true that
+Molly's graces brought Amilcare the crown of Nona, it must be added that
+neither Molly nor her Duke could have got in at all if Grifone had not
+been there to oil the hinges of the gates.
+
+He had the soft purring ways of a cat, the tact of a Jesuit, the
+penetration of a money-lender, the sensibility of a musical amateur, and
+the morals of a maid-of-honour. He had extraordinary command over
+himself; he seemed able to do everything, and wishful to win nothing.
+There never was a young man (as a matter of fact) who wanted so much or
+asked so little. It was the very boundlessness of his desires which
+reined him in. The appetite of the Cæsars would not have represented
+his, all the gratification they could have commanded would have been for
+him but a whet. If he had a weak side it was his own astuteness: he
+could not always see how unutterably foolish a man might be if he were
+let alone. Another foible he had--intellectual appreciation of beauty
+pushed to fainting-point. His senses were so straitly tied to his brains
+that to pluck at one was to thrill the other. Made on a small scale, he
+was pretty rather than handsome, had quiet watchful eyes, a smiling
+mouth, very little hands and feet. He seldom dressed out of black
+velvet, and if he wanted a man assassinated had the thing done at so
+many removes that it was always entered "private quarrel" or "love
+affair" in the reports of the City Watch. He generally chose friars for
+business of the sort, because they could be about at night without
+suspicion, and their hanging sleeves gave them such a pull. For cup or
+fruit work he found ladies the only possible agents. No one in Nona
+would dream of taking wine from a man; and as for presents of figs,
+Grifone was maturely of opinion that the last and present Pontiffs had
+exhausted that pretty artifice. Finally, you can easily understand how
+useful Duke Amilcare found a demure lad of this kind in the matter of
+moulding his new State.
+
+When his master brought him a mistress he gave her great attention. Like
+all clever fellows, he was at first disposed to set down her simplicity
+to her credit; but after watching her for some time, he decided that
+here was actually a soul clear as glass--thing of inestimable value in a
+country where lying was an axiom of politics--and his respect for her
+quickened into something more. If she had been only beautiful she would
+never have attracted him as she did. There were plenty of women in Italy
+handsome enough for his needs (the flower of whose amours were mostly
+for the mind); but simpletons were rarer. This tall wistful girl told
+the truth--but told it incredibly! Think of this. Shortly after the
+coronation, Bentivoglio, the chalk-faced tyrant of Bologna, came with an
+army on his way to Forlì. He had an old grudge against Nona. Finding
+himself within a league of its walls, his men lusty and well-fed, his
+artillery in great train, Nona (as he judged it) in ferment--he
+blockaded the place, and in due time summoned it to surrender. Amilcare
+laughed at him, told his wife (in secret) that he would attack on the
+morrow, and went to the Council. While he was there came a new summons
+from Bentivoglio, a messenger with a white flag. Word was sent to the
+Duke; the Duke could not be found. "Oh," said one, "seek Madonna for
+answer." This was done.
+
+"Tell the Lord of Bologna," says Molly, "that we attack to-morrow."
+
+The man bowed himself away. You should have seen Amilcare's face when
+this was reported to him; he rated his lovely Molly like a fish-fag.
+Then he had an interview with Grifone; told him the whole story.
+
+Grifone stared. "Ebbene, Monsignore," said he, "your Grace will do well
+to attack."
+
+"Attack, man? when the fellow knows we are coming! Are you mad?"
+
+"Not so, my lord," replied the Secretary. "Bentivoglio does not know you
+are coming. What he knows is that you have _said_ you are coming."
+
+Well, at last Amilcare saw what Grifone had seen from the first, the mad
+results which might be won by a truth-telling Duchess. The Nonesi did
+attack. Bentivoglio, of course, not expecting them, was scattered over
+the maize fields, and never collected his force again until his own
+territory was reached. That was why he could not help the Lady of Forlì.
+"Per Bacco," said Grifone to himself, "truth in Italy is soused in the
+mud at the well's bottom; in England it seems to lie in a pan. This
+pretty creature is as shallow as a crystal cup, where you may study
+Truth, like a blue jewel, in an inch of water." He went about
+thoughtfully the rest of that day. This new-discovered quality of
+Molly's was a thing very beautiful in his eyes. The conclusion he came
+to was that he was about to fall in love with the lady. "And that, after
+all," was his comment, "might not be a bad thing, if (as is probable) it
+become necessary to make her my consort." Then he went happily to sleep.
+
+Grifone's proposals to himself were still very simple. Shortly, they
+were to get a throne for his master in order that he might the more
+easily acquire one for himself. "My legs," he said frankly, "are too
+short to get up without a footstool." Amilcare was to have been the
+footstool. But then Molly came into play. At first she seemed to make
+the simple thing simpler. Amilcare was a strong man, but stiff. Grifone
+was sure he would bungle in his handling of Molly; this truth-telling
+beauty, this flawless jewel in a cup, would baffle him; he would neither
+see it the fine nor the delicate tool it was. He worked best with a
+bludgeon which, as it did brute's work, might be brutishly handled. So
+far well--he might trust Amilcare to wreck himself. Unfortunately, it
+seemed only too likely he might involve Molly in the mess. That danger
+was looming; already he set her to decoy-work which the girl herself
+(Grifone could see) did not relish. The ladies of Nona were gay and
+free--too free. Molly recoiled visibly, more than once. The men were
+worse. Incredible as it seemed to Grifone, they actually ravaged this
+tender honeysuckle spray to drench themselves with the scent. Molly,
+beautifully patient, courteous, meek as she was, cast a scared, paling
+face about the assembly now and again: some of the talk, too, cut her
+very deep. Grifone was already too much interested in her to stomach
+this. He decided to make discreet love to his Duchess by a way of his
+own. The Nonesi (gluttons!) abused her favours; he would refuse them. He
+would fast where Nona feasted, and be the only unkissed guest at her
+receptions.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+GRIFONE ENTERS THE MARKET
+
+
+The first opportunity he had he took. The Palazzo Bagnacavallo was
+thrown open to all worthy citizens, the rooms (since no one in those
+courting days was held unworthy) were crowded. Ladies, soldiers,
+churchmen, humanists in brocade, poets in velvet, a Cardinal, a
+cross-eyed Greek who had forsaken usury at Trebizond for moral
+philosophy at Nona; Madonna Diamante, too receptive wife of the Count of
+Cornuto; Madonna Smeralda, her discreet friend; Madonna Saphira; Madonna
+Rubina; frizzed young nobles in parti-coloured hose; humble abbates,
+uncured and incurable; a monk crowned with laurel for a sonnet; and a
+Knight of the Holy Ghost in retirement;--these were some of the company
+among whom Duchess Molly was paraded by her discerning lord, to carry
+her smiles of welcome and her pretty ways. Grifone, grave, attentive, in
+black, was there, be sure, waiting his turn. It came, and with it Molly,
+blushing and overwrought, new from the very kindly salutations of the
+Greek. To Grifone she proffered a greeting which was no less kind
+because her heart was troubled. Her well of trust in mankind was not yet
+dry. Grifone took her hand and bent over it; it was as much as he did to
+brush it with his lips. Molly wondered at him.
+
+"You should be Messer Grifone, my Lord's secretary," she said,
+faltering.
+
+"Alas, I have that misfortune," replied the youth, with averted eyes.
+
+"Why, I know you very well," said Molly, "but see now that I have
+offended you. What is my injury, Signore? What have I done?"
+
+"Madonna," said Grifone (but so low that no other could hear him),
+"believe me that the offence is none of your wilful making. It is,
+however, irremediable. Nothing but misfortune could overcome such
+misfortune as mine; and that I pray Heaven to keep far from you."
+
+"Alack! good Grifone, what sayings are these for a day that should be
+happy?" urged the warm-hearted girl, with eyes ready to fill.
+
+"Madonna, let me endure the thought of them alone, I entreat your
+Grace."
+
+"Never, while I live, Grifone. You make me most unhappy. Will you not
+kiss me?"
+
+"Never, while I live, Madonna, if I am to live honest."
+
+Molly went white and red, and stood hesitating, uncertain whether to cry
+or be angry. Either might have been a vent for her distress, which was
+real. Commanding herself with pains--
+
+"I will require you to speak with me after supper," she said, after a
+pause for the struggle.
+
+Grifone bowed his head and backed away from her. She, being boundless in
+capacity for the affections of her kind, spent the interval with an
+aching heart.
+
+Directly supper was done she hunted for the Secretary. The affair had
+by now throbbed itself into a question of her physical ease. Her
+heartstrings were at a dangerous stretch, she quivering at the point of
+tears. Master Grifone, for his part, had taken very good care that the
+Duke of Nona should be occupied, and himself not hard to find. Molly
+came upon him in a gallery of arras; caught him crouching there with his
+face hidden in his hands. She went to him at once, full of the trouble
+he showed her, sat by him, put her arm round his neck, and tried to draw
+his head up. Grifone turned her a white, miserable face.
+
+"Ah!" he said, husky with reproach, "ah! you have come with the ardours
+of an angel leaping in you; yet no cruelty could in truth be sharper."
+
+"Cruel? Cruel? Oh, Grifone, nobody has ever said this of me before!"
+whimpered poor Molly. She was swirling in wilder water than she knew.
+
+"The cruelty is unconscious, yet none the less bitter for that," he
+complained; and then, all at once, he turned fiercely to rend her.
+"What! When I throb for your footfall, or when I lean swooning to the
+wall for the scent of your hair as you pass; when I urge against your
+chamber door that I may feed upon the sound of your breath, or hunt for
+broken bread under your table that I may grow drunk on what your fingers
+have touched! When I go raving at night, weeping by day, with a knife in
+my heart, tears that scald my eyes! When with these pains to endure,
+these perils to skirt, heights to fly, you will speak, touch me, breathe
+upon me, tempt me to greet you with kissing of the lips--ah, heaven and
+hell! it is over-much. I would be an honest man, look you. I have a
+master to serve, I bid you remember. It is true enough that I love you
+out of all measure; there is no sin in that which I cannot help; but
+misery there is, by our Saviour. The sin is gaping all about me, itching
+here, aching there, gnawing and groping without cease, or stint, or
+allay. Yes, yes, I know this is true--God help me! I love you
+deplorably; but I will not touch you. You are the ever-blessed thing to
+me; but I will make you the ever-abhorred thing, _anathema maranatha_. I
+love you, I worship you, I adore you; you are my saint, my church, my
+altar, my soul's peculiar food; you shall be my devil, his hell, his
+cauldron, my venomous offence. And all this you shall be that I may love
+you yet more, yet incomprehensibly more, and (withal) live honest. I
+will hate you because I adore you. Ah! and I will prove whether by
+hating you most of all I cannot drown myself in love." He threw himself
+out of her reach, and rocked with hidden face.
+
+Here was pretty hearing for a pretty bride. Molly, with heaving bosom,
+stood abashed and dumb, and troubled profoundly. Not only had she never
+tried to stem so fierce a torrent of love, nor ever shuddered under such
+dry heat in men's words--she had never yet dreamed of so much passion in
+men created. And glorious passion, too, it seemed, so stern and
+repressed--a passion which hugged a fetter, a splendid misery of denial.
+Of course she had nothing to say; she never had anything to say; yet she
+longed to say or do something. Her interest in all these fine things
+was painful, if delicious; and it never occurred to her for a moment
+that it could be a sin to listen where it was evidently such a virtue to
+declare. She was conscious of no disloyalty to Amilcare in so listening,
+in being so troubled, in displaying her trouble so unaffectedly. Poor,
+poor, good Grifone! So very noble, so white and miserable; Heaven knows
+she would have satisfied him if she could. With her, to feel was to
+touch (if I may so put it); quite instinctively she stretched out her
+arms to draw him home; the good fool would have kissed his tears away if
+he had had any, giving him for comfort what he had screamed upon as a
+torment. But that was a talent denied to Grifone: he could not cry. All
+the same, she was at the point to kiss him, when he once more prevented
+her--this time without violence.
+
+"Ah, my lady, my lady," he said, with a smile whimsically sad, "have a
+little pity on a torturing wretch!"
+
+Molly now covered her face and freely sobbed. The scene was
+heartrending, and Grifone judged that he might give the finishing
+stroke. He stood over her where she was flung (the poor humble soul),
+and laid his fingers lightly on her silken shoulder.
+
+"Love makes a good reader of a man," he said slowly, drawling his words.
+"Long ago I discerned the clear stream of truth which is the issue of
+your love. Henceforward there is a secret pact between us two, a secret
+wholly honourable, since I have only told it that you might be won over
+not to dare me too far. Being honourable, you (who are the fountain of
+honour) will keep it. We go our two ways, we look not on each other, we
+greet not, neither speak what either knows. Chance will throw us much
+together; yet this law we will punctually observe. To me the hour will
+say--'Guard thee, Grifone, thy sweet enemy draws near.' To you--'Now
+goodness be thy guide, Molly, lest thou art a cause of stumbling to thy
+brother.' So let it always be."
+
+He left her then, knowing very well that he had sworn the good girl to
+faith inviolable, and given her the subject of perennial thought.
+
+And so he had. Molly kept his secret, honoured it, honoured him. She
+came by tortuous ways of her hoodblind heart to glory and exult in both;
+nor had she the wit to discern how or by what stealthy degrees the pain
+and longing she pitied in him grew to be more pitiable in herself. She
+watched him wonderfully in those crowded days of court life which
+followed, and when she was blinded by her tears, held him as a martyr
+who, for her sake, lay quivering under the knife. It shows the length of
+her road, that she was never aware how much more in her sight he was
+than Amilcare, the man of her election. Amilcare, it is true, was
+greatly occupied: one cannot be a duke for nothing. Not home affairs
+only (though discontent was never far off) called him from home: the
+times were full of the shock of alarms; thrones toppled; there were
+rumours of moving hosts beyond the Alps. Cesare, the flame-coloured
+Borgia, was still meditating his kingdom in Romagna; already the Lady of
+Forlì was flogging her sulky lieges into some sort of action for her
+defence. Now, Nona lay dead in the Borgia's way, and unless the Borgia
+could be hoodwinked again as he had been hoodwinked before, Nona need
+not cease to be a Duchy, but Amilcare would cease to be a Duke. No
+wonder the man was a lacklove just now. He intended to play Molly for
+his great stake; meantime he must be more of a duke than he was,
+recognised as such by other powers, by dukes firmly rooted, by grudging
+republics, or tyrants in thin veils.
+
+And while he was consolidating his throne--ruffling here, fawning
+there--Grifone was always before Molly's eye; always plucking at her
+poor heartstrings; always holding up his grave patience, his bleeding,
+his most eloquent refusals, for her wonder. Wonder, indeed, she did, and
+much more than that. The thought sat upon her like a brooding evil
+spirit, frayed her nerves to waste. He used to move her so much by this
+policy of negation that she found herself panting as she sat among her
+women; or when from her throned seat at table she saw his pale profile
+burn like a silver coin in the dusk, the pain of her heart's beating
+well-nigh made her suffocate. Her troubles came to be day-long; he
+haunted her by night. When she began to ask the Virgin Mary how long she
+could endure, it was the signal to herself that she could endure no
+more. She sent for him then, and implored him brokenly--sobbing,
+kneeling before him--that he would leave her. Grifone bowed his head.
+
+Next day Amilcare (or some other) told her that the Secretary was to be
+absent for some months arranging alliances abroad. He went without
+seeing her or bidding any farewells. She was prostrate for three or four
+days, could hardly drag herself to church, or away from it when she had
+once gained its cool sanctuary aisles. After that she got better and
+more her old self. The relief was as delicious as the grief had been;
+she was really happy. Then she found that she was beginning to dread his
+return. This was exactly what he had desired: he was a most astute young
+man.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A PEDLAR'S ROUND
+
+
+Grifone's tour of negotiation lasted very nearly six months--months of
+comparative ease for Molly, neglected by husband and shadowing lover
+alike. During this time the latter visited every important court in
+Italy, except Naples, whither he cared not, and Parma, whither he dared
+not venture--the object of his journey being, of course, to secure his
+master's acknowledgment by a better title than the throats of a marketed
+crowd. It would be as interesting as it was surprising to see the little
+craftsman at work, the ingenuity with which he plied his handful of
+tools, the proud patience with which he endured snub after snub, his
+bland passivity and extraordinary rebound. First of all, he went to
+Rome, ever the pivot of danger to an Italian diplomat. Molly's portrait,
+done in his best manner by Dosso of Ferrara, was presented to Duke Cæsar
+of Valentinois.
+
+In this, the lady with loose hair and a still looser robe (spangled with
+stars it was, and slipped off one white shoulder) was sitting in a green
+wilderness feeding lions with _confetti_. On a cedar near by, were
+several parrots and a pale owl, and from a low-swinging branch a great
+speckled snake stooped downward to embrace Molly's waist in a dry fold,
+and with his head writhed forward to lick her chin. It was a pleasing
+piece; Don Cesare was ravished. The seed planted in him at Foligno
+germinated, produced a bud, before long a triumphant flower. Not only
+would he come to Nona, and that soon, but the Holy Father sent the
+Golden Rose to "his dearest daughter in Jesus Christ, Maria, by the same
+grace Duchess of Nona." O mouth of singular favour!
+
+With the scent of this rare blossom, Grifone went off to tickle the
+nostrils of the North. But he must not delay us. Bologna he dared to
+visit: thither the ducal pair must needs go anon. Milan received him to
+some purpose; Venice received him to none at all. Barbarigo was not Doge
+for nothing. Ferrara was busy with thoughts of piety, the whole court
+barefoot, howling "Fac me plagis" between the garden walls. In other
+places he cried his wares, and reached Nona again in the heats of July.
+
+He found his lovely mistress in a shaking fever, languid under the
+breathless heat of the plain, yet never at rest. He found her large-eyed
+and bodeful, horribly nervous of him. She had been longing to see him,
+yet every day made vehement prayer that she might never look on him
+again. When she knew that he was indeed in the palace, she shut herself
+into her chamber with a crucifix, and spent the whole day at the window
+peeping from behind a curtain. Grifone saw the shape of her in it, saw
+her hand at the selvage.
+
+"Courage, Grifone, mio caro," he assured himself; "she is afraid of
+thee." He resumed his state of armed respect, Molly her tossing nights
+and pacing days. Affairs were something awry within the Duchy, yet
+Grifone assured his Lord they were likely to be much more awry out of
+it. Madonna Duchessa must certainly be shown about--otherwise, an
+avalanche. Preparations were pushed on. By October the Duke and Duchess,
+with a great train set out--actually for Bologna, but nominally for
+Milanese territory. Lodovico, of that great principality, would have
+been mortally affronted if he believed Bentivoglio to have been
+considered first. Therefore the visit to Bologna was to be a dead
+secret, performed by the principals almost unattended. Meantime Grifone
+(who loved mystification) prepared litters with a dummy Duke and Duchess
+to go under escort to Borgo San Donnino. He and his wagging escort duly
+entered that city: excuses to the Podestà secured him a covered passage
+to the palace. Once there, unfortunately, the populace clamoured for a
+view, insisted upon their Graces' appearance. Grifone had to set his
+dolls at a window. There they stared, embraced, while three Ciceronian
+orations were delivered from the piazza, and all the merchant-guilds
+marched round it with banners and torches. Next morning he got them off
+safely by some stroke of good luck; but his joke got wind in time, came
+round to Cesare Borgia's ears, and at last was repeated against Nona.
+For no other reason could this absurd incident claim your ears.
+
+At Bologna, also, all had gone well with the real adventurers--up to a
+certain point Bentivoglio the tyrant (whose name is surely the grimmest
+of his pleasantries) having seen the lovely Molly, was disposed to
+forgive her that disastrous veracity which (you remember) had prevented
+him before. He was so favourably impressed that Amilcare (who never
+missed a chance) left him alone with her for two hours in the garden
+after supper. At the end of that time Molly came to him, stumbling over
+her dress in her haste, flushed and in tears. They must leave Bologna at
+once, she declared; she would die else, or never look her husband in the
+face. The man had insulted her, was horrible, most wicked. Amilcare, her
+dear lord, must go and avenge her, etc., etc.
+
+Here was a pother. What could be done? Grifone, of course, had he been
+there, would have drawn his master's sword for him, dragged him out of
+the room, and sent him back in half an hour's time with a bloody
+testimony of nothing on the blade. Molly would have been pacified,
+Bentivoglio snug abed, the sword none the worse for a little pig's
+blood. But Grifone was at Borgo jigging his dolls and listening to
+Cicero, and Amilcare lost his head. He pooh-poohed the whole affair;
+Molly grew pale, stopped crying. Amilcare began to feel himself--come,
+come, she was reasonable after all. He condescended to explain the fine
+uses of Italian statecraft, the wife's part, the husband's part. He was
+most explicit; Molly grew white, ended by fainting. Amilcare carried her
+to bed; she refused to sleep with him. He raged; she cared nothing. She
+was wild with terror, shame, discovery of her lover's worth, and of her
+love's. He had to beg her pardon on his knees, made an enemy of
+Bentivoglio, a fool of himself, and left next morning in a tearing
+passion.
+
+Grifone, who met his master at Cremona, lost no time in seeing that
+something had gone counter, and very little in finding out what it was.
+
+"Leave it to me, my good lord," he said comfortably; "I will explain it
+to Madonna in another way."
+
+Before they went to bed he had a little guarded talk with his Duchess,
+half excusation of his absence which might have aggravated her alarms,
+half condemnation of Amilcare; the whole, consequently, a veiled eulogy
+of himself.
+
+Molly was very quiet at first, subdued and miserable, but sincerely
+grateful. To express this, she fell into her natural way, a way of
+little timid tendernesses, little touchings of the arm, urgings of the
+cheek. Grifone received them rigidly; she was reduced to tears.
+Thereupon he kissed her ardently, twice, and fled. She remained a long
+while in the dark, breathless, limp, awed, and absurdly happy. Next
+morning he was as distant as the Alps and quite as frosty. At dusk they
+reached Milan.
+
+Whatever Duke Ludovic (titular of Bari, actual of Milan) may have
+intended to ensue, he gave them a proper reception. Cardinal Ascanio
+himself came to the city gate with clergy and the Council; cavalry, a
+parti-coloured array, pennoned and feathered, escorted them to the
+castle. There, on the steps within the great courtyard, the Moor
+himself, sumptuous in silver brocade, and Donna Beatrice his wife; there
+his tired sister, Duchess Bona, and her by no means tired daughter,
+Bianca Maria of the green eyes, stood panoplied to await them. Trumpets
+announced the greetings that passed; yet another fanfare the greetings
+that were to come when within the hall, at the foot of the broad
+staircase, they found and kissed the hands of the anxious little Duke
+Galeazzo Gian and his pretty wife--pair of doomed children, even then in
+the cold shadow of their fate.
+
+Half-hearted, fainting Molly went through her little part with the
+accustomed success. Her pretty English-Italian, her English lips, again
+her eager hands, so anxious to search friends out, found their sure way
+to one at least. Bianca Maria, affianced of the Roman King, delighted to
+kiss and be kissed, announced herself the shy girl's lover. Pleasure
+broke over her face, broke the glaze of her bottomless eyes with a gleam
+like the sun's when in still water it betrays deep green paths of light.
+
+She was an enigmatic rogue, so clever that to most she seemed of
+unplumbed stupidity. Those blank green eyes of hers, that waxen face,
+that scarlet impenetrable mouth, her even gait and look of ruminating,
+look of a dolt--who knew Bianca Maria? Not Maximilian the mild-mannered
+King; not Duke Ludovic (that creased traitor) who schemed her marriage;
+not altogether Lionardo, who painted half her portrait and taught her
+much of his wisdom; certainly not poor Molly of Nona. All Milanese were
+her lovers, and here was another heart, Molly's, to wit, laid open and
+soothed by the little witch's quick hand-stroke. Bianca Maria had all
+her secrets with all her love in the first hour of their embracery.
+
+The two girls sat clasped in one chair in that pretty time of dressing
+when half is undone and half's to do. Molly, feeling a fool but loving
+to have it so, sat in the lap of the younger, who mothered her.
+
+After many days Lionardo, who forgot nothing and never her whom he thus
+happened on, glorified her as the Virgin Mary on the knees of Saint
+Anne. The indefinite smile, the innocent consciousness, the tender
+maiden ways! Wife, mother, handmaid of high God, he thought of her as of
+Molly in _apotheosis_; dutiful for love's sake, yet incurably a child,
+made for the petting place.
+
+"Grifone the Secretary is your lover, my Molly," said Bianca Maria the
+wise.
+
+Molly admitted the sobering truth, and the other pinched her lip.
+
+"Take care of him, my dear. He is more perilous than that stiff husband
+you now have. The husband is a trading fool. He uses you as a carrot to
+induce donkeys. The other is more curious, and has no use for donkeys.
+He will use you otherwise."
+
+"Why, how will he use me then?" said open-eyed Molly. She was vaguely
+ill at ease; but the other shammed stupid. All she could be brought to
+add was--
+
+"I will take care of you if I can. You will never do here, nor should
+ever have come--a lamb among our Lombard wolves. Had you no English
+lover, to kill Amilcare and prevent it?"
+
+Molly thought of Gregory Drax, who had been upon the North seas at the
+time. Gregory Drax used to lean over the garden gate chewing straws.
+This he did by the hour together, to the perfect satisfaction of himself
+and understanding of the neighbours. Molly could not think that it would
+have led to the slaying of Amilcare.
+
+"What was he like, this Gregorio?" asked Bianca Maria, suddenly alert
+when she had got his name smoothly.
+
+Molly did her best--ruddy, blue-eyed, always blushing and laughing,
+fair-haired, very long arms. He was a _marinajo_.
+
+"He sounds to be so," said Bianca Maria. Then she clapped her hands and
+summoned Lionardo.
+
+The great man had no sooner appeared (noiselessly in the doorway, the
+inscrutable grey-beard) than she kissed her friend and bade her go with
+her women to the appointed quarters of the Nonesi. Lionardo gravely
+saluted her as she went rosy out. He had seen the Virgin in the lap of
+Saint Anne and cared no more for the poor original.
+
+"Dear Lionardo," said the girl in the chair to the most learned man of
+her day, "you shall do me the favour to write a letter in Latin to a
+certain English lord, Messer Gregorio Dras, _Marinajo_, Londra."
+
+"Principessa," said the great man, "I am ready. Recite your letter."
+
+"To her very singular good lord," the letter began--the only one, so
+far as I know, written by the Empress Bianca Maria to England; certainly
+the only one she ever wrote to Wapping. The conceit of it was as
+follows: That the lovely Lady Molly was at Nona on the confines of
+Emilia and Romagna, wife of a man who would shortly be murdered in order
+that she might become the mate of the assassin; that a very great lord,
+son of the Holy Father, was intending for those parts, and would
+probably take the same means to secure himself the position of her third
+husband. The writer proposed that the Lord Gregorius, whose virtue and
+celerity of judgment were well known throughout Italy, should journey
+out to Nona with all reasonable despatch and repossess himself of the
+lady. "Thus your lordship," it concluded, "may happily become fourth
+husband of a lady, whose charms are of a sort so noble and perdurable
+that they are unlikely to suffer from the arduous duties their
+excellence involves. Yet such haste as is compatible with your
+worshipful degree in the realm of England may be recommended. From
+Milan, etc., in the year of our thankful Redemption 1494."
+
+"How shall we send our letter speediest, my Merlin?" His enchantress
+laid her emerald spell over him--O incomparable witch! Such sorcery
+exalted him always. He lifted her question upon one of his towering
+flights.
+
+"The wings of birds, if we could use them, were admirable for the
+purpose, Princess," he replied. "But, for the moment, the difficulty of
+instructing such messengers is insuperable. And not only so, but it is
+probable that the Lord Gregorio, seeing such an envoy to his hand, might
+put a bolt into it, and itself into the pot, without interrogatories
+delivered or answers made. So messenger and message would alike be
+boiled. Another way occurs to me, which arises out of this
+consideration. We stand, each bather of us, in a lake of air. A lake?
+Rather, an illimitable ocean of it spread over land and sea, in which
+the very mountain-tops do blink. Should not, then, the pulsing of our
+thought, as it rings outward from us, be discernible in the ripples
+about the Lord Gregorio's ears? Obviously it should. But the reading of
+such ripples would be a nice matter; and again we lack means, and again
+the time, to instruct his lordship. Once more--"
+
+"Ah, you dream your subtleties, and my letter gets cold," said Bianca
+Maria, pouting. "You are now just as you sit watchfully when you should
+be painting my picture."
+
+"It is then that I am painting my hardest, Princess Saint Anne," he
+returned. "But leave with me your letter. It shall go in a man's bosom
+to-morrow morning."
+
+High affairs of State are not settled in a week, nor dukes so apt at
+billing as a pair of girls. Duke Ludovic would not declare himself to
+every adventurer; Duke Amilcare was too patently adventurous to disclose
+all his hand. Then came Grifone, with a game of his own. Blind each of
+one eye, they set to dealing their cards for beggar-my-neighbour.
+
+Now Ludovic feared one man in all Italy, and so did Amilcare. That was
+the one man in all Italy whom Grifone respected, on whom he thought he
+could honestly rely. Thought he to himself, "Can their Serenities be
+leagued against this man in my service? Can they not, by our risen
+Lord?" He fancied that they might.
+
+To this end he proposed to his master, very shortly, the assassination
+of Borgia by means of the lovely Molly. Let her, at a private banquet,
+inveigle him to drink a cup.
+
+"Suggest this to the Duke of Bari," he said. "I think your lordship will
+not be disappointed. Substantial pledges must be exacted, of course; he
+must tread in deep enough to leave a footmark or two visible 'twixt
+Milan and Nona."
+
+Amilcare thought well of this advice and followed it. Ludovic,
+incredulous at first and breathless, took a fortnight to ponder. He
+consulted Cardinal Ascanio, consulted his astrologers, took the test of
+the opening Virgil. His eye lighted upon the portentous words: "Tantæ
+molis erat Romanam condere gentem." Who would have twittered after
+those? He sought his guest and told him roundly that if the thing went
+well he would send an envoy to the court at Nona, and support the new
+Duchy with moral force.
+
+Amilcare did not believe him, naturally, nor did he greatly care for
+moral forces. He stipulated for an envoy at once, an invitation for
+himself and his wife to Bianca Maria's wedding, and for a loan of twenty
+thousand ducats in specie.
+
+Ludovic boggled horribly at this; but they accorded at last. The envoy
+was to go then and there, the invitation should be sent when the Borgia
+had agreed to visit Nona, and the money when he was within a day's ride
+of that city. Reduced to cipher-writing, this treaty was placed below
+the visible Host on the high altar of Sant' Eustorgio; the allies
+received the Communion, and after another week's festivities the Duke
+and Duchess of Nona went home.
+
+At parting, the two girls clung together.
+
+"We shall never meet again, child," cried the chosen Empress. "I am sure
+of it."
+
+Molly kissed her. "Are we not to come to your marriage, dear Bianca?"
+
+"My marriage?" cried the other. "You will as likely see me there as that
+shadow of a name which will be my bridegroom. You will see my
+simulacrum, a plastered effigy of me. I shall be stiff with gold-dust
+and diamonds; a doll marrying a doll's bed-gown. Why should I be there
+if his ever-august Majesty is represented by a puff of silly breath?
+Pray, never look for Bianca Maria in the Queen of the Romans. The Queen
+of the Romans is a doll, windy ruler of the name of a people; Bianca
+Maria Sforza, daughter of thieves, has been your friend, as you will
+see. She has provided for your third husband an honest man. Now kiss me
+for the last time and, by Heaven, go quickly, or I shall keep you here
+for my soul's health."
+
+The fierce little hungry creature threw her arms round Molly's neck and
+kissed her like a lover.
+
+Molly was melted into tears. "Oh, Bianca, you bewilder, you terrify me!
+What is this of husbands and your soul?"
+
+"Ah, my soul!" cried she. "Do you think so highly of it as to suppose
+it will survive this marriage, or so lightly as not to care? My soul,
+poor child, is in the case with your lovely body. It is the tied bird of
+all these fowlers."
+
+"Alas, alas! But I cannot understand," Molly wailed; but the other
+caught her the closer.
+
+"That you do not understand, Carina, is your salvation. It proves you
+immortal. Now go. No! kiss me, kiss me!"
+
+They were parted at last; and though they did meet again, they kissed no
+more.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+PRIVATE TREATY
+
+
+To a most elaborately penned invitation the Borgia responded by half a
+dozen words scrawled by his secretary. He would be in the March at such
+and such a time, and would spend such and such a day in Nona.
+
+He had heard from Amilcare; he replied to Molly. The insult was glaring,
+even to her.
+
+"Is this tolerable, my lord?" said the meek beauty, incensed at last.
+
+Amilcare shrugged. "It may not have to be borne very long," said he.
+"For my part I am accustomed to reckon a gift by its use to me, not by
+the sacking round about it." He was now beyond his wife's depth: she
+neither followed nor tried to follow him.
+
+In these days she saw but little of her lord, and could have wished it
+less. He, who in action was as cheerful a soul as you could wish to
+serve, was harassed by the long expectances of diplomacy, and in the
+routine work of governing most grim. The Nonesi had come to hate him a
+good deal, but to fear him more. Expenses were incalculable, the taxes
+grew; there were riots. Savage snaps of speech in the Council did harm;
+imprisonments followed, then some unaccountable sudden deaths. High and
+low alike, none knew where the blow might fall, but all flinched at it.
+
+In these distresses Molly served him well, for she at least was
+universally loved. If the Duke had a man stabbed, the Duchess took such
+sweet consolation to the widow that none could murmur long. To watch her
+warm tears flow was in itself a solace; to feel her arms, to win her
+kissing mouth, quickened those doubtful poor souls.
+
+Furtively also, Grifone was on her side; a neat phrase here and there
+made her position plain to the most infidel in the city. It is true that
+while he helped her there he tortured her otherwhere inexpressibly. He
+hardly ever left her now, and her heart bled to see him go in fear of
+her; she prayed night and day that he might have strength to shake off
+this biting, cruel love. It never entered her head that she could
+console him by perfidy to a perfidious husband; it had entered Grifone's
+head a hundred times, but he always put it out. He could afford to wait
+for what, after all, he only valued as a concession to vulgar opinion.
+In thought she had been his for a year; and in the mind he lived most
+deliciously. It was, no doubt, his full intent to make her his in all
+the grossness of the fact, but not until he had got rid of Amilcare, or
+induced Amilcare to get rid of himself. This was what the stiffnecked
+Condottiere was now doing as fast as his best enemies could have wished.
+His people hated him so bitterly that he would certainly have worn
+mail--had not Molly been his mail. They spared him because they loved
+her, and believed that he still had her heart. "Amilcar, uxoris gratia,
+Dux," was now the fact. Grifone could have destroyed belief and him
+together by a lift of the eyebrow; but he wanted more than that, so
+waited on.
+
+The little fellow was really extraordinary. Luxurious as he was to the
+root, and effeminate; hating as he did cold water, cold food, the cold
+shoulder; one and all of these shuddering things he had schooled himself
+to bear without a blink. He grew even to take a stern pleasure in the
+bitterness they cost him, as he turned them to his uses and reckoned up
+his balance at the bank. Amilcare snarled at him, cut his words out of
+his mouth, struck him, kicked him once like a yard-dog. Grifone added it
+all to his store.
+
+But as the day for Duke Cesare's visit drew near, Molly began to be much
+again in her husband's thoughts--how far she would go in this maturer
+time. She had charmed the man once before, at Foligno; she had charmed
+everybody. But then she had been charmed herself. Subsequently she had
+charmed Bentivoglio, not so happily but that she endangered her own
+spell. That was the present trouble, for hitherto her charm had lain
+precisely in herself, in the little everyday acts which were her own
+nature. Bentivoglio had reasonably wanted more: so would Borgia want
+very much more. Could Molly be brought, not to surrender all he wanted,
+but to make him want? Amilcare, growing tense between his difficulties,
+felt that explanations must be given and received, felt also that they
+must come from himself--in fact, Grifone had declined them--and felt
+that he was not strong in such work. Direction he could give, but not
+explanation. However, he must try.
+
+On a vivid morning of early summer, when the lemon-trees in the
+_cortile_ looked as if they had been cut out of metal, and the planes
+and very poplars were unwinking in the thick blue air, Amilcare came
+into his wife's room. She had not expected him; he found her lying
+dishevelled and unbusked, with all her glossy hair tumbled loose. Very
+much a maiden still, notwithstanding her year and a half of troublous
+marriage, she jumped up directly she saw him, and, blushful, covered her
+neck. Amilcare, finding her and the act adorable together, took her in
+his arms and kissed her; then he led her back by the hand to the
+window-cushions and made her sit upon his knee. He began to play with
+her hair.
+
+"What a silken mesh, my Molly! What a snare for a man in this lovely
+cloud! How fragrant of roses! Ah, most beautiful wife, you could lead
+all Italy by a strand of this miraculous hair."
+
+She was pleased with his praises, touched and grateful; she kissed him
+for them. So they grew more friendly than they had been ever since the
+Bentivoglio had shocked her modesty and faith in him at once. Amilcare
+rattled on; love-talk comes easily to the Italian tongue, whose very
+vocables are caresses.
+
+Gradually he drew in and in to the Borgia, centre of all his spinning
+thought.
+
+"There is a lover of yours, for instance!" he said, comically aghast;
+and Molly laughed.
+
+"Why, Amilcare, you make all the world to be my lover, all the world to
+look at me through your eyes. Believe it, they see me truer than you do.
+I am a very simple person."
+
+Amilcare began to count upon his fingers, one hand meeting the other
+round Molly's caught waist.
+
+"The Borgia, the Count of Cavalcalupo, Oreste Colonna, Negroponte, three
+Bishops at Sesto, Bianca Maria, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, Ordelaffi,
+Benti----"
+
+She stopped him there with a hand on his mouth. "Pah, the horrible man!"
+
+Amilcare gaily struggled for vent, and--"voglio!" he concluded the word.
+"You may not relish the trophy, my wife; but him you undoubtedly
+charmed. And now Don Cesare is coming. Him also it will be as needful as
+easy to please."
+
+Molly turned in her husband's arms to consider him. Something in his
+tone (rather than the words he had used) struck bodefully upon her.
+Amilcare was kissing her hair and would not give over: she cast down her
+eyes unsatisfied.
+
+"I hope I may always please my lord's friends," she said in a low voice.
+
+Amilcare settled himself yet more luxuriously in his cushions, and
+looked at the ceiling.
+
+"You must charm him, my soul," he said intensely; "you must charm him. I
+am in his hands, in his way; he has sought my ruin and I believe still
+seeks it. Twice he has tried to poison me, once to have me stabbed; if
+he tries again he will succeed. Nothing can turn Don Cesare from his
+path but a woman. Therefore, you must charm him, ravish his eyes. You
+know very well how to do that."
+
+Molly stared, grew red, began to stammer. "But how can I--? Oh,
+Amilcare, what do you ask of me?"
+
+Then he looked at her, severely but without malice. She noticed for the
+first time the cold-steel hue in his eyes, the complete absence of
+friendliness--a tinge which his men knew very well, and other men's men
+even better.
+
+"I ask of you, my Molly, that the man be put at his ease," he said
+deliberately (happy in ordering at last); "more, that his direction be
+turned. He must be made high-hearted, full of glorious hope, not
+counting cost, keen in pursuit. He must blow off the cobwebs of his
+doubt; rather, these must shred from him as he flies in chase. I cannot
+afford his distrust. I can do nothing without you. Light of Heaven! am I
+asking too much? Or do you suppose that my safety with the Borgia is not
+yours also?" He shrugged his intolerable indignation and threw back his
+head. Thus he avoided to look at his wife.
+
+She still sat upon his knee, but like an alien, bolt upright, reasoning
+out her misery with wide tearless eyes, and a hand to press her bosom
+down. Shocks were no more for her--she had learned too much; but these
+things seemed like hard fingers on a familiar wound, which opened the
+old sore and set it aching. The part he now put to her had only to be
+named to be shown for horrible; was yet too horrible to be named; yet
+had to be named.
+
+"You ask of me to charm your enemy," she said in a still, fascinated
+voice (as if she were forced by a spell to speak obscenity): "to beguile
+your enemy--to make him--make him--seek me? Him, the man who tried to
+murder you? Charm him? Charm him? Lead him to pursue?"
+
+She could hardly drag the words out of her, but Lord! what a fool she
+was. At least, Amilcare thought so. The plainest duty, the easiest; this
+childish woman's game! He jumped up, quivering with nerves on edge, and
+the sympathy between the pair lacked even touch. Molly found her feet,
+stood brooding before him, all her hair about her lowered face.
+
+To see her thus, a mute, a block, maddened Amilcare. He clenched his
+fists. "Yes, Madam"--his words bit the air--"you shall charm this enemy
+of mine, if you please; this assassin, this ravener of other men's
+goods. You shall charm him in the way you best know--you and your
+nation. Bentivoglio I excused you: he was not worth your pains. Borgia I
+shall not excuse you. I showed you to him with this only view; I asked
+him here, I speak to you now, with this only view. You are adorable in
+every part, if you choose to be. Italy has no woman like you, so
+winning, so much the sumptuous child: such tall buds shoot only in the
+North. To it, then! Charm him as you charmed me. Teach him--_Santo
+Dio_!--teach him to die for a smile. At least afford him the smile or
+the provocation of it: the rest shall be my affair. Soul of Christ! am I
+to miss this astounding opportunity? Never in the world. I bid you by
+all you hold sacred to do your duty. Am I plain enough?"
+
+He was. She had grown as grey as a cloth, could say nothing, only motion
+with her dry lips. But she bent her head to him, and stretched out her
+hands in token of obedience to law.
+
+"Good," said Amilcare; "my wife understands me." And he went out then
+and there to his Council. His conviction of her submissiveness (and of
+other things about her to modify it) may be gauged by the fact that he
+never saw her again (except ceremonially) until a certain moment after
+the dinner with Borgia.
+
+Grifone saw her all the more for that. What he saw satisfied him that
+she was in terrible trouble. She slunk about, to his view, as if beaten
+down by shame. He had seen young girls in that strait very often, when
+the first step had been taken, the first flush faded from the venture,
+the first after-knowledge come. They always went as though they were
+watched. More than that, he discerned that she was nearly broken for
+want of a counsellor: he caught her long gaze fixed upon him sometimes.
+She seemed to be peering through him, spoke to herself (he thought) as
+she sat vacantly upon her throne, or at table among the quick wits, with
+all her spying ladies to fence her in. If any one addressed the word to
+her she flushed suddenly and began to catch after her breath. He could
+see how shortly that breath came, and how it seemed to hurt her. If she
+answered at all, it was stupidly and beside the purpose; then she would
+look conscious of her dulness, grow uncomfortably red, be at the point
+to cry. All this, while it could not but gratify him, made him a little
+sorry too.
+
+One night, at a very brilliant assembly given by the notorious Donna
+Smeralda Buonaccorso, he saw her standing forlorn on the terrace, like a
+lonely rock in the sea--the most beautiful woman in Nona and the most
+splendidly attired, absolutely alone in all that chattering, grimacing
+crowd. The Duchess of Nona! This consideration alone moved him to real
+pity--for to be great and unfortunate has a freakish way of touching
+your heart--it moved him quietly towards her, to whisper in her ear--
+
+"Madonna"--(and Heaven! how she started), "Madonna, what you need now is
+the courage of your race. But courage, I well know, comes only by
+confidence, and confidence is what I can give you. Trust for trust; will
+you hear me?"
+
+But she looked piteously at him, as if she had been found out, and put
+her hands to her ears.
+
+"I dare not hear you! I dare not! How can you speak to me when I have
+never asked--never thought? Ah, leave me, Grifone. I have not heard you
+yet: ask me not--but go!"
+
+It was she that went, that hurried from him, stumbling in her haste,
+like a hunted thing. He could see no more of her that night, so with a
+shrug turned to his quiet amusement. There were women there pleasant
+enough. It was true that he wanted but one woman superlatively; but it
+was eminently Grifone's maxim that, failing that which you need, you
+should take that which you can get.
+
+The last stage in the education of Molly, Amilcare found must positively
+be left to the Secretary.
+
+On the night before Duke Cesare's arrival, when every other preparation
+had been made, Grifone came into his master's room, late. He said
+nothing, nor got any greeting; but he placed a little phial on the
+table, and waited. Amilcare looked at it, did not touch it. It was a
+very small phial, half full of a clear liquid.
+
+"You prepared it yourself, Grifone?"
+
+Grifone nodded pleasantly.
+
+"Then I may rest assured--?"
+
+"You may, my lord."
+
+"I will ask you to make all arrangements, Grifone. When the time comes
+you will take the cup to Madonna Duchessa, with a hint of so much as may
+be necessary to provide against mischances. Will this be done?"
+
+"Punctually and surely, Excellence." The Secretary retired with his
+bottle.
+
+Amilcare sat on with a tight smile which neither waxed nor waned, but
+seemed frozen on his face. He may thus have sat for two or three hours,
+his eyes fixed on a point at the table's edge. That point, whatever it
+was, a speck of dust, may be, seemed to grow and grow till it was
+monstrous and a burden intolerable to endure. Amilcare, with an effort,
+stretched out his hand and cuffed at it. He knocked a book off the table
+by this means, then started, then swore at himself. Twice after this he
+spoke, smiling all the while. "Is it now indeed?" he asked, raising one
+eyebrow; "is it now indeed?" Then he got up, stretched himself noisily,
+and lay down as he was on the sofa, to sleep in a moment.
+
+Molly lay with a young maid of hers that night and never had a wink.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE LAST BIDDING
+
+
+That golden Duke of Valentinois had a pompous reception from his august
+ally at Nona. Amilcare, riding like Castor, at one with his horse, went
+out at the head of his court to meet him. The Centaurs lined the way
+with a hedge of steel. Hat in hand, the Duke of Nona rode back with his
+guest to the garlanded gates. There, a fluttered choir, all virgins and
+all white, strewed flowers; from that point to the Piazza Grande one
+song came leaping on the heels of another. On the steps of the Duomo
+were the clergy in brocade, a mitred bishop half smothered under his
+cope in their midst. The two Dukes dismounted, and hand in hand entered
+the church; the organ pealed; the choir burst out with the chant, _Ecce,
+Rex tuus venit_; and then (seeing Cesare had once been a Cardinal),
+_Ecce Sacerdos magnus_. The smoke of incense went rolling to the roof,
+_Te Deum_ spired between the rifts; an Archbishop intoned the Mass of
+the Holy Ghost. Cesare, in white satin, golden-headed, red-gold in the
+beard, cloaked and collared with the Golden Fleece, knelt in the middle
+of the dome; beside him the hawk-faced Amilcare, splendid in silver
+armour, knelt also--but stiffly; whereas the Borgia (graceful in all
+that he did) drooped easily forward on his _prie-dieu,_ like the
+Archangel Gabriel who brought the great tidings to Madonna Maria.
+Amilcare, at that rate, was like Michael, his more trenchant colleague,
+that "bird of God."
+
+The Bishop, who knew perfectly well why the Duke had come to Nona, and
+why Nona's Duke wanted him there, preached a sermon which the saving
+Italian virtue of urbanity prevented from being either monstrous or
+ridiculous. Before the altar the two lords kissed each other. One of
+them had tried and the other was about to try murder as a political
+expedient; but that was no reason why good manners should not prevail.
+Decent ceremony was always a virtue of the race.
+
+Half an hour before dinner Grifone (who had not been to church) stood
+before his mistress, who had not been suffered to go. He had a flagon in
+his hands, of silver gilt, like the calyx of a great flower whose stem
+was sheathed in the clustered wings of angels, whose base was their
+feet. He held it in both hands as if it were a chalice.
+
+Molly, beaten out and white, looked at it dully, but did not seem to see
+it.
+
+"Madonna mia," said the youth, "this is the loving-cup which I am to
+hand to you after dinner, and which you are to hand to Duke Cesare."
+
+He hardly heard her answer, but judged by the shaping of her lips that
+it was, "Well, Grifone?"
+
+"Duke Cesare will ask you to sip of it first, Madonna."
+
+His looks were piercing; yet she was too far gone to be disturbed by
+such as those. She even smiled faintly at his emphasis.
+
+"Well, Grifone?" she asked again, in that same dry whisper. "How shall
+that be harm to him if I do it?"
+
+Grifone blew out his lips. "Harm, _per Dio_! None at all, but common
+prudence on his part. No harm to him, lady; but to you obeying him,
+destruction, death!"
+
+Molly stared. Her breath came hollow from her mouth.
+
+"Death, Grifone?" she faltered, and then pored over his face again.
+
+He nodded his words into her.
+
+"Death, Madonnina."
+
+The girl tottered to her feet--had to balance like a rope-dancer to keep
+upon them.
+
+"But then--but then--O Saviour!"
+
+She threw her arms up. He thought she would fall, so put one of his
+round her waist. He felt her heart knocking like a drum, pressed her
+closer, drew her in and kissed her, with a coaxing word or two. She
+tried to collect herself--alas! her wits were scattered wide. Her head
+drooped to his shoulder.
+
+After that there began the most pitiful business. She was pleading with
+him in a whining, wheedling, silly voice, which would have broken down
+an Englishman. Grifone himself was pricked. It was like a child,
+frightened into slyness, coaxing its mother.
+
+"Dear Grifone, dear Grifone! You will not hand me the cup. Oh, please,
+please, please!"
+
+Grifone kissed her. "Why, what can I do?" he said. "My lord has ordered
+it so, dear one."
+
+She took no notice of his familiarities; indeed, the tone they lent his
+voice may have soothed the poor affectionate wretch. But she only wrung
+her hands at his news.
+
+"No, no, no! 'Tis impossible! No, no, he could never do it!"
+
+"I can repeat his words," said the inexorable Grifone; "he said--"
+
+Then she sprang away from him as if he had whipped her, and crouched in
+a corner, at bay. She began to rave, seemingly in a high delirium,
+pointed at him, wagged her arm at him, mowing the air.
+
+"Never repeat them, never repeat them. I shall die if you do!"
+
+Grifone set down his cup, ran forward and embraced her. "My lovely lady,
+my adorable Molly!" he murmured, in a passion of admiration for her
+transformed, unearthly beauty.
+
+She noticed nothing of him or his doings, lay lax in his arms. She
+stared, gulping down horror; she looked like some shocked Addolorata
+come upon the body of her dead Son. And so, perhaps (since all good
+women mother their lovers or lords), she was face to face with her dead.
+Tears came to blot out her misery; she could not stay their fall. They
+anointed also the burning cheeks of young Grifone, and drove him outside
+himself with love. He kissed her softly again, with reverence, and
+whispered--
+
+"Courage, sweet lady; I shall be with you. I have it all in hand. The
+end for you and me shall be happiness undreamed of yet. The Duke comes
+in a quarter of an hour." Then he left her alone.
+
+"The affair will go by clockwork," he assured himself. "Neither fast nor
+slow, but by clockwork." He had an ingenious mind, and loved mechanics.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+WITH ALL FAULTS
+
+
+At the coming out from church the two Dukes (mentally at least)
+separated; their paths coincided, but not their thoughts, nor their
+behaviour. By common consent, as it appeared, Amilcare at once resumed
+the obsequious, Cesare the overbearing part. Amilcare talked
+profusively, smirked, grimaced, pranced by the other's side, writhed his
+hands, in copious explanation of nothing at all. Cesare shrugged. The
+amount of disdain an Italian can throw into a pair of dull eyes or an
+irritable shoulder, the amount of it another will take without
+swallowing, can still be studied whenever a young lieutenant of the line
+sits down to breakfast in a tavern, and the waiter slaves for his penny
+fee. Yet, depend upon it, the cringer has balanced to a nicety the
+sweets and sours of boot-blacking against the _buona mano_; the rest is
+pure commerce. So now, the deliberate insolence of the flushed Borgia
+towards his host was a thing to be dumb at; yet Passavente redoubled his
+volubility.
+
+Going up the steps of the Palazzo Bagnacavallo, the guest plumply told
+his entertainer to bring out the woman and go to the devil with his
+cackling. Amilcare laughed all over his face at the best joke in the
+world, and bowed to the earth. Thus humoured they went in to dinner.
+
+Molly, in fold over fold of silk gauze which let every lovely limb be
+seen as glorified in a rosy mist, met them in the ante-room, and
+thenceforth the Borgia had eyes for nothing but the beauty of her. The
+moment he saw her, he drew, as once before, a sharp breath; she greeted
+him in her fashion; he was moved to a fit of trembling.
+
+From that time forth Amilcare was as though he were not. The Roman
+waited for no invitation and disregarded those he got. Would his Grace
+be pleased to dine? His Grace went on pouring out his talk to the
+wonderful rose-coloured lady. Amilcare, patient to excess, watched.
+Presently Cesare said, "Madama, shall we go to dinner?" and to dinner
+they went, Amilcare rubbing his hands behind them.
+
+They found the table prepared--a very low one; divans to sit upon; none
+but Grifone, pale and respectful, in the little painted chamber.
+
+All this had been carefully provided. The Duke's suite dined in another
+wing of the palace; the choir of minstrels, who held the passage between
+them, had mail under their cassocks, and two-edged swords made for
+thrusting. They were fifty strong. Every page-in-waiting in the hall and
+long cool passages was a "Centaur" armed to the teeth. Don Cesare, it
+seems, had walked into a steel trap at last. Do you wonder that Amilcare
+could afford a supple back?
+
+But as the delicate meats succeeded each other--each duly tasted by
+Grifone before a morsel went to plate--there was one, in the surge of
+her terrors, struck dumb with what was, rather, wonder. The magnificent
+Cesare went his road over the feelings of his host; the host bowed and
+waved his hands. Why should he not? Never one word of answer, never a
+gleam of attention did he win from the Roman. Why should he care? His
+wife was doing her duty, his enemy was webbed: what else could matter?
+The Italian shrug goes deeper than the shoulders; sometimes it strokes
+the heart of a man. The very indignities heaped upon the adventurer made
+his revenge the sweeter nursling.
+
+But Molly, the tall English girl, burning in her shameful robe, saw it
+vastly otherwise. That a man could bend so low! That she should ever
+have loved a man with such a stooping back! To think of that made (for
+the moment) every other degradation light. Her part as yet was one of
+sufferance: to look handsome, languid with the excess of her burden of
+beauty; to smile slowly, to keep her eyes on her lap. Pure passivity all
+this, under which the miserable soul could torture in secret. As she
+often had a back-ache, it was easy to wilt among her cushions; as she
+was always mute before flattery, to smile was as simple as to frown and
+meant no more; as she was ashamed of herself and her husband, she could
+hardly hope to lift her honest eyes, or temper her furious blushing.
+
+It would be untrue to say that the Borgia's eager under-current of
+love-language stirred her not at all. Even to her the man's fame made
+his homage a tribute; something it was, beyond doubt, to be courted by
+the greatest prince in Italy. And he had not touched her yet. Amilcare,
+whose desperate grinning made his jaws ache, noticed so much as he
+watched her, fidgeting in his place. His nails were for ever at his
+teeth: when the fruit should come in he was to slip out, and Grifone to
+crown the work. Meanwhile, the flagrant unconcern for his whereabouts
+shown by the victim might have stung a blind worm to bite, or excused
+any treachery. Amilcare had no rage at all and felt the need of no
+excuse. All his anxiety was that Cesare should enmesh himself deep
+enough; and then--! The thought of what should happen then set his head
+singing a song as mad as Judith's.
+
+The still Grifone stood behind his mistress and saw Cesare's golden head
+sink near and yet nearer to her shoulder. He watched his arm over the
+back of her seat, and how his other hand crept towards the lady's idle
+pair. The room held those four, and them not long. In his time Amilcare
+muttered some excuse and tiptoed out.
+
+Cesare was saying, "Ah, give me love--love only--else I must die!"
+
+Molly answered nothing with her lips, but in her bosom prayed
+ceaselessly for pity.
+
+"Love me, pledge me with your lips, let me drink of you, O my soul!"
+sighed the Duke.
+
+"Ecco, Madonna," said Grifone, and handed her the cup.
+
+"The chalice of love!" cried Cesare, straining towards the white girl.
+"Drink to me, my heart, and I will drink from thee!"
+
+Molly still held the cup, though the liquor curved brimming at the lip.
+Her eyes were sightless, her head shaking with palsy.
+
+"Drink, drink, my soul!"
+
+"Yes, my lord, yes, yes; I must drink very deep," she said, and raised
+the cup.
+
+"Pshutt!" said Grifone.
+
+She turned like a caught beast, wild and blanched with horror. She rose
+suddenly, swaying on her feet, entangled one of them in her long robe
+and stumbled forward to stay herself by the table. She looked like some
+spurred Bacchante, lurching over the board with the great flagon a-nod
+in her hand. Cesare made to catch her in his arms, and reached for the
+cup; but then she screamed with all her might and threw the accursed
+thing crash upon the pavement.
+
+"Treachery! Treachery!" Molly shrieked; and again, "Treachery! O God, he
+has made me a devil!" She threw her head up, herself tumbled back upon
+the cushions; knew nothing of Grifone's "Go, go, go, my lord; the house
+is quick with murder!" and when she opened her eyes at last saw Amilcare
+standing grim and grey before her.
+
+Who can say what shall best reveal a man, whether love or hate or fear?
+Or how to know which of these three passions stripped her this Amilcare
+naked? Naked he was now, and she found that she had never known him. The
+colour of his face was that of old white wax; his mouth seemed stretched
+to cracking point, neither turned up at the corners nor down, but a
+bleak slit jagged across his face. He fastened her with his hard eyes,
+which seemed smaller than usual, and had a scared look, as if he was
+positively disconcerted at what he read as they glimmered over his
+wife. In one of his hands (never still) he had a long knife, very lean
+in the blade.
+
+"Ah, what do you want of me more, Amilcare?" It was Molly spoke first,
+in a whisper.
+
+He croaked his reply. "I am going to kill you."
+
+"Oh! oh! You are going to kill me, my lord?"
+
+"You have sold me to my enemy. He is your lover."
+
+"No, no! I have no lover, Amilcare; I have never had a lover."
+
+"Liar!" he thundered. "If he had not been your lover you would not have
+spared his life. There can be no other reason. I am not a fool."
+
+To Grifone that was just what he appeared. To her some ray of her own
+soul's honest logic showed at the last.
+
+"Amilcare!" she cried out, on her knees, "Amilcare, listen, I pray you.
+I have done you no wrong; I implore you not to hurt me; I have done you
+honour. It was because I loved _you_ that I saved his life. I speak the
+truth, my lord, I speak the truth."
+
+"I have never thought you to speak otherwise; but I have been wrong, it
+appears. The excuse is monstrous. I am going to kill you."
+
+The miserable girl turned him a pinched face. She searched for any shred
+of what she had known in him, but all the deadly mask of him she saw
+told her nothing. She began to be witless again, to wring her hands, to
+whimper and whine.
+
+Amilcare looked fixedly at her, every muscle in his face rigid as stone.
+So, as he ruminated, some whisp of his racing thought caught light from
+his inner rage, flared blood-bright before him, and convulsing him drove
+him to his work.
+
+"Gross trull!" He sprang at her with his knife in the air. Molly
+shrieked for mercy; and before he could be on her Grifone whipped out
+his dagger and stabbed his master under the stabbing arm.
+
+Amilcare jerked in mid-career, constricted and turned half. But the blow
+had gone too deep and too true. He fell horribly, and Molly knew no
+more.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+FROM AN AMATEUR'S CABINET
+
+
+Grifone received his swooning lady into his arms and held her there to
+his great content, triumphing in her beauty and successful capture.
+Truly the adventure had gone by clockwork: he might say (he thought)
+that there was not one step in it but had been schemed to an eighth of
+an inch; and when you have to bring temperamental differences into
+account, the chances of Italian politics, the influence of climate, the
+panic alarms of a ridden mob--and still succeed, why, then you may
+lawfully be happy. Happy he was, but Molly was tall and he a
+light-weight. Moreover, he wanted to wipe his blade and be off. He
+judged it prudent, therefore, to bring her to herself again, and so did
+by sousing her liberally with cold water.
+
+Molly, as soon as she could see, was aware of him kneeling by her side
+and of his arms about her. Before she had done gasping he began to kiss
+her.
+
+"My heart of hearts, my lovely soul, my lady Moll! Mine altogether by
+the act of my arm!" were some of his fiery words.
+
+There were others yet more explicit, which left no doubt of his passion,
+nor any ray of doubt of his intentions. Grifone took everything for
+granted, as he had from the beginning.
+
+"My charmer," he said, "I have saved you from ignominious death; but I
+have saved myself also from a death by no means agreeable to me. It was
+impossible that our love could have held us much longer at a distance
+from each other, impossible that we could have still suffered a third
+person to usurp our privileges. If that stabbed stabber under the table
+had not misunderstood you so grotesquely--the gross-witted hog!--he
+would have lived, and I died of jealousy. A far from pleasant death, you
+will allow; worse in that it would have involved your own. For I should
+have had to kill you too, my dearest joy: so much would have been owing
+to my self-respect. Things, you see, could not have turned out more
+fortunately; the fellow trapped himself. We may be happy--we will be
+wildly happy--you shall see!"
+
+It may be doubted whether Molly heard anything of this exposition; she
+may well have missed one or two steps in a carefully reasoned argument.
+Hers was that state of absorbent lassitude when the words and acts put
+to you sink into the floating mass of your weakness. The late shocking
+grief hovers felt about you: a buzz of talk, a rain of caresses, hold
+the spectre off, and so are serviceable--but no more. The cold cheek,
+the clay-cold lips, the long, lax limbs of the poor doll were at his
+service. She saw nothing through her dim eyes, made no motion with her
+lips, sobbed rather than breathed, endured tearlessly rather than lived
+awake her misery. Misery is not the word: she had been sent down to hell
+and had come back dumb to earth, neither knowing why such torment was
+hers, nor thinking how to fly a second questioning. Had she been capable
+of a wish, a prayer, or of begging a favour, who can doubt what it would
+have been? Death, oh, death!
+
+Grifone's face was so near to hers, that not to kiss her would have been
+an affectation; but when he began to make plans, he released her, sat
+up, and spoke as though he were discussing theory.
+
+"There is very much to do, my love," said he, "but I think I see my way
+clear. It is instant flight, to begin with, for one of the household may
+be here any moment, or Don Cesare return. Such an one would have but to
+open the window and cry, 'Treason, ho!' to secure our being torn to
+pieces--not for any love the Nonesi bear that carrion; but because not
+one of them could resist the chance of kicking his benefactors. It is
+reasonable, after all. Instant flight, my dear, if you please. But
+whither? you will ask. Luckily I can take you to a pretty safe place, of
+which I have the key and _custode's_ goodwill in my pocket. You know the
+Rocca del Capitan Vecchio outside the Latin Gate? We go there for our
+terrestrial paradise. Shawl your lovely head, therefore, stoop your
+glorious shoulders, and obey me exactly."
+
+He got up as he made an end of speech, drew her gently to her feet, and
+showed her how to muffle herself in the hood of a man's cloak. He bound
+the rest of the garment about her waist with his belt, pinned up her
+skirt and petticoat as high as her knees, and gave her his own
+stockings and shoes. Then he helped himself to his dead master's pair,
+to his sword and velvet gown; and--
+
+"Now," he said, "we may start by the privy garden."
+
+He led the way. It was a golden afternoon of late summer; the shadows
+were lengthening as the air grew tired and cool, all the place was full
+of that vast peace in which a day of strenuous heat sinks to rest. The
+faint breeze in the myrtles was like a sleeper's sigh:--
+
+"Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbræ--" murmured Grifone to
+himself, as he slipped among the cypresses over the grass. Molly
+followed him with faltering knees, nearly spent. As always, she was at
+the mercy of a clear head, never masterless when a man was near her.
+Morally, nervously, she seemed to be dead; so she followed her new lord
+as meekly as she had followed her old--that one to Nona across the seas,
+this one by gloomy, pent ways through the stale-smelling streets of the
+city to the Rocca del Capitan Vecchio.
+
+Meekly enough she went, yet not so far nor so meekly but that she gave
+Grifone a genuine surprise. It seems that the air, the exercise,
+precautions, what-not, had cried back her escaped wits: certain it is
+that, once in the storm-bitten old fortress, she thanked her leader and
+rescuer with a tremulous sweetness all her own, and then--by Heaven and
+Earth!--urged him gently to go back, "lest her honour should be breathed
+upon."
+
+Her honour! Grifone, the romancer, turned sick with amazement. He was
+dumbfounded, could not believe his ears, nor yet his eyes; that there
+before him should stand that drooping, flagged, pitiful beauty, always
+at his discretion, now wholly at his mercy within nine-foot walls, and
+talk to him with wet eyes and pleading lips of the Cardinal Virtues.
+
+As soon as he could collect himself he put this before her in a whirl of
+words.
+
+_Santo Dio!_ Timidity, prejudice, after what had passed! In what
+possible way or by what possible quibble of a priest could anything stay
+them now from the harvest of a sown love--two years' sowing, by the
+Redeemer, two years' torture; and now--a solid square fortress on a
+naked rock, deemed impregnable by anything but black treachery! Let him
+make assurance incredibly secure: say the word, and he would go and
+silence the old _custode_ for ever. It was done in a moment--what more
+could he do?
+
+So he prayed; but Molly was a rock at last. She ignored everything but
+the fact that she could never survive the night if he stayed in the
+fortress-tower. Such, she assured him, was the fixed habit of her
+extraordinary race. She made no pretence of mourning her dead husband;
+indeed, her horror of him set her shuddering at his mere name; nor did
+she affect to deny that she loved Grifone. It made no difference. She
+was luminously mild, used her hands like a Madonna in a picture, was
+more lovely and winning in the motions of her little head, the wistful
+deeps and darks of her eyes, the pathetic curve of her mouth, than any
+Madonna short of Leonardo's. Grifone threw up his arms; such a pass
+confounded him; he had no tools to pick this sort of lock. Oh, but the
+thing was impossible! Two years' longing, the husband dead--why, they
+might marry, even, if she would. Perhaps that was what she needed? If
+so, he would risk his life in the city again to find a priest. But,
+think of it, formalities at this hour!
+
+Molly smiled and blushed; she was sorry for her friend and would have
+consoled him if she could; but the thing was so obvious. Did not Grifone
+see?
+
+Grifone did not see; he tore his hair, he threatened, prayed, raved,
+commanded, coaxed, swore by God and the Devil, clung to her
+knees--useless!
+
+"Dear friend," she said, and stroked his hot hair, "you have served me
+well. Never serve me now so ill."
+
+She beat him. From that moment, when love was dead, he began to hate
+her. She was safe from what she feared. Everything he might have waived
+but that, a clean blow at his own conceit. The end was near.
+
+Their colloquy, so frenzied on his part, so staid and generous at once
+on hers, was barely over before the hum of many voices crept upon them,
+a slow, murmurous advance, out of which, as the hordes drew near, one or
+two sharp cries--"Seek, seek!" "Death to the traitor!"--threw up like
+the hastier wave-crests in a racing tide. Again they heard (and now more
+clearly), "Evviva Madonna! La Madonna di Nona!" and then (more ominous
+than all) a cry for Cesare Borgia: "Chiesa! Chiesa!"
+
+At this last Grifone, who had been biting his fingers shrewdly, wrung a
+nail apart till the blood came. His was the desperate caught face of a
+stoat in a trap.
+
+"What is this crying without?" said Molly in a hush.
+
+"Pest! I must find out," said Grifone.
+
+He climbed to a high window and looked down into the moonlight. "The
+Nonesi in force. Cesare Borgia and the troops. Hist! He is going to
+speak to them; they are holding him up." He strained to listen--and it
+seems that he heard.
+
+"Citizens," said the Borgia, in fact, "I pledge you my sacred word that
+the Duchess shall be delivered to you whole and in honour. She shall be
+in the Palace within an hour. The Secretary who has her there, who
+stabbed his master and (as I learn from Milan) hatched all the plot,
+must be left to me. Madonna Maria saved my life at the peril of her own.
+She has no more devoted servant than I am. Trust me to prove it."
+
+"Chiesa! Chiesa! Madonna! Heed the Duke!" cried the mob. And then, "Let
+the Duke go up and win us our lady."
+
+"That he shall never do," said Grifone, and came down from the window.
+
+Molly, seeing the cunning in his eyes, backed to the wall.
+
+Time does not serve, and pity forbids, that I should dwell upon this
+misery. What she may have wailed, what he withstood who loved her once,
+I have no care to set down at large. He strangled her with cruel,
+vivacious hands, and then (since time had pressed, and all his passion
+not been pent in one wicked place) fell to kissing the flouted clay.
+Getting up from this tribute, he was faced by Cesare Borgia and his men;
+by Cesare who, used to such stratagems as this of late, had had the
+whole story out of Ludovic at Milan, and forestalled Nona by buying up
+the troop of "Centaurs" before ever he entered the city. Thus had
+Amilcare been sold by his own purchase, and thus Grifone griped in his
+own springe. Cesare found him, I say, and Grifone knew in the first
+crossing of their eyes that his hour had come.
+
+He bore it without a wink, and lucky he might think it that for Cesare
+also the time was short. He was sooner dead than he dared to hope, and
+died cursing the name of Borgia. But that was a seasoned name.
+
+"The populace is on fire, Highness," reported a breathed captain. "It
+clamours for the Duchess of Nona. We can hardly hold them much longer,
+strong as we are. We must show her, though I perceive that her
+Excellency has fainted."
+
+"She is dead, man," said Cesare shortly, wiping his pair of daggers.
+
+"It is a pity, Highness. _Ma----!_" He shrugged the end to his period.
+
+Cesare looked at the girl and shrugged in his turn.
+
+"Luckily it is dark. We must play them that trick they played on Borgo
+San Domino. She must be put in a litter, and at the palace see to it
+that the lights are behind her before ever you set her up in the window.
+Do what you can for us, Ercole."
+
+They worked their best to compose that pitiful dead. She had suffered
+much, and showed it. Her wide eyes were horrible. And there was little
+time for more than to order her dress and neck-jewels, and to smooth out
+her brown hair.
+
+"H'm," said Cesare, "you have made little of it; but at a distance it
+may serve our turn until the troops arrive. Is the litter below? Good.
+_Avanti!_"
+
+The church bells rang all night, and all night the Piazza Grande was
+alive, a flickering field of torches and passing and repassing throngs.
+"Evviva Madonna! Hail, Duchess of Nona!" were the cries they gave. And
+above, at an arched window, haloed by candle-light, the staring lady of
+the land, stiffened and relaxed, played out the last functions of her
+generous body, in return for the people's acclamation.
+
+Bianca Maria, Queen of the Romans by virtue of proxy and the Sacrament,
+spurred into the city of Nona next noon at the head of a plumed escort.
+There, at the fatal window, she saw the whole truth in a flash.
+
+"_O lasso!_ Her third husband was her last, I see," she said, and bit
+her lip to sting the tears back.
+
+"Majesty," said Cesare, hat in hand at her stirrup, "it is not quite so.
+Grifone was not quick enough for the other fellow. Messer Death is
+actually her second husband."
+
+"Now I have something for which to thank our Lord God," said Bianca
+Maria. "Let her be decently buried, but not here."
+
+It was, however, explained that for reasons of policy the Duchess of
+Nona must share tombs with the Duke. Serviceable in death as in life,
+there where she was marketed lies her fragrant dust; fragrant now, I
+hope, since all the passion is out.
+
+I almost despair of winning your applause for poor Molly Lovel, yet will
+add this finally in her justification. Women are most loved when they
+are lovely, most lovely when they are meek. This is not to say that they
+will be worthily loved or loyally: there are two sides to a bargain. Yet
+this one thing more: they are neither meek nor lovely unless they love.
+And since Molly Lovel, on my showing, was both in a superlative degree,
+it follows that she must have loved much. She was ill repaid while she
+lived; let now that measure be meted her which was accorded another
+Molly whose surname was Magdalene.
+
+
+
+
+MESSER CINO AND THE LIVE COAL
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+It is not generally known that the learned Aristotle once spent the
+night in a basket dangled midway betwixt attic and basement of a castle;
+nor that, having suffered himself to be saddled for the business, he
+went on all-fours, ambling round the terrace-walk with a lady on his
+back, a lady who, it is said, plied the whip with more heartiness than
+humanity. But there seems no doubt of the fact. The name of the lady
+(she was Countess of Cyprus), the time of the escapade, which was upon
+the sage's return from India in the train of the triumphant
+Alexander--these and many other particulars are at hand. The story does
+not lack of detail, though it is noteworthy that Petrarch, in his
+"Trionfo d'Amore," decently veils the victim in a periphrasis. "Quell'
+el gran Greco"--there is the great Grecian, says he, and leaves you to
+choose between the Stagyrite, Philip of Macedon, and Theseus. The
+painters, however, have had no mercy upon him. I remember him in a
+pageant at Siena, in a straw hat, with his mouth full of grass; the lady
+rides him in the mannish way. In pictures he is always doting, humbled
+to the dust or cradled in his basket, when he is not showing his paces
+on the lawn. By all accounts it was a bad case of green-sickness, as
+such late cases are. You are to understand that he refused all
+nourishment, took delight in no manner of books, could not be stayed by
+the nicest problems of Physical Science--such as whether the beaver does
+indeed catch fish with his tail, the truth concerning the eyesight of
+the lynxes of Boeotia, or what gave the partridge such a reputation
+for heedless gallantry. But it would be unprofitable to inquire into all
+this; Aristotle was not the first enamoured sage in history, nor was he
+the last. And where he bowed his laborious front it was to be hoped that
+Messer Cino of Pistoja might do the like. It is of him that I am to
+speak. The story is of Selvaggia Vergiolesi, the beautiful romp, and of
+Messer Guittoncino de' Sigibuldi, that most eminent jurist, familiarly
+known as Cino da Pistoja in the affectionate phrasing of his native
+town.
+
+Love-making was the mode in his day (which was also Dante's), but Master
+Cino had been all for the Civil Law. The Digest, the Pandects, the
+Institutes of Gaius and what not, had given him a bent back before his
+time, so that he walked among the Pistolese beauties with his eyes on
+the ground and his hands knotted behind his decent robe. Love might have
+made him fatter, yet he throve upon his arid food; he sat in an
+important chair in his University; he had lectured at Bologna (hive of
+sucking Archdeacons), at Siena, at Perugia. Should he prosper, he looked
+to Florence for his next jump. As little as he could contrive was he
+for Pope or Emperor, Black or White, Farinata or Cerchi; banishment came
+that road. His friend Dante was footsore with exile, halfway over
+Apennine by this time; Cino knew that for him also the treading was very
+delicate. Constitutionally he was Ghibelline with his friend Dante, and
+such politics went well in Pistoja for the moment. But who could tell?
+The next turn of the wheel might bring the Pope round; Pistoja might go
+Black (as indeed she did in more senses than one), and pray where would
+be his Assessorship of Civil Causes, where his solemn chair, where his
+title to doffing of caps and a chief seat at feasts? Cino, meditating
+these things over his morning sop and wine, rubbed his chin sore and
+determined to take a wife. His family was respectable, but Ghibelline;
+his means were happy; his abilities known to others as well as to
+himself. Good! He would marry a sober Guelphish virgin, and establish a
+position to face both the windy quarters. It was when his negotiations
+to this end had reached maturity, when the contract for his espousals
+with the honourable lady, Monna Margherita degli Ughi, had actually been
+signed, that Messer Cino of Pistoja was late for his class, got cold
+feet, and turned poet.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+It was a strange hour when Love leaped the heart of Cino, that staid
+jurisconsult, to send him reeling up the sunny side of the piazza
+heedless of his friends or his enemies. To his dying day he could not
+have told you how it came upon him. Being a man of slow utterance and of
+a mind necessarily bent towards the concrete, all he could confess to
+himself throughout the terrible business was, that there had been a
+cataclysm. He remembered the coldness of his feet; cold feet in mid
+April--something like a cataclysm! As he turned it over and over in his
+mind a lady recurred with the persistence of a refrain in a ballad; and
+words, quite unaccustomed words, tripped over his tongue to meet her.
+What a lovely vision she had made!--"Una donzella non con uman' volto (a
+gentle lady not of human look)." Well, what next? Ah, something about
+"Amor, che ha la mia virtù tolto (Love that has reft me of my manly
+will)." Then should come _amore_, and of course _cuore_, and _disiò_,
+and _anch' io_! This was very new; it was also very strange what a
+fascination he found in his phrenetic exercises. Rhyme, now: he had
+called it often enough a jingle of endings; it were more true to say
+that it was a jingle of mendings, for it certainly soothed him. He was
+making a goddess in his own image; poetry--Santa Cecilia! he was a
+poet, like his friend Dante, like that supercilious young tomb-walker
+Guido Cavalcanti. A poet he undoubtedly became; and if his feet were
+cold his heart was on fire.
+
+What happened was this, so far as I am informed. At the north angle of
+the church of San Giovanni fuori Civitas there is a narrow lane, so dark
+that at very noon no sunlight comes in but upon blue bars of dust
+slant-wise overhead. This lay upon Cino's daily beat from his lodgings
+to the Podestà;[1] and here it was that he met Selvaggia Vergiolesi.
+
+She was one of three young girls walking hand in hand up the alley on
+their way from early mass, the tallest where all were tall, and, as it
+seemed to him when he dreamed of it, astonishingly beautiful. Though
+they were very young, they were ladies of rank; their heads were high
+and crowned, their gowns of figured brocade; they had chains round their
+necks, and each a jewel on her forehead; by chains also swung their
+little mass-books in silver covers. Cino knew them well enough by sight.
+Their names were Selvaggia di Filippo Vergiolesi, Guglielmotta
+Aspramonte, Nicoletta della Torre. So at least he had always believed;
+but now, but now! A beam of gold dust shot down upon the central head.
+This was Aglaia, fairest of the three Graces; and the other two were
+Euphrosyne and Thaleia, her handmaids. Thus it struck Cino, heart and
+head, at this sublime moment of his drab-coloured life.
+
+Selvaggia's hair was brown, gold-shot of its own virtue. In and out of
+it was threaded a fine gold chain; behind, it was of course plaited in a
+long twist, plaited and bound up in cloth of gold till it looked as hard
+as a bull's tail. Her dress was all of formal brocade, green and white,
+to her feet. It was cut square at the neck; and from that square her
+throat, dazzlingly white, shot up as stiff as a stalk which should find
+in her face its delicate flower. She was not very rosy, save about the
+lips; her eyes were grey, inclined to be green, the lashes black. As for
+her shape, sumptuous as her dress was, stiff and straight and severe, I
+ask you to believe that she had grace to fill it with life, to move at
+ease in it, to press it into soft and rounded lines. Her linked
+companions also were beauties of their day--that sleek and sleepy
+Nicoletta, that ruddy Guglielmotta; but they seemed to cower in their
+rigid clothes, and they were as nothing to Cino.
+
+The lane was so narrow that only three could pass abreast; it was
+abreast these three were coming, as Cino saw. On a sudden his heart
+began to knock at his ribs; that was when the light fell aslant upon the
+maid. He could no more have taken his eyes off Selvaggia than he could
+have climbed up the dusty wall to avoid her. Lo, here is one stronger
+than I! At the next moment the three young rogues were about him, their
+knitted hands a fence,--but the eyes of Selvaggia! Terrible twin-fires,
+he thought, such as men light in the desert to scare the beasts away
+while they sleep, or (as he afterwards improved it for his need) like
+the flaming sword of the Archangel, which declared and yet forbade Eden
+to Adam and his wife.
+
+Selvaggia, in truth, though she had fourteen years behind her, was a
+romp when no one was looking. There were three brothers at home, but no
+mother; she was half a boy for all her straight gown. To embarrass this
+demure professor, to presume upon her sex while discarding it, was a
+great joke after a tediously droned mass at San Jacopo. Nicoletta would
+have made room, even the hardier Guglielmotta drew back; but the wicked
+Selvaggia pinched their fingers so that they could not escape. All this
+time Messer Cino had his eyes rooted in Selvaggia's, reading her as if
+she were a portent. She endured very well what she took to be the
+vacancy of confusion in a shy recluse.
+
+"Well, Messer Cino, what will you do?" said she, bubbling with mischief.
+
+"Oh, Madonna, can you ask?" he replied, and clasped his hands.
+
+"But you see that I do ask."
+
+"I would stop here all the day if I might," said Messer Cino, with a
+look by no means vacant. Whereupon she let him through that minute and
+ran away blushing. More than once or twice she encountered him there,
+but she never tried to pen him back again.
+
+Little Monna Selvaggia learned that you cannot always put out the fire
+which you have kindled. The fire set blazing by those lit green swords
+of hers was in the heart of an Assessor of Civil Causes, a brazier with
+only too good a draught. For love in love-learned Tuscany was then a
+roaring wind; it came rhythmically and set the glowing mass beating like
+the sestett of a sonnet. One lived in numbers in those days; numbers
+always came. You sonnetteered upon the battlefield, in the pulpit, on
+the Bench, at the Bar. Throughout the moil of his day's work at the
+Podestà those clinging long words, in themselves inspiration, _disìo,
+piacere, vaghezza, gentilezza, diletto, affetto,_ beautiful twins that
+go ever embraced, wailed in poor Cino's ears, and insensibly shaped
+themselves coherent. He thought they were like mirrors, so placed that
+each gave a look of Selvaggia. Before the end of the day he had the
+whole of her in a sonnet which, if it were as good as it was
+comfortable, should needs (he thought) be excellent. The thrill which
+marked achievement sent the blood to his head; this time he gloried in
+cold feet. He wrote his sonnet out fair upon vellum in a hand no scribe
+at the Papal Court could have bettered, rolled it, tied it with green
+and white silk (her colours, colours of the hawthorn hedge!), and went
+out into the streets at the falling-in of the day to deliver it.
+
+The Palazzo Vergiolesi lay over by the church of San Francesco al Prato,
+just where the Via San Prospero debouches into that green place. Like
+all Tuscan palaces it was more fortress than house, a dark square box of
+masonry with a machicollated lid; and separate from it, but appurtenant,
+had a most grim tower with a slit or two halfway up for all its windows.
+Here, under the great escutcheon of the Vergiolesi, Cino delivered his
+missive. The porter took it with a bow so gracious that the poet was
+bold to ask whether the Lady Selvaggia was actually within.
+
+"Yes, surely, Messere," said the man, "and moreover in the kitchen with
+the cookmaids. For there is a cake-making on hand, and she is never far
+away from that business."
+
+Cino was ravished by this instance of divine humiliation; so might
+Apollo have bowed in the house of Admetus, so Israel have kept sheep for
+Rachel's sake. He walked away in most exalted mood, his feet no longer
+cold. This was a great day for him, when he could see a new heaven and a
+new earth.
+
+"Now I too have been in Arcady!" he thought to himself, with tears in
+his eyes. "I will send a copy of my sonnet to Dante Alighieri by a sure
+hand. He should be at Bologna by this." And he did.
+
+Madonna Selvaggia, her sleeves rolled up, a great bib all about her
+pretty person, and her mouth in a fine mess of sugar and crumbs,
+received her tribute sitting on the long kitchen-table. It should have
+touched, it might have tickled, but it simply confused her. The maids
+peeped over her shoulder as she read, in ecstasy that Madonna should
+have a lover and a poet of her own. Selvaggia filched another handful of
+sugar and crumbs, and twiddled her sonnet while she wondered what on
+earth she should do with it. Her fine brows met each other over the
+puzzle, so clearly case for a confidence. Gianbattista, her youngest
+brother, was her bosom friend; but he was away, she knew, riding to Pisa
+with their father. Next to him ranked Nicoletta; she would be at mass
+to-morrow--that would do. Meantime the cook produced a most triumphal
+cake hot and hot, and the transports of poor Messer Cino were forgotten.
+
+Dante's reply to his copy was so characteristic that I must anticipate a
+little to speak of it. He confined himself almost entirely to
+technicalities, strongly objecting to the sestett with its three rhymes
+in the middle, upon which Cino had prided himself in no small degree.
+The only thing he seemed to care for was the tenth line, "A dolce morte
+sotto dolce inganno," which you may render, if you like, "To a sweet
+death under so sweet deceit"; but he said there were too many "o's" in
+it. "As to the subject of your poem," he wrote in a postscript, "love is
+a thing of so terrible a nature that not lightly is it to be entered,
+since it cannot be lightly left; and, seeing the latter affair is much
+out of a man's power, he should be wary with the former, wherein at
+present he would appear to have some discretion, though not very much."
+This was chilly comfort; but by the time it reached him Cino was beyond
+the assault of chills.
+
+Equally interesting should it be to record the conversation of Monna
+Selvaggia with her discreet friend Nicoletta; yet I cannot record
+everything. Nicoletta had a lover of her own, a most proper poet, who
+had got far beyond the mere accidence of the science where Cino was
+fumbling now; you might say that he was at theory. Nicoletta, moreover,
+was sixteen years old, a marriageable age, an age indeed at which not to
+have a lover would have been a disgrace. She had had sonnets and
+_canzoni_ addressed to her since she was twelve; but then she had two
+elder sisters and only one brother--a monk! This made a vast difference.
+The upshot was that when Cino met the two ladies at the charmed spot of
+yesterday's encounter he uncovered before them and stood with folded
+hands, as if at his prayers. Consequently he missed the very pretty air
+of consciousness with which Selvaggia passed him by, the heightened
+colour of her, the lowered eyes and restless fingers, Also he missed
+Nicoletta's demure shot askance, demure but critical, as became an
+expert. A sonnet and a bunch of red anemones went to the Palazzo
+Vergiolesi that evening; thenceforth it rained sonnets till poor little
+Selvaggia ran near losing her five wits. It rained sonnets, I say, until
+the Cancellieri brought out the black Guelphs in a swarm. Then it rained
+blood, and the Vergiolesi fled one cloudy night to Pitecchio, their
+stronghold in the Apennine. For Messer Cino, it behoved him also to
+advise seriously about his position. To sonnetteer is very well, but a
+lover, to say nothing of a jurisconsult, must live; he cannot have his
+throat cut if there is a way out.
+
+There was a very simple way out, which he took. He went down to Lucca in
+the plain and married his Margherita degli Ughi. With her Guelph
+connections he felt himself safer. He bestowed his wife in the keeping
+of her people for the time, bought himself a horse, and rode up to
+Pitecchio among the green maize, the olive-yards, and sprouting vines to
+claim asylum from Filippo, and to see once more the beautiful young
+Selvaggia.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] So the Pistolesi described at once their government and the seat of
+it.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+There is hardly a sonnet, there are certainly neither _ballate_,
+_canzoni_, nor _capitoli_ which do not contain some reference to Monna
+Selvaggia's fine eyes, and always to the same tune. They scorch him,
+they beacon him, they flash out upon him in the dark, so that he falls
+prone as Saul (who got up with a new name and an honourable addition);
+they are lodestones, swords, lamps, torches, fires, fixed and ambulatory
+stars, the sun, the moon, candles. They hold lurking a thief to prey
+upon the vitals of Cino; they are traitors, cruel lances; they kill him
+by stabbing day after day. You can picture the high-spirited young lady
+from his book--her noble bearing, her proud head, her unflinching
+regard, again the sparks in her grey-green eyes, and so on. He plays
+upon her _forte nome_, her dreadful name of Selvaggia; so she comes to
+be Ferezza itself. "Tanto è altiera," he says, so haughtily she goes
+that love sets him shaking; but, kind or cruel, it is all one to the
+enamoured Master Cino; for even if she "un pochettin sorride (light him
+a little smile)," it melts him as sun melts snow. In any case,
+therefore, he must go, like Dante's cranes, trailing his woes. It
+appears that she had very little mercy upon him; for all that in one
+place he records that she was "of all sweet sport and solace amorous,"
+in many more than one he complains of her bringing him to "death and
+derision," of her being in a royal rage with her poet. At last he cries
+out for Pity to become incarnate and vest his lady in her own robe. It
+may be that he loved his misery; he is always on the point of dying,
+but, like the swan, he was careful to set it to music first. Selvaggia,
+in fact, laughed at him (he turned once to call her a Jew for that)
+egged on as she was by her brother and her own vivacious habit. She had
+no Nicoletta at Pitecchio, no mother anywhere, and a scheming father too
+busy to be anything but shrugging towards poets. She accepted his rhymes
+(she would probably have been scared if they ceased), his services, his
+lowered looks, his bent knee; and then she tripped away with an arm
+round Gianbattista's neck to laugh at all these praiseworthy attentions.
+As for Cino, Selvaggia was become his religion, and his rhyming her
+reasonable service. His goddess may have been as thirsty as the Scythian
+Artemis; may be that she asked blood and stripes of her devotees. All
+this may well be; for, by the Lord, did she not have them?
+
+Ridolfo and Ugolino Vergiolesi, the two elder brothers of Selvaggia, had
+stayed behind in Pistoja to share the fighting in the streets. They had
+plenty of it, given and received. Ridolfo had his head cut open, Ugolino
+went near to losing his sword arm; but in spite of these heroic
+sufferances the detested Cancellieri became masters of the city, and the
+chequer-board flag floated over the Podestà. Pistoja was now no place
+for a Ghibelline. So the two young men rode up to the hill-fortress,
+battered, but in high spirits. Selvaggia flew down the cypress-walk to
+meet them; they were brought in like wounded heroes. That was a bad
+day's work for Messer Cino the amorist; Apollo and the Muses limped in
+rags, and Mars was the only God worth thinking about, except on Sundays.
+
+Ridolfo, with his broken head-piece, was a bluff youth,
+broad-shouldered, square-jawed, a great eater, grimly silent for the
+most part. Ugolino had a trenchant humour of the Italian sort. What this
+may be is best exampled by our harlequinades, in which very much of
+Boccaccio's bent still survives. You must have a man drubbed if you want
+to laugh, and do your rogueries with a pleasant grin if you are inclined
+to heroism. Ridolfo, reading Selvaggia's sheaf of rhymes that night, was
+for running Master Cino through the body, jurist or no jurist; but
+Ugolino saw his way to a jest of the most excellent quality, and
+prevailed. He was much struck by the poet's preoccupation with his
+sister's eyes.
+
+"Candles, are they," he chuckled, "torches, fires, suns, moons, and
+stars? You seem to have scorched this rhymester, Vaggia."
+
+"He has frequently told me so, indeed," said Selvaggia.
+
+"It reminds me of Messer San Giovanni Vangelista," Ugolino continued,
+"who was made to sing rarely by the touching of a hot cinder."
+
+Selvaggia snatched the scrolls out of her brother's hand. "Nay, nay, but
+wait," she cried, with a gulp of laughter; "I have done that to Messer
+Cino, or can if I choose." She turned over the delicate pen-work in a
+hurry. "Here," she said eagerly, "read this!"
+
+Ugolino scampered through a couple of quatrains. "There's nothing out of
+common here," said he.
+
+"Go on, go on," said the girl, and nudged him to attend.
+
+Ugolino read the sestett:--
+
+
+     "'His book is but the vesture of her spirit;
+     So too thy poet, that feels the living coal
+     Flame on his lips and leap to song, shall know,
+     To whom the glory, whose the unending merit;
+     Nor faltering shall his utterance be, nor slow
+     The mute confession of his inmost soul.'"
+
+
+Reading, he became absorbed in this fantastic, but not unhandsome piece;
+even Selvaggia pondered it with wide eyes and lips half parted. It was
+certainly very wonderful that a man could say such things, she thought.
+Were they true? Could they be true of any one in the world--even of
+Beatrice Portinari, that wonderful dead lady? She had never, she
+remembered, shown this particular sonnet to Nicoletta. What would
+Nicoletta have said? Pooh, what nonsense it was, what arrant nonsense in
+a man who could carry a sword, if he chose, and kill his enemies, or,
+better still, with his head outwit them--that he should turn to pens and
+ink and to fogging a poor girl! So Selvaggia, not so Ugolino. He got up
+and whispered to the scowling Ridolfo; Ridolfo nodded, and the pair of
+them went off presently together.
+
+Oblique looks on Cino were the immediate outcome. He knew the young men
+disliked him, but cared little for that so long as they left him free
+to his devotions. A brisk little passage, a rally of words, with a bite
+in some of them, should have warned him; but no, the stage he had
+reached was out of range of the longest shots.
+
+Said Ugolino at supper: "Messer Giurisconsulto, will you have a red
+pepper?"
+
+"Thank you, Messere," replied Cino, "it is over hot for my tongue."
+
+The huge Ridolfo threw his head back to laugh. "Does a burnt man dread
+the fire, or is he only to be fired one way? Why, man alive, my sister
+has set a flaming coal to your lips, and I am told you burst out singing
+instead of singeing."
+
+Cino coloured at this lunge; yet his respect for the lady of his mind
+was such that he could not evade it.
+
+"You take the language of metaphor, Messere," said he, rather stiffly,
+"to serve your occasions. You are of course within your rights. However,
+I will beg leave to be excused the red pepper of Messer Ugolino."
+
+"You prefer coals?" cried Ugolino, starting up. "Good! you shall have
+them."
+
+That was all; but the malign smile upon the dark youth's face gave a
+ring to the words, and an omen.
+
+Late that night Cino was in his chamber writing a _ballata_. His little
+oil-lamp was by his side; the words flowed freely from his pen; tears
+hot and honest were in his eyes as he felt rather than thought his
+exquisite griefs. Despised and rejected of men was he--and why? For the
+love of a beautiful lady. Eh, Mother of God, but that was worth the
+pain! She had barely lifted her eyes upon him all that day, and while
+her brothers gibed had been at no concern to keep straight her scornful
+lip. Patience, he was learning his craft! The words flowed like blood
+from a vein.
+
+
+     "Love struck me in the side,
+     And from the wound my soul took wing and flew
+     To Heaven, and all my pride
+     Fell, and I knew
+     There was no balm could stay that wound so wide."
+
+
+At this moment came a rapping at his door. He went to open it, dreaming
+no harm. There stood Ridolfo and Ugolino with swords in their right
+hands; in his left Ugolino carried a brazier.
+
+"Gentlemen," said Cino, "what is the meaning of this? Will you break in
+upon the repose of your father's guest? And do you come armed against an
+unarmed man?"
+
+The pair of them, however, came into the room, and Ridolfo locked the
+door behind him. "Look you, Cino," said he, "our father's guests are not
+our guests, for our way is to choose our own. There is a vast difference
+between us, and it lies in this, that you and the like of you are
+word-mongers, phrasers, heart-strokers; whereas we, Master Cino, are, in
+Scripture language, doers of the word, rounding our phrases with iron,
+and putting in full-stops with the point when they are needed. And we do
+not stroke girls' hearts, Cino, but as often as not break men's heads."
+
+Cino, for all his dismay, could not forbear a glance at the speaker's
+own damaged pate. "And, after all, Messer Ridolfo, in that you do but
+as you are done by, and who will blame you?"
+
+"Hark'ee, Master Giurista," broke in Ugolino, "we have come to prove
+some of these fine words of yours. It will be well for you to answer
+questions instead of bandying them. Now did you, or did you not report
+that my sister Selvaggia touched your lips with a coal and set you off
+singing?"
+
+Cino, with folded arms, bent his head in assent: "I have said it,
+Messere."
+
+"Good! Now, such singing, though it is not to her taste, might be very
+much to ours. In fact we have come to hear it, and that you might be
+robbed of all excuse, we have brought the key with us. Brother, pray
+blow up the brazier."
+
+Ridolfo, with his great cheeks like bladders, blew the coals to a white
+heat. "Now then," he said, grinning to Ugolino, "now then, the concert
+may begin."
+
+Cino, who by this time had seen what was in the wind, saw also what his
+course must be. Whatever happened he could not allow a poet to be made
+ridiculous. It was ridiculous to struggle with two armed men, and
+unseemly; but suffering was never ridiculous. Patience, therefore! He
+anticipated the burly Ridolfo, who, having done his bellows-work, was
+now about to pin his victim from behind.
+
+"Pray do not give yourself the pain to hold me, Messere," said he; "I am
+not the man to deny you your amusement. Do what you will, I shall not
+budge from here."
+
+He stood where he was with his arms crossed, and he kept his word. The
+red cinder hissed upon his lips; he shut his eyes, he ground his teeth
+together, the sweat beaded his forehead and glistened in his hair. Once
+he reeled over, and would have fallen if Ridolfo had not been there to
+catch him; but he did not sing the tune they had expected, and presently
+they let him alone. So much for Italian humour, which, you will see,
+does not lack flavour. It was only the insensate obtuseness of the gull
+which prevented Ugolino dying of laughter. Ridolfo was annoyed.
+
+"Give me cold iron to play with another time," he growled; "I am sick of
+your monkey-tricks." This hurt Ugolino a good deal, for it made him feel
+a fool.
+
+Will it be believed that the infatuate Master Cino spent the rest of the
+night in a rapture of poetry? It was not voiced poetry, could never have
+been written down; rather, it was a torrent of feeling upon which he
+floated out to heaven, in which he bathed. It thrilled through every
+fibre of his body till he felt the wings of his soul fluttering madly to
+be free. This was the very ecstasy of love, to suffer the extreme
+torment for the beloved! Ah, he was smitten deep enough at last; if
+poetry were to be won through bloody sweat, the pains of the rack, the
+crawling anguish of the fire, was not poetry his own? Yes, indeed; what
+Dante had gained through exile and the death of Monna Beatrice was his
+for another price, the price of his own blood. He forgot the physical
+agony of his scorched mouth, forgot the insult, forgot everything but
+this ineffable achievement, this desperate essay, this triumph, this
+anointing. Cino, Cino, martyr for Love! Hail, Cino, crowned with thy
+pain! He could have held up his bleeding heart and worshipped it. Surely
+this was the greatest hour of his life.
+
+Before he left Pitecchio, and that was before the dawn came upon it, he
+wrote this letter to his mistress.
+
+
+     "To his unending Lady, the image of all lovely delight, the Lady
+     Selvaggia, Cino the poet, martyr for love, wisheth health and
+     honour with kissing of feet. Madonna, if sin it be to lift over
+     high the eyes, I have sinned very grievously; and if to have great
+     joy be assurance of forgiveness, then am I twice absolved. Such
+     bliss as I have had in the contemplation of your excellence cometh
+     not to many men, yet that which hath befallen me this night
+     (concerning which your honourable brothers shall inform you if you
+     ask them)--this indeed is to be blessed of love so high, so rarely,
+     that it were hard to believe myself the recipient, but for certain
+     bodily testimony which, I doubt not, I shall carry about me to my
+     last hour. I leave this house within a little while and go to the
+     hermitage of Santa Marcella Pistoiese, there to pray Almighty God
+     to make me worthy of my dignities and to contemplate the divine
+     image of you wherewith my heart is sealed. So fare you well!--The
+     most abject of your slaves,
+                                                           "CINO."
+
+
+His reason for giving the name of his new refuge was an honourable one,
+and would appeal to a duellist. His flight, though necessary, should be
+robbed of all appearance of flight; if they wanted him they could find
+him. Other results it had--results which he could never have
+anticipated, and which to have foreseen would have made him choose any
+other form of disgrace. But this was out of the question; nothing known
+to Cino or his philosophy could have told him the future of his conduct.
+He placed his letter in an infallible place and left Pitecchio just as
+the western sky was throbbing with warm light.
+
+For the present I leave him on his way.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The third act of the comedy should open on Selvaggia in her bed reading
+the letter. Beautiful as she may have looked, flushed and loose-haired
+at that time, it is better to leave her alone with her puzzle, and
+choose rather the hour of her enlightenment. Ridolfo and Ugolino were
+booted and spurred, their hooded hawks were on their wrists when she got
+speech of them. They were not very willing witnesses in a cause which
+now seemed to tell against themselves. Selvaggia's cheeks burned as with
+poor Cino's live coal when she could piece together all the shameful
+truth; tears brimmed at her eyes, and these too were scalding hot.
+Selvaggia, you must understand, was a very good girl, her only sin being
+none of her accomplishment; she was a child who looked like a young
+woman. Certainly she could not help that, though all the practice of her
+race were against her. She had never sought love, never felt to need it,
+nor cared to harbour it when it came. Love knocked at her heart, asking
+an entry; her heart was not an inn, she thought, let the wayfarer go on.
+But the knocking had continued till her ears had grown to be soothed by
+the gentle sound; and now it had stopped for ever, and, Pitiful Mother,
+for what good reason? Oh, the thing was horrible, shameful,
+unutterable! She was crying with rage; but as that spent itself a great
+warm flood of genuine sorrow tided over her, floated her away: she cried
+as though her heart was breaking; and now she cried for pity, and at
+last she cried for very love. A pale ethereal Cino, finger on lip, rose
+before her; a halo burned about his head; he seemed a saint, he should
+be hers! Ugolino and Ridolfo, helpless and ashamed before her outburst,
+went out bickering to their sport; and Selvaggia, wild as her name,
+untaught, with none to tutor her, dared her utmost--dared, poor girl,
+beyond her strength.
+
+Late in the afternoon of that day Cino, in the oratory of his hermitage,
+getting what comfort he could out of an angular Madonna frescoed there,
+heard a light step brush the threshold. The sun, already far gone in the
+west, cast on the white wall a shadow whose sight set his head spinning.
+He turned hastily round. There at the door stood Selvaggia in a crimson
+cloak; for the rest, a picture of the Tragic Muse, so woebegone, so
+white, so ringed with dark she was.
+
+Cino, on his feet, muttered a prayer to himself. He covered his scarred
+mouth, but not before the girl had caught sight of it. She set to
+wringing her hands, and began a low wailing cry.
+
+"Ah, terrible--ah, terrible! That I should have done it to one who was
+always so gentle with me and so patient! Oh, Cino"--and she held out her
+hands towards him--"oh, Cino, will you not forgive me? Will you not? I,
+only, did it; it was through me that they knew what you had said.
+Shameful girl that I am!" She covered her face and stood sobbing before
+him. But confronted with this toppled Madonna, Cino was speechless,
+wholly unprepared by jurisprudence or the less exact science of love for
+such a pass. As he knew himself, he could have written eloquently and
+done justice to the piercing theme; but love, as he and his fellows
+understood it, had no spoken language. I do not see, however, that
+Selvaggia is to be blamed for being ignorant of this.
+
+Yet he had to say something, since there stood the weeping girl, all
+abandoned to her trouble. "I beseech you, Madonna," he was beginning,
+when she suddenly bared her face, her woe, and her beauty to his
+astonished eyes, looking passionately at him in a way which even he
+could not misinterpret.
+
+"Cino," she said brokenly, "I am a wilful girl, but not wicked, ah, no!
+not hard-hearted. I think I did not understand you; I heard, but would
+not hear; it was wantonness, not evil in me, Cino. You have never
+wearied of telling me your devotion; is it too late to be thankful? Now
+I am come to tell you what I should have said long before, that I am
+grateful, proud of such love, that I receive it if still I may,
+that--that"--her voice fell to a thrilled whisper--"that I love you,
+Cino." Ah, but she had no more courage; she hid her blushes in her hands
+and felt that now she should by rights sink into the earth.
+
+Judge you, who know the theory of the matter, if this were terrible
+hearing for Messer Cino. Terrible? It was unprecedented hearing; it was
+a thing which, so far as he knew, had never happened to a lover before.
+That love should go smooth, the lady smile, the lady love, the lady woo?
+Monstrous! The lady was never kind. Where was anguish? Where martyrdom?
+Where poetry and sore eyes? Yet stay, was not such a thing in itself a
+torment, to be cut off your martyrdom?
+
+Cino gasped for breath. "You love me, Madonna?" he said. "You love me?"
+
+Selvaggia nodded her head in her hands; she felt that she was blushing
+all over her body.
+
+Cino, at this new stab, struck his forehead a resounding smack. "This is
+terrible indeed!" he cried out in his distress; whereupon Selvaggia
+forgot to be ashamed any more, she was so taken by surprise.
+
+"What do you mean, Cino?" she began to falter. "I don't understand you."
+
+Cino plunged into the icy pool of explanation, and splashed there at
+large. "I mean, I mean"--he waved his hands in the air--"it is most
+difficult to explain. We must apprehend Love aright--if we can. He is a
+grim and dreadful lord, it appears, working out the salvation of the
+souls of poets, and other men, by great sufferings. There is no other
+way, as the books teach us. Such love is always towards ladies; the
+suffering is from them, the love for them. They deal the darts, and
+receive the more devotion. It is not to be otherwise--could not
+be--there can be no poetry without pain; and how can there be pain if
+the lady loves the poet? Ah, no, it is impossible! Anciently, very long
+ago, in the times of Troy, maybe, it was different. I know not what to
+say; I had never expected, never looked, nor even asked--ah, Madonna,"
+he suddenly cried, and found himself upon his knees, "what am I to say
+to you for this speech of yours?"
+
+Selvaggia, white enough now, froze hard. "Do you mean," she said slowly,
+in words that fell one by one, like cuts from a deliberate whip, "do you
+mean that you do not love me, Messer Cino, after all?"
+
+"You are a light to my eyes and a lantern to my feet," Cino murmured:
+but she did not seem to hear.
+
+"Do you mean," she went on, "that you are not prepared to be--to be
+my--my betrothed?"
+
+It was done: now let the heavens fall! She could not ask the man to
+marry her, but it came to the same thing; she had practically committed
+that unpardonable sin; she had approached love to wedlock, a mystery to
+a bargain, the rapt converse of souls in heaven to a wrangle over the
+heeltaps in a tavern parlour. She was a heretic whom any Court of Love
+must excommunicate. The thing was so serious that it brought Cino to his
+feet, severe, formal, an Assessor of Civil Causes. He spread out his
+hands as if to wave aside words he should never have heard. He had found
+his tongue, for he was now contemplating the Abstract.
+
+"Be very sure, most sacred Lady," said he, "that no bodily torment could
+drive me to such sacrilege as your noble humility leads you to
+contemplate. No indeed! Wretchedly unworthy as I am to live in the light
+of your eyes, I am not yet fallen so far. There are yet seeds of grace
+within me--of your planting, Madonna, of your planting!" She paid no
+heed to his compliments; her eyes were fixed. On he hurried. "So far,
+indeed, as those worldly concerns go, whereof you hint, I am provided
+for. My wife is at Lucca in her father's house--but of such things it is
+not fitting we should speak. Rather we should reason together of the
+high philosophy of love, which--"
+
+But Selvaggia was gone before he could invite her on such a lofty
+flight; the wife at Lucca sent her fleeting down the mossy slopes like a
+hare. It was too dark for men to see her face when she tiptoed into
+Pitecchio and slipped up to her chamber. Safe at last there, she
+shivered and drowsed the night away; but waking or sleeping she did not
+cease her dreary moan.
+
+Cino, after a night of consternation, could endure the hermitage no
+more; the problem, he was free to confess, beat him. Next day,
+therefore, he took horse and rode over the mountains to Bologna, intent
+upon finding Dante there; but Dante had gone to Verona with half of his
+"Inferno" in his saddlebag. Thither Cino pursued and there found him in
+the church of St. Helen, disputing with the doctors upon the Question of
+the Land and the Water. What passed between the great poet and the less
+I cannot certainly report, nor is it material. I think that the tinge of
+philosophy set here and there in Cino's verses, to say nothing of a
+couplet or two which give more than a hint of the "Vita Nova," may
+safely be ascribed to that time. I know at least that he did not cease
+to love his beautiful and wild Selvaggia, so far as he understood that
+delicate state of the soul which she, perverse child, had so signally
+misapprehended. The truth may well be that he was tolerably happy at
+Verona, able to contemplate at his ease the divine image of his lady
+without any interference from the disturbing original. He was, it is
+said, meditating an ambitious work, the history of the Roman Polity from
+Numa to Justinian, an epic in five and twenty books, wherein Selvaggia
+would have played a fine part, that of the Genius of Natural Law. The
+scheme might have ripened but for one small circumstance; this was the
+death of Selvaggia.
+
+That healthy, laughing girl, Genius of Nature or not, paid the penalty
+of her incurable childishness by catching a malaria, whereof she died,
+as it is said, in a high delirium of some eight hours. So it seems that
+she was really unteachable, for first she had spoiled Cino's martyrdom,
+and next, by the same token, robbed the world of an epic in twenty-five
+books. Cino heard of it some time afterwards, and in due season was
+shown her tomb at Monte della Sambuca high on the Apennine, a grey stone
+solitary in a grey waste of shale. There he pondered the science of
+which, while she was so strangely ignorant, he had now become an adept;
+there, or thereabouts, he composed the most beautiful of all his rhymes,
+the _canzone_ which may stand for an elegy of the Lady Selvaggia.
+
+
+     "Ay me, alas! the beautiful bright hair,--"
+
+
+Ay me, indeed! And thus he ends:
+
+
+     "Ay me, sharp Death! till what I ask is done
+     And my whole life is ended utterly,--
+     Answer,--must I weep on
+     Even thus, and never cease to moan _ay me_?"[2]
+
+
+He might well ask. It should be accorded him that he was worthy of the
+occasion: the poem is very fine. But I think the good man did well
+enough after this; I know that if he was sad he was most melodiously
+sad. He throve; he became a professor; his wife bore him five children.
+His native city has done him what honour she could, ousted his surname
+in favour of her own, set up a pompous monument in the Cathedral Church
+(where little Selvaggia heard her dull mass), and dubbed him once and
+for all, _L'amoroso Messer Cino da Pistoja_. That should suffice him. As
+for the young Selvaggia, I suppose her bones are dust of the Apennine.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[2] The translation is Rossetti's.
+
+
+
+
+THE JUDGMENT OF BORSO
+
+     "Unde proverbii loco etiamnunc usurpatur, præteriisse Borsii
+     tempora."--_Este Chronicle_.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE ADVENTURERS
+
+
+It is happily as unnecessary as it would be unwise to inquire into the
+ancestry of Bellaroba, a meek-eyed girl of Venice, with whom I have here
+some concern. Her mother was La Fragiletta, of the Old Ghetto, and her
+father may have been of the Council of Ten, or possibly a Doge. No one
+could deny it, for no one knew his name. It is certain that his daughter
+was not christened as she was called, equally certain that the nickname
+fitted her. _Bella roba_, a pretty thing, she always had been for her
+mother's many friends; _bella roba_ in truth she looked, as La
+Fragiletta fastened her dark red dress, stuck a bunch of carnations in
+the bosom of it, and pulled up the laces round her slim neck, on a
+certain May morning in or about the year 1469. "The shape you are,
+child," said that industrious woman, "I can do nothing for you in
+Venice. It is as timid as a nun's. Ferrara is the place of all the
+world for you. I look forward to your speedy establishment in a city
+where a girl may be like a flagstaff and yet not thought amiss."
+
+Bellaroba looked humbly at herself in the glass; though she could see
+that she was pretty, it was not to be denied that she was thin. Ah, no;
+she did not take after her mother. Here she sighed to remember that her
+bosom friend, Olimpia Castaneve, took after hers only too well, and was
+to accompany her fortune-hunting in Ferrara for precisely opposite
+reasons. Was this fair? she wondered. She, Bellaroba, was to go because
+she was of a piece with the Ferrarese; Olimpia, because she could
+furnish a provoking contrast. She was an affectionate, docile creature,
+this shrinking Bellaroba, absurdly young, absurdly your servant; but
+tears smarted in her eyes as she stood adorned for sacrifice--in her
+tight crimson dress, lace at her neck and wrists, a jewel on her
+forehead, a chain in her hair, and a cold block of lead dragging at her
+heart. She had never denied any one anything, and certainly not her
+mother. Her tears glistened as she blinked, her lip was shaky; she was
+kissed a good-bye none the less, and went down the steps to join Olimpia
+huddled in the gondola.
+
+"Good-bye, my child," cried Madam Fragiletta from the doorway. "Be wise;
+remember what I have told you. Never see a priest the wrong side of the
+grille, and obey Monna Nanna in everything. I shall have a mass for you
+at San Zan to-morrow, and another on your birthday, which I shall never
+forget."
+
+The morning was misty and sharp, Madam Fragiletta was very much
+undressed, and loved her bed. She waved her hand gallantly to Bellaroba,
+who still stood up wistful in the gondola; she did not wait for it to
+shoot the bridge or round the square corner of the _rio_, but turned
+shrugging to the house. There was no reasonable probability that these
+two would ever meet again. Short outlooks govern La Fragiletta's trade,
+and Providence, it seems, has little to do with it.
+
+Olimpia Castaneve, the muffled brooder in the poop, was cold, cross, and
+still. Bellaroba snivelled, but she was scornful under her cloak, and no
+word passed between the pair until they were in the great blunt-nosed
+barge, heading against a crisping tide for Chioggia. Then, as the sun
+shot through the mist and revealed the lagoon, one broad sheet of silver
+and blue, the shawls were opened, limbs went luxuriously at the stretch;
+you could see and hear chatter the couple of adventurers if you cared.
+Bellaroba you have seen already--very gentle, very simple, very unformed
+without and within. She had pretty ways, coaxing and appealing ways.
+When she asked a question it was with lifted eyebrows and a head on one
+side. She would take your hand without art, and let you hold it without
+afterthought. It was the easiest thing in the world to kiss her, for she
+suffered it gladly and quite innocently; it came as naturally as to a
+cat to rub his cheek on your chair or swinging foot. Yet the girl was as
+modest as a Clare. If you had presumed on your licence to make love to
+her, it would not have been her scorn (for she had none), but her
+distress that would have set you back in your place. God knows what La
+Fragiletta might have taught her. It is certain she was all unlettered
+in love up to that hour. Bellaroba was not only modest by instinct, but
+that better thing, innocent by preoccupation.
+
+In all this she was a dead contrast to her handsome friend Olimpia
+Castaneve, who was really a beauty of the true Venetian mould. As sleek
+and sumptuous as a cat, as splendidly coloured as a sunburnt nectarine,
+crowned with a mass of red-gold hair, as stupid as she was sly, and as
+rich as she was spendthrift, the lovely Olimpia had been sent
+adventuring to the bees of Ferrara, not as lacking honey for Venice, but
+as being too great a treasure for her mother's house. Her mother was La
+Farfalla--a swollen butterfly in these days--and frankly said that she
+could not afford such a daughter. Olimpia had no instructions; in fact,
+needed none. She went cheerfully out to what Monna Nanna and the Blessed
+Virgin should prepare for her, without kisses (which she garnered
+against the lean years) and without reserves. She neither condemned her
+mother nor approved. Perhaps she had not the wit; assuredly she lacked
+the energy. She was remarkably handsome in her hot Venetian way, richly
+coloured, brown-eyed, crimson-lipped, bosomed like a goddess and shaped
+like a Caryatid. She half closed her eyes, half opened her lips, smiled
+and drowsed and waited. You would have thought her melting with love;
+she was ciphering a price, but being slow at figures, she hid herself
+(spiderwise) in a golden mesh. Olimpia was nearly always complaisant,
+had no reticences, no conscience, few brains. She was luxury itself,
+fond of the fire, fond of her bed, fond of her dinner. Admittedly
+self-absorbed, she was accustomed to say that she knew far too much
+about love to fall into it. It was a reflection as serious as she could
+make it; but Love is very apt to take such sayings amiss. Olimpia out of
+love might make men miserable; in it, what might she not do? I am about
+to tell you.
+
+At Chioggia they were to await a shipload of merchants and pack-mules
+expected from Ancona; but the wind proved counter when their barge had
+weathered Malamocco, and that which dis-served them befriended the
+northering freight. They found the train of beasts awaiting them,
+saddled and loaded, restless to be off. Chioggia to Ferrara, by the road
+they would go, is a handsome fifty miles.
+
+In that company, as they neared, they observed a calm-eyed youth with a
+delicate, girlish face, and wonderful shock of light gold hair all about
+it. He stood alone on the mole, one knee bent, a hand to his hip, and
+soberly surveyed the group on the barge. He made a charming little
+picture there--seemed indeed posed for some such thing; he was
+charmingly pretty himself, but for all that, he had a tragic touch upon
+him, a droop of the lip, or the eyelid, perhaps. One could hardly say,
+yet never miss it. Even Olimpia noticed the shadow across him. As they
+touched--"Look, look, Bellaroba," she whispered, and nudged her
+friend--"that boy! Did you ever see such a lovely child?"
+
+Bellaroba drew a long breath. "I think he is as lovely as an angel," she
+replied, her eyes fascinated. And her saying was equally true. He was
+such a demure boy-angel, bright-haired, long and shapely in the limb, as
+the painters and carvers loved to set in Madonna's court, careful about
+her throne, or below the dais fiddling, or strumming lutes to charm away
+her listlessness. Moreover, Angioletto was the name he went by, though
+he had been christened Dominick. And he came from Borgo San
+Sepolcro--far cry from windy Chioggia--a place among the brown Tuscan
+hills, just where they melt into Umbria; and he was by trade a minstrel,
+and going to Ferrara. Of so much, with many bows, he informed the two
+girls, being questioned by Olimpia. But he looked at Bellaroba as he
+spoke, and she listened the harder and looked the longer of the two.
+
+Everything about him seemed to her altogether gracious, from the silky
+floss of his gold hair to his proper legs, sheathed in scarlet to the
+thighs. He was as soft and daintily coloured as a girl, had long curved
+lashes to his grey eyes, a pathetic droop to his lip, the bloom as of a
+peach on his cheeks. But you could never mistake him for a girl. His
+eyes had a critical blink, he looked to have the discretion of a man. A
+fop he might be; he had a wiry mind. A fop, in fact, he was. He had a
+little scarlet cap on his head, scarlet stockings, peaked scarlet shoes:
+for the rest he was in green cloth with a blue leather belt about his
+waist. He had fine lace ruffles at his wrists, a fine line of white at
+his throat, and in his ears (if you could have seen them) gold rings.
+Just the pampered young minion of any Tuscan court, a precocious
+wrappage of wit, good manners, and sensibility, he looked what he spoke,
+the exquisite Florentine, to these broad-vowelled Venetian lasses; did
+not smile, but seemed never out of temper; and was certainly not timid.
+Self-possessed, reticent he was; but not timid. That was proved.
+
+When the cavalcade was on the point to start, Angioletto stepped forward
+and took Bellaroba by the hand.
+
+"Little lady," says he to his blushing captive, "I have a mule for the
+road which I am assured is a steady pacer. Will you be my pillion?"
+
+"Oh, yes, Messere," said Bellaroba in a twitter, and dropped him a
+curtsy of her best.
+
+"Excellent!" he cried gaily. "I can see that we are to be friends." So
+she was led away.
+
+He helped her on to the mule in no time, showed her how she must hold
+him round the middle, how closely and how constantly; he explained how
+little there was to fear, for all that such a manner of going was as
+venturesome to her as a steamer would have seemed to Ulysses, that great
+captain. It was then that Olimpia (watching all this) proved Angioletto
+not timid, for she saw him conclude his precepts to her friend by
+kissing her cheek in the easiest manner. "H'm," thought the wise
+Olimpia, "I pray that Bellaroba may be careful."
+
+She herself accepted the services and part of the horse of a lean
+Ravennese, a Captain of Lances--two yards of sinew and brown
+leather--who told her that his name was Mosca, and his heart bleeding at
+her feet. Olimpia smiled beautifully upon him, but was careful; took a
+share of the courser, but gave in return nothing more than a hand on its
+master's belt. He wanted much more, and showed it. Olimpia, far from
+coy, hinted an exchange. She needed her bearings; did this apparent hero
+know Ferrara? The Mosca snorted, threw back his head at the word.
+Ferrara? cried he, did he know it! Saints and Angels, who could know it
+better? "Ferrara?" he went on to shout, appealing to gods and men, "the
+gayest court in all Italy--the cleanest air, the most laughing women,
+the--pest! It is a place of holy days and feasts--all music, loving, and
+delight! But you will see, my dear; I will see that you see." Olimpia
+must know more exactly than this, and so she told the Mosca. He could
+deny her nothing; so as they rode between the grey swamps of the lagoon,
+he poured out his understanding in his own fashion. His oaths made her
+gasp, but the facts atoned for that. By the bones of God, but he served
+a great lord of that city--Guarino Guarini by name, whose blade was the
+longest, the oftenest out, and the cleanest cutter, as himself was the
+lightest heart, and most trenchant carver of men in Borso's fief. The
+good captain carried his loyalty to the edge of his simplicity, and left
+it there for Olimpia to handle. "By the cheeks of the Virgin, my dear, I
+know what I know. My young master has an eye which, whether it say
+'Come' or 'Go,' needs not say it twice. He is as fine and limber as a
+leopard on the King of England's shield, of a nature so frank and loving
+that I suppose there is hardly a lady in Ferrara could not testify to
+it--unless she were bound to the service of his Magnificence the Duke.
+Why! Yourself might make a shift to be my little friend, and never
+repent it, mind you--no, no, I may be battered, my dear, but I am
+seasoned; I have great experience: you would not repent, and shall not,
+by the Face on the Handkerchief! But happen you see my master, happen he
+wear his brocade of white and gold--it is all peacocks' eyes, my
+seraphic heart, in gold and blue upon snowy white--happen again he look,
+'Come' at you--why, off you trot as a hound to the platter, and I speed
+you thither with open heart. Thus walks his world, Guarino Guarini, my
+noble master."
+
+Olimpia had a colour, and flew it now most becomingly in her cheeks. It
+was a wholesome, healthy, happy colour, born of her growing excitement;
+the Captain highly approved of it. She thus earned more information.
+Guarino Guarini, it appeared, though not of the reigning family, was
+very near the throne. He had married one of the d'Este ladies, Madama
+Lionella, legitimised daughter of Duke Borso, and was now ignoring the
+fact to his own and her entire satisfaction. Upon the Countess's score,
+Captain Mosca had not very much to say. "A great-hearted lady, amorous,
+generous, a great lover," he allowed; "a pretty taste for music and
+singing she has, is a friend of poets and such like. The antechamber is
+full of them; and there they are--on promotion, you understand. But
+though she has a wonderful free spirit, she is no beauty, you must know.
+Her mouth is too big, and her eyes are too small. It is a kissing mouth,
+as we say, my dear, and a speaking eye--and there you have Madama
+Lionella, who loves minstrels."
+
+"Tell me," said Olimpia here, "who is that pretty gentleman with my
+friend? Is he not a minstrel?"
+
+The Captain turned in his saddle and, when he had observed, snorted his
+disdain.
+
+"That sprout, my deary?" said he. "Some such dapper little
+chamber-fellow, I'll warrant you. A lap-dog, a lady's toy, with a piping
+voice and an eye for mischief. Yes, he'll be for climbing by Madama
+Lionella's back-stair. He has the make of it--just the doll she loves to
+dandle." Which was all the Captain had to say for Angioletto.
+
+Little as it was, it was more than Angioletto had to say for Mosca. He
+was, indeed, serenely indifferent to the lean brown man. From the moment
+of their setting out, he and Bellaroba had wagged tongues in concert,
+and before they had made a dozen miles each knew the other's story to
+the roots. Angioletto's was no great matter. The Capuchins at Borgo had
+taught him his rudiments, his voice had taken him into the choir, his
+manners into the sacristy. He had been Boy-Bishop twice, had become a
+favourite of the Warden's, learnt Latin, smelt at Greek, scribbled
+verses. Then, one Corpus Christi, he got his chance. There was to be a
+Pageant--"Triumph," he called it--a Triumph of Love and a Triumph of
+Chastity, wherein by the good offices of his friend the Warden he was
+chosen for the part of Love. It was to be assumed that he pleased, for
+Chastity (who was a great lady of the place) took him into her service;
+and there he stayed until, as he explained, she married again. She had
+been a widow, it seems, when she took part in the Triumphs.
+
+Bellaroba was much interested.
+
+"Was the lady kind to you, Angioletto?"
+
+"Oh, very kind."
+
+"But you had to go, you say?"
+
+"Yes. It was judged better."
+
+"But I don't quite see. If she was kind I wonder why you judged it
+better to go, or why she did."
+
+"It did not rest wholly with us," said Angioletto.
+
+Bellaroba did not pursue the subject. But after a short pause--
+
+"And are you now from her house?" she asked.
+
+Angioletto shook his head. "That was a very long time ago," said he;
+"two years at least. I am eighteen, you must know. When I left the
+Marchioness she gave me a handsome present. It sufficed to take me to
+Perugia--to the University there; it afforded me two years' study in the
+liberal arts, and my outfit for this present venture into the bargain."
+
+"And do you know what you will do at Ferrara, Angioletto?"
+
+"Yes, quite well."
+
+"What will you do?"
+
+"I will marry you, Bellaroba," the boy replied, as he turned suddenly,
+put his arms about her and took a long kiss.
+
+Bellaroba, in a bath of love, made him free of her lips. For a while the
+mule had to do his pacing alone.
+
+"Oh, Angioletto, Angioletto," whispered the girl, with a hidden face, "I
+have never been happy like this before."
+
+"You will never be unhappy again, dearest, for I shall be with you."
+
+For the time there was no more talk, since the broken murmurs of their
+joy and wonder cannot be so described. The billing of two doves on an
+elm was not more artless than their converse on the mule's back.
+
+The girl brought prose in again, as became a daughter of Venice. What
+had led Angioletto to Ferrara?
+
+"The Blessed Virgin," he promptly replied, and she sighed a happy
+acquiescence in so pious a retort.
+
+"But what else?"
+
+For answer Angioletto drew a silk-bound letter from his breast. "This
+epistle," he said, "promises me employment and fame almost as certainly
+as you promise me bliss. It is from a Cardinal of my acquaintance to a
+noble lady of Ferrara, by name Lionella, daughter of Duke Borso himself,
+and wife to one Messer Guarino Guarini, a very great lord. The lady is
+patroness of all poets and minstrels. Consider our fortunes made, my
+joy."
+
+"They must be made since you believe it, Angioletto," said Bellaroba
+with faith. "I have never seen any one like you, so beautiful and so
+wise at once."
+
+The compliment provoked kisses. Angioletto embraced her again; again
+conversation became ejaculatory, and again the mule tripped over the
+reins. He learned before the day was out to allow for this new hindrance
+to his way; he tripped no more. The lovers continued their rapt
+intercourse all that May-day journey through the rice-fields, until at
+Rovigo (half hidden in a mist of green) they halted for the night.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+ARMS AND THE MANNIKIN
+
+
+The hubbub of the inn-yard, where shouting merchants wrestled for
+porters, and donkeys brayed them down, the narrowed eyes of Olimpia, the
+sardonic grin of the gaunt Mosca, brought our lovers back into the real
+world. They faced their foes together with insensible meeting and
+holding of young hands. Angioletto did his best not to feel a detected
+schoolboy, and did succeed in meeting the Captain's terrific looks.
+Bellaroba made no attempt at heroism. Her blush was a thing to be seen.
+
+"Bellaroba, come with me, my child," said Olimpia severely; but
+Angioletto kept her hand.
+
+Captain Mosca fiddled at his sword-hilt.
+
+"Would you like spitted lark for supper, Madonna?" he asked with
+meaning.
+
+Olimpia burst into a shrill laugh, and Angioletto, who had the pluck of
+a little gamecock, turned to his partner in guilt.
+
+"And you, Madonnetta," he said sweetly, "what do you say to _boars head_
+larded?"
+
+Bellaroba giggled in spite of herself--for she was terribly
+frightened--but again Olimpia, the grand indifferent, pealed her
+delight. The Captain glared round about him over a tossing sea of bales
+and asses' ears; getting small joy of that, he scowled portentously at
+the little minstrel and took a stride forward.
+
+"Look you, sprigling," said he, "you have to do with a man of deeds; a
+man, by Saint Hercules, of steel."
+
+Angioletto was fired, cheek and eye. He never faltered.
+
+"I wish I had to do with a man of sense," he said.
+
+"If you do not drop that lady's hand, my lad--" growled the Mosca.
+
+"What then, sir?"
+
+"Then," the Captain roared, "by the ante-chambers of Paradise, she shall
+cling to carrion!"
+
+Bellaroba with a little cry fell to her knees; Olimpia bit her finger;
+Angioletto shrugged.
+
+"You have better lungs than manners, Captain," he said quietly. "These
+ladies of ours are fatigued with travel and tired of fasting. Moreover,
+I apprehend a bale of carpets on my back at every moment. We will, so
+please you, sup. If you and the lady whom you escort will do me the
+honour of sharing my table we can arrange other matters at our leisure.
+I have always understood that encounters before ladies are make-believe;
+but your experience should inform you how far that is true. By leave,
+Signor Capitano."
+
+Whereupon he lifts up the praying Bellaroba, kisses her forehead, and
+hands her into the inn as bold as a Viscount. One or two tongues were in
+one or two cheeks; one hand at least clapped him on the shoulder for a
+"little assassin"--a compliment: the honours were his to that present.
+Olimpia followed after him, very much impressed with the thought that
+the sooner she could exchange Mosca for Mosca's master the better for
+her. In the rear of the procession stalked that gaping hero swearing
+rapidly under his breath to keep himself in some sort of countenance.
+
+Angioletto's assurance, and with it his luck, held out the evening. Not
+otherwise could he have cleared himself of the mess. He fairly froze
+Mosca by the coolness of his assumptions.
+
+"I will fight you as soon as you choose, and with your own weapons,
+after supper," said he, "but it is only fair to warn you that you will
+be killed."
+
+"How so, by the King of Glory!" cried the Captain.
+
+"The wagging finger of Fate, sir," replied Angioletto readily, "and the
+conjunctions of the stars. My horoscope was taken at Foligno with the
+utmost exactitude. Mars himself, for reasons of his own, seems to have
+presided over my begetting. More than that, though I have not the least
+desire to take your life--should not, indeed, know what to do with
+it--it will be impossible for me to avoid it. I am really very sorry.
+Your case is just on a parallel with that of the younger Altopasso who,
+on this very day a year ago, insisted upon fighting with me. It is true
+that I do not pretend to love or even to approve of you, Captain; I
+consider that your legs have outgrown your brains. But for all that, I
+should be sorry to think that for want of a little ordinary politeness,
+or for shanks out of due measure, an honest man had lost his life.
+However, I fear the affair has gone too far."
+
+The Captain grew purple and green by turns. The room of full tables was
+all agog. He let out an oath which I omit.
+
+"The affair has not gone so far as this blade shall go, turkey-poult,"
+he thundered.
+
+"Make yourself quite easy on that point, my good sir," said Angioletto,
+cracking a walnut; "your sword shall fly the length of the room. I have
+a pass that is irresistible. You cannot fight planets, Captain."
+
+"I have never tried yet, by our Lord," the Captain admitted, "but no one
+has dared to doubt my valour, and, planet or no planet, I'll run you
+through."
+
+Angioletto smiled at another walnut. "I find the conceit admirable,"
+said he, "yet you will perish so sure as this city is Rovigo and a
+titular fief of my mistress's master."
+
+"A straw for your mistress, little egg," cried the suffocating Captain.
+
+"I will give it to Countess Lionella as your dying gift, Signor
+Capitano."
+
+The name smacked him in the face; he shook his head like a worried bull,
+or as a dog shakes water from his pelt. Olimpia, too, was interested,
+and for the first time. With face fixed between her hands, she leaned
+both elbows on the table, watching.
+
+"Is the Countess Lionella your mistress?" she asked. Angioletto made her
+a bow; the company applauded a popular name. Olimpia turned a glance
+upon her Captain, which said as plainly as she could have spoken,
+"Finish him for your master's sake." But it had no meaning for the
+champion, who possibly knew more about his master than he had been
+minded to declare.
+
+Angioletto tapped the ground with his toe. "Come, Master Captain," he
+said, "before your blood cools."
+
+"Have no fear, bantam," said a jolly Dominican in his ear, "that toad's
+blood was never hot." It certainly looked like it. The Captain scratched
+his head.
+
+"Look ye now, youngster," he said at last, "I serve his worship Count
+Guarino Guarini, who is the husband of Madama Lionella; and lucky for
+you that service is. Otherwise, by the truly splintered Cross, it had
+gone hard with you this night."
+
+"Oh, brava, brava!" cheered the dining-room, and then hooted the Captain
+to his bench.
+
+Angioletto put up his little hanger with a curt nod in his enemy's
+direction. "For the Countess's sake I spare you to the Count, Captain
+Mosca; though what precisely your value may be to his Excellency I do
+not at present understand."
+
+Thereupon he turned to his poor Bellaroba, took her in his arms before
+them all, kissed her eyes dry of tears, and ended by drawing a rueful
+smile from her lips. The dining-room found him admirable throughout; but
+Olimpia got up, yawning.
+
+"Come, child, it is time for bed," she declared, "I suppose even this
+entertainment must have a term." There was no gainsaying it. The lovers
+were torn apart by the moral force of Olimpia's attendance; but not
+until it was demonstrated that, though good-night is a word of two
+syllables, it needs four lips, and is therefore capable of infinite
+extension.
+
+"Well, my child, I hope you are satisfied with this little day's work,"
+said Olimpia, half undressed.
+
+For answer, Bellaroba, upon her friend's neck, dissolved in a flood of
+happy tears.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+HOW THEY CAME TO FERRARA
+
+
+That was a fair sight which greeted the travellers at the close of the
+next day--the towers of Ferrara rising stately out of a green thicket.
+The lovers trilled their happiness to each other: surely nothing but
+pleasure and a smooth life could come out of so treeful a place!
+
+"In our Venice, you must know," said Bellaroba, "we set great store by
+green boughs, having so few of them. We think that harshness and clamour
+may hunt the canals, but that birds can sing in gardens of a world
+really joyful. What a cloud of green trees--look, look how near the sky
+comes to them! Oh, my Angioletto, we are going to be so happy!" And the
+young girl laid her hot cheek on her lover's shoulder.
+
+He, though her premises were undeniable, had his doubts. Her words set
+him wondering what was to be the end of this light-hearted adventure.
+
+"My dear," said he, "if trees get in a man's way of villainy or
+incommode his pleasures he will cut them down, depend upon it."
+
+"Well, silly boy," she cried, and gave him a peck of a kiss, "and does
+not that prove what I say, that there are no villainies in Ferrara? For,
+see, the trees are as thick as a forest." She made him laugh again
+before many paces. His ringing tones caught the ears of Captain Mosca,
+and set that great man scowling.
+
+"If I don't get a crumb down that yapping gullet, call me not Mosca," he
+grumbled.
+
+"Speak a little louder, Signor Capitano," said his pillion.
+
+"Your pardon, Madonna Olimpia," he answered, "but I believe I was
+breathing a prayer on account of the little love-boy yonder."
+
+Olimpia laughed. "I love him as much as you do, I dare swear," said she;
+"but he may be very useful. Remember that I am but a poor gentlewoman
+with my fortune to make."
+
+"Give me the making of it, my angel," cried the Captain, crushing his
+heart with his fist. "You shall have the most crowded _cortile_ in
+Ferrara. May I give you a humble bit of advice?"
+
+"Certainly you may."
+
+"It will be this, then, that you hold off from Monna Nanna and keep
+yourself very much to yourself. Between us we can arrange a pretty
+future. I know Monna Nanna better than becomes me. Believe me, the
+acquaintance would become you still less. But with such talents as I
+have--and they are all yours--I can arrange for you a most proper
+dwelling-place which shall cost little and bring much in."
+
+"But we cannot live there alone, Captain."
+
+"Hey! I am beforehand. I parry with the head, my duchess," cried the
+delighted Mosca. "I have thought of all that. There is an old lady of my
+friendship in the city, by name Donna Matura. She is something decayed
+in estate o' these days, has fewer crusts than teeth, poor soul, but
+has mingled with the highest. She will be all that you could wish, and
+you more than she could hope for. Think of it, lady, think of it."
+
+"I will," said Olimpia, who had already done so. There is no doubt that
+she and the Mosca understood each other.
+
+They were now riding up the long lime-tree avenue which leads to the
+Sea-Gate of Ferrara; soon they entered Ferrara itself, that city of warm
+red brick, of broad eaves, of laughter, and, as it were, a fairy-tale,
+bowered in rustling green. The streets ran wide between garden walls and
+the massy fronts of great square houses; they were full of a traffic
+which seemed that of a prosperous people bent upon pleasure. Happy
+ladies rode by with hawks or leashed dogs, or crowns of flowers.
+Cavaliers, in white and yellow, ribboned, slashed, curled, and
+feathered, went in and out of the throng to keep an assignation, or to
+break one. The priests joked with the women, the very urchins coaxed for
+kisses. Every street corner had its lovers' tryst, never a garden walk
+without its loitering pair, never a lady came out of a church door but
+there stood a devout adorer to beg a touch of holy water from her
+finger-tip.
+
+"How happy this people is," cried Bellaroba, flushed and sparkling, to
+her little lord. "Everybody loves everybody else."
+
+"My dear, we have nothing to do with their loves; we are going to be
+married," replied Angioletto, looking straight before him.
+
+"Yes, Angioletto," said she, as meek as a mouse.
+
+Olimpia, who was not thinking of marriage, was highly entertained.
+There was a press of grooms and led horses, richly caparisoned, outside
+the open doors of a new and very spacious palace. Round about them
+crowded people of a meaner sort, and beggars not a few; but a lane was
+kept to the gateway by soldiers in red and yellow, who bore upon their
+breasts a quartered coat of eagles and lilies.
+
+"Hist!" said Mosca, pulling up his horse. "This is the fine new palace
+of the Duke, which he calls his Schifanoia. He is evidently expected in
+from his hawking. The greatest falconer you ever knew, my life! I do
+assure you."
+
+"That may very well be," said Olimpia, "for I have never known one at
+all."
+
+"You shall know this one before I die, and another who is my most noble
+master," cried Mosca, "or I am your kennel-dog for nothing."
+
+"Let us wait a little and see this hawking Duke of yours," Olimpia said,
+with a gentle pressure of her arms about the Captain's middle.
+
+"Blood of blood," sighed the Mosca, "I am as wax in the candle of you,
+my soul."
+
+Olimpia pulled down her hood. Her patience was rewarded in no long time
+by the sound of an approaching cavalcade; presently she saw the nodding
+plumes of riders and their beasts at the end of the street. Knights,
+squires, and ladies rode with their reigning prince: he himself with two
+young men, magnificently dressed, came in advance of the troop, and at a
+great pace.
+
+Olimpia judged her time well. At the moment Duke Borso drew rein to turn
+into his gates she threw back her hood and looked him full in the face,
+as if to dower him with all the splendour of her beauty. The sly,
+humorous face of the old fox twitched as his eyes caught the girl's. He
+looked a prude with a touch of freakishness in him; his pursed mouth
+seemed always to be strangling a smile, the issue of the strife always
+in doubt. Now, for instance, though Olimpia said to herself that she was
+satisfied, she could never have denied that he disapproved of her, while
+nobody could have maintained it. Borso had shot upon her a piercing
+glance the minute in which he had turned his horse; Mosca had had the
+benefit of another; then he had acknowledged in military fashion the
+waving caps and kerchiefs at the gates and had passed into the
+courtyard.
+
+"Oh, you may be satisfied, my soul," said the Mosca. "Borso will never
+forget us now: it is not his way. But look, look!" Another pair of eyes
+was at work, belonging to a very handsome, ruddy youth who had been at
+the Duke's left hand. Olimpia needed no nudge from the Captain to tell
+her who this noble rider might be. Guarino Guarini for a florin! And so
+it was.
+
+"Yes," said Mosca, "that is my most intrepid master. The flaxen lad in
+silver brocade, who was on the other side, is Teofilo Calcagnini, of
+whom I know little more than that he is Duke Borso's shadow. You shall
+hardly see them apart. The other, my charmer, the other is our man.
+Leave me to deal with him. Come now to the inn. To-morrow you shall have
+your hired house, and the next day company for it more to your taste
+than lean old Mosca."
+
+"I shall never forget you, my Captain," said the really grateful
+Olimpia; and said truer than she knew. "Come," she added, "we should
+seek out Bellaroba and her little sweetheart. There must be an end of
+that pretty gentleman, my friend."
+
+"By the majesty of King Solomon, there shall be an end," Mosca swore,
+and pricked his horse.
+
+Angioletto and his lady-love had been better exercised than to think of
+dukes. They had thought of religion.
+
+They passed by the Schifanoia at a sober walk, regardless of the crowd.
+
+"My heart," Angioletto said, "there is here what I suppose to be the
+most famous shrine in Romagna. I mean that of the Madonna degli Greci, a
+pompous image from Byzantium, which proceeded undoubtedly from the
+_bottega_ of Saint Luke. If that Signore had been as indifferent a
+painter as he was great Saint (which is surely impossible), we should do
+well to visit his Madonna. Her holiness is past dispute; there are very
+few miracles which she could not perform if she chose. As well as
+burning a candle apiece before her face, we could lay our prayers and
+new love at her feet. Beyond question she will hear and bring us good
+luck. What do you think?"
+
+"I think as you think, Angioletto," said Bellaroba, and held him closer.
+
+"Let us go then. I know the way very well."
+
+So they went to the tune which the young lad sang under his breath, and
+before long came to a piazza, not very broad, but flagged all over and
+set about with stately brick buildings, having on the left the stone
+front of a great church, tier upon tier of arches interlaced. The door
+of it was guarded by two stone lions, and above the porch was the figure
+of a buxom lady with a smile half saucy, half benevolent, to whom
+Angioletto doffed his cap.
+
+"They call her Donna Ferrara," he explained. "This is the Duomo. Let us
+go in."
+
+They dismounted; a lame boy held the mule; they entered the church.
+
+It was very large, very dark, and nearly empty. Angioletto put his arm
+round Bellaroba's waist, and they began to pace the aisle in
+confidential talk.
+
+"Where are you going to live in this place, Bellaroba?" he asked her.
+
+"I don't know. Olimpia knows. There was a Monna Nanna we were to live
+with, I think. But Olimpia will decide. I must do as she wishes."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"She is older than I am--two years. Besides I always have. And my mother
+commanded it."
+
+"Your last appears to me the only reason worth a thought. Do you not
+want to know what I think of it, Bellaroba?" He bent his head towards
+her. Her answer, the flutter of a quick little kiss, pleased him. "Well,
+I will tell you," said he. "I think we should be married at once--this
+very minute. I do indeed."
+
+"Oh!" said Bellaroba, blushing beautifully.
+
+"I can see that you are pleased at this, my dear," Angioletto said,
+looking at her. They were head for head level, these children. "But
+what would Olimpia say?"
+
+Bellaroba paused for strength to tell the painful truth.
+
+"She would say 'Fiddlesticks,' Angioletto."
+
+Angioletto frowned. "Ah! what is to be done?" he asked.
+
+Bellaroba looked down, plucked at her skirt, saw Angioletto's hand
+peeping round her waist. It seemed difficult to say, and yet what she
+did say was very simple: "We have not asked Olimpia, you know."
+
+"No," Angioletto answered; "we have had no time yet. But we will, of
+course."
+
+"Oh, of course," said she, who kept her eyes hidden, and spoke very low.
+"Oh, of course. But--"
+
+"Well, dearest?"
+
+"Could we not--would it not be wiser--of course you know best,
+Angioletto!--might we not ask her--afterwards?"
+
+Angioletto kissed her.
+
+"You are as wise as you are lovely, my little wife. Come, let us find
+the Madonna degli Greci." And he led her away by the hand.
+
+They found her in the north transept, in a little fenced chapel all
+starry with tapers and gleaming gold and silver hearts. As it was the
+eve of Pentecost she was uncovered; they could see her dark outline with
+its wrought metal ring about the head. Half-way down was another metal
+ring; Bambino's head should be in there.
+
+Both the hand-fasted pilgrims fell to their knees: Bellaroba crossed
+herself, and then hid her face with her left hand, Angioletto with his
+right. After a silence, about the space of two Hail Mary's, the youth
+looked resolutely up at Madonna, and began to speak to her.
+
+"Holy and most glorious Virgin, Mother of God," said he, "we, thy
+children, have sought thee first in this famous city of Ferrara, because
+we are sure that thou wilt love us even more than we love each other,
+and wilt be glad to share our secret. We are going to marry each other
+at this moment, Madonna, and thou shalt be the priest. There can be none
+better, since thou hadst in thy womb for many months the great Priest of
+all Christians, our sublime Redeemer. Now, behold, Madonna, how I wed
+this my wife, Bellaroba. With this ring, which was given me by a very
+great lady," and he took a ring from his breast, "I wed my wife, placing
+it upon her finger in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
+Holy Ghost. I do not endow her with my worldly goods, for thou knowest I
+have none. I do not worship her with my body at this moment, but in the
+meantime I worship her unfeignedly with my mind, just as I worship thee
+with my soul. It appears, therefore, that I have wedded her enough. It
+is useless, most sacred Lady, to ask her whether she will honour and
+obey me, because of course she will, seeing that she loves me with all
+her good heart. Such as we are--very young, quite poor, but much thy
+servants--thou knowest whether thou canst be happy in this mating. I
+believe that thou canst. Now, therefore, since she is mine, she shall
+say with me three _Aves_ and a _Paternoster_, likewise the _Credo_, or
+so much of it as she can remember. And, O Madonna, trust me to cherish
+her, and do thou intercede for us. _Per Christum Dominum
+nostrum_--AMEN."
+
+"Bellaroba, my wife, look at me," he said, and the girl looked up
+wondering. He took her happy face between his hands, and kissed her two
+eyes, her forehead, and her mouth. Then they said the appointed prayers,
+and rose to their feet to return; nor did they forget the candles, but
+purchased them at the door of an old lady, who had a basketful to sell.
+
+Coming out of the church into the sun again, they encountered the
+scrutiny of Olimpia. Captain Mosca, slapping his booted leg, was holding
+the horse.
+
+"Where have you two children been?" said Olimpia. "Mischief in a corner,
+eh? You have missed the sight of Duke Borso and a gilded company."
+
+"We have been saying our prayers to Madonna of the Greeks," said
+Bellaroba meekly.
+
+"There are red flames in your cheeks, child, and a ring on your finger.
+Did you find those in the church?"
+
+"Madonna gave them to me, Olimpia."
+
+"So, so, so! Do you begin by robbing a shrine, pray?"
+
+"Ah, Madama Olimpia," said Angioletto, "we have only taken from the
+shrine what is our due."
+
+Not the least of the minstrel's parts was that of speaking as though he
+had something weighty in reserve. Olimpia, though by nature dull, was
+also sly. She had a suspicion about Angioletto now; but a
+quick-shifting glance from one to the other of the pair before her
+revealed nothing but serenity in the boy, and little but soft happiness
+in the girl. She opened her lips to speak, snapped them to again, and
+turned to the Captain and affairs more urgent than the love-making of
+babies. It was the hour of supper; the question was of a lodging.
+Captain Mosca knew an inn--the "Golden Sword"--where decent
+entertainment could be had for the night. As no one could deny what
+nobody knew anything about, it was decided. They sought and found the
+"Golden Sword," and put up with it, and in it. The supper party was, at
+least, merry, for Angioletto led it. He sang, he joked, made love, spent
+money, was wise, unwise, heedless, heedful. He charmed a grin at last
+into the very Captain's long face. That warrior, indeed, went so far as
+to drink his health in wine of Verona. He and his
+Olimpia--unhesitatingly his in the gaiety of the moment--drank it out of
+the same glass. "Love and Ferrara!" cried Captain Mosca, with a foot on
+the table. "Love in Ferrara," said Angioletto, and stroked Bellaroba's
+hair. So everything was very friendly and full of hope. At a late hour,
+and for excellent reasons, Olimpia kissed Bellaroba good-night, was
+herself kissed by Angioletto, and withdrew. Captain Mosca prayed
+vehemently for further and better acquaintance with his friend "the
+divine poet," and his pretty mistress. So went Bellaroba's marriage
+supper.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+"WHY COME YE NAT TO COURTE?"
+
+     "Le donne e i cavalier, gli affanni e gli agi,
+     Che ne invogliava araore e cortesia."
+
+
+The little house--discreet affair of eaves modest as drooped eyelids, of
+latticed windows, of wistaria before and a bower of willows behind--was
+found and furnished out of the girls' store and the Captain's credit.
+Donna Matura, a brown old woman, hideous, toothless, and inclined to
+swooning, was installed as duenna. She was, indeed, owner of the house
+and furniture, for which Olimpia paid and the Captain promised to pay;
+but that did not appear until much later. There was a great charm, not
+without a certain deal of luxury, in the place. Of course there was a
+garden--a bright green nest of flowering trees and shrubs; in the middle
+was a grass-plat; in that, again, a bronze fountain, which had the form
+of three naked boys back to back, and an inscription to the effect that
+it had been set up by a certain Galeotto Moro, in the days of Marquess
+Lionel, "in honour of Saints Peter and Paul and of the Virgin Deipara,"
+upon some special occasion of family thanksgiving. The weeping
+willows--themselves fountains of green--sprayed over a stone seat. The
+place bore signs of an honourable past; it was falling now gently to a
+comely decay; but it answered every purpose. All promised well. So much
+Captain Mosca was given to understand; yet it was hinted that his
+promises were not complete. "My life and soul," cried he on his knees in
+the garden, "the little affair is a matter of three minutes." It proved
+to be a matter of more than three months and was then accomplished in
+another way and with other results than had been looked for. Thus it
+was.
+
+When Angioletto had been assured of the nesting of his mate, he dressed
+himself point-device and went to Court to deliver his credentials. He
+found the lady upon whom so much depended, at the Schifanoia. Madama
+Lionella d'Este, wife of the Count Guarino Guarini, was a
+fresh-coloured, lusty young woman of three and twenty, not at all in
+love with her husband, but very much in love with love. The Captain of
+Lances had said truly when he shrugged her off as no beauty.
+Large-limbed she was, the shape of a boy, with a long mouth and small
+eyes, full-lipped, big in foot and hand. Yet she was a very merry soul,
+frank if not free in her speech and gesture, and though liable to bursts
+of angry temper, for the most part as innocent of malice as a tiger cub.
+If you remember her an Este, you will forgive her much, excuse her
+everything, and rather like her.
+
+Angioletto, who found her sitting on the grass among her ladies,
+advanced with great ceremony and many bows. Madama did not get up; no
+one did; so Angioletto had to step gingerly into a ring of roguish
+women to deliver his letter. Lionella scampered through it, reddening
+with pleasure; she beckoned him with smiles to sit beside her.
+
+"We are making rose-garlands to adorn our pretty heads," she said,
+laughing. "Come and sit by me, Angioletto, and sing to us. Who knows but
+what, if you are good, we shall not crown you with one of them?"
+
+It was a great merit of Angioletto's that he always took things and men
+(especially women) as he found them. Such as they were he could be for
+the time. He was by no means waxen; elastic rather. Down he plumped,
+accordingly, cross-legged by his new mistress, and warbled a canzone to
+the viola which enchanted the lady.
+
+"More, more, more!" she cried, clapping her hands. "Oh, boy, I could
+have you a prince for less than that! What a throstle-pipe you have!"
+
+It was, as he afterwards found out, of her habit to be for ever at
+extremes; but just now, not knowing how to take her, he sang on all the
+better for her praise; and he had her next wriggling in an ecstasy over
+a trifle he made up on the spur of the moment--a snatch wherein roses
+and a girl's face (Bellaroba's, be sure) took turns to be dominant. At
+the end of this pretty piece the Countess Lionella fairly took his own
+face between her hands, crumpled his lips into a bud and kissed them
+full. Angioletto coloured, though no one else did. It was evidently
+quite harmless, and afterwards he was ashamed of his shame.
+
+As it was, a diversion of a different order broke in upon the next song
+which, so soon as he had picked up his nerve, he adventured. One of the
+Maids of Honour looked quickly over her shoulder, and "Hist, Madama! The
+Duke!" she said, with wide eyes and a blush.
+
+The song ceased, the whole company, Lionella included, scrambled to
+their feet. Duke Borso, his portly body swaying like a carriage on
+springs, his hands behind him, and attended by a tall young man, very
+splendid and very blonde, came across the grass towards them. Angioletto
+could not decide whether to think him rogue or prude. His puckered face
+twitched, his eyes twitched, his pursed-up lips worked together; it was
+again as if he were struggling with a laugh. He wore his tall square cap
+well off his forehead, and looked what he really was--a strong man
+tired, but not yet tired out, of kindness. The benevolence seemed
+inborn, seemed fighting through every seam of the pompous face.
+"Madonna! his generous motions work him into creases, as if he were
+volcanic soil," thought Angioletto. Watching him narrowly as he came, he
+decided that this was a master to be loved if not admired, respected but
+not feared. "I should get the worst of a bout with him," thought he;
+"but I had rather it were with him than with Apollo." That title was
+just, as the reflection shrewd. Teofilo Calcagnini would have made a
+terrible tutor to Master Phaëton.
+
+Duke Borso bowed shortly to the standing maids, and favoured Angioletto
+with a keen eye before he set a hand on his daughter's shoulder. She
+looked a pleased welcome as he began to stroke her hair. "Ah, they love
+the man," thought Angioletto; "good!"
+
+"Why, chick," said Duke Borso, "you are like a cage of singing-birds
+scared by the cat."
+
+"Your Grace shall judge whether we are too scared to sing," replied his
+laughing daughter. "Come," she added, turning to Angioletto, "tune your
+viol and pipe to it again, my little poet."
+
+The Duke made a wry mouth. "Hey, I have no ear for music, my dear," said
+he.
+
+Angioletto was ready for him. "If your Magnificence will permit," he
+said, "I will take care not to offend his honourable ear. I will say my
+piece, with no more music than will serve to tie word to word. May it be
+so, Magnificence? Have I liberty, Madam?" He bowed, smiling, from one to
+the other of the great people.
+
+He was a very courtly and charming little person, this Tuscan youth.
+Above all he had a ready address. So bright and strong, and yet so
+deferential did he look, pleading his cause among them, Lionella could
+have kissed him again for nothing more than his dexterity.
+
+"Ah, you shall do whatever you like, Angioletto!" she cried.
+
+Borso's eyes twinkled, and he primmed his lips. "I do not go so far as
+Madama, Master Angioletto, but I shall be pleased to hear what you are
+pleased to give me." He fell into an attitude of profound attention.
+
+Angioletto, having bowed once more, began.
+
+It so happened that Lorenzo de' Medici, that monster of genius, had not
+long printed his _Caccia col falcone_. Angioletto had it by heart
+against his need; using it now he could never have made a better
+choice--as, indeed, he guessed. It was as good as a play to watch
+Borso's wary eyes at the commencement of this piece, and to see them
+drop their fence as the declamation went on. Lorenzo begins with a
+pretty description of the dawn on Tuscan hilltops--
+
+
+     "Era già rosso tutto l'oriente,
+     E le cime de' monti parien d'oro," etc.
+
+
+Borso, neither approving nor disapproving, kept his head disposed for
+more. At
+
+
+     "Quando fui desto da certi rumori
+     Di buon sonagli ed allettar di cani"
+
+
+he began to blink; with the quick direction to the huntsman--
+
+
+     "Deh, vanne innanzi, presto Capellaio,"
+
+
+he stifled a smile. But the calling of the hounds by their names broke
+down his guard. Angioletto shrilled them out in a high, boyish voice--
+
+
+     "Chiama Tamburo, Pezuolo e Martello,
+     La Foglia, la Castagna e la Guerrina,
+     Fagiano, Fagianin, Rocca e Capello,
+     E Friza, e Biondo, Bamboccio e Rossina,
+     Ghiotto, la Torta, Viola e Pestello,
+     E Serchio e Fuse e'l mio Buontempo vecchio,
+     Zambraco, Buratel, Scaccio e Pennecchio...."
+
+
+Every muscle of the keen old hunter was now quivering; his eyes were
+bright, his smile open and that of a child. To the last word of the
+poem--and it has length--he followed without breath the checks, the
+false casts, the bickering of the huntsmen, the petty incidents of a
+breezy morning in the marshes, nodding at every point, missing nothing,
+cracking his fingers, cheering under his breath, with delight
+undisguised and interest unalloyed. The moment it was ended he seemed
+prime for a burst of heedless comment; but he stopped, shut his lips
+with a snap, and became the inscrutable ruler of a fief of the Empire
+once more. But Angioletto knew that he had pleased him, for all that he
+walked off as he had come, without word or sign.
+
+He had pleased every one. Homing to his nest in the Borgo, he caught his
+little Bellaroba in his arms with a rapture none the less because it had
+been earned at a stretch. It was long before he could find time and
+breath to lead her into the garden and have the story out. Olimpia,
+coming down to look for them in the dusk, found that a seat for two
+would easily hold one more. It should be added of Angioletto that he
+suppressed the incident of the Countess Lionella's salute.
+
+At supper there were evidences that, whatever had been Angioletto's
+fate, all had not gone so well with the Captain of Lances. Not that
+appetite failed him; indeed, he ate the more for his taciturnity. Yet
+not repletion made him sigh, for he sighed consumedly before he began
+and rather less when he had finished, as though the kindlier juices of
+our nature had got to work to disperse the melancholic. Angioletto
+rallied him upon his gloom, but to no purpose. The meal was a silent
+one; almost the only conversation was that of the minstrel's foot with
+Bellaroba's under the table.
+
+The truth was, that of conversation the Captain had had enough before
+supper--a very short colloquy with his Olimpia. In it he was brought to
+confess that he had seen his patron that morning. "Well?" had been
+Olimpia's commentary--a shot which raked the Captain fore and aft. Well,
+he desperately admitted, there was nothing actually arranged:
+_patienza_! His most noble master had been greatly harassed with
+affairs--the Duke's approaching visit to Rome, the precise forms which
+must be observed, the punctilios, the hundred niceties of etiquette;
+"Ah, _patienza_!" urged the sweating Mosca.
+
+Patience, she saw, was the only wear; but, per Bacco, he should learn it
+too! She was in a high rage. The Captain was given to know that Ferrara
+was a great city, with more houses in it than one; in fine, he was shown
+the door. Supper first was an extreme and contemptuous condescension of
+Olimpia's, urged by the thought that a fed Mosca might be a more
+desperate Mosca, while a lean one would be desperate only for a meal.
+
+A true relation of what passed in the Palazzo Guarini may serve to show
+how just she had been. The Count had received news of his henchman's
+attendance with a nod, had kept him waiting two hours in the _cortile_,
+then remembered him and bid him upstairs.
+
+"Well, dog," said the young lord, from his dressing-table, "and why the
+devil are you so late to report yourself?"
+
+"Ah, Excellence, believe me--" began to stutter the Captain.
+
+"That is exactly what I will not do, my man. Who was that wench at your
+back yesterday?"
+
+The Captain rubbed his hands. "Excellence, a wench indeed! A golden
+Venetian--glorious! Dove-eyed, honey-tongued, and very much your
+lordship's servant, I do assure you."
+
+"You are so completely and at such length a fool, Mosca," said Count
+Guarini, with a yawn, "and strive so desperately to be rascal in spite
+of it, that I am almost sorry for you. Tie me these points, my good
+fellow, get me my sword, and go to the devil with your golden Venetian."
+
+That, believe me, had been all. Therefore Captain Mosca, as he slunk out
+into the dark after supper in obedience to his inexorable Olimpia, felt
+that he must be more ingenious than he had supposed. At the same time it
+is only fair to say that when he had spoken so hopefully of his affair
+to the lady on the pillion he had believed every word of his own story.
+A man puts on spectacles to suit his complexion: the Captain's was
+sanguine.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+FORTUNE WITH THE DOUBLE BLADE
+
+     "Similemente agli splendor mondani
+     Ordinò general ministra e duca,
+     Che permutasse a tempo li ben vani,
+     Di gente in gente, e d'uno in altro sangue."--_Inf._ vii. 77.
+
+
+Angioletto had cause to believe in that star of his, for it never
+wavered in the course it held. Borso's court found him much to its
+taste. The men, however tall, of looks however terrible, bent their
+height and unbent their scowls to him; he was the pet of all the women;
+the very Fool, saturnine as he was (with a bite in every jest), had no
+gibe to put him to the blush withal. He made money, or money's worth, as
+fast as friends. A gold chain with a peregrine in enamel and jewels came
+to him by the hands of the Chamberlain; nothing was said, but he knew it
+was from the Duke. Countess Lionella could not reward him enough--now a
+jewel, now a gold cup, at one time a purse, at another a crystal phial
+filled with Jordan water. And so it went, the star waxing ever. He could
+have maintained the discreet house by Porta Angeli out of his earnings,
+and he did; but you have to pay for your luck somehow, and it very soon
+happened that he could not maintain himself in it. He was only too
+popular. The Count Guarino wanted him at the Palazzo Guarini; the
+Countess insisted that he should remain in bond at the Schifanoia; the
+august couple wrangled publicly over his little body.
+
+"What, Madam," cried the Count, "is it not enough that you absent
+yourself from my house? Must you keep my friends out of it also?"
+
+"He was accredited to me, my lord," said the lady, "to me, therefore, he
+shall come."
+
+"Good madam," returned Guarini, "I admire your taste as a man, but
+deplore it as a husband. I think the little poet will do better with
+me."
+
+"Stuff!" cried the Countess, "I might be his mother."
+
+Said the Count: "Madam, I need not deny it; yet it is very evident that
+you are not his mother." He spoke with some heat.
+
+Lionella was mightily amused. "Jealousy, my lord?" She arched her fine
+brows.
+
+"I don't know the word, Madam," he answered her, touched on a raw.
+Jealousy appeared to him as the most vulgar of the vices.
+
+"Prove that to me!" the Countess pursued him. Guarini made her a bow.
+
+"Perfectly, Contessa," said he. "You shall have your poet, and he shall
+be my friend." Wherein the Count showed that to be a gentleman it may
+sometimes be necessary to appear a fool.
+
+The matter was thus settled, and Angioletto ravished from his nest.
+
+His last night at home--_a casa_, as he loved to call it--need not be
+dwelt upon. Bitter-sweet it was, yet his courage made it more sweet
+than bitter. Bellaroba was tearful, clung to him, kissed and murmured
+incoherently because of sobbing. He loved her more than ever for that,
+but as became a prudent husband, thought to say a word in season.
+
+"My dear," he said in her ear, as he held her close, "you are very young
+to be a wife, and too young to be properly left alone with such
+companions as your Olimpia, whom I distrust, and Monna Matura, whom I
+abhor. But what can I do? I must make our fortunes, and pray to God that
+your beauty do not mar them. Follow my advice, my injunctions even, and
+it will not. Keep much at home, go not abroad unattended or uncovered.
+Your hooded head makes you surpassingly beautiful; you need not fear to
+be a figure of fun. At the same time it shields most of your sacred
+person from profane eyes. The great shield of all, however, is to have
+business before you when you are from house. Go briskly about
+this--whether it be market, mass, or mischief--and no one will look at
+you twice. At home it should be the same. There may be visitors; if
+Monna Olimpia can contrive it, there will be a good many. You may judge
+of their quality by her anxiety to receive them. Be guarded then, my
+dear, and go by contraries. They will not find the pattern of the carpet
+so interesting as you should do. Give them prose for their poetry,
+vinegar for their sweet wine, bitter herbs when they look to you for
+cane of sugar. Keep your honeycomb for him who is trying to earn it.
+Think where I am going, my Bellaroba! To what temptations, blessed
+Lord! to what askings, to what suggestion of wanton dealing! Remember
+that in all this I shall have your honour to keep, as you have mine. Say
+a great many prayers, my little heart, for the welfare of my soul and of
+yours; lock your door at night; let Monna Matura go with you to mass and
+confession; and--and--oh! my wife, my little wife, but I love not the
+leaving of you!" And so these poor children cried on each other's
+breasts, and so fell to the unspoken tongue of Love's elect. Next
+morning he went early, leaving her kissed in bed.
+
+He saw her once again, spent a most blissful two hours in her company,
+before the Countess Lionella took it into her head to shelter from the
+summer heats in a villa she had above Monselice. Thither Angioletto was
+forced to go in her train. He found it intolerable, went with a heart of
+lead; for so cheerful a soul he was what he looked, parched and wan.
+This lasted a week. Then came a paper, scrawled with brown ink marks,
+which, after much study, he took to imply--
+
+
+     "MY LOVE ANGILETO, I love you more every day. I cry a good deal for
+     lack of you. I kiss you two hundred times, and will be good and
+     happy,
+                                       "Your dutiful      BELAROBA."
+
+
+This revived him amazingly: he went singing about the gardens which hung
+upon the side of the grey hill, and composed a pastoral comedy to be
+acted by the Countess's ladies in the Temple grove.
+
+Lionella very openly and without afterthought made love to him. He was a
+charming little lad, it is true; but quite apart from that, he was the
+only male creature above servant rank in the household. I describe him
+so because I cannot bring myself to call him a man; but he was quite man
+enough for the lady's intent. It is a surprising instance of the tact
+there was innate in the youth that he checked every undue liberty on the
+part of his mistress without endangering her self-respect or his own
+high favour. Perhaps he allowed matters to go a little too far. His were
+times of artless Art and of franchise--immoral, yet mainly innocent.
+Children call each other pet names, hold hands, kiss, and no one is
+hurt. So it was in Ferrara when Borso ruled it. _Præteriere Borsii
+tempora!_ True enough. There were those who saw that tuneful time in the
+shaping; we, alas! look down on the splintered shards. But we know that
+if Assyrian balm was ever for the world's chaffer it was in the days of
+Borso, the good Duke.
+
+Angioletto loved his Bellaroba with all his heart: no debonair Lionella
+could decoy him to be untrue. But he was debonair himself, of high
+courage, and mettlesome; and he may have gone a little too far. He was
+now become her confidant, secretary, bosom friend. Whence came the shock
+of crisis.
+
+One morning Lionella called for him in a hurry. He found her, an amused
+frown on her broad brows, pacing the terrace walk, holding an open
+letter in her hand. The moment he came in sight the Countess ran towards
+him, drew his arm in hers, and began to speak very fast.
+
+"My dear boy," she said, "I am in a fix. You shall advise me how to act,
+the more willingly I hope, as you are in a sense the contriver of all
+the mischief. You know the Count my husband well enough to agree with
+me that he is a man of gallantry. He has proved it, for it is plain that
+he would never have left me (to my great content) to go my own gait
+unless it had been worth his while. I do him perfect justice, I believe.
+He has never thwarted me, nor frowned, nor raised an eyebrow at an act
+or motion of mine. Never but once, and that was when I proposed to take
+you into my service. Don't blush, Angioletto, it is quite true. He then
+raised, not his eyebrows--at least I think not--but some little
+objections. I said that I was old enough to be your mother--no, no, that
+also is true, my dear! He answered, 'No doubt; but it is very evident
+that you are not his mother.' That again may be true, I suppose?
+However, the affair ended in great good-humour on both sides, and here
+you are, as you see! But now the Count sends me this letter, in which he
+says--let me see--ah! 'Your ladyship will remember my not ungenerous
+conduct in the matter of the little poet, Angioletto, on whose account
+you had certain benevolent dispositions to gratify'--neatly turned, is
+it not? 'I have now to propose to you, turn for turn, a like favour to
+myself, which is that you shall take into your service a young
+gentlewoman of Venice, who is but newly come to Ferrara'--What is the
+matter, Angioletto? You put me out. Where was I? Oh, yes--'She is
+respectably bred, very modest, very diligent, very pious, moderately
+handsome.'--My dear boy, if you want to sit down, by all means say so.
+We will sit together here.--'The name she goes by with those who know
+her is Bellaroba.'--Bellaroba, indeed! Well--'I am very sure that you
+will have no reason to regret my excellent choice on your behalf; and it
+is the more timely because I learn from Fazio that one of your women has
+fallen sick of the small-pox'--and so on. The Count is occasionally
+sublime. I like particularly the list of the young lady's qualifications
+and the reference to his own kindness to myself. Now, what am I to say?
+I see you are puzzled. Well, I will give you time."
+
+What Angioletto himself was to say is more to the purpose. I think it
+much to his credit that his first ascertainable emotion after the buffet
+of assault was one of wildest exultation at the prospect. It shows that
+he had never for a moment distrusted the meek little partner of his
+fortunes. Whisps of such doubt did afterwards float across his pretty
+morning picture, but he put them away at once. Next came worldly wisdom.
+True Tuscan that he was, his instinct was to decline perilous rapture if
+waiting might bring it on easy terms. For a long time he weighed instant
+joy against policy. Finally, as he was more Italian than Tuscan, and
+more boy than either, he decided to jump the danger. The vision of
+Bellaroba shy in the rose-garden, of himself crowning her soft hair,
+bending over her, kissing her upturned face; of the Countess behind one
+thicket looking for him, and the Count behind another looking for
+Bellaroba--it was too much to resist!
+
+"Madama," he said, "it is hardly for me to advise in such delicate
+matters. I should not, by right, dare say what I am about to say upon
+your invitation. Yet if I were his nobility, Count Guarino Guarini, not
+the least of my pleasant moments would be that in which I could say, 'I
+have a noble lady to wife, for she honours me as I have honoured her.'"
+
+That was a very dextrous remark, vastly pleasing to the Countess. She
+kissed the speaker then and there, wrote her letter hot-head, talked
+about it all that day, and worked herself into such a fever of curiosity
+that she cut short her villeggiatura by six weeks, so as the sooner to
+see the girl who could inspire her with such admirable ideas of her own
+magnanimity. She even grew quite enthusiastic upon her husband's
+account, almost sentimental about him. This much the wily Angioletto
+(who did not study character for nothing) had allowed for in his
+calculations.
+
+It is by no means certain that the Countess was as wise as her guide.
+The facts which induced the letter were these. Guarini had chanced upon
+an early mass at San Cristoforo and Bellaroba kneeling at her prayers.
+She, all unconscious of any presence but her own and her Saviour's, was
+looking up to the Mother who had made Him so, dim-eyed, and smiling
+rather tenderly. Her lips framed petitions for the coming home of
+Angioletto. She had hooded her head as he commanded, and it became her
+as he had foreseen. With her added cares of wifely duty this gave a
+sober look to her untameable childish bloom; she was almost a
+business-like beauty now. To Guarino the pathetic appealed more nearly;
+to him she seemed a pretty nun, a wood-bird caged. He never took his
+eyes off her--she caught him in a soft mood and ravished him. A little
+saint in bud, he swore; a wholesome, domestic little household goddess,
+meek and very pure, who would carry home her beauties unaware and oil
+the tousled heads of half a dozen brothers and sisters. Homeliness is
+neither Italian word nor virtue; but just as it describes Bellaroba, so
+an inkling of its charm thrilled the young lord who saw her. Could one
+cage such a gossamer thing? Fate had done it, why not he? At least he
+could not lose sight of her. He tracked her to the house under the wall,
+saw the door scrupulously shut upon her, wandered up and down the street
+for half an hour, returned a laggard to his palace--and yet had her full
+in vision. She possessed him until mass-time following: the same things
+happened. Guarino was hit hard; he took certain steps and got
+information which tallied with his better instincts. It guided also his
+subsequent efforts, for obviously the more direct remedies would not
+meet his case. Therefore, he wrote to the Countess, as you have seen.
+Her reply delighted him, and the rest was very easy. Borso signed the
+order of appointment, boggling only at her name. "Buonaroba I know,"
+said he. "What am I to think of Bellaroba, Guarino?"
+
+"Your Grace shall be pleased to think that his daughter has chosen her
+for her own person," said the Count.
+
+"Hum," said Borso, and signed the parchment.
+
+Then came another scrawl for "my love Angilotto," in which the
+miraculous news was told.
+
+
+     "Olimpia took it very ill," she wrote, "but the Signor Capitano
+     talked her happier--at least, he stayed a long time. I hope you
+     will think it all for the best. I am very good, and kiss you many
+     times,
+                                          "Your        BELAROBBA."
+
+
+Olimpia had indeed been very cross, as Captain Mosca would have
+testified. She had not, at any rate, talked _him_ any happier: that he
+would have upheld with an oath. The experienced man knew the whip of
+sleet on his bare skin; but this was worse than any winter campaign; it
+left him dumb and without the little ease which shivering gives you. It
+had not been a question so much of talking as of keeping his feet.
+Olimpia, when the news came, had raged like a shrieking wind about the
+narrow house. "My dearest life! Soul of my soul!" was all the Captain
+had to fend the blast. It was no time for endearments--Olimpia raved
+herself still. Tears, floods of them, followed, whereat the Captain
+melted also and wept. He did foolishly. Demoniac gusts of laughing
+caught and flung him to the rafters, chill rages froze him where he
+fell. He lost his little store of wit, sagged like a broken sunflower,
+and was finally pelted from the door by a storm of Venetian curses, in
+which all his ancestors, himself, and any descendants he might dare to
+have, were heavily involved. Bellaroba, trembling in her bed, heard him
+go with a sinking heart. "Olimpia will come and murder me now," she said
+to herself.
+
+But Olimpia slept long where she fell, and next morning decided to
+garner her rage.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+ENDS AND MEANS
+
+     "Amor che a null' amato amar perdona."
+
+
+Bellaroba, who pleased the Countess, for the same reasons, no doubt, did
+not please the Count. It is possible to be too demure, and very little
+good to have domestic charm if you shut the door upon the amateur.
+Lionella had never had so much of her lord's society as during the month
+that followed her return to Ferrara. She did not complain of this; on
+the contrary, the more the maid held off and the man pursued, the more
+Lionella was entertained. Angioletto, invited to share her sport, proved
+dull. She confessed to more than one of her women (including Bellaroba)
+that if she had not been very much in love with the poet she would have
+thought him a fool. You see that she made no secret of her weakness. The
+fact is, she did not consider it a weakness; whereby you have this
+remarkable position of affairs at the Schifanoia, that Bellaroba was
+invited to be a student of her husband's amours, and he of hers.
+Considering the state of their secret hearts this might have led to
+matter of tragic concern; if they had loved less it would have done so.
+As it was, they were quite indifferent. Their hours were a series of
+breathless escapades--romance at fever heat. Stolen meetings before
+dawn among the dewy rose-bushes, chance touchings, chance kisses,
+embraces half tasted, and looks often crossed--of such were their days
+at the Schifanoia. Meantime a coiled ladder watched out the sun from a
+myrtle thicket, of which and its works came their happy nights. Then, as
+she lay in his arms, the Maid of Honour vanished in the child who was so
+lovely because she so loved; she could prattle, in the soft Venetian
+brogue, of boundless faith in her little lord, of her simple admiration
+of him and all he did, of her wonder and delight to be loved. She could
+tell him of what she could do, and of how much she could never do, to
+please him and pay him honour. And Angioletto would nod gravely at each
+point that she made, and kiss her now and then very softly to show her
+that he was perfectly satisfied. So soon as the first swallow twittered
+in the eaves, or the first pale line of light trembled at the casement,
+he had to fly. But he waited in the rosery till she came tiptoe out; and
+then the day's alarms and the day's delight began. Eh! It was a royal
+month, a honeymoon indeed!
+
+But it could not last--barely saw its round of eight and twenty days.
+Lionella was a lady born, as it were, in the purple. Command sat lightly
+on her; she had never been disobeyed. She now grew querulous, exacting,
+suspicious, moody, sometimes petulant, sometimes beseeching. It gave
+Angioletto the deuce's own time now and then; but he might yet have
+weathered the rocks--for his tact was only equalled by his good
+temper--if the Countess had not precipitated matters. There came a day,
+and an hour of a day, when she spoke to him. She had spoken before; her
+ambitions had always been verbal--but now they were literal, all the
+"t's" were crossed. That was a moment for Angioletto to take with quick
+breath.
+
+He took it so. Instead of hinting at his duty, or hers, he blundered out
+the fact that he did not love her.
+
+"Dog," cried the Countess, "do you dare to tell me that?"
+
+"Madama, I do indeed," he answered sadly, for he saw his house about his
+ears.
+
+Lionella checked herself; she bit her lip, put her hands ostentatiously
+behind her back.
+
+"You had better leave the house, Master Angioletto," said she drily,
+"before I go further and see to it."
+
+He bowed himself out. Then he sought his poor Bellaroba, found her in
+the garden, drew her aside without trouble of a pretext, and told her
+the whole story.
+
+"My lovely dear," he said, "I am a broken man. There has been a terrible
+scene with Madama, in which she got so much the worst of it that I was
+very triumphantly ruined. You behold me decked with the ashes of my
+scorched prosperity. What is to be done with you? For I must go."
+
+"Oh, Angioletto," cried Bellaroba, trembling and catching at his breast,
+"won't you--can't you--ruin me too? Then we shall be happy again."
+
+He pressed her to his heart. "Dearest dear," he said, half laughing,
+half sobbing, "you are quite ruined enough. Stay as you are. I will see
+you every night What! By the Mass, are you not my wife?"
+
+"Of course I am, Angioletto. But nobody thinks so--not even any priest."
+
+"Eh!" he cried, "but that is all the better. Only you and I and Madonna
+the Virgin of the Greeks know it. She never blabs secrets, and you dare
+not, and I can't. So you see it is well arranged."
+
+She loved him most of all in this gay humour, and provoked him to new
+flights.
+
+"But, you wild boy, how can you see me when you are ruined?" she asked,
+all her roses in flower at the fun of the thing. "How can you be in the
+Schifanoia if you are thrust out of it?"
+
+Angioletto, with a mysterious air, kissed her for answer. "Leave that to
+me, my dear," he said. "Never have another of the maids to sleep with
+you, and lock your chamber door. Now I must go, because I am kicked out.
+Good-bye, my bride; I shall see you long before another dawn."
+
+She let him go at last, and turned to her duties with less sighing than
+you would have supposed, and no tears at all. Her belief in the wisdom,
+audacity, and decision of her Angioletto was absolute. She had never
+known him to fail. Yet if she chanced to think of the towering Count
+Guarini plying her with flowers and sweatmeats, she shivered to remember
+her citadel naked of all defences. This made her feel homesick for her
+lover's arms. Like a sensible girl, therefore, she thought of the Count
+as little as possible; still less of another sinister apparition, that
+of the obsequious Captain Mosca, craning his lean neck round the corners
+of her vision, grinning from ear to ear.
+
+Free of the Schifanoia (whose dust he was yet careful to keep upon his
+shoes for the sake of her it harboured), Angioletto walked briskly down
+the street, shaping his course for the Borgo. He had been rounding a
+plan even while he was announcing to Bellaroba that he had it cut and
+dried; and now he was to execute it. True, it was a little extravagant,
+depended too much, perhaps, upon other people's estimations of him
+tallying with his own; but you will have found out by this time that the
+youth was a realist. Ideas stood for things with him; and, as he said,
+if he could not make them stand so to his auditory he was no poet. This
+was a heresy he could not allow even supposititiously. The idea was
+excellent; the thing, therefore, no less. Therefore he concluded that he
+should not fail of his plan.
+
+Beyond the Porta Angeli, in Borso's day, was to be found a huddle of
+tenements--fungus-growth upon the city wall--single-storied,
+single-roomed affairs, mostly the lodging of artificers in the lesser
+crafts. Among them all there was but one of two floors, a substantial
+red-brick little house with a most grandiloquent chimney-stack. And very
+rightly it was so, for it belonged to the Court chimney-sweep.
+
+On this eventful noon Sor Beppo, the sweep, was sitting on his doorstep
+in the sun, eating an onion, one of many which reposed in a vinegar
+bath on his knees. He was quite black, save where a three-days beard
+lent a gleam of snow to chaps and chin; being toothless, he was an
+indifferent performer upon the onion. But his hearing was as keen as his
+eyesight. He caught Angioletto's vivacious heeltaps upon the flags, and
+peered from burly brows at the smart little gentleman, cloaked,
+feathered, and gaudy, who looked as suitable to his dusty surroundings
+as a red poppy to a rubbish heap.
+
+Angioletto, stopping before him, took off his scarlet cap with a
+flourish.
+
+"Well, young stabbing blade," said Beppo, "and who may you be?"
+
+"Sir," replied the youth, "I am a poet." Beppo rubbed his shooting chin
+with a noise like the scraping of nutmegs.
+
+"Well," said he, "I'll not deny that it's a trade, and a lawful trade;
+but for my part I sweep noblemen's chimneys and am proud of it. Shake
+hands, poet."
+
+They shook hands, with great cordiality on the poet's part.
+
+"Sit down, poet," said Beppo.
+
+Angioletto sat on the doorstep beside him without a word.
+
+"Will you have an onion, my friend?" the old fellow went on to ask.
+
+"Thank you, Sor Beppo, but I have already dined. Let me rather talk to
+you while you finish your meal."
+
+"It is not so much a meal as a relish," said the sweep. "But talk
+away--we'll never quarrel over terms."
+
+"I hope not," Angioletto took him up; "because I have done with
+poetising and have a mind to try your trade."
+
+Beppo, his mouth full of onion, paused in his bite to gape at this
+dapper page, who, all scarlet and white as he was, talked after such a
+fashion.
+
+"How'll that be now?" he said. "You've never come all this way to crack
+a joke?"
+
+"Ah, never in the world, my friend," cried Angioletto. "I am in
+earnest."
+
+"You may be as earnest as a friar in the pulpit, and yet pretty bad at
+chimney-work, young master. What do you know of it, pray?"
+
+"Nothing at all," replied Angioletto, as if that helped him.
+
+"Look at that now," cried the triumphant Sor Beppo.
+
+"Pardon me, Master Beppo," said the youth, "you cannot look at it yet,
+but you very soon shall. Have you a chimney to hand?"
+
+"Ah, I might have that," the old man agreed, with a chuckle which ended
+as a snort. "There might be a chimney in my house that's not been swept
+for thirty year, having little time and less inclination to sweep 'em
+for nothing but glory. But, happen there were such a piece of work, what
+then?"
+
+Angioletto pointed into the house. "Is that the chimney, Beppo?"
+
+Beppo nodded. "That might be the chimney in question, my gentleman."
+
+With a "By your leave, Sor Beppo," Angioletto stepped delicately into
+the room. He threw down cloak and cap, unstrapped girdle and hanger,
+stripped off his doublet, and stood up in shirt and breeches. Beppo
+watched him, all agape, too breathless to chew. Before he could
+interfere--
+
+"By the Saints, but he's in!" he cried with arms thrown up. "Eh, master,
+come you back, come you back!"
+
+"What do you want?" a muffled voice came from the chimney. Beppo sawed
+the air.
+
+"Don't you play the fool up there, my boy, don't you do it! That's as
+foul as the grave, that chimney is. I'll have ye on my soul as long as I
+live, and I can ill afford it, for I've a queasy conscience in my black
+shell." He seemed to be treading on pins.
+
+He was answered, "We will talk of your conscience and its shell when I
+come back. Take off my shoes, will you?"
+
+A neat leg was pushed into the fireplace; then another. Beppo did the
+office, meek as an acolyte. Then he sighed, for the legs drew up the
+chimney and vanished in dust.
+
+"There goes a lad of spirit to his gloomy end," murmured brokenly the
+sweep, as he looked at the little red shoes in his hand. "I would not
+have had that come to pass for twenty gold ducats. But, Lord! who'd 'a
+thought it of a Court spark, that he should be as good as his word? Not
+I, used to Courts as a man may be." He fell to scratching his head.
+
+"Hey, hey!" he cried, as there was a prodigious scuffling up the
+chimney. "Now he strangles, now he strangles!" A shower of soot came
+down. Beppo flacked about the room; then two heavy objects fell. Beppo
+crept up. "Mary Virgin, he's killing birds," he said, in an awed
+whisper, and picked up two owls with wagging heads. The recesses of the
+chimney were still very lively. "Eh, there he is again," said the old
+sweep. "What now?" Down came a rat, squeaking for its life, then three
+in succession, very silent because their necks were wrung. "This is
+better than a cat any day of the seven," said Sor Beppo. "What a diamond
+of a poet! He should be crowned with laurel-twigs if I were Duke Borso
+in all his glory. Being but Beppo the sweep, he shall be free of my
+mystery the moment he's free of my chimney-stack."
+
+He could await Angioletto's coming now with equal mind. The lad had
+approved himself. I leave you to judge of the welcome he got when,
+breathless, scratched, and sable as the night, he showed his white teeth
+at the door. Beppo, in fact, fell weeping on his neck. By this simple
+device Angioletto was enabled to keep his word, and Bellaroba to find
+him black but comely.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE CAPTAIN'S TREADINGS
+
+
+While Angioletto and his Bellaroba dwelt in a paradise, none the less
+glorious for being as sooty as the darkness which veiled it, the estate
+of Captain Mosca, that hungry swordsman, was most unhappy. Divorced from
+bed and board, cast off by his mistress, and not yet adopted by his
+master, the poor man felt dimly about for supports, conscious that his
+treadings had well-nigh slipped. At such a time the gentle eyes of
+Bellaroba--nobody's enemy--courted him, like a beam of firelight on a
+rain-scoured street, with a smiling invitation to share the peace within
+doors. He hung uneasily about the gateways in these days, cold-elbowed
+by the lackeys, ignored by the higher sort, unseen by the quality; he
+burnished the lintels with his shoulder-blades, chewed many straws,
+counted the flagstones, knew the hours by the signals of his stomach.
+Then, if by hazard Bellaroba should come dancing by with a "Good
+morning, Signor Capitano," a "_Come sta?_" or, prettier still, a bright
+"_Sta bene?_" what wonder if the man of rage humbled himself before the
+little Maid of Honour? What wonder, again, if she, out of the
+overflowings of her happiness, should give him an alms?
+
+No wonder at all, but pity there should be; for the Captain played an
+unworthy part. I suppose his standard was not very high. I know he was
+hungry; I know that nothing degrades a man so low as degradation--since
+what he believes himself, that he is; but I find it hard to excuse him
+for draining Bellaroba of her little secrets. Judas that he was, he took
+her sop, and then sold her for thirty pieces of silver.
+
+The draining of a well so limpid was the easiest thing in the world. She
+was too absurdly happy, too triumphant altogether in the successful
+craft of her brilliant little lord, to be continent. She dealt in
+semi-transparent mystery with her manipulator from the moment he had won
+her compassion. Her secret was none from the first, or it was like the
+secret which a child will tell you, all the louder for being said in
+your ear.
+
+"My dear little friend," said the smirking Captain, when he had it,
+"what you tell me there is as wine in my blood. I declare it sets me
+singing tunes."
+
+"Ah, but he is wonderful, my Angioletto," said she, and her eyes grew
+larger for the thought of him.
+
+"For a stripling of his inches he beats any cock that ever fought a
+main," Mosca declared; "blood of Blood, but he does! What and if he did
+square up to me--do I bear a grudge? Never, upon my body."
+
+"You will not--you would not--ah, tell Olimpia of this, Signor
+Capitano?" she hazarded. The Captain stroked one eye with the back of
+his finger. He looked pityingly upon her with the other.
+
+"Ah, my dear soul," he said, sighing, "could you think it of old
+Mosca?"
+
+Bellaroba hastened to disclaim. "No, no, no, I did not think it, Signor
+Capitano. But for a minute I had a little fear. Olimpia never loved
+Angioletto at all, and I don't think she loves me very much--now."
+
+"To be plain with you, my lamb," said the Mosca, "she has no such vasty
+love for me. I have not set foot within her door since a certain day you
+may remember."
+
+The girl shivered. "If I remember it! Ah, Madonna delle Grazie, she had
+a devil that day!"
+
+"She had seven, I'm sure of it," cried the Captain. "So I leave you to
+judge how much of your story she may worm out of me."
+
+He so beamed upon her, kissed her hands with such a lofty stoop, that
+she felt ashamed of herself, and begged his pardon.
+
+This brought the Captain to his knees. "By the God who made the Jews,"
+he swore, "I leave not this raw flagstone till you have unsaid those
+words!"
+
+In the end, after a prodigious fuss, he drifted away down the corridor
+and left her to go about her business.
+
+But he drifted not very far. He felt himself full of affairs which were
+as meat and drink to his spirit starved by neglect. It was so great a
+thing to have a pretext for approaching Count Guarini. That young lord
+had a way like a keen-edged knife. You might weave a whole vestment
+about your errand, fold upon fold of ingenious surmise, argument _pro_,
+argument _con_; Guarino Guarini would dart eyes upon you--slash! he had
+rent your fabric and discovered you naked underneath, a liar ready for
+the whip. Nor, to do him justice, did he ever fail to apply it. Truth
+was, indeed, the only key to Guarino's chamber.
+
+Truth, and timely truth, was what the Captain felt he had at last. With
+it he braved the supercilious doorkeeper; with it he forced the fellow
+to lift his intolerable eyelids.
+
+"By the powers of darkness, my friend," he said, "it will be a bad day's
+work for you if you deny me this time." So he won his admission and
+faced his master.
+
+"Now, Mosca, your lie," said the Count, with his cold-steel delivery.
+Mosca did not stumble.
+
+"Master," he said, "I can do you service."
+
+"Do it then," whipped in the Count.
+
+"I can tell your Excellence why he succeeds no better with La
+Bellaroba."
+
+"Ah!" The Count was suspicious, but interested.
+
+"The little lady has a lover."
+
+"Body of a dog!"
+
+"Body of Angioletto, Excellence."
+
+"Angioletto? That spaniel? How many more laps will he cradle in? Cut his
+tongue out, my good fellow, and then come to me again."
+
+"Excellence, may I speak?"
+
+"I suppose so. Speak."
+
+The Captain waited no further invitation, but told the whole story from
+the beginning. Guarino thought upon it for a moment.
+
+"He will come to-night?" he asked.
+
+"Certain, Excellence."
+
+"Then we have him. You have done well, Mosca--it was time, my friend,
+for you are an expensive hack to keep at grass. Now listen. Take
+Bellaroba away--command of the Contessa, of course. Take her to the
+little house in the Borgo. Make all fast, and return here in time for
+the steeple-jack. When you have him in the trap, run him through the
+body, raise the devil's uproar, and denounce him to the patrol. Do you
+understand me?"
+
+"Perfectly, Excellence."
+
+"Take my purse from the table and off with you then."
+
+Captain Mosca bowed to the ground and backed out.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+FIRST MIDNIGHT CONVERSATION
+
+
+The Borgo of Borso's day was, as you might say, a sucker of the city of
+the Po, a flowery crop of villas and gardens about the city's root.
+There was the discreet house which Captain Mosca had once chosen for his
+Olimpia; there also was that which Guarino Guarini maintained for his
+(or any) Bellaroba. It is probable that there were many such houses in
+the Borgo; it was a very pleasant place, heavy scented with lilac and
+hawthorn in the spring, drowsy all the summer through with rustling
+leaves and the murmur of innumerable bees. The place was quiet; there
+was no traffic, no hint of the city bustle; on the other hand there was
+the notoriety which must always attach to any act done where no others
+are doing. Time, day-time especially, hangs heavy in the Borgo. One
+machinates in the face of many green shutters, which are not necessarily
+dead because they are shut.
+
+This reasoning does not attack the sagacity of Count Guarini, for the
+only circumstance which could give it force was entirely unknown to him.
+He did not know that the Borgo held Bellaroba's friend, Olimpia, or that
+it sheltered under the same roof Olimpia, the Captain's enemy. He knew
+nothing of Bellaroba's friends and cared nothing for the Captain's
+enemies. But, as a matter of history, the proceedings of Mosca upon that
+eventful day were of the greatest possible interest to Signorina
+Castaneve. Donna Matura, trust her, had not failed to report his first
+appearance, stork-like, in the Borgo. No subsequent voyage of his into
+those parts (and he made many) was lost upon Olimpia. Captain Mosca,
+honest man, made a preposterous accomplice. His rusty cloak, the white
+of his observant eye, the craning of his neck, the very angle of his
+sword--cocked up for frolic like a wren's tail--spoke the profuse
+conspirator. He spent money liberally, seemed to have plenty more, had
+his finger to his nose with every other word. He brought a troop of
+underlings; a bevy of young women under his orders turned the little
+shuttered house out of doors--at every window carpets, curtains,
+hangings of all sorts, fluttered as if for a triumphal procession.
+Flowers came in stacks: "H'm!" said Olimpia, "there's a woman in this."
+A couple of asses brought skins of wine. "That will be wash for the lean
+hog himself," she added. From that time forth she never left her
+shutter. To make herself the more sure she gave orders to Donna Matura
+to close all the shutters alike. Captain Mosca, on one of his returns to
+the Borgo, looked up at the blind green eyes of his former haven and,
+chuckling, rubbed his hands. This artless outlet to his feelings was
+interpreted for what it was worth behind the shutter.
+
+By six of the evening Mosca, seeing Olimpia's house still keep a dead
+face, threw off the last remnant of his cares and bade himself be
+merry. "My handsome friend is either asleep or on a journey, it
+appears," said he to himself. "That, on the whole, is well. I cannot
+think she would be pleased at the advent of little Bellaroba riding
+pillion to me. Still less would the honour about to be paid the young
+lady afford her any gratification. Least of all would her observations
+on the subject tend to clear the air. No, no. Everything is for the
+best, it seems, and the world still a tolerable place. Now for my little
+wood-bird." He paid and dismissed his work-people, then rode off himself
+to fetch Bellaroba. And Olimpia, from her shutter, watched him go.
+
+There was no trouble on the child's score. The Countess was away; a
+feigned message from her was enough. Had she been at home and in a good
+humour, she would have accorded a real one, no doubt; so the deceit was
+quite harmless. Bellaroba demurred a little that she could not in person
+warn Angioletto, but the Captain begged her to have no fears. Time
+pressed; it was evident the Countess's service was urgent. Yet the
+Captain swore by all that he held sacred--to be sure no great things,
+but Bellaroba could not know that--to deliver her message to the lad
+with his own hand. "For," said he, and confirmed it with an oath, "if I
+don't see him this very night it will be a pity:" words which were
+afterwards thought to have been prophetic by the curious in such
+matters. So Bellaroba entrusted him with her scrawl to "My love
+Angilotto," and the Captain chewed and swallowed it when she was not
+looking. Then he lifted her to his horse and rode with her into the
+green-sheltered Borgo, just as it was settling into twilight. And
+Olimpia, from her shutter, saw them come.
+
+I spare you the picture of her fury: it was not seemly, for all it was
+very white and still. The sight of a handsome girl shuddering in a cold
+stare under the grip of an evil spirit can never be pleasant; and where
+the experienced Donna Matura shrank from what she saw and heard, it
+becomes not me to tread. Donna Matura was of her country, that cheerful,
+laughing Midland of the Po, and neither felt the Venetian throb of
+pleasure nor conceived the excesses of Venetian pain. Extremes touch on
+the Lagoon. Donna Matura saw her gold-haired mistress white and drawn,
+saw her witless shaking, saw her tear and rend herself, heard her jerked
+words of loathing, blasphemy, and obscene defiance--and fairly fled the
+house. "For," as she said, "if words of man or woman could bring the
+rafters about our ears, or open a pit to send us lightly whither we all
+must go who have heard them, those words which Madam Olimpia spat about
+her must surely do it." So much she confessed to afterwards, but no
+more; for she stayed nothing more.
+
+Olimpia may have leaned twisting against her wall for about an hour,
+mouthing insane babble from her blued lips. It was at least quite dark
+when she came to herself, lit the lamp, wiped the cold beads from her
+forehead, smoothed and bound her hair. She was not herself, nor looked
+to be so; she had a face completely colourless, lips like grey mould,
+and burning black eyes. But her hand was steady; she hardly winked; her
+breath, which came through her nose, was even, though it whistled rather
+sharply. Whatever she was about--and she seemed to be acting a part--she
+did with extraordinary care, down to the changing of her crimson dress
+for a dark green one. The former had been loose and clinging, made of
+velvet; the dark green was of cloth, fitted her close, and, as she
+ascertained by a few gestures, gave free play to her arms. She knocked
+off her heeled Venetian shoes, whose clatter was familiar to the house,
+and bound on flat-soled sandals instead. Over her head she had a black
+lace scarf, on her hands leather gauntlets. Lastly, she took from a
+press a long, double-edged knife, felt its temper, and stuck it inside
+her stocking, under the garter. She made a final hasty sweep of the room
+with her unquiet eyes as she went out of it.
+
+The door of the house she knocked upon was opened by a page, who asked
+her business.
+
+"Mosca, Captain Mosca, is my business," said she in a whisper.
+
+"The Signor Capitano is occupied, Madonna," replied the boy.
+
+"I know it, I know it," she answered. "But my business is the lady's
+business also. I must see them both--and at once. Let me pass."
+
+The page vowed and swore by all the company of Heaven that those were
+her actual words. He was put to the torture and cried in the most
+heartrending manner; but he held to it, so long as he could hold to
+anything, that the visitor had said "her business was the other lady's
+business." What a further application of the question might have
+brought we cannot tell, since he fainted before it could be tried. "The
+boy Gasparo appeared to take no further interest in the elucidation of
+the truth," reported the judges, "and we recommend that he be chastised
+for contumacy." He was, at any rate, no witness of the scene which
+followed Olimpia's entry. There was that about her, a subdued haste, a
+deliberation, a kind of intensity got by rote, which fascinated the
+youngster and left him staring in the hall.
+
+Olimpia walked across it alone, went straight to a door at the bottom on
+the right-hand side, turned the handle, and entered. There was a table
+spread with supper; there was Captain Mosca seated at it eating a peach
+from his wine-glass; there was Bellaroba, flushed and marred with tears,
+leaning against the further wall. She gave a little gasp of fear when
+she saw what the doorway framed; after that she followed Olimpia about
+the room with the same incurable fascination which the page-boy had
+felt. Olimpia shut the door as softly as she had opened it, and as
+softly shot the bolt.
+
+Then it seemed that Mosca felt her presence, for he turned, saw, and
+jumped up with a cry mingled of fear and rage. It was found out
+afterwards that he was unarmed. This will explain his alarm. Disastrous
+honesty! his sword was upstairs in the bed.
+
+There followed a most curious scene. The Captain stood up by the table
+and dogged Olimpia with his narrow eyes. When she advanced, he backed;
+when she stopped, he stopped. In this manner, eyeing each other without
+a blink, they made the round of the table. Bellaroba cowered by the
+wall; pursued and pursuer brushed against her in turn. She shivered and
+moaned a little at every touch; but they were too intent upon their game
+to know that she was there. In the second round, Mosca, who was again
+close to her, reached out his hand for a knife from the table. Quick as
+thought Olimpia was at him, reached across and drove her knife through
+his hand into the wood. Mosca howled, but his fear by now was such that
+he must be free to run as before, though he maimed himself. He tore his
+hand away and left Olimpia holding a fixed blade. She wrenched it out
+and made a pounce. The miserable Mosca turned to Bellaroba. He laid what
+he had left of hands upon her shoulders; he pulled her from the wall; he
+set her before him and hugged her close to his breast. Thus he made her
+back a shield against the long knife, and with her he fenced and held
+off his enemy for minutes more. Olimpia, horribly busy, scorched the
+girl's neck with her breath--but she never made to hurt her.
+
+Then came the end. Olimpia made a lunge at his right side. The Captain
+hugged Bellaroba there. At the next moment the long knife was below his
+left arm, buried to the hilt, and defender and defence rolled heavily to
+the floor. Olimpia walked to the table and helped herself to the
+Captain's Val Pulicella.
+
+The watch (whom the page had roused after Mosca's first cry) broke in by
+the window, disentangled Bellaroba, bound the hands of both prisoners
+behind their backs, and marched them and the boy off to the Castle.
+Count Guarini, coming in an hour later, found his murdered lieutenant
+for his only guest.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+SECOND MIDNIGHT CONVERSATION
+
+
+In that same night of mine and countermine Duke Borso, who had broken up
+the circle early by reason of his toothache, went wandering the long
+corridors of the Schifanoia under the sting of his scourge. He found his
+spacious pleasure-house valueless against that particular annoy, but (as
+always) he was the more whimsical for his affliction. Nothing works your
+genuine man of humour so nearly as himself. The sight of his own image,
+puffed and blinking in nightcap, bed-gown, and slippers, when he came
+upon it in a long mirror, set him chuckling. He paused before the absurd
+epitome to apostrophise, wagged a finger at it, and got wag for wag. "We
+might be two drolls in a pantomime!" said he to his double. "Your arm,
+gossip:" he crooked an elbow. "It seems," he continued, "that we are
+both sufferers, my poor fellow! Magnificence goes drooping; a swollen
+estate does not forbid a jowl of the same proportions; and give me leave
+to tell you, brother, that we have each of us been better dressed in our
+day. Fie, what a pair of quills below your gown; and what a sorry diadem
+to stand for two duchies and a marquisate of uncertain age! Duke and my
+brother, if we were to be spied upon by any of our Court just now, what
+sort of a reverence should we get, think you? Eh, you rogue, as much as
+we deserve! I will tell you, good Borso, my own poor opinion of these
+things. A Duke who cannot be dukely in his shirt, a Pope who is but an
+afflicted biped between the blankets, is no Duke at all, is a Pope by
+toleration. There should be some such test at every crowning of our
+sort. Souse a Bishop in his bath before you let him warm his chair; cry
+'Fire!' on the stairs of the Vatican and watch your Pontiff-elect
+scudding over the Piazza in his sark, before the Conclave sing _Veni
+Creator_. Judge of your Emperor with a swollen nose, blacken your Dukes
+in the eye: if they remain Dukes and Emperors you may safely obey them.
+They are men, Borso, they are men! Yes, you spindle-shanked rascal, you
+may well wince. Do you ponder how you would stand assay? So do I ponder
+it, brother, and doubt horribly." He clapped his hand to his face.
+"Steady now, steady, here comes another bout. Ah, Madonna of the
+Este--but this is a shrewd twinge! Fare you well, brother Fat-chops. I
+must walk this devil out of me." He waved a hand to his brother of the
+looking-glass and slippered away, groaning and sniggering to himself. So
+he walked and was philosophical till two of the morning. At that hour he
+was ready to drop with fatigue; but his pains had left him. "I will
+sleep, by the grace of Heaven," he said. He plumped down in the
+embrasure of a door, prepared to follow his humour: the door yielded and
+he with it. "Who am I to outrage a lady's chamber?" he muttered, half
+asleep. "To be sure she seems to invite me. Let us look at this
+complaisant sleeper." He went into the room. A glimmering lamp burned
+before a shrine, enough to show him to a decent four-post bed, empty.
+"By the great god Pan!" cried Borso, "my luck holds. Courage! I am not a
+Duke for nothing, then." He shut and bolted the door, slipped into the
+bed and was asleep in three minutes. It was twenty minutes after two.
+
+At the stroke of three, with a scarcely perceptible rustling, Angioletto
+slid down the chimney and stepped into the room. He carefully brushed
+himself with a brush which hung by the hearth. The chimney was by now
+thoroughly clean, however. He next washed his face and hands, undressed,
+and crept softly to the bed. Very quietly he inserted himself between
+the sheets, very softly kissed the shoulder of the sleeper; very soon he
+was as sound as his bedfellow.
+
+The Duke awoke, as his habit was, with the first light, and saw the
+curly head on the pillow beside him. He whistled softly to himself.
+
+"Now, by the tears of the Virgin," said he, "how did this lady come in?
+It would be as well to know it, since plainly I must go out." He sat up
+in bed, clasped his knees, and frowned a little. "It is clean against
+the traditions of my house," he ruminated, "but I think I will go. And
+the sooner the better."
+
+Suiting action to word, he had one foot on the floor when Angioletto,
+with a long sigh, opened his eyes, turned over, and saw him.
+
+"The devil!" said Duke Borso.
+
+"Madonna," was his second venture, when he had recognised the
+impropriety of his first, "Madonna, I am this moment about to retire--"
+
+Angioletto, whose eyes had attained their fullest stretch of wonder,
+opened his mouth--but not to speak. He gaped at the lord of the land.
+
+"Madonna--" Borso began once more. Then the other found his voice--
+
+"Alas, my lord Duke, it is Madonna I thought to find. Where is my wife?"
+
+That was Borso's cue to stare.
+
+"Your wife?" he cried, "your wife! Heaven above us, man, why the devil
+should your wife be in my bed?"
+
+Angioletto, with the deepest respect always, suffered a smile to play
+askew about his lips.
+
+"Alas, Magnificence," he said, "if I dared I would ask him, why the
+devil he should be in my wife's bed?"
+
+It was the youth's way to preface his audacities by the assurance that
+he dared not utter them. But the retort pleased Borso. His eyes began to
+twinkle.
+
+"Look ye, young gentleman," said he, suppressing his wish to chuckle,
+"if this is your wife's bed, I am sorry for you, for I give you my word
+she has not been in it to-night. But I confess I should like to know why
+your wife has a bed in my house."
+
+Angioletto nodded gravely.
+
+"I should be the last person to deny your Grace's right to all
+information. Bellaroba is my dear wife's name, her country is Venice,
+her duties are to be about Madama Lionella's person. My own duties are
+to be about hers, so far as I may."
+
+"Fair and softly, my friend," said the Duke, "not so fast, if you
+please. Do you know that Maids of Honour may not marry without
+permission, and, in any case, may not be visited by their husbands
+during their service?"
+
+"Magnificence, she was not married without permission. Or rather, she
+was married before permission was needed."
+
+"Eh, how may that be now?" said Borso, tucking in his chin. "Did she
+come here as Signora Qualcosa?"
+
+"She came here as Bellaroba, Magnificence. No one knows of our marriage
+but your Grace and the Holy Virgin."
+
+"Then you are not married, but should be. That is your meaning--eh?"
+
+"Ah, by Heaven, Magnificence," cried Angioletto, "we are the most
+married couple in the world!"
+
+"H'm," was all Borso had to say to that. "And who made her of Madama's
+Court?"
+
+"It was your Grace."
+
+"Oh, of course, of course, man! But why the deuce did I do it?"
+
+"It was at the request of Count Guarino Guarini, Magnificence?"
+
+"Eh, eh! now I recollect. Ah, to be sure! That must be a very agreeable
+reflection for you at this moment, my friend," he said, with a sly look.
+
+Angioletto took the equivoque with dignity, "I have perfect confidence
+in my wife, my lord Duke."
+
+Borso shrugged. "Well, it is your affair--not mine," he said. Then he
+changed his tone. "I think, however, we will come back to what is my
+affair as well as yours. Be so good as to tell me how you came here."
+
+"I came down the chimney," said Angioletto calmly. "I am by calling a
+chimney-sweep."
+
+"Upon my word," Borso said, "this is a fine story I am piecing together!
+How long have you been of that trade, pray?"
+
+Angioletto received this shot with firmness, even dignity. "I was
+formerly a poet attached to the Court, Magnificence. But when Madama
+turned me away it became necessary that I should see my young wife; so I
+became a chimney-sweep for the purpose."
+
+The Duke's mouth twitched too much for his own dignity. He pulled the
+bedclothes up to his nose, therefore, before he asked--
+
+"Why did Madama turn you away, sir?"
+
+Angioletto, for the first time, was confused. He hung his head.
+
+"I hope your Grace will not insist upon an answer," he replied in a
+troubled voice.
+
+Borso looked keenly at him for a time. "No, I think I will not," said
+he. "Are you the lad who sang me the _Caccia col falcone_?"
+
+"The same, my lord Duke."
+
+"I thought so. Now, sir, to come back to this performance of yours,
+which I suppose is not the first by any means--eh?"
+
+"It appears to be the last, my lord," said Angioletto ruefully.
+
+"I think it is the last," replied the Duke; "for I hope you understand
+that I can have you clapped into gaol for it."
+
+"Pardon, Magnificence--he can do more. He can have me hanged for it."
+
+"I don't agree with you," said Borso. "If my name were Ferdinand of
+Arragon, or Sforza, or della Rovere, yes; but being Borso d'Este, no."
+
+"Your Grace puts me to shame," said Angioletto, with feeling. "I am to
+take it then--"
+
+"You shall take it as you please, my friend," Borso rejoined, with his
+chin once more upon his clasped knees. "For my part I propose to take
+_you_ and keep you under lock and key for a season--as at present
+advised."
+
+Angioletto bowed, as well as one may who is sitting up in a very soft
+bed. His voice was quite meek.
+
+"I shall in all duty obey your Grace's directions, and will leave behind
+me but one small request, which I am persuaded Borso d'Este will not
+refuse his prisoner."
+
+"And what is that, my good friend?"
+
+"It is the care for the person and honour of my wife, my lord Duke,"
+answered Angioletto.
+
+This set Borso rubbing his nose. He thought before he spoke again.
+
+"As for your wife's person, my man," said he, "it will be as safe in my
+dominions as all persons, whatever their ages or conditions. Her honour
+is another affair. That is neither for me nor my laws, but for herself.
+And perhaps you will let me add that if to-night is a sample of her
+course of living, you are putting upon me a rather onerous charge."
+
+"My Lord, my Lord," cried Angioletto here, "I will answer for my wife's
+honour with my last drop of blood. It is her person I cannot answer for
+if I am in prison."
+
+"I have told you that I will answer for her person, master poet. I would
+much rather leave her honour to you and your drops of blood. So you may
+go to the Castle with a clear mind. To the Castle, moreover, you shall
+undoubtedly go, if it is only to teach you that the possession of a wife
+is no passport to other men's chimneys. First, however, I will ask you
+to do me a small service, which is to go to my bedchamber and send me my
+gentlemen, my dresser, and my clothes. I am, you perceive, entirely at
+your mercy. You will follow these persons back to me here, and will then
+give yourself up as I shall direct."
+
+Angioletto, out of bed by this time, knelt to the Duke's hand.
+
+"I am your Grace's servant," said he. He hastily dressed himself and
+went about the business he was bidden on.
+
+"Madam the Virgin," said Borso, with a half-laugh, "that is a fine young
+man! If he had not made so free with my chimneys I would advance him.
+Advanced he shall be!" he cried out after a while. "Zounds! has not
+Guarino made free with his wife? Eh, but I fear it." He shook his
+nightcap at the thought. "A couple of days' reflection in a half light
+will do the lad no harm. He'll dream of his wife, or compose me some
+songs. Bellaroba, he called her. I remember the jade--a demure,
+rosy-cheeked little cat, for ever twiddling her fingers or her
+apron-ends. Those sleek ones are the worst. Poor boy! I'll advance him.
+He shall be librarian, go secretary to Rome or Florence. I'll have him
+about my own person. By the Sons of Heaven, but he's as good as gold!
+Ah, I hear him."
+
+The Duke's gentlemen bowed themselves into the room, followed by the
+dresser.
+
+"Good morning, my friends," said Borso. "But where is my messenger?"
+
+"Magnificence, he is at the door," said the usher.
+
+"Bring him in, Foppa, bring him in," cried the Duke; "we know each other
+by now."
+
+Angioletto was introduced.
+
+"Master Angioletto," the twinkling old tyrant said, "get you downstairs
+to the Captain of the Archers. Say to him as follows: 'Captain, my lord
+the Duke begs you to conduct me surely to the Castle, and keep me
+prisoner there during his Grace's pleasure.' Will you oblige me so far?"
+
+"I shall obey you exactly, my lord Duke," said Angioletto, making a
+reverence.
+
+He went at once and gave himself up. In some quarter of an hour's time
+he was lodged in the Castle, in a cell upon the level of the moat. Next
+door to him on either side (though he knew nothing of it) were two women
+who had been brought in with a page-boy over night upon a charge of
+murder. Their case, indeed, was one of the first matters which engaged
+the attention of Duke Borso after mass.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+ORDEAL BY ROPE
+
+
+The prison chills made Olimpia shiver, the prison silences made her
+afraid. The wavering moan of the page-boy, who had been tumbled on to a
+straw bed after his first bout of the question, drove home the reality
+of her situation, and made her sick. Olimpia was one of your snug pretty
+women; she loved to be warmed, coaxed, petted; liked her bed, her fire;
+liked sweetmeats, and to see people about her go smiling. Mostly, too,
+she had had her way in these matters, for she was a beautiful creature,
+smooth and handsome as a Persian cat. Jealousy, on this account, was a
+new experience; she had never suffered it before, did not realise it
+now. Besides, it was over; she had killed her faithless lover. But the
+dark, the cold, the silence, the calm enmity of the dim walls--these
+were but an intensification of familiar discomforts. She had always been
+afraid of the dark, often cold, often quelled by quiet, made sullen by
+indifference. She hated all this, and felt it all, in spite of the glory
+of the Captain's killing. It seemed more awful now, more unendurable
+than ever, because--she knew there was no good disguising it--because it
+stood for something else. Ah, ah! she was in danger. So sure as she
+thought of this, Olimpia's heart stood still, and then suddenly throbbed
+as if it must break. It surged up into her throat. Her tongue clove to
+her palate, she felt the bristling of her flesh, could hear her heart
+quite loud making double knocks at her side. The page-boy moaned to
+himself through it all; a rat hidden somewhere bore him company by
+scratching most diligently at the brickwork. She could not hear anything
+of Bellaroba--the only familiar thing in this vast black horror. The
+panic gained upon her till her head swam in it. She could not die! Ah,
+never, never, never, by Christ on His throne!
+
+The sickening futility of that final word, Never, in the face of the
+dead certainty announced by the inexorable walls, served to make the
+wretch's case the more desperate. Panic, chalk-white, staring
+panic-fear, swallowed her up: the next few hours flew by as minutes,
+while she was cowering and gibbering in a corner. Before the inevitable
+you either resign or rave yourself mad--there is no middle course.
+Bellaroba took the first. Sitting in her cell with her cheek pressed
+against the wall which (though she knew it not) penned also her
+Angioletto, she never opened her eyes, nor cried, nor moaned; but where
+she settled herself at her entry there she was found when they came to
+hale her to the judgment. She gave no trouble, made no sign; but she let
+down her hair to cover her bare neck, and if she blushed it was that
+folks should see her blood-smirched evening finery by the light of day.
+She was a very decent girl always, and this seemed to her horrible even
+in a pit of horrors. Olimpia, clinging to life, was driven upon the
+second course. It took two halberdiers to hold her up.
+
+Borso had before him the deposition of the page-boy and the report of
+the watch. From the words of the first he suspected that both women were
+concerned--until he had heard the second. This was to the effect that
+the Captain's head had been cut off.
+
+"No, no," said Borso to himself, "I am heartily sorry for my young
+friend the chimney-sweeping poet, but I can't think him a fool. He would
+never have married a woman who could cut off a man's head. Yet stay! It
+may be that she floored the Captain and that the other rounded off the
+job with that gratuitous touch. She--that other--was eating walnuts when
+the watch came, I gather. She could have cut a dead man's head off,
+never doubt it. Well, let us see, let us see."
+
+Then it was that he gave the order: "Bring the two women before me."
+
+He did justice ever in the open. A broad green field outside one of the
+gates served him for court. Two gibbets and an open pit stood for the
+terror of the law; he himself, on a gilt chair under a canopy, for the
+majesty of it. The day was bright, breezy, and white-clouded. The
+poplars twinkled innumerably, the long Este gonfalon flacked and
+strained in the wind. Spectators with soldiery to hedge them kept a wide
+square about the plain. From their side the figures in the midst--the
+red, gold, and white about the pavilion, the steel of the soldiers, the
+drooping women between them--were about as real as a handful of
+marionettes. It seemed impossible such puppets could decide issues of
+life and death. But the red hangman and his machines were grim touches
+for a puppet-show.
+
+Olimpia Castaneve was brought forward first. She was more composed by
+now--the air, the sun, the cheerful colours of the court, had warmed
+her. She stood alone facing Borso. He, at first glance, remembered every
+shred of her; but he betrayed nothing. There was no one more blankly
+cool in this world than Borso on the judgment-seat.
+
+"What is your name, mistress?"
+
+"Magnificence, I am well known in Ferrara."
+
+"Your name," thundered the Duke, "by the face of the sky!"
+
+"Olimpia Castaneve."
+
+"Did you cut off the head of the Captain of Lances, who was called Il
+Mosca?"
+
+Olimpia was looking very handsome, and knew it.
+
+"Magnificence," she said, "my hand is on my heart." It was.
+
+"What the devil has that got to do with it?" asked Borso, looking about
+him for a reason.
+
+"Serenity, if my heart were guilty, it would burn my hand. If my hand
+were red, it would soil my heart."
+
+"Pouf!" said Borso, and puckered his face. "Stand back, Castaneve. Now
+for the little one. How are you called, baggage?"
+
+Bellaroba shivered a very little, and looked solemn.
+
+"Bellaroba, my lord."
+
+"Very pretty; but I must have more."
+
+"There is no more, my lord. I am wife of Angioletto."
+
+"Well, well. I know Master Angioletto, and he me. We'll have him here, I
+think. Hi, you!" said he, turning to an officer of his guards. "Go and
+fetch the chimney-sweep."
+
+Ten minutes passed; then Angioletto came up between a detachment of men,
+unbound. He was not observed to falter throughout his course over the
+broad field; but his eyes were fever bright and colour noticeably high.
+Bellaroba did not look up at him; her eyelids fluttered, but she kept
+her head hung, and as for her blushes they were curtained by her long
+hair. He, on the contrary, directly he had bent his knee to the Duke,
+turned to where she stood, and, in face of the whole city, put his arms
+about her, and found a way to kiss her cheek. The broad ring of
+onlookers wavered; the twitches played like summer lightning over
+Borso's face.
+
+"Come here, Angioletto," he said. Angioletto drew near the throne.
+
+"You see now, my friend," the Duke continued in a low voice, "what may
+happen to one's wife if she keeps not her bed o' nights. A certain
+Captain Mosca has been stabbed. More than that, his head was attacked
+when he had ceased to take any interest in it, and cut off. I ask no
+words from you, no comments, no adjurations, for you are a prejudiced
+party. Your wife and this other woman between them have done the
+Captain's business. Mine is to find out how. Stand aside now and
+listen."
+
+Angioletto started, opened his mouth to speak--but the Duke put up his
+hand. "Young man," said he sternly, "I am Duke of Ferrara, and you are
+my prisoner. Be good enough to remember that."
+
+Angioletto hung his head. Borso turned again to Bellaroba, but kept the
+other in his eye.
+
+"Now, missy, what had you to do with Captain Mosca's headpiece?"
+
+"Nothing, my lord."
+
+"What!" he roared. "Did you not cut it off?"
+
+"No, my lord."
+
+"Why not, girl? He was your enemy, I suppose?"
+
+"I think he was, my lord."
+
+"Think! Do you not know it? What did he want of you?"
+
+"He wanted to make me bad, my lord."
+
+"Ah! So you stabbed him, eh?"
+
+"No, my lord."
+
+"Come now, come now, girl. Look at your frock."
+
+She did look and was silent.
+
+"Well!" Borso continued, after a sharp glance at Angioletto. "Did your
+husband cut it off?"
+
+"No, my lord, he wasn't there--but--"
+
+"Well--but what?"
+
+"He would have killed him, my lord."
+
+"Oh, the devil he would! Why?"
+
+"Because he loves me, my lord."
+
+"H'm. Well, Miss Bellaroba, where's your hand?"
+
+She held it out. "Here, sir."
+
+"What a little one! Well, put it on your heart. Now, how does it feel?"
+
+"It jumps, my lord."
+
+"Does it burn you, child?"
+
+"No, my lord; it's quite cold."
+
+"Stand down, Bellaroba. Castaneve, come forward."
+
+His face just now was a sight to be seen--crumpled, infinitely prim,
+crow-footed like an ivied wall; but extraordinarily wise; with that
+tempered resolve which says, "I know Evil and I know Good, and dare be
+just to either." He was thinking profoundly; every one could see it.
+Best of the company before him Angioletto, the little Tuscan, read his
+thought. His own was, "Unless I fear Justice I need not fear Borso.
+Dante saw the death of his lady to be just. Courage then!"
+
+"Mistress Castaneve," said Duke Borso, "you declare yourself innocent?"
+
+"Excellency, I do, I do! Ah, Mother of God!" The panic was creeping up
+Olimpia's legs, to loosen the joints of her knees.
+
+The Judge turned half. "Mistress Bellaroba, you also declare yourself
+innocent?"
+
+"Yes, my lord," she said.
+
+"Diavolo!" muttered Angioletto, "he is not 'my lord'; he is
+'Magnificence.' I must scold her for this afterwards."
+
+"The position of affairs is this," said the Duke, aloud. "One of these
+prisoners is guilty of the deed, and the guilty one is the liar. Now, I
+will not put an innocent person to death if I can avoid it; and I will
+not put these women to the question, because I should wring a confession
+of guilt from each, and be no more certain than I was before. I may
+have my own opinion, and may have proved it on various grounds. That
+again, I do not care to obtrude. I do not see that I can better the
+precedent set me by a very wise man and patriarch, King Solomon of Zion.
+Let the women judge each other. My judgment is that the innocent of
+these two shall hang the guilty."
+
+The bystanders were silent, till one man shivered. The shiver swept
+lightly through the company like a wind in the reeds, and ran wider and
+wider till it stirred the farthest edge of the field. All eyes were upon
+the prisoners. Borso's blinked from below his shaggy brows, young
+Teofilo Calcagnini's were misty, Angioletto's hard and bright. Bellaroba
+had been motionless throughout, except when her lips moved to speak; she
+was motionless now. But Olimpia was panting. The unearthly quiet was
+only broken by that short sound for ten minutes.
+
+"Bellaroba," then said the Duke, "what say you? You declare that you are
+innocent. Will you hang the guilty and go free?"
+
+For the first time she looked up, but not at her judge. It was at
+Angioletto she looked, Angioletto at her.
+
+"No, my lord, I cannot," said Bellaroba in the hush. The wind shivered
+the reeds again, then fainted down.
+
+"Castaneve," said the dry voice, "what say you? You declare that you are
+innocent. Will you hang the guilty and go free?"
+
+The drowning Olimpia threw up her hands to clutch at this plank in the
+sea-swirl. Free! O God! The word turned her.
+
+"Magnificence, I must, I must, I must!" She wailed, and fell a heap to
+the ground. Bellaroba covered her eyes. Teofilo Calcagnini shook the
+tears from his. Borso sat on immovably, working his jaws.
+
+It is at this point that the conduct of Angioletto touches the
+sublime--a position never accorded by posterity to his verse. It proves
+him, nevertheless, the greater artist to this extent, that he was
+equally the slave of the Idea, though working in more intractable stuff:
+himself, namely; his own little heart throbbing in his own young body.
+Therefore he deserves well of posterity, which finds his verses thin.
+Said Angioletto: "Yes, Bellaroba is my adorable wife, loved beyond all
+women, deserving beyond all price. Yet if she killed the Captain she is
+guilty of death, and the sentence is just whoever perform it. And if,
+being guiltless, she is hanged by the guilty, the action will glorify
+her; for it is the price she pays for clean hands."
+
+Then, in the midst of that waiting assembly, he called the girl to him
+by her name, took her face in both his hands and kissed it very
+tenderly, smiling all the time through his quick tears.
+
+"My dear little heart," said he, "your husband is proud of you. All that
+you have done is admirable in this black business. In a very short time
+I shall see you again. Though it is a higher flight than the Schifanoia
+chimney, it is quicker done. Trust me, Bellaroba; you know I have never
+failed you yet."
+
+He could say no more, but took her in his arms and held her there,
+speechless as he was with inspiration. She, seeming to burn in the fire
+that consumed him, lay quite still, neither sobbing any more, nor
+shivering. So they clung together for a little. Then Angioletto lifted
+up his face from her cheek, and put her gently away from him.
+
+"Let justice be done, Excellency," he called out in his shrill boy's
+voice, "we have said our say to each other."
+
+Borso spoke.
+
+"Justice shall be done. The innocent has condemned the guilty: let that
+woman be hanged. We have learned the value of clean hands this day.
+Mistress Bellaroba, you have a man in ten thousand; Angioletto, my
+friend, you have what you deserve, a woman in ten million. It is not
+fair that the worth of you two should be known only to me and the
+Blessed Virgin; you shall tell it now to a priest. Come along, and let
+me have the whole story with my breakfast."
+
+Thus Duke Borso did judgment for his good town of Ferrara in times very
+remote from our own. The Ferrarese used to say that it needs a sound
+lawyer to know how to break the laws.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Little Novels of Italy, by Maurice Henry Hewlett
+
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+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Little Novels Of Italy, by Maurice Hewlett.
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+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Little Novels of Italy, by Maurice Henry Hewlett
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Little Novels of Italy
+       Madonna Of The Peach-Tree, Ippolita In The Hills, The
+              Duchess Of Nona, Messer Cino And The Live Coal, The Judgment
+              Of Borso
+
+Author: Maurice Henry Hewlett
+
+Release Date: March 29, 2007 [EBook #20929]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Thierry Alberto, Juliet Sutherland, Martin
+Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class = "mynote"><p class="center">Transcriber's Note:<br /><br />
+The Table of Contents has been extended to include links to chapters.</p></div>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>LITTLE NOVELS OF<br />ITALY</h1>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>MAURICE HEWLETT</h2>
+
+<p class="center">AUTHOR OF "THE FOREST LOVERS," "PAN AND THE YOUNG
+SHEPHERD," "EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY," ETC.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">New York<br />THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br />
+<span class="smcap">London: Macmillan &amp; Co., Ltd.</span><br />1899</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>All rights reserved</i></p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1899,<br />
+By MAURICE HEWLETT.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">Norwood Press<br />
+J. S. Cushing &amp; Co.&mdash;Berwick &amp; Smith<br />Norwood Mass. U.S.A.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">To<br />HIS FRIEND<br /><span class="smcap">And</span><br />ITALY'S<br />
+MAJOR-GENERAL JOSEPH BONUS, R.E.<br />THE AUTHOR<br />DEDICATES HIS BOOK</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<div class="index">
+<ul>
+<li><a href="#MADONNA_OF_THE_PEACH-TREE">MADONNA OF THE PEACH-TREE</a>
+<ul>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#I">I</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;VANNA IS BID FOR</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#II">II</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>TERTIUM QUID</i></li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#III">III</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE SEED OF DISCORD</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#IV">IV</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE HARVEST OF LITTLE EASE</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#V">V</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE MIRACLE OF THE PEACH-TREE</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#VI">VI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE VISITATION OF THE GOLDEN FISH</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;<a href="#VII">VII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;LAST CONSIDERATIONS OF CAN GRANDE II</li>
+	<li class="subitem"><a href="#VIII">VIII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE REPROACHES</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#IX">IX</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE CROWNING PROOF</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li><a href="#IPPOLITA_IN_THE_HILLS">IPPOLITA IN THE HILLS</a>
+<ul>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BI">I</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE GLORIOUS IPPOLITA</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BII">II</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;MESSER ALESSANDRO THINKS TO CUT HIS NAILS</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BIII">III</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE JEW IN THE VIA DELLA GATTA</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BIV">IV</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;IPPOLITA LIFTS UP HER EYES TO THE HILLS</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BV">V</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;ANNINA AS DEMIURGE</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BVI">VI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;SILVESTRO</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;<a href="#BVII">VII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;CASTRACANE</li>
+	<li class="subitem"><a href="#BVIII">VIII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;RESURRECTION OF THE JEW</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BIX">IX</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;PYLADES FINDS HIS ORESTES</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BX">X</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;CYMON FINDS HIS IPHIGENIA</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li><a href="#THE_DUCHESS_OF_NONA">THE DUCHESS OF NONA</a>
+<ul>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CI">I</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;BOCCA BACIATA</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CII">II</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;AMILCARE: COMMERCE AND THE AFFECTIONS</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CIII">III</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;MARKET COVERT</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CIV">IV</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;MARKET OVERT</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CV">V</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;GRIFONE&mdash;AMATEUR OF SENSE</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CVI">VI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;GRIFONE ENTERS THE MARKET</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;<a href="#CVII">VII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A PEDLAR'S ROUND</li>
+	<li class="subitem"><a href="#CVIII">VIII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;PRIVATE TREATY</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CIX">IX</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE LAST BIDDING</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CX">X</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;WITH ALL FAULTS</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CXI">XI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;FROM AN AMATEUR'S CABINET</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li><a href="#MESSER_CINO_AND_THE_LIVE_COAL">MESSER CINO AND THE LIVE COAL</a>
+<ul>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#DI">I</a></li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#DII">II</a></li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#DIII">III</a></li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#DIV">IV</a></li>
+</ul></li>
+<li><a href="#THE_JUDGMENT_OF_BORSO">THE JUDGMENT OF BORSO</a>
+<ul>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#EI">I</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE ADVENTURERS</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#EII">II</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;ARMS AND THE MANNIKIN</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#EIII">III</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THOW THEY CAME TO FERRARA</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#EIV">IV</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"WHY COME YE NAT TO COURTE?"</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#EV">V</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;FORTUNE WITH THE DOUBLE BLADE</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#EVI">VI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;ENDS AND MEANS</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;<a href="#EVII">VII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE CAPTAIN'S TREADINGS</li>
+	<li class="subitem"><a href="#EVIII">VIII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;FIRST MIDNIGHT CONVERSATION</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#EIX">IX</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;SECOND MIDNIGHT CONVERSATION</li>
+	<li class="subitem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#EX">X</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;ORDEAL BY ROPE</li>
+</ul></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY</h1>
+
+<h2><a name="MADONNA_OF_THE_PEACH-TREE" id="MADONNA_OF_THE_PEACH-TREE"></a>MADONNA OF THE PEACH-TREE</h2>
+
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h3>VANNA IS BID FOR</h3>
+
+<p>Not easily would you have found a girl more winning in a tender sort
+than Giovanna Scarpa of Verona at one and twenty, fair-haired and
+flushed, delicately shaped, tall and pliant, as she then was. She had to
+suffer her hours of ill report, but passes for near a saint now, in
+consequence of certain miracles and theophanies done on her account,
+which it is my business to declare; before those she was considered (if
+at all) as a girl who would certainly have been married three years ago
+if dowries had not been of moment in the matter. In a city of maids as
+pretty as they are modest&mdash;which no one will deny Verona to be&mdash;there
+may have been some whose charms in either kind were equal to hers, while
+their estate was better in accord; but the speculation is idle.
+Giovanna, flower in the face as she was, fit to be nosegay on any
+hearth, posy for any man's breast, sprang in a very lowly soil. Like a
+blossoming reed she shot up to her inches by Adige, and one forgot the
+muddy bed wondering at the slim grace of the shaft with its crown of
+yellow atop.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> Her hair waved about her like a flag; she should have been
+planted in a castle; instead, Giovanna the stately calm, with her
+billowing line, staid lips, and candid grey eyes, was to be seen on her
+knees by the green water most days of the week. Bare-armed, splashed to
+the neck, bare-headed, out-at-heels, she rinsed and pommelled, wrung and
+dipped again, laughed, chattered, flung her hair to the wind, her sweat
+to the water, in line with a dozen other women below the Ponte Navi; and
+if no one thought any the worse of her, none, unhappily, thought any the
+better&mdash;at least in the way of marriage. It is probable that no one
+thought of her at all. Giovanna was a beauty and a very good girl; but
+she was a washerwoman for all that, whose toil fed seven mouths.</p>
+
+<p>Her father was Don Urbano, curate of Santa Toscana across the water.
+This may very easily sound worse than it is. In Don Urbano's day, though
+a priest might not marry, he might have a wife&mdash;a faithful, diligent
+companion, that is&mdash;to seethe his polenta, air his linen, and rear his
+children. The Church winked at her, and so continued until the Jesuits
+came to teach that winking was unbecoming. But when Can Grande II.
+lorded in Verona the Jesuits did not, and Don Urbano, good, easy man,
+cared not who winked at his wife. She gave him six children before she
+died of the seventh, of whom the eldest was Giovanna, and the others, in
+an orderly chain diminishing punctually by a year, ran down to
+Ferrantino, a tattered, shock-headed rascal of more inches than grace.
+Last of all the good drudge, who had borne these and many other burdens
+for her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>master, died also. Don Urbano was never tired of saying how
+providential it was that she had held off her demise until Giovanna was
+old enough to take her place. The curate was fat and lazy, very much
+interested in himself; his stipend barely paid his shot at the "Fiore
+del Marinajo," under whose green bush he was mostly to be seen. Vanna
+had to roll up her sleeves, bend her straight young back, and knee the
+board by the Ponte Navi. I have no doubt it did her good; the work is
+healthy, the air, the sun, the waterspray kissed her beauty ripe; but
+she got no husband because she could save no dowry. Everything went to
+stay the seven crying mouths.</p>
+
+<p>Then, on a day when half her twenty-first year had run after the others,
+old Baldassare Dardicozzo stayed on the bridge to rest from the burden
+of his pack&mdash;on a breezy March morning when the dust filled his eyes and
+the wind emptied him of breath. Baldassare had little enough to spare as
+it was. So he dropped his load in the angle of the bridge, with a
+smothered "Accidente!" or some such, and leaned to watch the swollen
+water buffeted crosswise by the gusts, or how the little mills
+amid-stream dipped as they swam breasting the waves. In so doing he
+became aware, in quite a peculiar way, of Vanna Scarpa.</p>
+
+<p>Baldassare was old, red-eyed, stiff in the back. Possibly he was
+rheumatic, certainly he was grumpy. He had a long slit mouth which
+played him a cruel trick; for by nature it smiled when by nature he was
+most melancholy. Smile it would and did, however cut-throat he felt: if
+you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> wanted to see him grin from ear to ear you would wait till he had
+had an ill day's market. Then, while sighs, curses, invocations of the
+saints, or open hints to the devil came roaring from him, that hilarious
+mouth of his invited you to share delights. You had needs laugh with
+him, and he, cursing high and low, beamed all over his face. "To make
+Baldassare laugh" became a stock periphrasis for the supreme degree of
+tragedy among his neighbours. About this traitor mouth of his he had a
+dew of scrubby beard, silvered black; he had bushy eyebrows, hands and
+arms covered with a black pelt: he was a very hairy man. Also he was a
+very warm man, as everybody knew, with a hoard of florins under the
+flags of his old-clothes shop in the Via Stella.</p>
+
+<p>Having spat into the water many times, rubbed his hands, mopped his
+head, and cursed most things under heaven and some in it, Master
+Baldassare found himself watching the laundresses on the shore. They
+were the usual shrill, shrewd, and laughing line&mdash;the trade seems to
+induce high mirth&mdash;and as such no bait for the old merchant by ordinary;
+but just now the sun and breeze together made a bright patch of them,
+set them at a provoking flutter. Baldassare, prickly with dust, found
+them like their own cool linen hung out to dance itself dry in the wind.
+Most of all he noticed Vanna, whom he knew well enough, because when she
+knelt upright she was taller and more wayward than the rest, and because
+the wind made so plain the pretty figure she had. She was very
+industrious, but no less full of talk: there seemed so much to say! The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+pauses were frequent in which she straightened herself from the hips and
+turned to thrust chin and voice into the debate. You saw then the sharp
+angle, the fine line of light along that raised chin, the charming turn
+of the neck, her free young shoulders and shapely head; also you marked
+her lively tones of <i>ci</i> and <i>si</i>, and how her shaking finger drove them
+home. The wind would catch her yellow hair sometimes and wind it across
+her bosom like a scarf; or it streamed sideways like a long pennon; or
+being caught by a gust from below, sprayed out like a cloud of litten
+gold. Vanna always joined in the laugh at her mishap, tossed her tresses
+back, pinned them up (both hands at the business); and then, with square
+shoulders and elbows stiff as rods, set to working the dirt out of Don
+Urbano's surplice. Baldassare brooded, chewing straws. What a clear
+colour that girl had, to be sure! What a lissom rascal it was! A fine
+long girl like that should be married; by all accounts she would make a
+man a good wife. If he were a dozen years the better of four and fifty
+he might&mdash;Then came a shrug, and a "Ma!" to conclude in true Veronese
+Baldassare's ruminations. Shrug and explosion signalled two stark facts:
+Baldassare was fifty-four, and Vanna had no portion.</p>
+
+<p>Yet he remained watching on the bridge, his chin buried in his knotty
+hands, his little eyes blinking under stress of the inner fire he had.
+So it befell that La Testolina saw him, and said something shrill and
+saucy to her neighbour. The wind tossed him the tone but not the sense.
+He saw the joke run crackling down the line, all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> heads look brightly
+up. The joke caught fire; he saw the sun-gleam on a dozen perfect sets
+of teeth. Vanna's head was up with the rest, sooner up and the sooner
+down. Even from that height the little twinkling beacons from the bridge
+shot her through. He saw her colour deepen, head droop; she was busy
+long before the others had wrung their joke dry. "Soul of a cat!"
+grunted Baldassare between his teeth, "what a rosy baggage it is!" He
+waited a little longer, then deliberately passed the bridge, rounded the
+pillar by the steps, and went down to the women like a man who has made
+up his mind. Lizabetta of the roving eye caught the first hint of his
+shadow. Her elbow to Nonna's ribs, Nonna's "Pst!" in Nina's ear, spread
+the news. Vanna's cheeks flew the flag.</p>
+
+<p>"Buon' giorno, Ser Baldassare!" shrilled La Testolina, plump and
+black-eyed leader of mischief.</p>
+
+<p>"Giorno, giorno, La Testolina," growled the old man.</p>
+
+<p>Vanna, very busy, grew as red as a rose. The others knelt back on their
+heels; compliments of a homely sort flew about, sped on by flashing
+teeth. Baldassare's own were black as old channel-posts in the Lagoon,
+but in tongue-work he gave as sharp as he got. Then a wicked wind blew
+Vanna's hair like a whip across her throat, fit to strangle her. She had
+to face the day. Baldassare pondered her straight young back.</p>
+
+<p>"When Vanna's a nun she'll have no more trouble with her hair," quoth La
+Testolina, matchmaker by race.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p><p>"When Vanna's a nun the river will be dry," said Vanna from between her
+elbows.</p>
+
+<p>"When Vanna's a nun the river, on the contrary, will be in flood." This
+from Baldassare.</p>
+
+<p>"Hey! what's this?" Caterina cried; and Nonna pinched her arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Adige will go crying that she comes no more to dip her arms," said the
+old man, with the utmost gravity and a broad grin. The women screamed
+their delight, slapped their knees, or raised witnessing hands to
+heaven; La Testolina caught Vanna round the waist and gave her a
+resounding kiss.</p>
+
+<p>"Compliments, my little Vanna, compliments!" Her voice pealed like a
+trumpet.</p>
+
+<p>"Vi ringrazio, signore," said Vanna under her breath, and La Testolina
+held up a tress of her long hair to the light.</p>
+
+<p>"When Vanna's a nun you would bid for that, eh, Baldassare?"</p>
+
+<p>"I will bid for whatever she will sell me," says he, with a blink.
+Whereupon the matchmaker made no more music. The scent was too hot for
+that.</p>
+
+<p>Yet for all his adventuring he got little reward; she turned him no more
+than the round of her cheek. Vanna never stayed her work, and he,
+ordinarily a silent man, paid no more compliments&mdash;yet ceased not to
+look.</p>
+
+<p>Going up the street at dinner-time, he made his bid. He limped by the
+tall girl's side without speech from either; but at the door he looked
+up queerly at her and pinched her ear.</p>
+
+<p>"Go in and feed the youngsters, my chuck,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> said he; "I know where to
+meet Don Urbano, and please Madonna you shall feed your own before
+long."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Ser Baldassare," says pretty Vanna in a twitter.</p>
+
+<p>The conference between the high contracting parties was wordy, bristled
+with the gesticulations of two pair of hands, and was commented on by
+all the guests in the "Fiore del Marinajo." The girl, said Don Urbano,
+was the very pride of his eye, prop of his failing years, a little
+mother to the children. She had had a most pious bringing-up, never
+missed the Rosary, knew the Little Hours of the Virgin, could do sums
+with notches in a stick, market like a Jew's housekeeper, sew like a
+nun, and make a stew against any wife in the <i>contrada</i>. Dowry, dowry!
+What did such a girl as that want with a dowry? She was her own dowry,
+by Bacchus the Thracian. Look at the shape of her&mdash;was that not a dowry?
+The work she could do, the pair of shoulders, the deep chest, the long
+legs she had&mdash;pick your dowry there, my friends! A young woman of her
+sort carried her dowry on her back, in her two hands, in her mouth&mdash;ah!
+and in what she could put into yours, by our Lord. Rather, it should be
+the other way. What, now, was Ser Baldassare prepared to lay out upon
+such a piece of goods? Baldassare shivered, grinned fearfully, and shook
+his head many times. Money was money; it was limited; it bore its value
+in plain figures upon its face: you knew where you were with money. But
+you could get wives cheaper than ducats, and find them cheaper value,
+soul of a cat! <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>Besides, what was he? A poor pedlar, by his faith! At
+this he spread out his arms and dropped them with a flop upon his knees.
+The priest sat back in his chair and cast appealing looks at the
+rafters; the company chuckled, nudged each other, guffawed. Baldassare
+was made to feel that he had over-coloured his case. True, he admitted,
+he had a roof over his head, shared fortune with the rats in that. But
+look at the thing reasonably, comrades. Vanna would make another to
+keep; a girl of her inches must be an eater, body of a dog! Had his
+reverence thought of that? His reverence made a supreme effort, held up
+one pudgy forefinger, and with the other marked off two joints of it.
+"Of mortadella so much," he said; "of polenta so much"&mdash;and he shut one
+fist; "of pasta so much"&mdash;and he coupled the two fists; "and of wine, by
+the soul of the world, not enough to drown a flea! I tell you,
+Baldassare," he said finally, emboldened by the merchant's growing
+doubt&mdash;"I tell you that you ask of me a treasure which I would not part
+with for a cardinal's hat. No indeed! Not to be Bishop of Verona,
+throned and purfled on Can Grande's right hand, will I consent to
+traffic my Vanna. Eh, <i>sangue di Sangue</i>, because I am a man of the
+Church must I cease to be a man of bowels, to have a yearning, a tender
+spot here?" He prodded his cushioned ribs. "Go you, Ser Baldassare
+Dardicozzo," he cried, rising grandly in his chair&mdash;"go you; you have
+mistaken your man. The father stands up superb in the curate's cassock,
+and points the door to the chafferer of virgins!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p><p>The tavern-room, on Don Urbano's side to a man, beat the tables with
+their glasses; Baldassare had to surrender at discretion. The bargain,
+finally struck, was written out by an obliging notary on the
+scoring-slate. In the name of the holy and undivided Trinity it was
+declared to all men living and to be born, that Baldassare Dardicozzo,
+merchant of Verona, was obliged to pay to the reverend father in God,
+Urbano, curate of Santa Toscana in the Borgo San Giorgio, the sum of
+sixty florins Veronese and two barrels of wine of Val Pulicella, under
+condition that if within thirty days from those presents he did not lead
+in marriage Giovanna, daughter of the said reverend, he should be bound
+to pay the sum of one hundred and twenty florins Veronese, and four
+barrels of wine of Val Pulicella.</p>
+
+<p>The notary executed a monstrous flourish at the bottom&mdash;a foliated cross
+rising out of steps. On the last step he wrote his own name, Bartolo de
+Thomasinis; and then Baldassare, smiling as he should, but feeling as he
+should not, stuck his seal upon the swimming wax, and made a cross with
+the stile like the foundations of a spider's web.</p>
+
+<p>The affair was thus concluded; before the thirty days were up Vanna was
+taken to church by her father, and taken from it by her new master.
+Within a week she appeared at the doorway of Baldassare's little shop,
+very pretty, very sedate, quite the housewife&mdash;to sit there sewing and
+singing to herself from grey dawn to grey dusk.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h3><i>TERTIUM QUID</i></h3>
+
+<p>A year passed, two years passed. Vanna was three and twenty, no more
+round but no less blooming in face and figure; still a reedy,
+golden-haired girl. But Baldassare was fifty-seven, and there was no
+sign of issue. The neighbours, who had nudged each other at one season,
+whose heads had wagged as their winks flew about, now accepted the
+sterile mating as of the order of things. Pretty Vanna, mother as she
+had been to her brothers and sisters, was to be a mother no more. There
+was talk of May and December. Baldassare was advised to lock up other
+treasure beside his florins; some, indeed, of the opposite camp gave
+hints none too honest to the forlorn young wife. The Piazza Sant'
+Anastasia at the falling-in of the day, for instance. Thus they put it.
+All girls&mdash;and what else was Vanna, a wife in name?&mdash;walked there arm in
+arm. Others walked there also, she must know. By-and-by some pretty lad,
+an archer, perhaps, from the palace, some roistering blade of a
+gentleman's lackey, a friar or twinkling monk out for a frolic, came
+along with an "Eh, la bellina!" and then there was another arm at work.
+So, for one, whispered La Testolina, dipping a head full of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> confidence
+and mystery close to Vanna's as the girl sat working out the summer
+twilight. The Via Stella was narrow and gloomy. The tall houses nearly
+met in that close way. Looking up you saw the two jagged edges of the
+eaves, like great tattered wings spread towards each other. When the
+green sky of evening deepened to blue, and blue grew violet, these
+shadowing wings were always in advance, more densely dark. There it was
+that Vanna worked incessantly, sewing seam after seam, patching,
+braiding, and fitting the pieces. By no chance at all did a hint of the
+sun fall about her; yet she always sang softly to herself, always wore
+her pretty fresh colours, and still showed the gold sheen in her yellow
+hair. Her hair was put up now, pulled smoothly back over her temples;
+she spoke in a low, sober, measured voice, and to La Testolina's sly
+suggestions responded with a little blush, a little shake of the head,
+and a very little sigh. "Ser Baldassare is good to me," she would say;
+"would you have me do him a wrong? Last Friday he gave me a silver piece
+to spend in whatsoever I chose. I bought a little holy-water stoup with
+a Gesulino upon it, bowered in roses. On Sunday morning he patted my
+cheek and called me a good girl. To say nothing of the many times he has
+pinched my ear, all this was very kind, as you must see. With what do
+you ask me to reward him? Fie!" La Testolina snorted, and shrugged
+herself away. Vanna went on with her sewing and her little song&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>"Giovanottin, che te ne vai di fuora,</div>
+<div>Stattene allegro, e cos&igrave; vo' far io.</div></div>
+
+<div class='stanza'><div><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>Se ti trovassi qualche dama nuova,</div>
+<div>L'ha da saper che tua dama son io."</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>So sang she, innocently enough, whose sweethearting went no farther than
+her artless lips. There was not a spice of mischief in the girl. What
+she had told La Testolina had been no more than the truth: Master
+Baldassare was good to her&mdash;better than you would have believed possible
+in such a crabbed old stub of a man. He was more of a father to her than
+ever Don Urbano had been to anything save his own belly; but it was
+incontestable that he was not father to anything else. That alone might
+have been a grievance for Vanna, but there is no evidence that it was.
+Baldassare was by nature gruff, by habit close-fisted: like all such
+men, the more he felt the deeper he hoarded the thought under his ribs.
+The most he would venture would be a hand on her hair and a grunt when
+she did well; so sure as she looked up gratefully at him the old man
+drew off, with puckered brows and jaws working together. He may have
+been ashamed of his weakness; it is dead certain that no one in Verona,
+least of all Vanna herself, suspected him of any affection for his young
+wife. Mostly he was silent; thus she became silent too whenever he was
+in the house. This was against nature, for by ordinary her little songs
+bubbled from her like a bird's. But to see him so glum and staring
+within doors awed her: she set a finger to her lips as she felt the tune
+on her tongue, and went about her business mute. Baldassare would go
+abroad, stooping under his pack: she took her seat at the shop-door,
+threaded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> her needle, her fingers flew and her fancy with them. The
+spring of her music was touched, and all the neighbours grew to listen
+for the gentle cadences she made.</p>
+
+<p>So passed a year, so two years passed. Vanna was twenty-three, looking
+less, when along there came one morning a tall young friar, a Carmelite,
+by name Fra Battista, with a pair of brown dove's eyes in his smooth
+face. These he lifted towards Vanna's with an air so timid and so
+penetrating, so delicate and hardy at once, that when he was gone it was
+to leave her with the falter of a verse in her mouth, two hot cheeks,
+and a quicker heart.</p>
+
+<p>This Fra Battista, by birth a Bergamask, accredited to the convent at
+Verona by reason of his parts as a preacher, was tall and shapely, like
+a spoilt pretty boy to look at, leggy, and soft in the palm. His frock
+set off this petted appearance&mdash;it gave you the idea of a pinafore on
+him. He did not look manly, was not manly by any means, and yet not so
+girlish but that you could doubt his sex. His eyes, which, as I say,
+were soft as a dove's pair, he was not fond of showing; and this gave
+them the more searching appeal when he did. His mouth, full and fleshy
+in the lips, had a lovely curve. He kept it very demure, and, when he
+spoke, spoke softly. This was a young man born to be Lancilotto to some
+Ginevra or other; and, to do him justice, he had had his share of
+adventure in that sort at an early age. He had learned more out of Ovid
+than from the Fathers of Divinity, you may believe. Very popular he was
+in whatsoever convent he harboured, as a preacher famous all over
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>Lombardy and the March,&mdash;in Bergamo, in Brescia, even as far as Mantua
+he had been heard of. The superior at Verona did his best to spoil him
+by endearment, flattery, and indulgence; but this was difficult, since
+he had been spoilt already.</p>
+
+<p>He passed down the Via Stella morning and evening for a week. Morning
+and evening his eyes encountered Vanna's. The third evening he smiled at
+her, the fourth morning he saluted her; the fifth evening he stopped and
+slipped in a gentle word; the first evening of the second week he
+stopped again, and that night, La Testolina being by, there was quite a
+little conversation.</p>
+
+<p>La Testolina had black eyes, a trim figure, and a way of wriggling which
+showed these to advantage. Fra Battista's fame and the possibility of
+mischief set her flashing; she led the talk and found him apt: it was
+not difficult to aim every word that it should go through and leave a
+dart in Vanna's timid breast. The girl was so artless, you could see her
+quiver, or feel her, at every shot. For instance, was his sanctity very
+much fatigued by yesterday's sermon? <i>Eh, la bella predica!</i> What
+invocations of the saints, what heart-groping, what reachings after the
+better parts of women! It was some comfort to know that a woman had a
+better part at all&mdash;by the Saviour! for their handling by men gave no
+hint of it. Let Fra Beato&mdash;ah, pardon, Fra Battista she should have
+said&mdash;send some such arrows into men's hides! See them, for the
+gross-feeding, surly, spend-all, take-all knaves that they were! One or
+two she might name if she had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> a mind&mdash;ah! one or two in this very city
+of Verona, in this very Street of the Star, who&mdash;But there! Vanna must
+go and hear the Frate's next sermon, she must indeed. And if she could
+take her old curm&mdash; Pshutt! What was she saying? How she ran on! She did
+indeed. Fra Battista, leaning against the lintel, kept his eyelids on
+the droop, seemed to find his toes of interest. But now and again he
+would look delicately up, and so sure as he did the brown eyes and the
+grey seemed to swim towards each other, to melt in a point, swirl in an
+eddy of the feelings, in which Vanna found herself drowning and found
+such death sweet. La Testolina still ran on, but now in a monologue. Fra
+Battista looked and longed, and Vanna looked again and thrilled. It grew
+quite dark; nothing of each other could they see and little know, until
+the friar put out his foot and found Vanna's. A tremor, beginning at her
+heart, ran down to her toes; Battista felt the flutter of it and was
+assured.</p>
+
+<p>When he left her that night he kissed her cold hand, then La
+Testolina's, which he found by no means cold, and moved off leisurely
+towards the Piazza dell' Erbe. Neither woman spoke for a while: La
+Testolina was picking at her apron, Vanna sat quietly in the dark
+holding her heart. She was still in a tremble, so ridiculously moved
+that when her friend kissed her she burst out crying. La Testolina went
+nodding away; and the end of the episode may be predicted. Not at one
+but at many sermons of the tall Carmelite did Vanna sit rapt; not for
+one but for every dusk<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> did he stoop to kiss her hand. All Verona saw
+her devotion,&mdash;all Verona, that is, but one old Veronese. The essence of
+comedy being that the spectators shall chuckle at actors in a fog, here
+was a comedy indeed.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SEED OF DISCORD</h3>
+
+<p>When Vanna announced her condition the neighbours looked slyly at each
+other; when her condition announced Vanna, they chattered; the gossip
+sank to whispering behind the hand as time went on, and ceased
+altogether when the baby was born. That was a signal for heads to shake.
+Some pitied the father, many defended the mother: it did not depend upon
+your sex; sides were taken freely and voices were shrill when neither
+was by. Down by the river especially, upon that bleached board below the
+bridge, <i>ci</i> and <i>si</i> whistled like the wind in the chimneys, and the
+hands of testimony were as the aspen leaves when storms are in. Some
+took one side, some another; but when, in due season, it was seen what
+inordinate pride Baldassare had in the black-eyed <i>bambino</i> there was no
+question of sides. He had ranked himself with the unforgivable party:
+the old man was an old fool, a gull whose power of swallow stirred
+disgust. Vanna had the rights of it, they said; such men were made to be
+tricked. As for Fra Battista's pulpit, it was thronged about with
+upturned faces; for those who had not been before went now to judge what
+they would have done under the circumstances.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> Having been, there were
+no two opinions about that. Messer Gabriele Arcangelo, some said,
+judging by the honey-tongue; San Bastiano, others considered him, who
+went by his comely proportions; and these gained the day, since his
+beardless face and friar's frock induced the idea of innocence, which
+Sebastian's virgin bloom also taught. The quality of his sermons did not
+grow threadbare under this adventitious criticism: he kept a serene
+front, lost no authority, nor failed of any unction. There was always a
+file at his confessional; and at Corpus Christi, when in the pageant he
+actually figured as Sebastian, his plump round limbs roped to a
+pine-stock drew tears from all eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Unhappily you have to pay for your successes. There were other preachers
+in Verona, and other eloquent preachers who, being honest men, had had
+to depend upon their eloquence. These were the enemy&mdash;Franciscans, of
+course, and Dominicans&mdash;who got wind of something amiss, and began to
+nose for a scandal. What they got gave them something besides eloquence
+to lean on: there were now other sermons than young Fra Battista's, and
+the moral his person pointed had a double edge. In fact, where he
+pointed with his person, the Dominicans pointed with their sharp
+tongues. The Franciscans, more homely, pointed with their fingers. Fra
+Battista began to be notorious&mdash;a thing widely different from fame; he
+also began to be uncomfortable, and his superior with him. They talked
+it over in the cloister, walking up and down together in the cool of the
+day. "It has an ugly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> look, my dear," said the provincial; "send the
+young woman to me."</p>
+
+<p>What of the young woman, meantime? Let me tell the truth: motherhood
+became her so well that she was brazen from the very beginning. No
+delicacy, no pretty shame, no shrinking&mdash;she gloried in the growing
+fact. When she was brought to bed she made a quick recovery; she
+insisted upon a devout churching, an elaborate christening of the
+doubtful son (whereat, if you will believe me, no other than Fra
+Battista himself must do the office!); thenceforth she was never seen
+without her <i>bimbo</i>. While she worked it lay at her feet or across her
+knee like a stout chrysalis; the breast was ever at its service, pillow
+or fount; when it slept she lifted up a finger or her grave eyes at the
+very passers-by; her lips moulded a "Hush!" at them lest they should
+dare disturb her young lord's rest. The saucy jade! Was ever such
+impudence in the world before? It drew her, too, to old Baldassare in a
+remarkable way. This the neighbours&mdash;busy with sniffing&mdash;did not see.
+She had always had a sense of the sweet root under the rind, always
+purred at his stray grunts and pats, taking them by instinct for what
+they were really worth; and now to watch his new delight filled her with
+gratitude&mdash;and more, she felt free to love the man. For one thing, it
+unlocked his lips and hers. She could sing about the house since Cola
+had come&mdash;they had christened him after good Saint Nicholas&mdash;because
+Master Baldassare was so talkative on his account. The old man sat at
+home whenever he could, in his shiny<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> armchair, his cup of black wine by
+his side, and watched Vanna with the baby by the hour together, poring
+over every downward turn of her pretty head, every pass of her fingers,
+every little eager striving of the sucking child. There were, indeed, no
+bounds to his content: to be a father&mdash;poor old soul!&mdash;seemed to him the
+most glorious position in the world. Can Grande II. in the
+judgment-seat, the bishop stalled in his throne, the Holy Father himself
+in the golden chambers of his castle at Avignon, had nothing to offer
+Ser Baldassare Dardicozzo, the old-clothes man.</p>
+
+<p>Though the neighbours knew nothing of this inner peace, they could not
+deny that Monna Vanna, brazen or no, was mightily become by her new
+dignity or (as you should say) indignity. She was more staid, more
+majestic; but no less the tall, swaying, crowned girl she had ever been.
+She was seen, without doubt, for a splendid young woman. The heavy child
+seemed not to drag her down, nor the slant looks of respectable
+citizens, her neighbours, to lower her head. She met them with level
+eyes quite candid, and a smiling mouth to all appearance pure. When she
+found they would not discuss her riches, she talked of theirs. When she
+found them over-satisfied with their children, she laughed quietly as
+one who knew better. This was a thing to take away a woman's breath,
+that she should grow the more glorious for her shame. Party feeling had
+been stormy, like crossing tides, between those who held Baldassare for
+a gull and those who resented Vanna's unruffled brows. But now there was
+but one party. It was very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> well to hoodwink an old skinflint; but, by
+the Mass, not honest to flaunt your methods in the world's face. And
+since our own dignity is the skin upon which we rely for all our
+protection, while contempt for our neighbours is but a grease we put
+upon it for its ease, it was self-defence which brought it about that
+the party against Vanna grew ominously large, while Baldassare gained
+quite a host of sympathizers. The girl was now shunned, ostentatiously,
+carefully shunned. Even La Testolina was shy of her. But, bless you, she
+saw nothing of it&mdash;or cared nothing. She chattered to her grossly
+deceived husband, went (nominally, you may be sure!) confessing to the
+grossly deceiving friar, she cooed to her baby, warbled her little
+songs, looked handsome, carried herself nobly, as if she were the
+Blessed Virgin herself, no less. This could not be endured: a thousand
+tongues were ready to shoot at her, and would have shot but for fear of
+old Baldassare's grim member&mdash;reputed forked. While he was in the way,
+fat-headed fool, there was no moral glow to be won by a timely word. The
+tongues lay itching; two or three barren women in the Via Stella were
+hoarding stones.</p>
+
+<p>Then, just about the time when the prior of the Carmelites bid Fra
+Battista send him the young woman, Baldassare took the road for a round
+of chaffer which might keep him out of Verona a week. The Via Stella
+felt, and Fra Battista knew, that the chance had come.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE HARVEST OF LITTLE EASE</h3>
+
+<p>Verona, stormy centre of strife, whose scarred grey face still wears a
+blush when viewed from the ramp of the Giusti garden, was in those times
+a place of short and little ease. The swords were never rusty. A warning
+clang from the belfry, two or three harsh strokes, the tall houses
+disgorged, the streets packed; Capulet faced Montague, Bevilacqua caught
+Ridolfi by the throat, and Della Scala sitting in his hall knew that he
+must do murder if he would live a prince. It seems odd that the suckling
+of a little shopkeeper should lead to such issues; but so it was. And
+thus it was.</p>
+
+<p>On the morning of Baldassare's setting-out for the Mantuan road, La
+Testolina&mdash;at that time much and unhealthily in Fra Battista's
+hire&mdash;came breathless to the Via Stella. Craning her quick head round
+the door-post, she saw Vanna sitting all in cool white (for the weather
+was at the top of summer), stooped over her baby, happy and calm as
+always, and fingering her breast that she might give the little tyrant
+ease of his drink. That baby was a glutton. "Hist, Vanna, hist!" La
+Testolina whispered; and Vanna looked up at her with a guarded smile, as
+who should say,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> "Speak softer, my dear, lest Cola should strangle in
+his swallow."</p>
+
+<p>But La Testolina's eyes were like pin-points, centring all her alarms.</p>
+
+<p>"You must come to the Carmelites, Vanna. There is a great to-do. The
+warden of San Francesco has been to the bishop, and the bishop is with
+Can Grande at this moment. You must come, indeed, at
+once&mdash;<i>subitissimo</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>Vanna laughed&mdash;the rich quiet laugh of a girl whose affairs are in good
+train, and all other affairs the scratch of a flea.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, what have I to do with the bishop and Can Grande, La Testolina?"
+says she. "My master is out, and I must mind the shop. There is baby
+too."</p>
+
+<p>"By Saints Pan and Silvanus, my girl, it will be the worse for you if
+you come not," said La Testolina, with a tragic sniff. "Eh, you little
+fool, don't you know that it is you and your brat have set all Verona by
+the ears?"</p>
+
+<p>Vanna had never thought of the ears of Verona, and knew not how to think
+of them now; but she saw that her friend was in a fever of suppressed
+knowledge. Therefore she shawled her head and her baby in her sea-blue
+cloak, locked the shop-door, and followed La Testolina.</p>
+
+<p>The sealed gates in the white convent wall were barred and
+double-locked. A scared brother cocked his eye through the grille to see
+who was there.</p>
+
+<p>"It is she," hissed La Testolina.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Dio mio</i>, the <i>causa causans</i>!" cried he, and let them in through a
+cranny. "Follow me, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>mistresses, and God give good ending to this
+adventure," he prayed, as he slippered up the court.</p>
+
+<p>Vanna, blank and smiling, La Testolina with wandering, fearful eyes,
+followed.</p>
+
+<p>They found the prior sitting well back in his ebony chair and in
+meditation, his chin buried in his hand. Behind him (and behind his back
+his hands) was Fra Corinto the pittanciar, pockmarked, thin, and
+mortified. He looked the prior's reproach, and was.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, women," said the prior, testily&mdash;a fat and flabby old man with a
+sour mouth&mdash;"now, women, which of you is at the bottom of this accursed
+business? Where is the baby? Let me judge for myself."</p>
+
+<p>La Testolina, protesting her remarkable innocence by every quiver of her
+head, edged Vanna to the front. Vanna stood up, straight as a candle,
+and unveiled her bosom.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you want to see my little son, reverend prior?" she said. "Behold
+him here (<i>Eccolol&igrave;</i>)." She held him out proudly in her arms, as if he
+were monstrance and she priest.</p>
+
+<p>Now whether it was that motherhood had fired a comely girl with the
+beautiful seriousness of a woman, so that she was transfigured before
+him; or whether some chance passage of the crossing lights played tricks
+with his vision&mdash;which it was, or whether it was both, I know not. He
+saw, or thought he saw, a tall, smiling lady, hooded in blue over white,
+holding up a child; he saw, or thought for a moment that he saw, the
+Image of all Mothers displaying the Image of all Sons. His fingers
+pattered over his scapular. "Eh, my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> Lady the Virgin! What dost thou
+here, glorifying this place?" As soon as he had said it he might have
+known that he was a fool; but Vanna's large grey eyes loomed upon him to
+swallow him up, her colour of faint rose glowed over him and throbbed.
+<i>Vera incessu patuit dea!</i> "By her presence ye shall judge her," quoth
+the prior to himself, and hid his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>There was a hush upon all the group in the chamber, during which you
+could have heard afar off the nasal discords of the brethren in choir
+droning through an office. No one spoke. The prior's lips moved at his
+prayers; Fra Corinto looked frowningly before him; La Testolina was
+fidgety to speak, but dared not; Vanna, her long form like a ripple of
+moonlight in the dusk, cooed under her voice to the baby; he, unheeding
+cause of so much strife in high places, held out his pair of puckered
+hands and crowed to the company. So with their thoughts: the prior
+thought he had seen the Holy Virgin; Fra Corinto thought the prior an
+old fool; La Testolina hoped his reverence had not the colic; and Vanna
+thought of nothing at all.</p>
+
+<p>Fra Corinto it was (looking not for Madonna in a baggage), who, by
+discreetly coughing, brought his master back to his senses. The prior
+cleared his throat once or twice, looked at the young woman, and felt
+quite himself. Ridiculous what tricks a flicker of sunlight will play on
+the wisest of men!</p>
+
+<p>"Monna Vanna," said he, "I have not brought you here to judge between
+you and my brother Battista, now at discipline in his cell. The flesh,
+which he should have tamed, has raised, it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>appears, a bruised head for
+one last spite. My brother was bitten, and my brother fell into sin.
+Whether, as of old, the tempter was the woman, it is sure that, as of
+old, the eater was a man. I will not condemn you unheard, lest I incur
+reproach in my turn. But our order is in peril; the enemy is abroad,
+with Envy, Hatred, and Malice barking on their leashes. What can the
+poor sheep do but scatter before the wolves? Fra Battista, his penance
+duly done, must leave Verona; and you, my sister, must do penance, that
+God be not mocked, nor the Veronese upraised to mock Him."</p>
+
+<p>Of this solemn appeal, Vanna, to all seeming, understood not one word.
+True, she blushed a little, but that was because a prior was talking to
+her: her honest grey eyes were quite untroubled, her smile as tender as
+ever. She spoke as one deprecating temerity&mdash;that she should speak at
+all to so great a man&mdash;and by no means any judgment.</p>
+
+<p>"I am only a poor girl, reverend prior," said she, "most ignorant and
+thick-witted. Pray, what have I and my baby to do with these high
+matters of Fra Battista's error?"</p>
+
+<p>The prior grew angry. "Tush, my woman," he grunted, "I beg you to drop
+the artless. It is out of place here. Let me look at the youngster."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes, mistress, let us see the child," said Fra Corinto, who
+croaked like a nightingale in June.</p>
+
+<p>Vanna moved forward on a light foot. "Willingly, reverend fathers," said
+she. "He is a fine child, they all say, and reputed the image of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+father." A sublime utterance, full of humoursome matter, if it had been
+a time for humours.</p>
+
+<p>But it was not. La Testolina could not contain her virtuous
+indignation&mdash;for who is so transcendently righteous as your rascal for
+once in the right?</p>
+
+<p>"Hey, woman!" she cried shrilly, "what grossness is this? Do you think
+the whole city don't know about you?"</p>
+
+<p>Vanna turned quivering. "And what is it that the whole city knows but
+does not say, if you please?"</p>
+
+<p>The prior wagged helplessly his hands. Like Pilate, he would have washed
+off the business if he could. He looked at the two women. Eh, by the
+Lord! there would be a scene. But the whole thing was too impudent a
+fraud: there must be an end of it. He caught Fra Corinto's eyes and
+raised his brows. Fra Corinto was his jackal&mdash;here was his cue. He went
+swiftly to the door, set it open, came back and caught Vanna roughly by
+the shoulder. He turned her shocked face to the open door, and his dry
+voice grated horribly upon her ears.</p>
+
+<p>"Out with you, piece!" was what he said; and Vanna reeled.</p>
+
+<p>For a full minute she gaped at him for a meaning; his face taught the
+force of his words only too well. She sobbed, threw up her high head,
+bent it, like Jesus, for the cross, and fled.</p>
+
+<p>The old porter leered by his open gates. "He! he! They are all outside,"
+he chuckled&mdash;"Magpies and Dusty-hoods, Parvuses, Minors and Minims,
+Benets, and Austins, every cowl in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>Verona! Come along, my handsome
+girl, you must move briskish this day!"</p>
+
+<p>She heard the hoarse muttering of the men, and, a worse poison for good
+ears, the shrill venom of the women. Out of the gates she blindly went,
+and all the pack opened their music upon her. Stones flew, but words
+flew faster and stuck more deep. The mob, as she blundered through the
+streets, shuffling, gasping, stumbling at her caught gown, dry-eyed,
+open-mouthed, panting her terror, her bewilderment, her shame and
+amaze&mdash;the mob, I say, dizzied about her like a cloud of wasps; yet they
+had in them what wasps have not&mdash;voices primed by hatred to bay her mad.
+There was no longer any doubt for her: the pittanciar's word (which had
+not been "piece") was tossed from pavement to pavement, from balcony to
+balcony, out at every open door, shot like slops from every leaning
+casement, and hissed in her ears as it flew. It was a mad race. The
+Franciscans tucked up their frocks and discarded stones, that they might
+run and shout the more freely. The Dominicans soon tired: their end was
+served. The cloistered orders were out of condition; the secular clergy
+came to weary of what was, after all, but a matter for the mendicants.
+The common people, however, had the game well in hand. They headed her
+off the narrow streets, where safety might have been, and kept her to
+the Lung' Adige. Round the great S the river makes she battled her blind
+way, trying for nothing, with wits for nothing, without hope, or
+understanding, or thought. She ran, a hunted woman, straight before her,
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> at last shook off the last of her pursuers by San Zeno. Stumbling
+headlong into a little pine-wood beyond the gates, she fell, swooned,
+and forgot.</p>
+
+<p>It was near dark when she opened her loaded eyes&mdash;that is, there was no
+moon, but a great concourse of stars, which kept the night as a long
+time of dusk. The baby was awake, too, groping for food and whimpering a
+little. She sat up to supply him: though in that act her brain swam, it
+is probable the duty saved her. Fearing to faint again, she dared not
+allow herself to think; for children must be fed though their mothers
+are stoned from the gates. Vanna nursed him till he dropped asleep, and
+sat on with her thoughts and troubles. Happily for her, he had turned
+these to other roads than the Lung' Adige. She knew that if he was to be
+fed again she must feed also.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h3>THE MIRACLE OF THE PEACH-TREE</h3>
+
+<p>Directly you were outside the Porta San Zeno the peach-trees began&mdash;acre
+by acre of bent trunks, whose long branches, tied at the top, took
+shapes of blown candle-flames: beyond these was an open waste of bents
+and juniper scrub, which afforded certain eatage for goats.</p>
+
+<p>Here three herd-boys, Luca, Biagio, and Astorre, simple brown-skinned
+souls, watched their flocks all the summer night, sleeping, waking to
+play pranks with each other, whining endless doggerel, praying at every
+scare, and swearing at every reassurance. Simple puppyish folk though
+they were, Madonna of the Peach-Tree chose them to witness her epiphany.</p>
+
+<p>It was a very still night, of wonderful star-shine, but without a moon.
+The stars were so thickly spread, so clear and hot, that there was light
+enough for the lads to see each other's faces, the rough shapes of each
+other. It was light enough to notice how the square belfry of San Zeno
+cut a wedge of black into the spangled blue vault. Sheer through the
+Milky Way it ploughed a broad furrow, which ended in a ragged edge. You
+would never have seen that if it had not been a clear night.</p>
+
+<p>Still also it was. You heard the cropping of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> the goats, the jaws' champ
+when they chewed the crisp leaves; the flicker of the bats' wings. In
+the marsh, half a mile away, the chorus of frogs, when it swelled up,
+drowned all nearer noise; but when it broke off suddenly, those others
+resumed their hold upon the stillness. It was a breathless night of
+suspense. Anything might happen on such a night.</p>
+
+<p>Luca, Biagio, and Astorre, under the spell of this marvellous night, lay
+on their stomachs alert for alarms. A heavy-wheeling white owl had come
+by with a swish, and Biagio had called aloud to Madonna in his agony.
+Astorre had crossed himself over and over again: this was the Angel of
+Death cruising abroad on the hunt for goats or goat-herds; but "No, no!"
+cried Luca, eldest of the three, "the wings are too short, friends. That
+is a fluffy new soul just let loose. She knows not the way, you see. Let
+us pray for her. There are devils abroad on such close nights as this."</p>
+
+<p>Pray they did, with a will, "Ave Maria," "O maris Stella," and half the
+Paternoster, when Biagio burst into a guffaw, and gave Luca a push which
+sent Astorre down.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, 'tis only a screech-owl, you fools!" he cried, though the sound of
+his own voice made him falter; "an old mouse-teaser," he went on in a
+much lower voice. "Who's afraid?"</p>
+
+<p>A black and white cat making a pounce had sent hearts to mouths after
+this: though they found her out before they had got to "Dominus tecum,"
+she left them all in a quiver. It had been a cat, but it might have been
+the devil. Then, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>before the bristles had folded down on their backs,
+they rose up again, and the hair of their heads became rigid as quills.
+Over the brow of a little hill, through the peach-trees (which bowed
+their spiry heads to her as she walked), came quietly a tall white Lady
+in a dark cloak. Hey! powers of earth and air, but this was not to be
+doubted! Evenly forward she came, without a footfall, without a rustle
+or the crackling of a twig, without so much as kneeing her skirt&mdash;stood
+before them so nearly that they saw the pale oval of her face, and said
+in a voice like a muffled bell, "I am hungry, my friends; have you any
+meat?" She had a face like the moon, and great round eyes; within her
+cloak, on the bosom of her white dress, she held a man-child. He, they
+passed their sacred word, lifted in his mother's arms and turned
+open-handed towards them. Luca, Biagio, and Astorre, goat-herds all and
+honest lads, fell on their faces with one accord; with one voice they
+cried, "Madonna, Madonna, Madonna! pray for us sinners!"</p>
+
+<p>But again the Lady spoke in her gentle tones. "I am very hungry, and my
+child is hungry. Have you nothing to give me?" So then Luca kicked the
+prone Biagio, and Biagio's heel nicked Astorre on the shin. But it was
+Luca, as became the eldest, who got up first, all the same; and as soon
+as he was on his feet the others followed him. Luca took his cap off,
+Biagio saw the act and followed it. Astorre, who dared not lift his
+eyes, and was so busy making crosses on himself that he had no hands to
+spare, kept his on till Luca nudged Biagio, and Biagio cuffed him
+soundly, saying, "Uncover, cow-face."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span></p><p>Then Luca on his knees made an offering of cheese and black bread to
+the Lady. They saw the gleam of her white hand as she stretched it out
+to take the victual. That hand shone like agate in the dark. They saw
+her eat, sitting very straight and noble upon a tussock of bents.
+Astorre whispered to Biagio, Biagio consulted with Luca for a few
+anxious moments, and communicated again with Astorre. Astorre jumped up
+and scuttled away into the dark. Presently he came back, bearing
+something in his two hands. The three shock-heads inspected his burden;
+there was much whispering, some contention, almost a scuffle. The truth
+was, that Biagio wanted to take the thing from Astorre, and that Luca
+would not allow it. Luca was the eldest and wanted to take it himself.
+Astorre was in tears. "<i>Cristo amore!</i>" he blubbered, "you will spill
+the milk between you. I thought of it all by myself. Let go, Biagio; let
+go, Luca!" So they whispered and tussled, pulling three different ways.
+The Lady's voice broke over them like silver rain. "Let him who thought
+of the kind act give me the milk," she said; so young Astorre on his
+knees handed her the horn cup, and through the cracks of his fingers
+watched her drink every drop.</p>
+
+<p>That done, the cup returned with a smile piercingly sweet, the Lady
+rose. Saints on thrones, how tall she was! "The <i>bimbo</i> will thank you
+for this to-morrow, as I do now," said she. "Goodnight, my friends, and
+may the good God have mercy upon all souls!" She turned to go the way
+she had come, but Astorre, covering his eyes with one hand, crept
+forward on three legs (as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> you might say) and plucked the hem of her
+robe up, and kissed it. She stooped to lay a hand upon his head. "Never
+kiss my robe, Astorre," said she&mdash;and how under Heaven did she know his
+name if she were not <i>what she was</i>?&mdash;"never kiss my robe, but get up
+and let me kiss you." Well of Truth! to think of it! Up gets Astorre,
+shaking like a nun in a fit, and the Lady bent over him and, as sure as
+you are you, kissed his forehead. Astorre told his village next day as
+they sat round him in a ring, and he on the wellhead as plain to be seen
+as this paper, that he felt at that moment as if two rose-leaves had
+dropped from heaven upon his forehead. Slowly then, very slowly and
+smoothly (as they report), did the Lady move away towards the
+peach-trees whence she had come. In the half light there was&mdash;for by
+this it was the hour before dawn&mdash;they saw her take a peach from one of
+the trees. She stayed to eat it. Then she walked over the crest of the
+orchard and disappeared. As soon as they dared, when the light had come,
+they looked for her over that same crest, but could see nothing
+whatever. With pale, serious faces the three youths regarded each other.
+There was no doubt as to what had happened&mdash;a miracle! a miracle!</p>
+
+<p>With one consent then&mdash;since this was plainly a Church affair&mdash;they ran
+to their parish priest, Don Gasparo. He got the whole story at last;
+nothing could shake them; no detail was wanting. Thus it was: the
+Blessed Virgin, carrying in her arms the Santissimo Bambino Ges&ugrave;, had
+come through the peach-trees, asked for and eaten of their food, prayed
+for them aloud to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> Messer Domeneddio himself, and kissed Astorre on the
+forehead. As they were on their knees, she walked away, stopped, took a
+peach, ate it, walked on, vanished&mdash;<i>ecco</i>! The curate rubbed his head,
+and tried another boy. Useless: the story was the same. Third boy, same
+story. He tucked up his cassock with decision, took his biretta and
+walking-staff, and said to the three goat-herds:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"My lads, all this is matter of miracle. I do not deny its truth&mdash;God
+forbid it in a simple man such as I am. But I do certainly ask you to
+lead me to the scene of your labours."</p>
+
+<p>The boys needed no second asking: off they all set. The curate went over
+every inch of the ground. Here lay Luca, Biagio, and Astorre; the belfry
+of San Zeno was in such and such a direction, the peach-trees in such
+and such. Good: there they were. What next? According to their account,
+Madonna had come thus and thus. The good curate bundled off to spy for
+footprints in the orchard. Marvel! there were none. This made him look
+very grave; for if she made no earthly footprints, she could have no
+earthly feet. Next he must see by what way she had gone. She left them
+kneeling here, said they, went towards the peach-garden, stayed by a
+certain tree (which they pointed out), plucked a peach from the very top
+of it&mdash;this they swore to, though the tree was near fourteen feet
+high&mdash;stood while she ate it, and went over the brow of the rising
+ground. Here was detail enough, it is to be hoped. The curate nosed it
+out like a slot-hound; he paced the track himself from the scrub<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> to the
+peach-tree, and stood under this last gazing to its top, from there to
+its roots; he shook his head many times, stroked his chin a few: then
+with a broken cry he made a pounce and picked up&mdash;a peach-stone! After
+this to doubt would have been childish; as a fact he had no more than
+the boys.</p>
+
+<p>"My children," said he, "we are here face to face with a great mystery.
+It is plain that Messer Domeneddio hath designs upon this hamlet, of
+which we, His worms, have no conception. You, my dear sons, He hath
+chosen to be workers for His purpose, which we cannot be very far wrong
+in supposing to be the building of an oratory or tabernacle to hold this
+unspeakable relic. That erection must be our immediate, anxious care.
+Meantime I will place the relic in the pyx of our Lady's altar, and mark
+the day in our calendar for perpetual remembrance. I shall not fail to
+communicate with his holiness the bishop. Who knows what may be the end
+of this?"</p>
+
+<p>He was as good as his word. A procession was formed in no time&mdash;children
+carrying their rosaries and bunches of flowers, three banners, the whole
+village with a candle apiece; next Luca, Biagio, and Astorre with larger
+candles&mdash;half a pound weight each at the least; then four men to hold up
+a canopy, below which came the good curate himself with the relic on a
+cushion.</p>
+
+<p>It was deposited with great reverence in the place devoted, having been
+drenched with incense. There was a solemn mass. After which things the
+curate thought himself at liberty to ruffle into Verona with his news.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE VISITATION OF THE GOLDEN FISH</h3>
+
+<p>When a beast of chase&mdash;hart-royal, bear, or wolf&mdash;has been bayed and
+broken up, the least worthy parts are thrown to the curs which always
+come in at the heels of the pack. So it is with a kingly seat: the best
+of the meats, after the great officers of the household have feasted, go
+to the dependants of these; the peelings and guttings, the scum and
+scour of the broth, are flung farther, to the parasites of the
+parasites, the ticks on ticks' backs. Round about the Castle of Verona,
+where Can Grande II. misused the justice which his forefathers had set
+up, lay the houses of his courtiers; beyond them the lodgings of the
+grooms; beyond them again, down to the river's brink, were the stews and
+cabins and unholy dens, whose office was to be lower than the lowest,
+that there might still be degrees for the gentlemen of gentlemen's
+gentlemen. And since even cockroaches must drink, in this fungus-bed of
+misery there flourished a rather infamous tavern by the sale of <i>vino
+nostrano</i>, black and sour, of certain sausages, black also and nameless,
+speckled with white lumps, and of other wares whom to name were to
+expose. This was the tavern of the Golden Fish.</p>
+
+<p>On the evening of the day of the Translation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> of the Peach-stone, this
+tavern was full to suffocation. Stefano, the purple-faced host, in shirt
+and breeches, stood dealing the liquor from a tub. Two outlaws lay under
+the benches, partly for fear of a visit from the watch, partly because,
+having already fallen there once, they feared to fall there again if
+they rose. In one hand each held his knife, in the other his empty mug.
+Two ladies, intimates of theirs, Robaccia and Crucciacorda, sat
+immediately above them, with petticoats ready to make ambush the moment
+a staff should rattle at the door; round the table half a dozen shabby
+rogues bickered over their cards; Picagente, the hairy brigand, lay
+snoring across the threshold, and his dog on him; on a barrel in a
+corner a gigantic shepherd in leather, with bandaged legs and a patch
+over one eye, shut the other eye while he roared a hymn to Bacchus at
+the top stretch of his lungs. The oil-lamp flickered, flared, and
+gloomed, half drowned in the fumes of wine. A smell of wicked bodies,
+foul clothes, drink, and bad language made the air well-nigh solid. The
+hour was at the stroke of ten; outside the streets seemed asleep.</p>
+
+<p>In the middle of the uproar Stefano the host looked up sharply,
+listening.</p>
+
+<p>"Stop your devil's ferment, Malabocca!" he thundered at the shepherd;
+"stop it, or I'll split your crown."</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>"Bacco trionfante,</div>
+<div>Amante e spumante,</div>
+<div>Evviva l'ubbriacchezza!"</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>roared Malabocca, screwing up his eye.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span></p><p>Stefano brought down a mug full of wine upon his pate, which gave him a
+red baptism.</p>
+
+<p>"Mum, you blockhead, mum!" said his host "There is a stir outside the
+door I tell you!"</p>
+
+<p>The shepherd grew sober in a moment.</p>
+
+<p>There was a brief scramble in the room&mdash;then silence. The ladies'
+petticoats went farther than they were ever intended to go; Picagente
+rolled over and over till he reached cover under the table; the cards
+were hidden, all the players' heads buried in their elbows. Stefano blew
+out the light. Then they heard distinctly a fluttering knock at the
+door, timid but continuous.</p>
+
+<p>Feigning a yawn, Stefano growled, "Who's there at this hour?"</p>
+
+<p>The answer came in a woman's voice, saying, "Open, open, in the name of
+high God." It brought every head into the air again, but hushed every
+breath.</p>
+
+<p>The shepherd broke the silence with a groan. He brought his hand
+splashing on to his wet head, then fell to his knees and began to
+confess his sins.</p>
+
+<p>"My fault, my fault, my exceeding great fault! O Mary! O Jesus! <i>O nobis
+peccatoribus!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Thus the shepherd, voicing the suspicions of the rest. So he became
+their prophet as well as their priest. He towered in the room.</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you, comrades, that the hour of our visitation is come. Not Can
+Grande and his hounds are hunting us this night; not the tumbril, the
+branding-irons, nor the cart's tail, are for us; but the pains of death,
+the fire eternal, the untirable worm, the trumpet of the Last Things!
+Who comes knocking in high God's name? Who saith<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> 'Open'?&mdash;I will tell
+you: it is She who last night lit upon my village and my own sister's
+son. Eh! bodies of all dogs, what will become of us sinners?" Here the
+shepherd beat the drum of his breast as a signal before he fell flat on
+the floor.</p>
+
+<p>From behind his wailful voice the gentle knocking was heard running on.
+It had never ceased; it was insistent! Crossing himself desperately,
+Stefano slid back the bolts, then paused, then turned the key, then
+paused again to breathe hard, his hand upon the latch. He threw his head
+forward with a gesture of abandonment to what must be, flung wide the
+door, and dropped upon his two knees.</p>
+
+<p>Against a mild radiance, softer than any lamp could shed, was a tall
+shrouded woman's figure. They saw the round of her cloaked head, they
+saw the white stream of her under-robe run from a peak at her bosom in a
+broadening path to her feet. They saw the pure grey moon of her face,
+guessed by the dark rings where her eyes should be, watched with quicker
+awe the slow movement of her arms, lifted their own to what she held up,
+and to the running under-current of the two sobbing drabs muttered in
+one voice their remembered adoration.</p>
+
+<p>The tall shepherd rose up by the help of the table, swayed and spoke. No
+one knew his voice again, hollow as it was like the sea-grumble.</p>
+
+<p>"O Holiest, O Rose, O Stem of Sharon, O Tree of Carmel!" said he. "What
+wouldest thou with us sinners?"</p>
+
+<p>And the woman at the door said, "My friends,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> I have no roof to my head;
+will you take me in? I am hungry; have you no meat for my child and me?"</p>
+
+<p>The host in Stefano jogged the sinner to speak. "Surely, surely, sweet
+Lady! Surely, surely. I entreat your Graciousness to enter, to step in,
+to accommodate, to sit down, to be pleased to be easy, to&mdash;to&mdash;to&mdash;"
+inspiration failed him&mdash;"to sit down, in short," was his lame
+conclusion. His sweat (as he said next day) would have blinded any other
+man.</p>
+
+<p>Through the backing ranks of the scared company&mdash;Robaccia leaning face
+to the wall, sobbing her heart out; Picagente, the hairy brigand,
+breathing short and hard; the shepherd, glorified, exalted, bursting
+with prophecy; two thieves at their prayers and a wanton taking the
+words from them&mdash;through such an assembly the Lady of the Peach-Tree
+(who else, pray?) walked to the table. A soft grey light from without
+filled the room; there was no need of a lamp, nor did any eye then on
+watch fail to see all that followed. Bread and wine were served by
+Stefano on bent knee; bread and wine (but sparingly) did the Lady eat
+from cup and platter. That cup, that platter, encased in gold leaves and
+crusted with turquoise, are to this day in the Treasury. Crutches have
+been cast before them, hearts innumerable burn about them. When she had
+finished she sat a little while with her white cheek against her hand,
+whispering words in an unknown tongue (they said, who knew no baby
+language) to the child on her lap. He lifted up a little hand, and, "Eh,
+my son, my son," she said, "wilt thou take<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> of me?" Then she gave him
+the breast, while not a soul said anything but prayers for half an hour.</p>
+
+<p>When the child slept the Lady folded up her dress, covered him with her
+cloak, and rose up in their midst.</p>
+
+<p>"Only the poor love the poor," said she, in those low tones which all
+Verona came to know by heart, "and only they who have little to eat give
+to them that have less. My little son will bless you for your charity;
+and I, good friends, will pray my Master to reward you when He comes.
+<i>Addio, addio</i>, be with God."</p>
+
+<p>Then she would have gone and left them crying had not Robaccia, the
+blowsy wench and good-for-naught, wailed aloud and caught her by the
+knees.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, mother, mother!" whimpered this hardy rascal, "bless me a
+little more than the others, a very little more! I am bad&mdash;eh, God, I am
+vile, enough!&mdash;but I will never let thee go save thou kiss me."</p>
+
+<p>You could have heard the roomful of them catch breath together.
+Crucciacorda, the other woman, laughed horribly; the shepherd made a
+step forward to drag the slut away. But no! The light seemed to swell
+and grow towards that point where it threatens to be music, so charged
+with messages it is&mdash;it came undoubtedly from the heart of the Lady
+through her smile. For smile she did, as sweetly, as tenderly, as a
+breaking cloud. The sun of her smile was like a clean breath in the
+stivy den; and, behold, she took Robaccia by the hand and lifted her up,
+she <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>encircled her with a mothering arm, and drew her close to her own
+breast. Her lips touched the bad girl's cheek, lingered for a moment
+there, wistfully withdrew; and Madonna of the Peach-Tree, none staying
+her now, went out into the dead street, and was seen no more of that
+company.</p>
+
+<p>The sun at noon looked down upon Verona at peace, upon her citizens at
+their prayers. Never was such a scene in the stormy little city before.
+All the bells of all the churches pealed all day&mdash;with no lack of arms
+to pull them. Men and women ran to and fro kissing whom they met, with a
+"Save you, brother!" "Save you, sister! well met, well met!" The Grey
+Brethren, the Black Brethren, the White Brethren of Carmel, held hands,
+and confessed to each other as many sins as they had time to remember.
+Can Grande went unarmed about his own city, Bevilacqua unbarred his
+door, Giusti married his mistress, the bishop said his prayers. The
+cripples at the church doors had no need to whine. As for the tavern of
+the Golden Fish, it smelt of lavender and musk and bergamot the day
+through. At one time there were eight litters with their bearers, eleven
+stallions, trapped and emblazoned, held by eleven grooms in livery,
+outside its door. The ladies of the litters were in the room upon their
+knees; the knights of the horses, their great helmets on their backs,
+knelt in the kennel praying devoutly. The wail of "Dies Ir&aelig;" went down
+the Corso and up again, "Salve Regina" wavered over the sunny spaces of
+the Br&agrave;. In the amphitheatre, after an open-air mass, the
+Cardinal-Legate solemnly exposed the relics of last night's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>miracle,
+and a bodyguard of twenty noble youths, six chaplains, and a Benedictine
+abbot went to the suburb to escort into the city the curate with the
+Peach-stone. It was a glorious day, never to be forgotten in the annals
+of Verona. Charity and the open heart went side by side with compunction
+and the searching of the heart. Tears were shed and kissed away; kisses
+induced the fall of gentler tears. It might be stoutly questioned
+whether Verona held one unshriven soul, one sin unspoken, or one solace
+unawarded.</p>
+
+<p>It might be reasonably questioned, yet it must be denied. Within the
+walls of the friars of Mount Carmel were two uneasy spirits. Fra
+Sulpicio, the fat prior, was extended face downwards before the high
+altar; Fra Battista, the eloquent preacher, chewed his thumb in his
+cell. The pittanciar, on the other hand, was of the common mind. He was
+ambling down the Via Leoni with Brother Patricio of the Capuchins on one
+arm and Brother Martino of the Dominicans on the other, singing "In
+Exitu Israel" like a choir-boy. But the prior, who had half believed
+before, was sobbing his contrition into the pavement, and Fra Battista
+was losing faith in himself, the only faith he had.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>LAST CONSIDERATIONS OF CAN GRANDE II</h3>
+
+<p>You are not to suppose that the spectacle of Verona garbed in a gown of
+innocence, singing hymns and weaving chaplets of lilies, was to go
+unnoticed by the ruling power. Can Grande II. was lord of Verona, a most
+atrocious rascal, and one of many; but, like his famous ancestor and
+namesake, he had a gibing tongue, which was evidence of a scrutiny
+tolerably cool of the shifts of human nature. Human nature, he had
+observed, must needs account to itself for itself. If it met with what
+it did not understand, it was prompt to state the problem in a phrase
+which it could not explain. The simplicity of the plan was as little to
+be denied as its convenience was obvious. It was thus that Can Grande
+II. understood the emotions of Verona; it was thus, indeed, that he
+himself, confronted with statements and an explanation which did not
+satisfy him, accounted to himself, like any mother's son of his lieges.
+He explained their explanation, but only by another inexplicable
+formula. The energy with which he expounded his own view to those about
+him betrayed, perhaps, a lurking uneasiness in the burly tyrant.</p>
+
+<p>"Pooh, my good lord," said he to the bishop, who had come full of the
+day's doings and night's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> report, "don't you know your own flock better
+than this? Did you ever hear a man with a broken limb attribute his
+mishap to other than Domeneddio? However drunk he may have been, however
+absurdly in a hurry&mdash;act of God! If it thunder and lighten of a summer
+night, if it turn the milk&mdash;a judgment! Luckily Monsignore has broad
+shoulders by all accounts; <i>per Bacco!</i>&mdash;He had need. Now then, look at
+this case. A belated woman with a baby stumbles upon a company of
+shepherds all in the twittering dark. Hearts jump to mouths, flesh
+creeps, hairs stand tiptoe&mdash;Madonna, of course! Whom else could they
+call her, pray? They don't know the woman: name her they must. Well! Who
+is there they don't know whose name comes readiest to the tongue?
+Madonna, of course. Good: <i>Ecco Madonna!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>This was very eloquently reasoned, but the bishop shook his head. "It
+was not a brace of goat-herds last night, Excellency, but a roomful of
+brigands and their trulls in the Golden Fish. The worst company in
+Verona, Excellency&mdash;the most brazen, the most case-hardened. But the
+story is the same from their mouths as from the lads'; not a detail is
+wanting; not one point gives the lie to another. Excellency, I would bow
+to your wit in any case but this. The affair is inexplicable short of a
+miracle."</p>
+
+<p>Can Grande knit his black brows; he objected to be crossed, and the more
+so when he had a sneaking thought that he was rightly crossed.</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to see my Lady this night with my own eyes, bishop," said
+he.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p><p>"Hey, Excellency," cried the other, "there are many devout souls in the
+same case."</p>
+
+<p>Can Grande pished. "Devout jellyfish," he grunted; and then&mdash;"She seems
+to haunt one quarter, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is so, Excellency, save that yesterday she must have passed through
+the Porta San Zeno unseen of the guard."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you interrogated the guard?" asked the tyrant, sharply.</p>
+
+<p>"It was done, Highness. Nothing entered between Compline and Prime but a
+couple of bullock-carts and a cavalcade of merchants from Brescia."</p>
+
+<p>"What was in the bullock-carts, bishop?"</p>
+
+<p>"Birch-bark, Excellency, for the yards."</p>
+
+<p>"H'm!" was all Can Grande had to say to this.</p>
+
+<p>He changed the conversation. "I have had the warden of the Minorites and
+the provincial of the Dominicans here this morning," he said, "about
+that accursed business of the rag-picker's wife. It is another example
+of what I told you just now, that these people attribute what they
+cannot understand to persons they can only dream about. They put down
+the whole of your miracles to a special reward for their zeal in
+hounding down the Carmelite and his mistress. They want the order
+expelled; I think they would like the house razed and the church washed
+out with holy water, or Fra Battista's blood&mdash;the latter for choice.
+Now, I cannot pull down religious houses, lord of Verona though I be,
+because a herd of frightened peasants have gone capering over the city
+singing, 'Salve festa dies.' I must<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> really do the parties the honour of
+an interview before I draw the sword. Let me be sure which back I am
+going to score before I begin to carve. You had better bring the prior
+and Fra Lancillotto-Battista to me, and if you can collect the young
+woman and her brat, so much the better."</p>
+
+<p>"Alas! Excellency, I fear the young woman is in pieces," said the
+bishop. "She has never been heard of since the day of her expulsion."</p>
+
+<p>The advice, however, was good, the judgment good enough; but before it
+could be followed a stroke more telling than any Can Grande's sword
+could have made was wrought by Madonna of the Peach-Tree.</p>
+
+<p>On the night of that same day Can Grande was sitting in the palace with
+two chosen companions, as dare-devil as himself, waiting the hour of an
+assignation. It was about ten o'clock: at half-past the hour they were
+to go out cloaked into the streets, bent upon the lifting of a decent
+burgess's wife from her bed. Hence they were not in the castle, which is
+near San Zeno, but in the Della Scala Palace, in the very heart of the
+city. The two accomplices were Baldo Baldinanza, a grey villain, and
+young Francesco della Rocca Rossa. All three were armed with swords and
+daggers; the cloaks lay with the masks on the table. A servant came to
+the door, knocked, and waited. Can Grande, who (to be just) feared no
+eye upon his goings, shouted him into the room.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, son of a pig," was his greeting, "and what is it now?"</p>
+
+<p>The fellow, whose teeth chattered in his head,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> announced a veiled lady,
+very tall, who would not be denied. Baldinanza, grizzled and scarred as
+he was, took a quick breath and glanced at Rocca Rossa. The younger man
+was at no pains to conceal his emotions. His face ran the gamut from
+white to red, from red back again to white. It ended ashen. Neither
+looked at his master.</p>
+
+<p>"Let her in," said Can Grande; and each noticed how laboriously he
+spoke.</p>
+
+<p>The servant turned to obey: there in the doorway stood the Lady.</p>
+
+<p>Tall enough she was, her head seemingly about a foot from the cross-beam
+of the door. She was cloaked from crown to foot; nothing but the oval of
+her face, colourless white with lips very wan, and a droop to them
+inexpressibly sad, showed out of the dark column she made. The servant
+shrank into the passage and stayed there praying; of the three men at
+the table only one, Can Grande himself, had the spirit left to be
+courteous. He got up; the other two remained seated, Francesco with his
+face in his arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Madonna," began the tyrant; but she uncloaked her hand and put a finger
+to her sad lips.</p>
+
+<p>"I may not stay," she said, in a voice so weary that it drew tears to
+Baldinanza's wicked old eyes&mdash;"I may not stay; but I must warn you, Can
+Grande, before I go. Walk not in the streets this night, walk not by the
+Piazza, pass not the arched way; peril lies there. No sword shall help
+you, nor the royal seat you have,&mdash;enter it not. Now I have warned you;
+let me go."</p>
+
+<p>She put back her lifted hand under her cloak. Can Grande saw the round
+head of the Babe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> asleep. For five minutes after her disappearance no
+one spoke.</p>
+
+<p>Francesco was the first. He groaned, "God have mercy upon me a sinner,"
+between his hands. Then Baldinanza began to swear by all devils in
+Christendom and Jewry, not blasphemously, but in sheer desperate search
+for a little courage. Can Grande shook his head like a water-clogged
+hound, as if to get the ring of that hollow voice out of his ears. The
+first to rise was the eldest of the three. His eyes were very bright,
+and you could see the long scar plainly shining on his cheek.</p>
+
+<p>"I am a sinner too," said he, "but this night I will sleep clean." He
+made to go.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you desert me, comrade?" Can Grande asked.</p>
+
+<p>The old dog turned upon his master.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother of Pity!" he said in a whisper, "you are never going after
+this?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am going, good sir. What of you?" Baldinanza blinked hard. "I am your
+servant, Can Grande," he said shortly; "where you go I follow. That is
+how I read the Book of the Law."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Checco," the tyrant went on, turning to the youngster still at
+the table, "what of you?"</p>
+
+<p>Francesco threw up his arms. "Never, Excellency, never!" he groaned in
+his anguish. "I dare not, I dare not!" He concealed neither his tears,
+nor his despair, nor his bodily fear.</p>
+
+<p>Can Grande shrugged. "Are you ready, Ubaldo?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Baldinanza bowed his head. The two men<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> cloaked and masked themselves,
+and went out of the palace. The moon shone broad over the Piazza; it was
+a cold white night. They crossed at the farther corner, went up a few
+steps, and then were lost in the glooms of the arched way.</p>
+
+<p>They never came out alive. Six hired daggers hacked the life out of them
+and their hearts from their bodies. To this day the unwholesome place is
+called for a testimony the "Volto Barbaro," the horrid entry. So died in
+his sin Can Grande II., a man who feared nothing and won nothing but
+fear, and Can Signorio his son reigned in his stead. You might trust the
+cloth-white lackey and the stricken conscience of Francesco della Rocca
+Rossa to spread the news they had.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE REPROACHES</h3>
+
+<p>A scared city of blank casements, a city of citizens feverishly asking
+questions whose answers they knew beforehand, a city of swift feet and
+hushed voices, was Verona on the morrow of Can Grande's murder. They
+carried the two torn bodies covered with one sheet to Sant' Anastasia,
+and laid them there, not in state but just huddled out of sight, while
+the bishop and his canons sang a requiem, and "Dirige" and "Placebo"
+went whining about the timbers of the roof. Nobody mourned the man, yet
+he had his due. His yellow-skinned wife knelt at his feet; Can Signorio,
+the new tyrant, frozen rigid, armed in mail, knelt at his head. The
+mercenaries held the nave, the bodyguard the door, archers lounged in
+the Piazza. All this parade of force was mere superfluity; Verona had no
+desire to revolt. The Veronese were for rending their hearts and not
+their rulers that day.</p>
+
+<p>In the afternoon the show of a trial-at-law was made. The depositions of
+the lackey, of Rocca Rossa, of the finders of the murdered, and the
+hunters for the murderers, were taken and recorded by the <i>Podest&agrave;</i> in
+the presence of the council. After that the six unknown dastards<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> were
+publicly condemned to death by the civil power from the loggia of the
+palace, and as publicly excommunicated by the bishop from the steps of
+the cathedral. It was felt on all hands that on this occasion the bishop
+had wielded the heavier arm: at least, in the absence of the criminals,
+he had brought his chances level. But what gave him most weight was that
+which had made the testimony of Francesco and the lackey overshadow
+every event of a week full of events&mdash;the interposition of Madonna of
+the Peach-Tree. Not a soul in the city was left to doubt; it might be
+said that not a soul was left to save, if faith can save you. The
+churches were packed from dawn to dark, not an altar in a chapel went
+bare of a mass. There were not enough of them. Altars were set up in the
+squares, and the street-ends blocked by a kneeling, bowing, weeping,
+adoring crowd. The bishop spoke the common mind when at Vespers that
+night he gave notice that he should go forthwith to purge the Carmelite
+church of the stain upon it, "at the request of my reverend brother the
+Prior Provincial of the Order." He set out then and there in solemn
+procession of the whole cathedral chapter. Rank formed on rank behind
+him till his ordered following trailed across Verona like a host.</p>
+
+<p>Now, although, as it has been said, and truly said, there was no soul in
+the city who doubted, there was one soul very much in doubt. That was
+Fra Battista's. The offer of purgation had come in frenzy from the lips
+of his prior; by its acceptance Fra Battista saw himself driven to one
+of two courses. He must destroy his reputation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> for obedience to
+heavenly commands which it had been rank heresy in him to overlook, or
+that other reputation he had won, for being a desperate lover, upon
+which he shrewdly surmised some of his fame depended. He may have been
+right about that&mdash;I am not here to defend him. If he admitted his guilt,
+he would be unfrocked; he would show like a chanticleer stripped of his
+hackles before his hens. If he denied it, he could never preach to the
+women again. Admit it? Be degraded? Eh, that would be a nasty shift!
+Deny it? Oh, preposterous! The whole day he battled with himself, voice
+crying against voice, without result. Observe, it was a mere case of
+expediency: he had no thought to own a fault or repudiate a slander&mdash;the
+fellow had no conscience at all. Expediency, indeed, was his conscience,
+his attention to it the ladder whereby he hoped to climb to the only
+heaven he knew. No imagination had he, but very tender senses.
+Applause&mdash;the hushed church, the following eyes, the sobered mouths, a
+sob in the breath&mdash;stood him for glory. He had worked for this, and, by
+the Lord! he had won it. And now he must lose it. Eh, never, never!
+Stated thus, he knew the issue of his battle. He knew he could not give
+up these things&mdash;eye-service, lip-service, heart-service&mdash;of which he
+had supped so thirstily. Rather be unfrocked, driven out of the city,
+reviled, and spit upon, than admit such a shame as that other: to prove
+himself a vapourer before his slaves, to be pricked like a bulging
+bladder, slit open like a rotten bag&mdash;God of the love of women, never,
+never in life! The other course, then? He pictured himself,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> the tall
+and comely youth, standing up alone before the grim assembly of elders,
+flinty old men who knew nothing of my Lord Amor, how he rides afield in
+a rose-coloured garment, throwing a flower and a dart to boy or girl as
+he goes. He saw a dewy-eyed Battista owning himself Love's priest. The
+women called him Sebastian for his beauty. A Sebastian he was, <i>per
+Dio!</i> stuck all over with Amor's fiery darts. Like Sebastian, by his
+persecutors he would be stripped bare; like that martyr's enemies, they
+would wound his tender flesh; like Sebastian he would endure, casting
+his eyes upwards; and like Sebastian he would infallibly be wept by the
+women.</p>
+
+<p>If women will weep for you they will bleed for you; the fount of tears
+feeds a river as well as betrays a hidden well. Good, then; good, then!
+He saw a future in all this. From the other spike of the dilemma he saw
+nothing but his impaling; in this case, if he was impaled, balm at least
+would be laid upon his wounds. Fra Battista determined to brazen it out
+before Verona.</p>
+
+<p>They lit the tapers in the sanctuary betimes; and then all the brethren
+in their hoods sat in choir awaiting the bishop. With him and his clergy
+should come the reverend prior. Fra Battista was to stand on the
+rood-step to make his purgation. He would be backed by the light. So
+much of grace they would do him, that he should face a sea of dark, and
+be seen but in outline by it.</p>
+
+<p>The bishop's procession, long announced by the indefinable hum a great
+crowd breeds, swept up the nave with a slippering of countless feet.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+The bishop in purple, his canons in scarlet, his cross-bearer, his
+chaplains and singing-men, the bearer of his mitre, his ring on a
+cushion; after these the archdeacon and his chaplains, the clergy of the
+city, heads of religious orders, representatives of the civil arm, Can
+Signorio with the officers of his household; finally, the silent, eager
+people, edging past each other, whispering, craning their heads to see
+what there was and what there was not to be seen. So came Verona in a
+multitude to the great business of Fra Battista and the rag-picker's
+wife, in reality thrilling with but one thought: Madonna of the
+Peach-Tree was in the city, for any waking soul to see!</p>
+
+<p>After the penitential psalms, a litany, and the office appointed, the
+bishop stood with his back to the altar, and spoke <i>urbi et orbi</i> from
+the text, "God, who in divers times and in divers places," etc. I cannot
+do more than report the sum of his discourse, which was that, as it was
+plain these late marvels had some root in the hidden ways of men's
+hearts, so it behoved him as a father to lay all such ways bare. That
+for himself, if he might speak as a man only, he was conscious of no sin
+unpurged which the apparitions might condemn, and certainly (alas!) of
+no graces of his own which they could have been designed to reward. Let
+each speak for himself. If there was any man in that vast assembly
+unshriven, let him confess now what his fault was; so that instant
+prayer might be made to their glorious Visitant for forgiveness by
+intercession. If, on the other hand, there was some Christian virtue
+blossoming in secret, let them (brethren)<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> find it speedily out, that
+thanks might be given for mercies vouchsafed. It was noticed afterwards
+that the death by butchery of the feudal lord was passed by without a
+comment. There might have been reason for this in the circumstance that
+Can Grande II. had been warned of his sin, had nevertheless set out to
+commit it, and had died in the act, as it had been foretold. To discuss
+all this in the hearing of Can Signorio, his successor, might have been
+a task too delicate for the bishop. But I believe that the scent of the
+miraculous, which was all about him, was too much for him. He could nose
+out nothing beyond the line which that fragrance seemed to point. All
+his thoughts, with those of his auditors, were upon Madonna of the
+Peach-Tree, whom there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to connect with
+Fra Battista, his doings and undoings. No one detected this, so Can
+Grande may have been inspired. A great to-do, which no one had the
+rights of, was followed by mysterious appearances which no one pretended
+to understand. What more natural than that one mystery should be allowed
+to explain the other?</p>
+
+<p>The bishop having ended, the prior (who was very nervous) began. There
+were certainly foxes here and there in the vineyard, wild grapes on the
+vines as well as grapes. No community was so holy but that, through
+excess of zeal, over-inflamed by charity, it might nurture upon its
+bosom a fanged snake. Might he not allude to the detestable and
+never-enough-to-be-condemned sin of simony which, as they knew only too
+well, had fattened in the Dominican convent at B&mdash;&mdash;?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> What should he
+say of that Friar Minor, the famous preacher of S&mdash;&mdash;, who had been
+found dead of a surfeit of melons and white wine? Alas! he brought the
+taint of gluttony&mdash;a deadly sin&mdash;upon his order! Wonderful, then, would
+it be in such days as these if the most renowned of all orders and most
+venerable, that of Mount Carmel, should pass unscathed through the
+tempting fires! Not only wonderful, but in itself a snare. What a
+temptation to the sin of pride in the order! What a drawing on of others
+(too disposed already) to the sin of envy, to uncharitable speaking&mdash;ah,
+and to unlovely dealing! Let sin be owned, therefore, since men were
+born sinners; but let purgation be done, the wicked member plucked out,
+etc.</p>
+
+<p>He passed to the sin of Fra Battista&mdash;that promising young
+apostle&mdash;handled it soberly yet gingerly, hinted extenuating
+circumstances&mdash;the pride of life, young blood, the snares of women,
+Satan's favourite sitting-places, etc.&mdash;drew a tear or two from his own
+eyes and floods from La Testolina; and then called Fra Battista to come
+forth that he might purge himself or be purged by the canon law.</p>
+
+<p>Thus exhorted, Fra Battista, becomingly tonsured, delicately combed,
+with an aspect most meek and hands at a pretty droop, came demurely out
+of the friars' door into the full light of the chancel. To the bishop he
+bowed, to the altar he bent a knee, to his father in religion he bent
+both, to the hush in the nave he cast a glance of wistful appeal. It was
+truly aimed. They could see nothing of his face, nothing but the shape
+of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> him, yet the women were sure he made a wistful appeal. Many were
+affected; the anxiety to hear him was intense, the squeezing fearful. An
+enormous fish-seller from the Lago di Garda, who had come in express,
+leaned over La Testolina and ground a braized heel into her toes.
+"<i>Achi!</i>" whimpered the little laundress; but "Snakes of Purgatory!"
+said the other, "what's a toe more or less when Madonna is round the
+corner with a blessing for us in her maunch?"</p>
+
+<p>In a rapt silence, with no preface at all, Fra Battista made direct
+confession to all his gods (whether remote or throned within the
+sanctuary-rail) that he had committed the sin whereof he was accused. A
+perceptible shiver of sensation swept over the church, although
+everybody in it was sure, before he had uttered a word, what that word
+ought to be. Indeed he had never denied it; but not to deny is different
+from bold affirmation. The prior, whose avowal had also been tacit,
+looked pained: avowals are painful things. The bishop, more used to
+avowals, did his best to look shocked; the archdeacon (professionally
+enough) thought avowal the most indecent part of an indecent business.
+The Dominicans looked at each other, frankly delighted; the Friars Minor
+told each other what they had always said. What the people thought can
+only be guessed, for the nave was in darkness; but when Battista had
+made an end, a shuddering sigh came from a woman far down the church,
+and then stopped, hidden in some hasty new movement there which could
+not be accounted for. There seemed to be a stampede, a sudden rush to
+the side, the surging of some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> great unsuspected wave, which broke, as
+it were, in the midst of the throng, and washed an open space to right
+and left. Up in the choir, after the first surge of this wave (which
+made every heart beat), all ears heard the long-drawn following
+"Ah!"&mdash;not fear only, not expectation made real, but rather awe,
+expectation shown just. It began low and hollow, ran up to a hiss: then
+the silence was such that the cracking of a man's ankle-bone by the door
+sounded like a carter's whip to him upon the bishop's throne. In that
+deathly state the whole body of people remained breathless, waiting what
+was to ensue.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the dark, stealing (it appeared) from the middle of the nave and
+floating down the church upon a bodily silence, came a cold voice. Like
+a wind from the snow-mountains it came in a thin stream, before which
+Fra Battista shrivelled visibly.</p>
+
+<p>"O thou craven!" it said, "thou wicked man! what sin can be greater than
+thine? If thou hadst done this thing thou ownest to, it had gone better
+with thee than now, when thou standest a liar and boaster in a filthy
+cause. Wilt thou foul thyself, Battista, and think it honour? I tell
+thee that it was more tolerable for that stoned simple wretch than it
+shall be for thee; and it were better that men should go unsouled like
+the dogs, committing offence with their bodies, than souled horribly
+like thee, thou sinner of the mind, idolater of thine own image! Dost
+thou yet make slippery the ways of Mount Carmel, Battista? Dost thou yet
+hang the pearls which are the tears of Mary about thy neck? It shall be
+in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> such case that Carmel will be her holy hill no more, and those same
+pearls turned to leaden bulls to seal thee in Tophet. There is no mercy
+for the coward, and none for him that serves false gods. Go forth, thou
+groper after vainglory, kennel with the swine!"</p>
+
+<p>The voice ceased. Fra Battista, who had been rocking under its chill
+breath, fell with a thud. The bishop adored the altar; the
+rest&mdash;priests, monks, people alike&mdash;broke into "Salve Regina," so loud,
+so wild, the very church seemed to shake. At that time the west doors
+flung open of themselves, and a roaring wind swept round, disastrous to
+candles. A quick flicker of blue flame jagged across the nave; the
+thunder came instant, pealing, crackling, braying ruin, fading at last
+to a distant grumble; and then the rain. No one got home that night with
+a dry skin; but it was Madonna who had quenched the doubting of Fra
+Battista, and washed fragrant the memory of Vanna to whomsoever had
+loved her once. As her lovers in early days had been many, it follows
+that they all forgot in the delight of reminiscence any harsh judgments
+she had received.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE CROWNING PROOF</h3>
+
+<p>The week went its way without further miracle; but Verona had supped
+full of miracles, and had need to digest. The signs and wonders she had
+witnessed, as one soul, in the church of the Carmelites had been so
+astonishing that you will easily understand how all little differences
+between order and order were forgotten. The root of disturbance&mdash;Vanna
+and her baby, Fra Battista and his luxurious imaginings, Baldassare and
+his addition&mdash;were also forgotten. Baldassare was at Mantua, Vanna had
+been stoned to death ("martyred" was now the word)&mdash;all was well. Fra
+Battista had been quietly ridded the very next morning: unfrocked, he
+took the way of the Brenner and the mountains, and Veronese history
+knows nothing further certainly of him. It is thought he may have got so
+far as Prague, where at any rate a perfervid preacher called Baptist von
+Bern was burnt for heresy in the year 1389&mdash;a spreader of anabaptistical
+doctrines he was, Gospels of the Spirit, Philadelphianism, and what not.
+Everything settled down to routine: Can Signorio to tyranny and
+coquetting with Visconti of Milan (who finally swallowed him up), the
+bishop to accommodating the claims of God, the Pope, and his temporal
+lord, to those of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> salvation and his stomach; and in like manner did
+every person in this narrative after his kind.</p>
+
+<p>Then, on a bright morning in early September, old Baldassare came
+limping up the Ponte Navi with his pack on his back, paused a minute on
+the bridge, as his habit was, to look down on the busy laundresses by
+the water, spat twice, and so doing was observed, threw a cracked "Buon'
+giorno, La Testolina!" over the side, and went on his slow way to the
+Via Stella.</p>
+
+<p>It was still very early, but not so early that Vanna was not in her
+shop-door sewing and crooning to the baby on her lap. She heard his step
+the moment he rounded the bottom corner of the street, blushed prettily
+from neck to temples, caught up the child, and went out to meet her
+lord. Standing before him in her cool cotton gown, there was no sun in
+the dusky place but what her halo of hair made, no warmth but that of
+her welcoming mouth. Half shyly she stopped, holding up the baby for him
+to see: it was not for her to make advances, you must understand; but it
+needed no magic to make one believe that what a man's wife should be to
+a man that was young Monna Vanna to her rag-picker. Baldassare blinked
+and tried to look harassed; the next minute he had pinched Vanna's
+cheek. She put the baby into his wiry old arms&mdash;a very right move of
+hers.</p>
+
+<p>"Eh, <i>bambinaccio</i>," he muttered, highly pleased, "it is good to see
+thee! So thou art come out to meet thy old dad&mdash;thou and thy little
+rogue of a mother? Come, the pair of ye, and see what my pack has in
+store."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p><p>The baby crowed and bubbled, Vanna nested her arm closer in his ribs,
+and the trio went into the house.</p>
+
+<p>A keen shot from one eye sufficed to assure the old fellow that as well
+as a little beauty he had a domestic treasure to wife. The house was as
+fresh as her cheeks, as trim as her shape. "Now the saints be good to
+this city of Verona," said he, "as to me they have proved not amiss."
+This was great praise from Baldassare; his generosity gave it point.
+From his pack came a pair of earrings&mdash;wagging, tinkling affairs of
+silver and coral; next some portentous pins, shining globes like prickly
+pears; a coral and bells for Master Niccol&agrave;, and a <i>scaldino</i> of pierced
+brass for the adornment of the house. "Thank you, Baldassare," said
+Vanna to her blinking old master; then she kissed him. Before she knew
+where she was, before she could say, "Gi&agrave;!" he put his arm round her and
+whispered in her ear. Then she clung to him, sobbing, laughing,
+breathing quick; and the rest it were profanation to report.</p>
+
+<p>Verona rubbed its eyes as it came out yawning to its daily work. There
+was the open shop, ever the first in the street; there the padrone;
+there, by the manger of Bethlehem, were the padrona and the baby, whom
+they had last seen huddling from their stones. Vanna wore her colours
+that morning; she was rosy like the dawn, she was smiling, she had very
+bright eyes. But there was a happy greeting for man or wife who looked
+her way; and when La Testolina came peeping to behold the discomfiture
+of Baldassare, Vanna's gay looks found her out, and "Buon'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> giorno, La
+Testolina," came more cheerfully from her than it had come from her
+husband on the bridge. All the little woman could do was to squat upon
+the threshold at her friend's feet and pretend that she was troubled
+with spasms.</p>
+
+<p>The crowning proof remains to be told. As La Testolina (who blazed the
+story abroad) is reported to have said, you might have drummed the guard
+out with her heart-beats. Vanna, by way of weaning her baby, it seems,
+was tempting him with gobbets of peach from a wine-glass. She bit a
+corner from the peach and tendered it in her lips to the youngster on
+her lap. The baby (a vigorous child) made a snap at it like a trout at a
+fly, and a gulp so soon as he had it. The peach was hard, the morsel had
+many corners,&mdash;went down bristling, as it were. Cola had his first
+stomach-ache, was hurt, was miserable, prepared to howl. At that moment
+La Testolina happened to look at him: she stared, she gasped, she reeled
+against the door-post.</p>
+
+<p>"Hey, Mother of Jesus!" she cried; "look at the baby!"</p>
+
+<p>"It was a corner-piece, I'm afraid," said Vanna, with great calmness;
+"but the natural juices will thaw it."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, no! It is not that, woman," her friend went on feverishly&mdash;"it
+is not that! Look at his face, look at his face!"</p>
+
+<p>Vanna looked. "Well," she asked, "what of his face?"</p>
+
+<p>The <i>bambino</i>, to express his agony, was <i>grinning from ear to ear</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This was the last miracle wrought by Madonna of the Peach-Tree.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IPPOLITA_IN_THE_HILLS" id="IPPOLITA_IN_THE_HILLS"></a>IPPOLITA IN THE HILLS</h2>
+
+<h2><a name="BI" id="BI"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h3>THE GLORIOUS IPPOLITA</h3>
+
+<p>Almighty God, that supreme Architect, Who, alone among craftsmen, knows
+when to give and when to stay the rein, has chosen the Plain of Emilia
+to be, as it were, the garden of Italy, a garden set apart betwixt Alp
+and Apennine to be adorned within a garden; has filled it with every
+sort of fruit and herb and flowering tree; has watered it abundantly
+with noble rivers; neither stinted it of deep shade nor removed it too
+far from the timely stroke of the sun; has caused it, finally, to be
+graced here and enriched there with divers great and grave cities. Man,
+who has it not in him to be thrifty in so prodigal a midst, has here
+also thought it lawful to go free. Out of that lake of rustling leaves
+rise, like the masts of ships crowding a port, church towers, the
+belfries of pious convents, the domes and turrets of great buildings
+walled into cities. Among which, prized as they all are and honourably
+additioned,&mdash;Vicenza, Treviso, Mantua, Verona, Ferrara,&mdash;there is none
+more considerable than Padua, root of learning and grey cupolas, chosen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+to be the last resting-place of Antenor, King Priam's brother, and the
+first of Titus Livy.</p>
+
+<p>It is of Padua that I am now called upon to report certain matters which
+may seem strange to one who does not know her well: to the others,
+<i>verbum satis</i>. Whether it is their University (too famous, perhaps, for
+so quiet a place) or the suspiration of their greatest citizen which has
+kindled their wits; whether that cauldron of brick, the <i>Santo</i>,
+bubbling with silver domes, is the stem or flower of their exaltation;
+whether their seat at the head of a sun-steeped marsh (at whose mouth is
+Venice) hath itself unseated them; whether Petrarch set boiling what
+Saint Antony could not allay; what it was, how it was, who gave them the
+wrench, I know not&mdash;but the fact is that the people of Padua have been
+as freakish a race as any in Italy; at the mercy of any head but the
+aggregate's, pack-mules of a notion, galley-slaves of a whim, driven
+hither and thither in a herd, like those restless leaves (souls once)
+whose nearer sight first made Dante pitiful. Not that they, for their
+part, asked for pity or got it. Mostly they paid their tavern bills when
+the last cup had been drained and the last chorus led. When Ezzelin was
+master of the revels they paid in blood: that tower of his by the river
+is dark with it yet. Petrarch from his mountain-vineyard at Arqu&agrave; tipped
+them a brighter stave: they broke their hearts for pretty women and had
+every one the comfort of a swanlike end, since sonnets are a knack. With
+Antony they flagellated, with Carrara defended walls, with Gattemelata
+knocked them down. Then Venice took<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> what Padua could never keep; the
+Euganeans hailed on either side the Lion of Saint Mark; the Arts
+flourished; Squarcione cut out small-clothes and taught anatomy none the
+worse; Mantegna dreamed of Julius C&aelig;sar, smouldering while he dreamed;
+and Ippolita, the stone-mason's daughter, from too much courting fled in
+breeches to the hills. She, like all the Padovani, paid her score
+without flinching. It may have been run up without leave asked, but it
+was run up in her name. The rule in Padua was so; I never heard that she
+repined. Maybe that she had her money's worth; but of that you will be
+able to judge as well as I.</p>
+
+<p>Padua is a city set in meadows full of light; it is well spaced,
+plentifully watered, arcaded, green with gardens. The streets are like
+cloister-walks; as in Lucca, the plane is the sacred tree, and next to
+that flag of green on a silver staff, the poplar shows the city blushful
+in the spring and thrilling all a summer with the memory. It is a place
+of brick and marble, painted orange, brown, yellow, and warm white,
+where every cornerstone and every twig is printed sharply on a sky of
+morning blue.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>"Quivi le mura son fatte con arte,</div>
+<div>Che parlano, e rispondono a i parlanti."</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>A tale of Padua should have the edge of a cut gem. So let Ippolita's be
+told.</p>
+
+<p>In her day&mdash;that day when, at sixteen years old or so, the sun briefly
+lit upon her golden head and showed her for the lovely girl she
+was&mdash;Padua was passing through a time of peace.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> Novello was dead at
+last, poor heroic gentleman, Verona was shaken off; Venice was
+supreme&mdash;easy, but unquestionably mistress of the Emilia. There was time
+to make madrigals, to make eyes, to make love, to imagine portraits.
+Mantegna was painting giants in the Eremitani and Bellini picking his
+brains, but not as yet a quarrel. The classics, the ingenuous arts,
+lovely woman&mdash;always interwoven when times are happiest&mdash;flourished in
+that sunny place: it was not really wonderful that Ippolita the
+stone-cutter's daughter, classically fair, indisputably a beauty, should
+win all seeing eyes and be the despair of all rhymers. Given the vision
+to the visionary (and both came in their time), she might be trusted
+with the rest; for she was remarkable by contrast; there were none like
+her. The Paduan girls are all charming, and mostly pretty. Ippolita was
+neither: she was beautiful, and when you came to know her face, lovely.
+They are brown, she was fair; they are little, she was very tall. They
+have eyes like a dove's, glossed brown; hers were deeply blue, the
+colour of the Adriatic when a fleeting cloud spreads a curtain of
+hyacinth over the sheeted turquoise bed. Beautifully hued in mingled red
+and white, delicately shaped, pliant, supple, and shy, such as she was
+(an honest, good girl, Heaven knows!) she might have lived and died in
+her alley&mdash;sweetheart of some half dozen decent fellows, wife of the
+most masterful, mother of a dozen brats, unnoticed save for her
+qualities of cheerful drudge and brood-mare; beautiful as a spring leaf
+till twenty, ripe as a peach on the wall till thirty, keen-faced<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> and
+wise, mother and grandmother, at forty; and so on&mdash;such she might have
+lived and died, and been none the worse for her reclusion, had she not
+leaned more than half out of her window in the <i>Vicolo</i> one bright April
+morning of her sixteenth year, to exchange lively banter with a friend
+below, and been seen by Messer Alessandro del Dardo, who within the
+cuirass of Sub-Prefect of Padua nourished the heart of an approved Poet;
+been seen of him for the miracle of young beauty she really was. Chance
+sparks kindle chance tinder; and so here. I am far from alleging the
+heart of Messer Alessandro to be dry tow; but I do repeat it, Padua was
+a freakish cityful, Ippolita lovely exceedingly, amorous poetry in the
+air.</p>
+
+<p>He, then, passing by, saw her stoop flushed and sparkling from above
+him; the sun caught her shining hair; a loose white smock revealed so
+much of her neck as to picture him the snowy rest. Snow and rosebuds&mdash;O
+ye little gods! As he stood in ecstasy she saw him at the end of the
+lane, and blushing drew back with a finger in her mouth, to thrill and
+giggle at ease. She saw a great gentleman stare; he saw a rosy goddess
+stoop and laugh, then blush and hide. <i>Vitas hinnuleo me similis,
+Chloe!</i> Away he went, his heart leaping like a wood-fire, to report to
+Meleagro de' Martiri and Stazio Orsini, to Donna Euforbia, Donna
+Clarice, and Donna Simpatica&mdash;friends and poets alike&mdash;that he had had a
+most rare vision.</p>
+
+<p>"To me it seems," he said, "that that fair-haired daughter of the
+Greeks, Madonna Elena,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> the slim, the rosy-fingered disturber of the
+repose of cities, hath appeared to distract this our city of Padua. Me
+at least she hath distraught. Fair friends, sister and brother poets,
+you shall understand that henceforth I devote myself to this lady and
+her praise. More, I vow a vow, and call upon you to register it in the
+Golden Book of the Amorous Gests of Padua, that I will never cut my
+nails again until I have enthroned her sovereign lady of me, and of you
+all, and of this our humane Commonwealth. By golden Venus and her son,
+by Mars armipotent powerless in such toils, and by Vulcan in chains too
+cunning for his pincers; by Saints Ovid and Sappho, the Chian, the
+Mantuan, and the Veronese, I swear this oath."</p>
+
+<p>"It is well done, Alessandro," assented the listening company.</p>
+
+<p>That evening in his fellowship, Meleagro and Stazio, cloaked and lurking
+under the arcades, saw Ippolita walk down the Via Pozzo Depinto arm in
+arm with two shawled friends, transparently in the ranks of the <i>popol
+basso</i>, but as obviously not of them. Her golden head was bare; also by
+a head she sailed above them. They followed her by the Via Zitelle, over
+the Ponte della Morte, further yet, between garden walls topped with
+lilac, into the Prato della Valle. There the three unconscious girls
+mingled with the concourse of those who took the air under the still
+trees. Ippolita, that slim, tall marvel, seemed not to be remarked by
+any; Alessandro, swooning on his friend's arms, could scarcely believe
+it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p><p>"Edge up, Alessandro, edge up&mdash;accost, accost!" said Meleagro; but&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think I would profane the <i>aura</i> of her by my abhorred
+presence?" cried the lover. "Ah, God of Love, I would die sooner! I
+feel, indeed, my D&aelig;mon at work. Let me sit upon this bench&mdash;my tablets,
+ha!" He sat. Finely disordered verse, <i>rime sciolte</i>, resulted; but
+Ippolita was so far unperturbed.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually, however, it came to her notice that she was watched. There
+was singing under her windows at night; the day brought parties of noble
+youths into the <i>Vicolo</i> scarlet-capped, feathered, slashed, and booted
+youths; ladies were with them as often as not; garlanded ladies with
+square-cut bodices showing half their bosoms; flowers came, verses,
+platters of Urbino, Gubbio, Faenza. She was saluted in the street,
+followed to the church door, waited for at the coming out from mass. It
+came, more or less, to this, that whenever she went abroad by ways where
+the honourable might pass, her going resembled that of the processional
+Host rather than of a respectable young woman. Her friends were no
+protection: the girls thought it fun, courted it, found stuff in it for
+giggling and peering with the eyes into dark corners; the lads of her
+station shrugged at it, then sulked, and at last fairly fought shy of
+such a conspicuous mate.</p>
+
+<p>Ippolita herself tried to laugh it off, but failed absurdly. She became
+plaintive.</p>
+
+<p>"What do these signori mean by their my-ladying?" she cried to Annina,
+her bosom friend. "Why do they send me these things? Platters!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> What use
+are platters to the likes of us, who as often as not have nothing to put
+on them?"</p>
+
+<p>Annina looked demurely. "It is easy to see what they want of thee,
+dearest. What does a gentleman always want of a poor girl that takes his
+fancy?"</p>
+
+<p>Ippolita tossed her high head.</p>
+
+<p>"Eh!" she snapped. "They may fill the house with crockery at that rate.
+I'm not rubbish!"</p>
+
+<p>She was not; but she wronged her adorers, who neither thought it nor
+hoped it of her. Messer Alessandro was not growing his nails for that
+sort of ware; nor could he have treated the Pope with more respect. He
+had never ventured to speak, though he had never failed to salute her.
+What he wrote was chiefly in verse, and as Ippolita could not read, it
+really did not much matter what his letters contained. Meleagro had
+opened his mouth to pay her a compliment: he won a frightened look out
+of her blue eyes, a fine blush, and lived upon them for a week. The
+ladies were bolder. Some of them had walked with her once in the Prato.
+There was very little to say, except that they loved her and thought her
+like a goddess. Ippolita was rather scared, laughed nervously, and said,
+"Chi lo sa?" Donna Euforbia then told her the story of the original
+Ippolita, the Scythian queen; of King Theseus, and the child born to
+them in sea-washed Acharn&aelig;. The Paduan Ippolita said "Gi&agrave;!" several
+times, and asked if her namesake was a good Catholic. Finding she was
+not, she took no further interest in her fortunes than to suppose her
+deep in hell for her pains. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> ladies asked her to come and be their
+queen; she said she couldn't leave her father. They offered her jewels
+for her hair, neck, fingers, wrists, ankles; she laughed, and said that
+they were not for the likes of her. They spoke of Alessandro, the Poet.
+She asked if he were any relation to the Signor Sotto-Prefetto. He was
+that same, said they.</p>
+
+<p>"Dio buono!" cried Ippolita. "Is he the gentleman who wants to undo me?"</p>
+
+<p>They were shocked. "He asks no more than to sit at your feet, Ippolita,
+and read the secrets of your beautiful eyes. It is your soul he loves;
+he asks nothing of your body." "They never do, Madonna," said Ippolita;
+"but I am a poor girl, so please you, who have to look every way at
+once, as the saying is. Domeneddio is the only Signore I ever heard tell
+of who could get on with people's souls. Men want more of us than that."</p>
+
+<p>Protests were wasted, and Alessandro, watchful of his nails, went mad in
+numbers. This it was to be tall out of common, this to lift up in
+dark-browed Padua a brave golden head; this to carry the bosom of an
+Oread beneath the smock of a girl in her teens; this, merciful Heaven,
+to be a vortex when poets are swirling down the stream of Time.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="BII" id="BII"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h3>MESSER ALESSANDRO THINKS TO CUT HIS NAILS</h3>
+
+<p>Not to weary you, it is clear that Ippolita was the fashion. The poets,
+the courtiers, the painters, of whom in that age of peace Padua was
+full, were wild about this glowing girl, this sumptuous nymph of the Via
+Agnus Dei; they were melodiously, caperingly, symphonically wild,
+according to their bents. She saw herself on plates of faience, where
+the involutions of a ribbon revealed "Ippolita Bella" to the patient
+eye; she found herself (or they found her) an inordinate tri-syllable
+for a canzone, saw her colours of necessity reproduced on her lover's
+legs and shoulders as colours of election. One by one she could appraise
+her own possessions, and those they fabled of her. Her hair was
+Demeter's crown of ripe corn&mdash;she knew nothing of the lady, but hoped
+for the best. Her eyes were dark blue lakes in a field of snow&mdash;this she
+thought very fine. Her lips were the amorous petals of a rose that needs
+must kiss each other; kissing, they made a folded flower&mdash;ah!</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>"La virt&ugrave; della bocca,</div>
+<div>Che sana ci&ograve; che tocca,"</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>sighed the poets. But, bless her good innocence! that sweet mouth had
+touched nothing more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> mannish than her father's forehead or the feet of
+the Crucified. Her cheeks, said they, were apple-blossoms budded, her
+neck the stem of a chalice, her breast&mdash;but I spare your blushes, though
+they never spared hers. There is a book, "Gli Ornamenti delle Donne,"
+which will tell you what that bastion of a fair girl should be; and what
+it should be those Paduan lyrists will more than assure you Ippolita's
+was. Thus passionately they fingered every part, dwelling here, touching
+there, with no word that was not a caress. What she had not, too, they
+gave her&mdash;the attributes she sowed in them. She was "vagha," since they
+longed; "lontana," since she kept them at a distance; "nascosa," since
+they drove her to it; cold, since she dared not be warm.</p>
+
+<p>The painters, not to be behind, expressed what the others hinted. She
+saw herself, first, as <i>Daphne</i> behind a laurel-bush&mdash;the artist,
+kneeling in the open, offered his heart smoking upon a dish; second, as
+<i>Luna</i>, standing in shrouded white on a crescent moon&mdash;the artist, as
+<i>Endymion</i>, asleep in a rocky landscape, waiting to be kissed; third, as
+<i>Leda</i>, naked in reeds beside her pair of eggs&mdash;the plumed artist near
+by, ruffling and flapping his wings. Luckily, their allusiveness escaped
+her; she knew nothing of the diversions of the ancient gods.</p>
+
+<p>But of all the vantage she gave them, none equalled that for which her
+gossips should have answered, her most commendable name of Ippolita. The
+verses she received on that theme would have made a <i>Theseid</i>, those she
+had to hear would have kept the rhapsodists for a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>twelve-month, those
+she saw the very Sala del Consiglio could not have contained. Ippolita
+at war with the Athenian, or leading her Amazons afield; Ippolita
+turning her unmaimed side to an adoring warrior (the painter) and you,
+or suckling Ippolita (with the artist's strongly marked features) in an
+ivied ruin with peacocks about it; Ippolita in a colonnade at Athens on
+the right hand of the king&mdash;thus she saw herself daily; thus the old
+palace walls of Padua, if they could yield up their tinged secrets
+through the coats of lime, would show her rosy limbs and crowned head.
+Mantegna has her armoured, with greaves to the knee and spiked cups on
+her breastplate. Gian Bellini carried her to Venice, to lead Scythians
+in trousers against Theseus in plate-armour and a blazoned shield.
+Giorgione set her burning in the shade, trying to cool her golden flank
+in deep mosses by a well.</p>
+
+<p>All this, and much more, Ippolita endured because she was a good as well
+as a beautiful girl. Sometimes she wept in a friend's arms, sometimes
+(really frightened) she sought her parish priest; mostly it was the
+wonder-working Virgin in Sant' Antonio or, at the greatest stress, the
+Saint's own black sarcophagus in the lighted chapel, to lay upon it a
+feverish palm or hot, indignant cheek. By some such aids as these she
+preserved entire her head, her heart, all her precious store, so that no
+flattery ever tarnished the clear glass of her mind, no assaults,
+however fierce, could bruise the root of modesty within her.</p>
+
+<p>Her father, vexed man, at first felt the glory<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> of his daughter, shone
+by her reflected light, guessed (and had reasonable grounds for
+guessing) the profit it might be; but lastly, seeing the suitors sought
+not to marry her, and she would do no less, he grew disgusted with so
+windy a business, beat her for what was no fault of hers, and bade her
+be sold or begone. Ippolita, who began her day's processioning with
+music and flowers, ended it mostly in tears and stripes. There seemed no
+escape. If she went to draw water at the well the courtiers jostled for
+her first salutation; if she went to mass in the grey of the morning,
+so, blinking, did they. The priest who confessed her paid her
+compliments, the blind beggar at the church door looked at her out of
+one eye. She was incredibly the fashion; and the women, far from being
+jealous, were as wild about her as the men. She could have had a Court
+of Virgins, or gone like Artemis, buskined through the thickets, with a
+hundred high-girdled nymphs behind her, all for her sake locked in
+chastity. They also made her presents, which her father sold, until
+(learning to fear the Greeks, their brothers), she gently forbore them.
+Whereupon, the honest stone-mason had fresh cause for chastisement of so
+incalculably calculating a child.</p>
+
+<p>The hunted fair at last came to a point where she must stand or deliver.
+From three desperate lovers there seemed no sure road. All that was
+possible she did. She consulted her priest; he patted her cheek. A very
+old woman of her intimacy advised her to look in the glass; she did, and
+blushed at her own distressful face. A<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> friar of the order of Saint
+Francis plumply told her to choose the most solid of her pursuers and
+make the most of him. "Such roses as yours, my daughter," said he,
+"should be early to market. You are sixteen now; but remember that by
+the mercy of Heaven you may live to be six and sixty. That's the time
+when the pot wants lining. If you have not the experience, pray how are
+you to direct the young in the way they should go? Yet that is the trade
+for an old lady whose life has been an easy one. For my part, I regret
+that the rules of our convent do not allow me to open the gate."</p>
+
+<p>She pouted, and went out into the sun again, to find her way to the
+Santo barred. The three poets, with three lutes, were singing a madrigal
+in her honour. They were understood to say that her going was over the
+tired bodies of lovers, that she went girdled with red hearts, that her
+breast was cold ivory, and her own heart carved in ice. <i>Nymph</i> rhymed
+with <i>lymph</i> and <i>Ippolita</i> with <i>insolita</i>; the whole, ingenious as it
+was, was not <i>ad rem</i>; and as for the poor subject of it all, her heart
+(far from being ice) was hot with mutiny. She knew herself for a
+simpleton&mdash;just a poor girl; she knew herself made ridiculous by this
+parade; could see herself as she was. Her crisping hair was over her
+ears and knotted behind her neck, without garland or fillet or so much
+as a brass pin; her green dress, though it was low in the neck, was
+tightly drawn over her bust; for what were glorious to be shown in a
+great lady, in her had been an immodesty. When she lifted her skirt out
+of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> the gutter you could see some inches of bare leg. Her hands were
+brown with work, though her neck was like warm marble in the sun. Eh,
+she knew herself through and through just a low-born wench; and "O Ges&ugrave;
+R&egrave;!" her heart cried within her, "why can they not leave me alone!"</p>
+
+<p>The three poets&mdash;Stazio Orsini in white and yellow, Alessandro del Dardo
+in white and green, and Meleagro de' Martiri in a plum-coloured
+cloak&mdash;accompanied her down the Via Pozzo Depinto to her poor house in
+the quarter of Santa Caterina; she lived in the Vicolo Agnus Dei. To
+their florid exercises in the language of courts she replied in
+monosyllables&mdash;"Sissignore," "Grazie, Signore," or "Servo suo"; the
+humble words were as much her daily use as <i>Padre nostro</i> or <i>Ave
+Maria</i>. At the door she must have her hand kissed three times in face of
+the nudging neighbours; and to each salute her honesty prompted a fresh
+"Grazie, Signore," a curtsy, and a profound blush. Meleagro beat his
+forehead to see her so lovely and so unapproachable; Orsini bit his lip;
+but Alessandro, mindful of his nails, and not to be Sub-Prefect for
+nothing, went away to find the girl's father.</p>
+
+<p>This worthy bowed to the earth before his visitor. In what way could His
+Excellency be served? By the acceptance, on Matteo's part, of twenty
+ducats? Benissimo, e tante grazie!</p>
+
+<p>"Matteo," said the Sub-Prefect when this little transfer was
+accomplished, "your daughter is the most beautiful lady in all this city
+of Padua."</p>
+
+<p>"She is a choice thing, I own it," said the good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> Matteo; "and how dear
+to her old father your honour hath no notion."</p>
+
+<p>"I can very well imagine it," returned Messer Alessandro; "and, indeed,
+I remember that you are twenty ducats in hand."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, va bene, va bene!" cried Matteo. "I am your Excellency's humble
+servant. You shall take her when you like and as you like."</p>
+
+<p>"All will be done scrupulously," Alessandro said with fervour. "We shall
+crown her Queen of our College of the Muses; she shall be priestess,
+sacred image, and oracle; and most honourably served."</p>
+
+<p>"Honour of course," said Matteo, "comes into the game. I have played it
+myself, and know what I am talking about. There was Beppina, that fat
+Venetian hussy&mdash;to see her eat! But she always had her whack. Eh, I have
+been a blade in my day!"</p>
+
+<p>To this testimony the Sub-Prefect had no comments ready. He returned to
+the object of his thought.</p>
+
+<p>"We shall in turn contemplate her excellence," he explained, "and derive
+inspirations in turn. A fine body of devotional rhyme should be the
+result of this."</p>
+
+<p>"The result," Matteo broke in, "will be a fine one, I warrant your
+Excellency, if such things as that are in your mind&mdash;and call it what
+you will, she's as healthy as ever her mother was. And <i>she</i> had
+seventeen of 'em, one way with another, before I buried her."</p>
+
+<p>"She shall be crowned with stars, rest upon beds of roses, walk in
+flowery meadows, hide from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> heat in thickets where water is&mdash;"
+Alessandro went lilting on. "We will sing to her all day, and of her all
+night. The saloon of the Villa Venusta shall depict the story of her
+glorious arising."</p>
+
+<p>"Pretty, pretty!" cried Matteo, "I see that your honour knows the rules
+of play. Now when shall the game begin?"</p>
+
+<p>"My honest friend, the litter will be at your door come daybreak," said
+Alessandro. "Three noble ladies will attend Madonna to bathe and dress
+her. After that, you shall leave her safely in our keeping."</p>
+
+<p>Matteo bowed. "Excellency, I am your servant. Everything shall be as you
+wish."</p>
+
+<p>He did not add, though he might well have added, that it was more than
+himself had dared to hope for.</p>
+
+<p>At time of sunset home he came, but not to beat his beautiful daughter.
+On the contrary, he made much of her. Fuddled he was, but not drunk. He
+took her incontinent upon his knee and began to deal in rather liberal
+innuendo. Divining him darkly, she went to work with such arts as she
+had to wheedle the worst out of him.</p>
+
+<p>"Carissimo padre,"&mdash;so she coaxed him, with hands interwoven about his
+scrubby face,&mdash;"tell me more of this gallantry of young blades."</p>
+
+<p>"Chuck, chuck, chuck," he babbled, oozing wine, "come and feed out of my
+hand. Bill me, sweeting, and I bill thee. Ho, ho! Two doves on a branch!
+What, turtle? Wilt thou mope for ever?"</p>
+
+<p>She trembled. "Nay, nay, I'll mope no more,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> father," says she. "But do
+thou tell me who my mate is to be."</p>
+
+<p>Slyly he looked at her burning face and slyly kissed it. Then he began
+to sing&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>"Quell' drudo, Messer Amore,</div>
+<div>Ha scelto un Dardo per cuore!</div>
+<div>Dardo acerbo, ardente,</div>
+<div>Che fa gridare le genti&mdash;</div>
+<div>Ohim&egrave;! Dolce dolore!"</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>She had been a fool indeed to miss such a rebus. So the peril was worse
+than her dread! The lees of twenty ducats shabby in his fist told her
+how near the peril was.</p>
+
+<p>Going to bed, he folded her in his arms, making her prop while he
+mumbled comfort.</p>
+
+<p>"It is all for the best, my beauty-bright," he hiccoughed, "all clearly
+for the best. Messer Alessandro is a lover in ten thousand. I shall be
+as good as a father-in-law any day of the week. Why, it's 'My honest
+friend' that he hails me already! That is what a man may call climbing
+up, I hope, when a poetical roaring blade cuts out your 'servo suo' in
+that fashion. And he's Sotto-Prefetto, remember. That means all Padua
+yours for the asking. Sleep sound, my pretty bird, Ippolita bella! After
+this night you shall sleep by day." So he found, by good luck, his bed,
+and she a time for tears.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="BIII" id="BIII"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h3>THE JEW IN THE VIA DELLA GATTA</h3>
+
+<p>If there is not much to be said for the Via della Gatta in these days,
+there was even less when Ippolita was the reigning toast. It was
+cloistered (as now), it was cobbled, shabby-white, secret, blind; it
+echoed silence, was a place for slippering crones, for furtive cats, and
+the smell of garlic and charcoal fires. Of nights, by the same token, it
+was not the place to choose for an after-supper walk. The watch used to
+go through it with swords before and daggers behind. Lanterns were
+little use save to reveal the cut-throat blackness all about.</p>
+
+<p>Now, on the very night when Matteo was fuddled, Ippolita in tears,
+Alessandro in a fever, and the more reputable Padovani turning down
+their beds, the watch came rattling at the Sub-Prefect's door to report
+a dead Jew in the Via della Gatta. Of all nights in the year, this, the
+eve of the Glorious Ippolita's home-bringing, to be vexed by a dead Jew!
+Messer Alessandro was exceedingly annoyed.</p>
+
+<p>"Take your accurs&egrave;d Jew," he said to the lieutenant, "and stuff him
+underground. I am busy, I am absorbed in work. When I have leisure I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>
+will attend to him. You can dig him up again. And I take this
+opportunity to tell you, Lieutenant, that your visit is most
+inopportune. For six months you have brought me nothing of the sort, and
+to-night, for example, you plump a Jew on my doorstep. Bury your beastly
+Jew and leave me in peace."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Excellency," stammered the Lieutenant, "your Excellency will see
+that I have no control over the assassins of Padua. This Jew has not
+died happily. There is a great hole under his ribs. He is scarcely cold
+yet."</p>
+
+<p>"That is soon remedied," said Alessandro; "put him in the ground."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Excellency, a murdered Jew, a Jew in holes&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The Jews have been damned from the beginning of our dispensation,"
+cried the Sub-Prefect in a rage. "Well, I add my malediction. I say,
+Damn your Jew!" And he shut the door in the face of the watch.</p>
+
+<p>The Lieutenant was hungry. If his chief could damn the Jews, so could
+he.</p>
+
+<p>"Corporal," says he, "I am going to supper. Do what you like with the
+Jew, so long as you put him decently away when you have finished. Good
+night."</p>
+
+<p>The Corporal conferred with his men. Here was the Jew&mdash;what should they
+do with him? One of the archers suggested a source of profit. He might
+be shown in the wine-shops at a quattrino a head. Agreed. Off they set.</p>
+
+<p>They showed him at the Codalunga&mdash;there were some low-browed hovels
+there, as was usual<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> about the gates: the Jew did well. Thence they
+skirted the walls by the Riviera Santa Sofia, tried him at the outer
+gate of the Carmine, worked their way from tavern to tavern, till they
+came to the Vicolo Agnus Dei. It was a thousand pities Matteo was drunk
+in his bed; he had quattrini enough and would not have missed the treat
+for the world. Ippolita, whimpering in hers, wondered what the buzzing
+and sliding of shoes in the street below could be about. She had
+troubles of her own, poor girl, but she could not stand this. Up she
+got: a single glance out of window was enough. She shuffled on a shift
+and a petticoat, snatched a shawl, and tiptoed out. Annina, her bosom
+friend, had no troubles. She was half undressed, but she too slipped a
+shawl over her head and went peering into the alley. There she met
+Ippolita, and joined hands. Flaring torches, a swarm of eager black
+heads, whispers, grunting, the archers' plumed helmets&mdash;"Madonna! What's
+all this?" cried the two girls together in a stew of curiosity. A dead
+Jew? A murdered Jew? O Ges&ugrave;! They borrowed a quattrino apiece from a
+neighbour and were richly rewarded. Ah, the blood, the staring, his grey
+old fingers! There was a something, if you like, to talk about at the
+house door; and a something to dream of, per Bacco! I believe the Jew
+engulfed all her annoyances of the past and all her fret over the
+immediate future.</p>
+
+<p>When they had done with him, came the question of his interment. It was
+the small hours, very near the time to relieve guard. The Jew's hosts
+found themselves out by the Porta Santa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> Croce&mdash;an empty quarter of the
+town, abounding in gardens.</p>
+
+<p>"Over the wall with him," said the Corporal; "we'll plant him here." It
+was done. The Jew, who, by the look of him, had earned more money an
+hour after death than in all the years of his life, was put a foot and a
+half underground among the pumpkins in a garden of the Via di Vanzo.
+Padua went to sleep.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="BIV" id="BIV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>IPPOLITA LIFTS UP HER EYES TO THE HILLS</h3>
+
+<p>Waking from a late troubled sleep, Ippolita found her little room
+possessed by three noble ladies&mdash;Emilia Malaspina, Euforbia di
+Ponterotto, and Domenica di Campodarsego&mdash;dressed all in saffron and
+white (her sacred colours, they told her), who announced themselves,
+with much kneeling and folding of arms over breasts, as her handmaids.
+"Sagro cuor di Ges&ugrave;!" thought poor Ippolita, "what a way to undo me!"
+But aloud she only murmured, "Tante grazie, gentildonne," and got out of
+bed.</p>
+
+<p>They had prepared for her a scented bath, into which, in her dazed
+condition, she entered without overmuch persuasion. True, she thought to
+find her death in so much water, and crossed herself vehemently when
+first it touched her back; but there might be worse deaths (she
+supposed) than drowning for a poor girl bought and sold, and not so very
+long ago a Jew had been baptized in Santa Giustina in water up to his
+neck. Nothing, however, would induce her to sit down. They dressed her
+then in silk, tied and garlanded her hair, put a gold chain round her
+neck, silken shoes on her feet&mdash;talking in quick whispers to each other
+all the time; and so announced with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> curtsies that she might enter the
+litter as soon as she would. She was at the disposition of these ladies,
+was her faltered reply. Emilia waved her hand out of the little window;
+chords of music sounded from the street; the voices of men and ladies
+rose upon a madrigal&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Fior' di Maggio&mdash;Soave, pio e saggio&mdash;Salve, Ippolita!"&mdash;the work of
+Alessandro's muse upon that night of discord from the Jew. So she went
+downstairs.</p>
+
+<p>The Vicolo Agnus Dei&mdash;a blind alley of low jutting houses over arcades,
+full of squalor, pink wash, children, and cats&mdash;was on this early
+morning ablaze with colour and music. From wall to wall (and eight feet
+will measure that) it seemed packed with the nobility. Tousled heads
+from above looked down curiously on heads elaborately frizzed, on
+scarlet caps, on plumes, on garlands, on jewelled necks. Poverty and
+riches touch at their extremes, like houses in the South. The shoulders
+of the ladies at play were no barer than those of the slatterns who
+gaped at them playing; but for Ippolita, who had always been a decent
+girl, let us hope her blushes were a cloak. She felt naked. And the
+bath, remember, had unnerved her.</p>
+
+<p>What these neighbours of hers may have thought is no concern of ours,
+since the actors in the play took no concern in it. Twenty pieces of
+silver had bought an incomparable peg for their conceits. They were
+rescuing, they said to each other, a lily from the gutter, taking a
+jewel from a dirty finger, glorifying the glories&mdash;a pious act which
+could not fail of returning<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> honour to those who took honour in doing
+it. The people! Sacks to be filled with garlic and black wine, liver and
+blood-puddings&mdash;grunting hogs, let them keep their sty. Let them not
+dare (and in truth it never occurred to them to dare) interfere with the
+diversions of the great. Yet as the veiled sacrifice went to mount the
+litter, one brown-eyed rascal from an upper window, holding a towel over
+her neck, shrilled out in homely patois, "A vederti, 'Polita mia!" and
+Ippolita turned her lovely head and showed for a moment her shining wet
+eyes to those who watched. She smiled tenderly at the send-off, but
+"Addio, Annina, addio!" she said softly, and turned bowing to her bowing
+gaolers.</p>
+
+<p>As the swaying litter of gold and white went out into the Pozzo Depinto
+and turned up towards the Pontecorbo Gate; as the music and
+chanting&mdash;"Candida Ippolita, premio d'Amore! Grazia insolita del sommo
+Fattore!"&mdash;died away to a murmurous underflow of sound, perhaps a tongue
+or two was thrust into a cheek or two, perhaps a bare shoulder shrugged
+or one shock-head wagged to another. The air was sharp, beds still
+warm&mdash;whose business was it? The street was left to the rats and
+snuffing dogs again.</p>
+
+<p>But Annina had sparks of fire in her brown eyes, and panted as she
+tugged at her staylaces. It was not long before she clattered downstairs
+on her clacking heels, and went to mark the cage they had gilded for her
+dear Ippolita.</p>
+
+<p>Those hierophants, that Collegio d'Amore (as the new style ran), bearing
+in their midst the garlanded victim&mdash;Goddess at once and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>Sacrifice&mdash;awoke the echoes of the streets without comment. The city
+gates were open, it is true; in some churches the doors stood wide for
+the first mass; they passed a priest or so just up, a friar or so,
+furtive truants from their beds; then, at the edge of the Piazza del
+Santo, Ippolita peeping through her curtains saw a little company of
+goatherds, blanketted, brown-legged, shabby rogues, their feet white
+with country dust, new in from the hills with their flocks. They blinked
+to see the gay procession; but wistfully, longingly, she looked after
+them from her cage. They were not so much market-stuff, per Dio! They
+walked at large over bright hillsides, singing to the sky and the winds.
+They were not pestered with love or fine buzzing ladies or capering
+signori, who larded poor girls with compliments, and showed their teeth
+most when they meant least. Ah, if she could run away! If she could hide
+with them, lie on the hillsides while the goats cropped about her; lie
+on her back, her hands a pillow, and sing to the sky and the winds
+because she was so happy! The thought possessed her; she ached for
+freedom; felt the water of desire hot in her mouth. The sleepy shepherds
+huddled in their rags watched her go by; they little knew what a craving
+the sight of their dusty ease had stirred in a heart whose covering was
+fine silk and strung pearls. Her wrongs came back upon her like heaped
+waters of a flood. That shameful bath&mdash;ah, Soul of Christ, to strip one
+naked, and let souse in hot water, like a pig whose bristles must come
+off! More than songs which she did not understand, more than
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>compliments which made her feel foolish and pictures which made her
+look so, was this refined indignity. Seethed in water like a dead
+pig&mdash;ah, Madonna! She arrived sulky&mdash;if so humble-minded a girl could be
+sulky; defiant, suspicious, at least.</p>
+
+<p>The place chosen for the new Collegio d'Amore was the Villa Venusta,
+whose shady garden can still be seen from the Riviera Businello. This
+garden is full of trees, myrtle, wisteria, lilac, acacia&mdash;flowering
+trees&mdash;with a complement of firs and shining laurel to give a setting to
+so much golden-green and white. It has a canal on two sides, is a deep,
+leafy place, where nightingales sing day and night; it abounds in grass
+lawns, flowers, weeping trees, and marble <i>herm&aelig;</i>. The villa itself is
+very stately, a three-storied house in the Venetian style, from whose
+upper windows you can command a fine stretch of country; below you on
+either hand the Piazza del Santo, the Prato della Valle, with their
+enormous churches, pink and grey; beyond these the city walls, the green
+plain; lastly, the ragged outline of the far distant hills. It has a
+courtyard with lemon trees, long, dim rooms empty of all but coolness,
+shuttered against the glare of noon; above, a great saloon coffered in
+the ceiling, frescoed on the walls, with a dais and a throne; an open
+loggia full of flowers; above all this again, raftered bedrooms smelling
+of lavender. A roomy, stately place for those whose lives move easily in
+such surroundings; for Ippolita, the girl of the people, happy in her
+dark tenement in the Vicolo, gossip of the upper windows, shy beckoner
+to the street, burnisher of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> doorposts at sundown&mdash;for Ippolita this
+windy great house was a prison, neither more nor less.</p>
+
+<p>It was a prison, at least, conducted according to the best rules of
+gallantry then obtaining. They bowed her up the staircase to the
+refectory: they sat her down and plied her on their knees with fruit and
+cups of wine. They led her to the throne room, where, high above them
+all, she was to sit, and (being crowned) hear them contend in verse and
+prose for the privilege of her love for the day. It was all arranged.
+She was to have a favourite every day, man or maid. Favour was to go by
+merit among her slaves. The theme was always to be her incomparable
+virtues&mdash;her beauty, discretion, wit (poor dumb fish!), her shining
+chastity, power of binding and loosing by one soft blue ray from her
+eyes, etc. They displayed her emblems on the walls&mdash;the peacock, because
+her beauty was her pride, her pride her beauty; doves, because they were
+Aphrodite's birds; rabbits, because the artist understood rabbits; the
+beaver, that glorious witness of virtue, who makes himself less
+certainly a beaver that he may be more safely a saint; the beaver, I
+say, in white on a green field. Other symbols&mdash;the lily of her candour,
+the rose of her glowing cheeks, the crocus of her hair, the pink
+anemones which were her toes, the almond for her fingers: she saw
+herself articulated; her fauna, her flora, her moral and physical
+attributes cried at her from the four walls.</p>
+
+<p>Ippolita sat very scared on her throne, and endured what she could by
+catching firmly to the knobs of it and blinking her eyes. One by one
+they came creeping, these silken ladies, these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> slashed and curled young
+lords, to kiss her hand. "Dio mio!" thought she. "What is all this
+about? And are maids courted this way among the great?" She knew very
+little about it, yet was quite sure they were not. She wondered when
+Alessandro's business was going to begin. As a matter of fact, it <i>had</i>
+begun. He was now removing several inches of superfluous finger-nail
+with a sword.</p>
+
+<p>For the first day that same Alessandro del Dardo won her to himself by
+his descant upon the theme, "How a gentleman may dismember himself
+without dishonour for a lady's love; and how not."</p>
+
+<p>"Now he has me," thought poor Ippolita, and set her teeth. But he lay at
+her feet most of the day, and though at night he led her into the
+garden, if you will believe me, he never even kissed her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is mad?" thought she to herself, staring from her bed into the
+shadowy angles of the room. "Am I mad? Are these signori all mad? Is
+this a mad-house? Dio! it soon should be at this rate." She cried
+herself to sleep at last.</p>
+
+<p>Next day it was Meleagro who won her by a careful consideration of the
+question, "Whether or no, when a gentleman has served a lady for ten
+years, and she falls sick of the small-pox, he is <i>ipso facto</i> absolved
+of his vow?" Meleagro decided that he was not, and was accepted by
+Ippolita, not because she admired his reasoning but because she thought
+it part of the game.</p>
+
+<p>Next came the turn of Donna Emilia, a very burning poetess, for a
+Sapphic ode; and so on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> and so on. After three days Ippolita found
+herself yawning her head off; the longing for freedom returned, for the
+open country, the hills, the goatherds. Not for her home in the Vicolo:
+this everlasting love-making with its aftertaste of stale sugar had
+turned her sick of Padua. The whole city, to her mind, reeked of
+bergamot; she guessed a fawning lover at every street corner, a pryer at
+every window&mdash;basta, basta, la citt&agrave;!</p>
+
+<p>No: it was to the hills she lifted up her eyes, to the hills and the
+swart goatherds free of their mystery. That <i>riviera</i> across the canal,
+where the budding planes made a mist of brown and rose, was a favourite
+haunt of theirs. There they assembled and milked their goats, thence set
+out homewards at night. Sitting in the pleached arbours, with two
+adoring ladies at her feet and a little cluster of youths behind and
+beside her, she used to peer long and earnestly through the branches to
+see them collect their flocks and start for the hills at dusk. Lithe,
+brown, sinewy lads they were! What long legs they had, with what bravery
+wore their ragged cloaks! One carried a great bulging skin under his
+arm&mdash;bagpipes! She was sure they made good music to each other in the
+green country places. Very early in the morning she heard them come in;
+they were known by their bells. She jumped out of her luxurious bed at
+the first tinkle, and was at the shutter watching for them before ever
+they rounded the angle of the Ponte della Morte. There they came! colour
+of dust, with the straggling goats following after in a cloud of it. Her
+impulse was to fling wide the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> casement, hold out both her arms, call to
+them with all her might, "Ha! help, in the name of the Trinity! Take me
+with you to the green hills. I am weary of life in this place!" Then,
+knowing she could not, she would hold herself back by main force, stare
+about her, run back, throw herself on the bed, lie there sobbing wildly,
+and so be found by her ladies who came to put her in that detestable
+bath. She was sure her skin was being rotted by so much water; she used
+to feel her arms and thighs secretly to see if they were palpably more
+flabby. It stood to reason that the water must soak in&mdash;where else could
+it go to! She thought that she walked like a bladder, supposing a
+bladder were to take itself legs. The whole affair was clean abominable;
+but she saw no way out.</p>
+
+<p>The way came.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="BV" id="BV"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h3>ANNINA AS DEMIURGE</h3>
+
+<p>They held a tournament in the courtyard of the villa; quite a concourse
+thronged the painted lists. Ippolita, a miracle of rose and gold, in a
+white gauzy robe, her hair crowned with daisies, was Queen of Love and
+Beauty, fanned by ladies in red. Del Dardo tilted with Vittore
+Marzipane, Gottardo de' Brancacci with Giacomo F&egrave;o, a young lion from
+the Romagna. Messer Meleagro very nearly fell off his horse. They were
+all in gilt armour, their steeds blazoned with peacocks; but there was
+no dust, for the ground had been wetted with rosewater; no bones were
+broken and no blood drawn. The gallants of the Quattrocento could not
+abide what gave the salt to their grandfathers' feasts. They had other
+ways of deciding issues which appeared satisfactory; and when at the end
+the conquering champion went down on his two knees before the throne,
+when Ippolita, with deprecating hands and downcast eyes rose timidly to
+crown him, the silver trumpets pealed as shatteringly as ever over a
+blood-fray, and the company cried aloud to the witnessing sky, "Evviva
+Ippolita bella!" They could have done no more for a sheaf of broken
+necks.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span></p><p>This was a great day; but at the close of it its glorious Occasion
+locked herself into her chamber with breathless care, and sat tearful by
+the window, with crisping hands and heaving bosom, watchful of the happy
+idlers she could see afar off in the broad green Prato. Under the
+shimmering trees there walked mothers, whose children dragged at their
+skirts to make them look; handfasted lovers were there; a lad teased a
+lass; a girl hunched her shoulder to provoke more teasing. An old priest
+paused with a finger in his breviary to smile upon a heap of ragged
+urchins tumbling in the dust. The air breathed benevolence, the peace of
+afternoon, the end of toil. Round about, so still and easeful after the
+day's labour, were the white houses, green-shuttered, half hidden in the
+trees, the minarets, the domes, the coursing swallows: over them the
+golden haze of afternoon, a sky yellowing at the edge, beams of dusty
+sunlight coming slantwise, broad pools of shadow; further still, the far
+purple shoulders of the hills. Ah, those velvet-sided, blue-bathing,
+bird-haunted, wind-kissed hills!</p>
+
+<p>But what was that? The jangle of little bells&mdash;the goatherds were going
+out of the city! This poor prisoner then, this watched and weary beauty,
+whispered to herself of her despair. "Oh, Madonna, Madonna, Madonna,"
+she fretted, "let me go!"</p>
+
+<p>As by miracle they announced a visitor: one Annina, a girl of the town.
+Would her Majesty see her?</p>
+
+<p>Ah, Heaven! but her Majesty would! In came, staring and breathing hard,
+a brown-eyed girl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> with a shawl over her head, below it a blue stuff
+gown, below all a pair of sturdy bare legs. "Corpaccio! that's a lady;
+that's never my 'Polita," she stammered when she saw the white silk
+wonder of the room, the jewels in her neck, the chains of gold, the
+bosom.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Annina! Annina! it is, it is your poor Ippolita," panted the
+beauty, and fell into the red arms of her friend.</p>
+
+<p>"Sakes! dear sakes! Thou'lt spoil thy glory, my lovely dear," cried the
+other; "but there then, but there then, there's nothing to wail about.
+Tell me the trouble, tell thy good Nannina!" So she petted her, like a
+mother her child.</p>
+
+<p>Donna Euforbia stood confused, but dutiful ever. "Has her Majesty any
+further commands?"</p>
+
+<p>"Grazie, grazie," said her kissing Majesty, "niente!" and so was left
+alone with all that she held true in Padua.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come, Nannina, come and sit with me; come to the window&mdash;let us
+have the air." She led her there. "O lasso!" said she then, and sighed;
+"how good it is to see thee, child!"</p>
+
+<p>Before the other could let out a "Madonna!" she began her plaint. "They
+give me no rest, Nannina, no rest at all. Day long, night long, they are
+at their postures. I am dressed, undressed, put to bed, taken out, fed,
+watered, like a pet dog. They put me in a bath, they do my hair out
+every day: to get me up in the morning according to their fancies is an
+hour and a half's work for three ladies. Figure it!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span></p><p>"Christian souls!" cried Nannina, "what's the meaning of this? A bath?
+What, water."</p>
+
+<p>"Full to the brim with water, on the faith of a Catholic. Of course, if
+this continues I must die."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, sicuro, sicurissimo!" she agreed. "This is very serious, Ippolita.
+Eh, let me feel you. Are you ever dry, my poor child?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dry to the touch, Nannina, dry to the touch. But it is within my body I
+fear it. I must be sodden, dearest."</p>
+
+<p>"Send for a priest, Ippolita, that is the only chance. But, remember,
+when they have washed you, they put clothes upon you like these. Ah, but
+it is worth a girl's while to have silk upon her, and these chains, and
+these pearls. Corpaccio! there is no Madonna in Padua with such stones
+as these, nor any bishop either, upon my faith!"</p>
+
+<p>Ippolita shook her beautiful head. "They are not worth the price of all
+that smelling water," she complained. "Try it, Nannina, before you
+speak. Seriously, I am very unhappy. Let me tell you something."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;come nearer. I'll whisper."</p>
+
+<p>The two heads were very close together. Nannina's eyes became a
+study&mdash;attention, suspicion, justified prophecy, hopefulness; then
+saucerfuls of sheer surprise to smother every other emotion.</p>
+
+<p>"Ma! Impossibile! And they have never&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never so much as a finger."</p>
+
+<p>"But what? Are they&mdash;? Don't they&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p><p>Ippolita shrugged, pouting. "Chi lo sa? I tell you, Nannina, I shall go
+mad in this place."</p>
+
+<p>"And why not?" cried the other, with a snort. "You have examples enough
+about you, my conscience! What is all their singing and stuff about?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think it is about me, Nannina."</p>
+
+<p>"And their disputing?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is about me."</p>
+
+<p>"And the rhymes?"</p>
+
+<p>"They are about me."</p>
+
+<p>"And you have never&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never, never, never!"</p>
+
+<p>"What, not in the garden even?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, never, I tell you. Only my hand."</p>
+
+<p>"Your hand&mdash;pouf! The nightingales sing there, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"All night."</p>
+
+<p>"And there is moonlight?"</p>
+
+<p>"Floods of moonlight."</p>
+
+<p>"Dio! Dio santissimo!" cried Nannina, striking her friend on the knee,
+"you must be out of this, Ippolita! This is unwholesome: I like not the
+smell of this. Faugh, fungus! Mawkish! I will see your father this very
+night."</p>
+
+<p>Ippolita shook her head again. "My father is paid by these signori."</p>
+
+<p>"Then the priest must do it. Father Corrado must do it."</p>
+
+<p>"He dare not."</p>
+
+<p>"A convent&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, never! That is worse than this. But&mdash;oh, Nannina! if I dared I
+would do such a thing."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p><p>"Well, let me hear. If it can be done it shall be done."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," sighed Ippolita, with a hand on her heart, "ah, but it cannot be
+done!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then why speak of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I want so much to do it. Listen."</p>
+
+<p>Then Ippolita, clinging to her friend's neck, whispered her darling
+thought. The goatherds on the hills! There was freedom&mdash;clean,
+untrammelled freedom! No philandering, for no one would know she was a
+girl; no ceremony, no grimacing, no stiff clothes; no hair-tiring&mdash;she
+must cut off her hair&mdash;no bathing, ah, Heaven! If she might go for a few
+months, a few weeks, until the hue and cry was over, until the signori
+had thought of a new game; then she would come back, and her father
+would be so glad of her that he would not beat her more than she could
+fairly stand. It was a great scheme; indeed it was the only way. But how
+to do? How to do?</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose it is a dream of mine," sighed she, knotting her fingers in
+and out of the gold chains.</p>
+
+<p>Annina said nothing, but frowned a good deal. "I see that you are not
+safe in Padua," she said in the end. "You are really too handsome, my
+child. You couldn't show your nose without being known and reported. You
+must go outside if you are to be in peace."</p>
+
+<p>"But I can't go, Nannina; you know it as well as I do."</p>
+
+<p>"I am not so sure. Do you mean what you say, Ippolita?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, Nannina!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then you shall go. It so happens that I know<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> one of those goatherds&mdash;a
+rough lout of a fellow called Petruccio. I could tell him that a
+youngster had got into trouble in the city and wanted to lie quiet for a
+week or two. I can do it, Ippolita."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! And will you, will you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Corpaccio! If you mean business."</p>
+
+<p>"I mean nothing else."</p>
+
+<p>"Then it is done."</p>
+
+<p>They clung together and kissed. Annina was to return the next evening at
+the same hour.</p>
+
+<p>That night it was remarked on all sides that Ippolita's beauty had never
+been so disastrous, her eyes so starry bright, her colour so
+fire-flushed. Messer Alessandro, who loved her like a maniac, went
+shivering out alone into the moonlit garden to expostulate with Nature.
+"Thou hast formed, most cruel Mother," cried he, "an image of thy fatal
+self, whose eyes are sharp swords, and her breath poison of ineffable
+sweetness; whose consummate shape killeth by mere splendour; to whose
+tint of bright fire every arm must stretch as moth to flame, and by it
+be blasted. All this thou hast done, and not yet content, hast set this
+glory so low that all may reach for it, and yet so remote that none can
+touch. Burning-pure is my Beloved, at whose approach I faint. What hard
+miracle is this of thine, Goddess, that all must love and none be found
+worthy?" Thus we may reflect, as Alessandro beat his resounding
+forehead, to what a pass poetry may bring a youth, who buys for twenty
+ducats what twenty thousand cannot give him the use of. Pygmalion made a
+woman one day, moulding all her gracious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> curves as his experience
+taught him. There went his twenty ducats. But not he could warm that
+image into glowing flesh, however much he sang to it and hymned. That
+was another's affair. So here.</p>
+
+<p>Annina came on the morrow full of secrecy and other things more
+equivocal still in appearance. Her burden proved, however, to be a
+bundle of rags which, she assured Ippolita, represented all that was
+necessary to the perfect goatherd.</p>
+
+<p>"We will do what we can here, child," said she, "in the way of staining
+your skin, cutting off your hair, and such like. Then you shall veil and
+come into the garden with me; but whereas you shall come in as the
+Madonna of these heathens, you shall leave, per Dio, as Silvestro, who
+murdered the Jew in the Via della Gatta and has to hide in the hills. Do
+you remember him, Ippolita?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I do," said Ippolita. "Have I killed that Jew, Annina?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is to be understood, my dear. Now come, there is everything to
+arrange."</p>
+
+<p>There was indeed. Del Dardo would have swooned to see how Annina handled
+his Unapproachable. Her burnished hair was off with a clip or two of the
+great shears; a mixture of soot and walnut-juice hid up her roses, and
+transformed her ivory limbs to the similitude of a tanner's. Ippolita
+did not know herself. Veiled up close, she crept into the garden with
+her confidante, and in a bower by the canal completed her
+transformation. Not Daphne suffered a ruder<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> change. A pair of ragged
+breeches, swathes of cloth on her legs, an old shirt, a cloak of patched
+clouts, shapeless hat of felt, sandals for her feet, shod staff for her
+hand&mdash;behold the peerless Ippolita, idol of half Padua, turned into a
+sheepish overgrown boy in tatters, whose bathing could only have been in
+sweat, and the scent of his garments the rankness of goats. On the floor
+in a shining heap lay the silk robes, the chains and jewels, only
+witness with Annina of what had been done. That same Annina clasped in
+her arms the tall boy.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my dear, my dear!" she said, half sobbing, "if any ill should come
+of this I shall kill myself."</p>
+
+<p>"No ill will come, Nannina, believe me," replied Ippolita, quite calm.
+"You are sure they expect me?"</p>
+
+<p>"I see them on the riviera now. Slip into the boat. I will put you
+across."</p>
+
+<p>On the other bank, Ippolita was received by the herd-boys, all agog to
+see the champion who had killed the Jew.</p>
+
+<p>"Addio, Silvestro," said Annina, keeping up the play.</p>
+
+<p>"Addio, Nannina," said Silvestro, with a chuckle.</p>
+
+<p>"Are we ready, boys?" Petruccio called out, turning about him. "We must
+be careful what we're doing."</p>
+
+<p>"Hist, Silvestro," whispered one, with a nudge; "did he bleed much?"</p>
+
+<p>"Cosa terribile&mdash;a flood!" Silvestro spread out his hands.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span></p><p>"Cristo! The glory of it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Valentino, I scrag you, my man, if you speak of the Jew till we are out
+of the Porta San Zuan," growled Petruccio, the leader: "Avanti!" And the
+drab-coloured crew moved off towards the sunset.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="BVI" id="BVI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>SILVESTRO</h3>
+
+<p>The guard at the Porta San Zuan let them go unheeded; one ragamuffin
+more or less made no odds. The heart of the new-born Silvestro gave a
+great bound as they cleared the gate, and she saw before her the
+straight white road with its border of silver stems and the spreading
+tent-roof of golden green. These stems were so obviously like the
+pillars of a church that Silvestro ventured to remark as much to her
+neighbour&mdash;a broad-faced, thick fellow, not quite her own height, but
+twice as big in the girth. His mouth was large, his eyes were small and
+rather hot. He blinked a good deal, was very sulky, and met her advances
+with a grunt. "Chi lo sa?" was as far as he would go along with her in
+the matter of tree-trunks.</p>
+
+<p>It was annoying. Every one had seemed friendly at first. But being free,
+she could not feel daunted long; and at the second bend of the road the
+hills sailed into full vision&mdash;the solemn hills in a long line of peak
+and hollow, velvety, dark, and brooding sleep, like a bank of cloud
+edging the pale sky. The frogs were singing vespers in the ditches, the
+sharp chorus of the cicalas shrilled on all sides. At<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> the sight of this
+enormous calm Silvestro forgot rebuffs. For a murderer he was in a very
+cheerful humour; he began to sing; soon he had all the boys (except that
+blinker) rapt to attention. Andrea slewed round his bag and pipes and
+began upon a winding air; they all sang, going at a trot. The goats
+pricked up their ears; they too began to amble; it became a stampede.
+The sun went down behind Monte Venda, the bats came flickering out, the
+great droning cockchafers dropped on the road like splashes of rain. The
+night found them still far from Abano, but still talking and nearly all
+friends. Silvestro was hand in hand with Petruccio and another boy,
+called Mastino because he was heavy-jowled and underhung. Their tongues
+wagged against each other about nothing at all. Silvestro strengthened
+his position by hints and shrewd winks, but it was decided that the Jew
+should be kept for the night fire. That was too choice a morsel to be
+eaten on the road; that must be rolled on the palate, to get the
+flavours. It was a pity, certainly, about the pig-eyed boy, who snorted
+whenever the exploit was mentioned&mdash;but "Never mind him," thought
+Silvestro; "I have all the others."</p>
+
+<p>They passed through Abano; Monte Ortone was ahead, a spur of the great
+body of the hills.</p>
+
+<p>"There's the hermit's candle," said Petruccio. A twinkling light showed
+deep in the trees. "There was a most excellent miracle there&mdash;the
+Blessed Virgin in a tree. Two girls saw her and thought she was a kite
+entangled. But they fetched a priest from Abano, and he knew better. So
+then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> they built an oracle or some such place, and paid a hermit to pray
+there. And now, whoever has ague, or is with child, or hath bandy-legged
+children, or witch-crossed cows, always goes there; and the hermit cures
+them. That was money well laid out, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"Per Bacco!" cried Andrea, "I'll tell you some more. Did you ever hear
+of Monna Betta's short leg?"</p>
+
+<p>Petruccio cuffed him well. "A palsy on her leg, and a palsy strike
+thee," he thundered, "if with thy old women's tales we miss the path! Go
+drive the goats in, thick-chops, and stay that clapper of thine till
+they ask for a crow-keeper. Move now, be off!"</p>
+
+<p>"'Tis a hard thing, Petruccio," blubbered Andrea, "if one may not tell
+the honour of his own land to a stranger."</p>
+
+<p>But Petruccio sent him flying with grit in his ear.</p>
+
+<p>By a brambly path they climbed Monte Ortone&mdash;Petruccio first, the others
+after him, the newcomer as best might be, then musically the goats. That
+round-faced, blinking boy, whom they called Castracane, was behind
+Silvestro now, much diverted by her panting efforts to go up without
+panting what he could rise on with closed mouth and scarcely any sharper
+whistling at the nose.</p>
+
+<p>"Hey, comrade," said he, grinning, "one sees that the Jew's stair was
+easier going for thee than Ortone." And he prodded her with his staff.</p>
+
+<p>This was not friendly. Ippolita did her best to humour him. "I go up as
+well as I can,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> Castracane," she said. "But do you go first, if you
+will."</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, nay," he replied, with a chuckle; "I make very good practice in
+the rear." So saying he caught her ankle in the crook of his staff, and
+brought her down into the bushes like a running ram.</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro was hurt in his feelings; all the rest laughed; his late-won
+empire seemed slipping. And it was very strange treatment for the Queen
+of the Collegio d'Amore, if wholesome. She arrived wet and breathless at
+the top, feeling moreover that she must by all means make a friend of
+this ugly fellow.</p>
+
+<p>The fire was made, the pot put on, the pot boiled. Then for a time,
+though jaws worked like mill-clappers, it was to better purpose than
+words. But when the last shred of garlic or last gobbet of pork had been
+fished up, when the wine-skin was flabby, the last crust's memory faded
+from the toothpick, Petruccio slapped Silvestro on the knee.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, comrade," cried he, "we'll have the Jew for dessert."</p>
+
+<p>"The Jew, the Jew! Now for the Jew!" went the chorus.</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro coloured. "The Jew? Eh, well, I killed him&mdash;ecco!"</p>
+
+<p>The flaming logs lit up a ring of tense, pale faces&mdash;not one of which,
+Silvestro saw, would rest content with that. The interrogatories began,
+a dropping fire of them.</p>
+
+<p>"How did you do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"With my knife, of course."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p><p>"Where did you strike?"</p>
+
+<p>"Under the ribs. I took him by his great goat's beard, the old dog, and
+jerked up his head&mdash;so. Then I drove in between his ribs&mdash;ping!"</p>
+
+<p>Surely that would do? Not at all.</p>
+
+<p>"The left ribs?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!"</p>
+
+<p>"Did he gurgle?"</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't he!"</p>
+
+<p>"Blood choked him&mdash;eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Per Bacco!"</p>
+
+<p>"You stabbed him on the stair?"</p>
+
+<p>"Gi&agrave;!"</p>
+
+<p>"Did he roll down?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no; he just lay where he fell."</p>
+
+<p>"Why did you kill him?" said Castracane, suddenly&mdash;bolt upright.</p>
+
+<p>This was awkward. Silvestro fenced. "Eh, corpo di Bacco, why does one
+kill the Jews?"</p>
+
+<p>The others at first took the same side. Why, indeed? The question seemed
+absurd. Did they not crucify young children, and eat them afterwards?
+Did they not kill Ges&ugrave; Cristo? Everybody knows that they did; and, as
+for proof, look at them with a dish of pork. Ugh!</p>
+
+<p>But Castracane blinked his small eyes, and held to it.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you kill him because of Ges&ugrave; Cristo?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro shrugged. "It was partly that, of course."</p>
+
+<p>"What else?"</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro grew hot&mdash;desperate. Why, after all, would one kill a Jew?
+Something must be urged, something solid.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span></p><p>"There was Annina, you know," said Silvestro, at his wit's end.</p>
+
+<p>"Annina&mdash;that girl you were with? What of her?" Castracane licked his
+lips.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, this Jew, you must understand, was a limber young fellow&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Young!" shouted the other. "You told me he had a great grey beard like
+a goat."</p>
+
+<p>"It wasn't very grey&mdash;not so grey as a goat's. Well, he was always
+following Annina about, making her presents, cadging for favours.
+Accidente! I couldn't stand it, you must know. So, thinking of Annina,
+and of Ges&ugrave; Cristo, and one thing and another, I decided to follow him
+back to the Via Gatta&mdash;and so I did."</p>
+
+<p>Andrea leaned forward, hoarsely whispering (blessed diversion!)&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Say, Silvestro, what colour was the Jew's blood?"</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro opened wide those blue eyes, which had wrought such havoc
+among the Paduan nobility.</p>
+
+<p>"Black, Andrea!" he whispered again; "black as pig's blood!"</p>
+
+<p>Andrea crossed himself. "Pio Cristo," he prayed, "let me kill a Jew some
+day!"</p>
+
+<p>Even then Castracane, the sceptic, was not satisfied. "All I know is,"
+said he, "that I saw a Jew cutting bread at the <i>Albero Verde</i> last
+Martinmas, and he slipped into his own thumb, and came off as red as a
+dog's tongue. Bah!"</p>
+
+<p>"Damn the Jew," said Petruccio, yawning; "let's go to sleep, boys."</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="BVII" id="BVII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>CASTRACANE</h3>
+
+<p>She woke early, with the full light of day in her eyes. She felt tired,
+but not inert, languid and luxurious, rather, and explored to the full
+the happiness of stretching. Round about her were huddled the drowsy
+boys; on the slopes of the steep place where she lay she could see the
+goats browsing on lentisk and juniper, acanthus, bramble, mountain-ash.
+Misty on the blue plain lay Padua, a sleeping city, white and
+violet&mdash;remote now and in every sense below her and her concerns. The
+sky was without cloud, very pale still, glowing white at the edge; the
+sun not yet out of the sea. The freshness of the air fanned her
+deliciously; larks were climbing the sky singing their prick-song,
+scores of finches crossed the slopes, dipping from bush to bush.
+Ippolita clasped her hands behind her head, and looked lazily at all
+this early glory. The freedom of her heart seemed explicit in that of
+her limbs. What she could do with her legs, for instance! How she could
+sprawl at ease! She was just like all the others&mdash;as ragged, as dirty,
+at least; and soon she would be as brown. Dio buono, the splendid life
+of a goatherd!</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p><p>Then she found that Castracane was watching her out of one wicked eye.
+He had rolled over on to his belly, his face lay sideways on his hands;
+one eye was shrewdly on her. She considered him, rather scared, out of
+the corner of hers. Decidedly he was a sulky boy&mdash;you might say an
+enemy. As unconcernedly as she could she got up, stretched herself with
+elaborate ease, and strolled off along the edge of the hill. Castracane
+followed her; she affected not to know it; but her heart began to
+quicken, and when he was close beside her she found that she had to look
+at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Good morning, Castracane," says Silvestro.</p>
+
+<p>He grunted. "Look here, Silvestro," he began, "about that Jew&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The accursed Jew, who, so far from denying the resurrection of the dead,
+seemed a standing proof of it! Was she never to have done with the Jew?</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what about him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Did you kill him or not? That's what about him."</p>
+
+<p>"I told you last night."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but I don't believe it."</p>
+
+<p>"What!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe it. Now then?"</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro looked about for help: they were out of sight of the others,
+and there lay Padua, slumbrous in the plain. It seemed as if Castracane
+meant quarrelling. Well, what must be, must be.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care whether you believe it or not. Now then?" The blue eyes
+were steady enough on the black by this time.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p><p>"Look here," said Castracane after a pause, "I'll fight you if you
+like. That'll settle it."</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro laughed nervously. "Why should we fight, Castracane? Besides,
+we have no knives. How can we fight?"</p>
+
+<p>"Like this," said the other between his teeth. His left arm whipped out,
+like a lizard's tongue, and Silvestro lay flat on his back among the
+cistus flowers, seeing ink and scarlet clouds.</p>
+
+<p>"Stick a Jew indeed!" cried Castracane. "Stick a grandmother! Why,
+you're as soft as cheese!"</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro's shoulders told a tale. He had turned on his face, but his
+shoulders were enough. Lord, Lord, look at that! Scorn in his conqueror
+gave way to amazement, amazement to disgust, disgust to contempt. Last
+came pity. Who'd have thought such a leggy lad such a green one? He was
+crying like a girl. Castracane had no malice in him: he was sorry for
+those sobbing shoulders. He stooped over the wreck he had made, and
+tried to put it together again.</p>
+
+<p>"Come, Silvestro," he said gruffly, "I never meant to hurt you."</p>
+
+<p>The wet face was up in a moment&mdash;red and wet and angry.</p>
+
+<p>"It's not that! It's not that! I never killed the Jew&mdash;there! But I was
+a stranger, and I tried to be friendly, and you hated me. I hate being
+hated. Why should you hate me? What have I done?"</p>
+
+<p>This was too subtle for the youth. "The trouble was," he said, "that I
+hit you in the right place. That's the knock-out blow, that one. Morte
+di<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> Ercole, and down you went! Well, I'm sorry; will that do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes&mdash;I want no more. Let us be friends, Castracane."</p>
+
+<p>"Benissimo."</p>
+
+<p>He helped his late enemy up; they kissed each other, then sat together
+on the grass&mdash;admirable friends.</p>
+
+<p>"So you didn't kill the Jew?" Castracane began. "I knew it! But what did
+you do to run away?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you mustn't ask. Indeed, I can't tell you. It was rather bad."</p>
+
+<p>Castracane looked keenly at his new friend. "Was it a girl?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro blushed. "Yes, it was a girl."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, ah! Then I say no more. I like girls myself. But they get you into
+trouble quicker than anything. You would rather not tell me any
+more&mdash;quite sure?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I can't indeed. Let's talk of something else. How old are you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Seventeen."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not sixteen yet. Is Castracane your real name?"</p>
+
+<p>Castracane looked pleased.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad you asked. No; they call me that among ourselves, because of a
+little knack I have; but my name is Pilade."</p>
+
+<p>"That's a very nice name," said Silvestro.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe you&mdash;it's a splendid name. There's no better. It's the name
+of a Roman&mdash;Emperor of Rome and Sultan of Padua he was&mdash;who killed a
+giant called Oreste, having first caused him to become a Christian."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p><p>"But why did he kill him when he had made a Christian of him?" asked
+Silvestro, greatly interested; "or why did he make him a Christian, if
+he was going to kill him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pouf! What questions!" cried Castracane. "He made him a Christian
+because he was a good Catholic himself, and killed him for being a
+giant, of course. Or take it this way. If he hadn't been a Christian,
+how could he have made a good death? He couldn't, naturally. So the
+Emperor christened him first and killed him afterwards&mdash;ecco! It's
+always done like that, they tell me."</p>
+
+<p>"I see it now," said Silvestro; "it was very fine. I like your name of
+Pilade best. I shall always call you that, if you will let me."</p>
+
+<p>"Call me what you like," says Pilade. "Let's go and wake the others. I'm
+as hungry as the devil with all this talking."</p>
+
+<p>The result of this was that Silvestro became Pilade's foot-boy, his
+slave. The lout was in clover; nothing could have suited him so well. No
+more goats to herd in the heat of the day&mdash;Silvestro would do it; no
+share of foraging for him; no more milk to carry into the valley; no
+more fires to make up; nor strays to follow; nor kids to carry to new
+pastures&mdash;Silvestro would do it. The luxurious rascal lay out the
+daylight stretched on his back with his hat over his eyes; he woke only
+for his meals. He would not be at the pains even to swathe his own legs
+or strap his own sandals. Silvestro, bathed in sweat, his fair skin
+burnt and blistered, his delicate hands and smooth legs scratched by
+brambles, his slender neck bowed beneath the weights he carried on
+shoulders<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> stretched to cracking point&mdash;Silvestro worked from dawn to
+dusk, rejoicing in the thankless office. Thankless it was, since Master
+Pilade took no sort of notice; yet Silvestro gave thanks. Pilade allowed
+the other to stoop to his shoe-ties, to wind the swathes about his
+sturdy calves, to carry his very cloak and staff, while he slouched
+along with hands deep in breeches pockets, and his hat pulled down to
+his nose. Silvestro would proudly have carried him, too, had that been
+possible. Most unmanly of Silvestro, all this; but the rogue he petted
+was too snug to consider it. At the falling-in of night, having his
+belly full of meat and drink (which Silvestro had prepared and served
+him with), he might, if the mood took him, pull out his reed pipe.</p>
+
+<p>"Silvestro," he might say, "you have been useful to-day; perhaps I'll
+play you something."</p>
+
+<p>And the beautiful Silvestro (tanned counterpart of the Glorious
+Ippolita) would hang upon the melancholy noise, and observe with adoring
+interest every twitch and distension of the fat-cheeked hero; and at the
+end sigh his content, saying&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, thank you, Pilade; you have been very kind to me."</p>
+
+<p>"The truth is," Pilade would allow, "I am a good-natured devil if you
+take me the right way. I'll tell you what, Silvestro; you have pleased
+me to-day. You may sleep at my feet if you like: it will keep them warm,
+to begin with, and you'll be near me, don't you see?"</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, thank you, dear Pilade," cried the enraptured Silvestro.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span></p><p>The world is a very odd one, and it is most true that the man who is
+for taming hearts should pursue, ostensibly, any other calling. Not that
+Pilade had that in view. He only sought to be comfortable, good lad.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="BVIII" id="BVIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>RESURRECTION OF THE JEW</h3>
+
+<p>This idyllic state of things might have lasted no one knows how long,
+with Ippolita-Silvestro finding joy in unreasonable service, and Pilade
+both ease and reason. Where either partner was so admirably suited it
+might have been interesting to see what would have happened: whether
+Ippolita would have betrayed herself or Pilade found her out. She was
+over head and ears in love, but he was vastly well served; and there is
+nothing like content for drugging the wits.</p>
+
+<p>Things, however, fell out otherwise. The Jew, to begin with, fell out of
+the grave to which he had been hastily recommended, and most insecurely
+at that. He made himself felt in a variety of ways, was discovered by
+the gardener in the Via di Vanzo, and stuck into a gutter in the Via Man
+di Ferro. He was discovered again by some one who had either less to do
+among Christians or more among Jews than the generality in Padua; and
+this time he was carried to the Guard House. Being reported (reporting
+himself, indeed) to the watch, he was reported on to the Capitano, by
+him to the Prefect. The Prefect put the Sub-Prefect, who had met him
+before, upon the look-out.</p>
+
+<p>"The Most Serene Republic," said that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>authority, "cannot have unburied
+Jews adrift in the city without finding out why the cemetery does not
+hold them and why the gutter does. Inquire, Alessandro mio, inquire!
+There was a wound in the man's ribs big enough for a nest of rats."</p>
+
+<p>Alessandro bowed, but raised his fine eyebrows. He was at that hour most
+happily unhappy over the late disappearance of his Glorious Lady. The
+peerless beauty of Padua, the incomparable Ippolita, was gone. His
+business was to devise dirges, monodies, laments, <i>descortz</i> in the
+Proven&ccedil;al manner; to cry "Heigho!" and "Well-a-day!" not "Ban!" or "Out,
+haro!" To have these high frenzies, these straining states of the soul,
+disturbed by the unclaimed remains of a resolving Jew, was a cruel test.
+Yet, he reflected within himself, if his piercing love survived this
+inquiry, it was founded on rock. And, indeed, Alessandro believed that
+his heart was slowly turning to stone. He felt a curious chill there
+when he got up in the morning, a dead weight, a mass to lift with every
+choked beat. Perhaps the Jew would end what Ippolita had begun. If so,
+well. But, ah, Ippolita, Ippolita bella, Ippolita crudel! Ah, ohim&egrave;!</p>
+
+<p>Habit set him to work. He instructed his officers, he visited the gates,
+questioned, took notes, inspected the gutter in the Via Man di Ferro,
+even inspected the Jew. He went to the Via della Gatta, to the fatal
+staircase; he bullied two or three landlords of two or three low
+taverns; went to the stews, to the Ghetto; talked very loud, flourished
+his sword, drove his men this way and that&mdash;in fine, did everything
+that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> becomes a young official of spirit. The result of his labours was
+that the Jew got posthumous fame out of all proportion to his merits.
+The city fairly hummed with him; nobody talked of anything but the dead
+Jew.</p>
+
+<p>The goatherds, coming in by the Porta San Zuan a day later, were
+shrewdly scrutinised by the Guard. They were numbered off, their names
+taken; they were pulled about and flustered, asked questions,
+contradicted before they had time to answer, and then called
+prevaricators because they said nothing; they were, in fact, brought to
+that state of breathless hurry in which a boy will say anything you
+choose. This, as everybody knows, is the only way of getting at the
+truth.</p>
+
+<p>"There were more of you fellows the other night," said the Corporal of
+the Guard. "Where are the rest of you? Come now, out with it; no lies
+here!"</p>
+
+<p>Petruccio, who had some sense, shammed to have none; but Andrea, less
+happy, was a real fool. At this invitation he looked wise.</p>
+
+<p>"Castracane is not here&mdash;true, but it wasn't Castracane," he muttered,
+and found his neck in a vice.</p>
+
+<p>"Who was it then, son of a pig? Who was it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy, mercy, my lord! I will tell the truth!" he whined as he twisted.</p>
+
+<p>"Ges&ugrave; morto! Tell anything else and I cut thy liver out, hound!" swore
+the man who held him.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, Dio! I will! I will! It was Silvestro who killed the Jew!"</p>
+
+<p>"You shall come with me to the Signor Sotto-Prefetto," said his holder.
+"There's a ducat for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> me in this affair." The poor little company were
+driven into the gatehouse and there pent; but Andrea went off between
+two archers to be examined at greater length by Messer Alessandro, and
+to give blubbering confirmation of the fact. All the unfortunate
+particulars wrung out of Silvestro on his first night of Monte
+Ortone&mdash;the stab under the ribs, the Jew's beard, his black blood, etc.,
+etc.&mdash;were now screwed out of Andrea and went to prove his story.</p>
+
+<p>"By the twenty-four ears of the Twelve Apostles," swore the Corporal,
+"we've got him at last, Messere."</p>
+
+<p>The Sub-Prefect felt that he must act upon this news. So much insistence
+had been laid upon the affair by his chief, he dared not send his
+lieutenant: he must go himself. This is what comes of neglecting
+new-killed Jews! he might have thought. He little knew what was to come
+of it.</p>
+
+<p>Two mounted men, Andrea with a rope round his neck, himself very
+splendidly booted and cuirassed, made up a sufficient cavalcade to fetch
+home one snivelling goatherd. It was four by the time they were off,
+seven before they were at Abano, eight when they reached the foot of
+Monte Ortone and faced the deep chestnut woods in which that precipice
+dips his flanks. But though it was getting dusk there were eyes sharp
+enough on the top of the mountain to watch for what sharp ears had
+heard&mdash;a most unaccustomed sound in those leafy solitudes&mdash;trotting
+horses and jingling steel. Castracane from the summit saw it all; and
+what is more, guessed at once what Andrea in a halter meant.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="BIX" id="BIX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+<h3>PYLADES FINDS HIS ORESTES</h3>
+
+<p>"Silvestro," he called softly, without moving from his ambush or turning
+his eyes from those he watched, "Silvestro, come here!"</p>
+
+<p>The obedient stripling came eagerly, and knelt as close to his master as
+he dared&mdash;just so as to touch him.</p>
+
+<p>"Eccomi, Pilade," says he.</p>
+
+<p>"Get back over the brow as fast as you can," said his friend, "and hide
+in the cave. Wait there till I come. Go now; do as I bid you."</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro went at once.</p>
+
+<p>Castracane squared his jaw and waited. Every now and then he muttered to
+himself, with lazy lifted eyebrows. It was too much trouble to shrug.
+"Poor little devil&mdash;it would be a shame! And I knocked him down for
+nothing. And he loves me, per Bacco! Certainly, I have never been loved
+before&mdash;by a man, I mean&mdash;except by my big old mother out yonder, and
+she is a woman. She'll be sorry&mdash;she's old&mdash;eh, she's horribly old!
+Accursed, most rotten ass, Andrea! The whole story out of him&mdash;and a lie
+at that. Cospetto! I can't let the poor lad swing. And I did knock him
+down&mdash;and he cried like a girl; but not because I grassed him. By my
+soul, I'll do it&mdash;there, then!" Then he mortised his chin in his brown
+hands and blinked while he waited.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p><p>He had not so very long; but you might have given him an hour, it would
+have made no difference to Castracane then. The guard came reeking to
+the brow of the hill; Andrea, haltered, was with them. Alessandro,
+mopping his head and cursing the flies, came last.</p>
+
+<p>"Look yonder, Marco," said one. The other said "Ha!" and pounced upon
+his treasure. He had him by the ear and was pricking him with his sabre
+in the fleshy parts.</p>
+
+<p>"Easy, friend," said Castracane; "I'm not running away."</p>
+
+<p>He went like a sheep to the Sub-Prefect. Andrea watched him twittering.</p>
+
+<p>"What is your name, fellow?" said that heated officer.</p>
+
+<p>Andrea's eyes yearned for his mate's. Castracane gave him a terrible
+look.</p>
+
+<p>"Silvestro is my name, Signore," says he; and Andrea knew his game.</p>
+
+<p>"We have found our bird, I think," said Alessandro, turning to his men.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Excellency, this is the lad we want. There was another of
+them&mdash;Castracane they call him."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, yes. Where is Castracane, fellow?"</p>
+
+<p>"He is over Venda. Gone to Noventa, to his mother," replied Castracane.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we don't want him so far as I know. Now, attend to me. You are
+suspected of that business in the Via della Gatta."</p>
+
+<p>Castracane shrugged. "Chi lo sa?" says he.</p>
+
+<p>"We shall see about that. Meantime, what have you to urge?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p><p>Castracane scratched his head. "What would you have me say, Messere? I
+am a poor lad. You are many, and I am one."</p>
+
+<p>Alessandro turned to his archers. "Bring him down to the hermitage," he
+said. "I am going to eat something. Tie him up and wait for me there.
+You can let the other go. This is the lad, fast enough. Avanti!"</p>
+
+<p>So the shackles were taken off Andrea's raw wrists, and transferred to
+Castracane's; the neck halter was shifted; Castracane was bond, Andrea
+free. Then Messer Alessandro went down the hill to what supper the
+hermit could afford.</p>
+
+<p>In about half an hour Silvestro, who had been fidgeting in the cave,
+came out, restless to have stayed so long beyond sight or hearing of his
+Pilade. His reception by Andrea was shocking. The gaping boy sprang
+forward with his arms out.</p>
+
+<p>"Ha! Here is a terrible affair," he wailed.</p>
+
+<p>"Our Castracane is taken, and for your fault; he will be hanged, and for
+you! Make your supper of it, you Jew-jerker. What sacrifice, Dio mio!
+There has been nothing like it, I suppose, since Giulio Cesare kissed
+Brutus, or Judas Ges&ugrave; Cristo. You kissed him this morning; you know you
+did! You always do, you blush-faced sneak! And for that kiss he has
+taken your sins upon him, and is to be hanged. Fie, Judas, fie! Oh,
+Madonna Maria, the terrible affair!"</p>
+
+<p>So ending as he began, he danced about the hill-top, wringing his hands.</p>
+
+<p>But Silvestro, very pale, came quickly up, and laid hold of him.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me all, Andrea," says he; "for I know<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> nothing except that I love
+Castracane and will save him. Who has taken him?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is a lord&mdash;the Sotto-Prefetto&mdash;the hook-nosed gentleman with thin
+eyebrows; him they call Messer Alessandro. Castracane is tied like a
+netted calf&mdash;his hands behind him, and them to his neck. What's the good
+of his strength? He is as strong as the town bull; but if he writhes his
+hands he strangles, and if he thrusts his neck he chokes. Ecco!"</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro was staring down into the valley. "Where is Messer Alessandro,
+Andrea? Tell me quickly, for I can save Castracane."</p>
+
+<p>"He is eating with the hermit in the wood. But what can you do?"</p>
+
+<p>"You stay here," said Silvestro with decision; "that's what you can do.
+I'll go down."</p>
+
+<p>The sound of breaking through undergrowth was followed by rapping at the
+hermit's door.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you want, boy?" said the pious man to the ragged figure in the
+dark.</p>
+
+<p>"Messer Alessandro, my reverend&mdash;Messer Alessandro at once."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you come about the Jew? He will bear no more. He is eating. He
+tells me he knows more about the Jew than he does about our holy
+religion&mdash;which is a dangerous state of things, except that he is sick
+to death of him."</p>
+
+<p>"It is not about the Jew, father," said Silvestro, out of breath. "Tell
+him it is about&mdash;Ippolita."</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene," said the hermit. "Stay where you are."</p>
+
+<p>Messer Alessandro dropped his tools with a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> clatter, wiped his mouth,
+beat his breast, and began to walk up and down the cell.</p>
+
+<p>"Send him in, hermit, send him in! Forty ducats if he has any news, ten
+ducats in any case for bringing my thoughts from Jews on earth to
+Ippolita in Paradise. Despatch, despatch, send me the goatherd."</p>
+
+<p>The pale apparition of a fair-haired boy, timid in rags, cloaked in
+rusty black, with bandaged legs, and his old felt hat crushed against
+his breast, stood in the doorway.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, boy!" cried Alessandro, gesticulating with one hand, "may you be my
+Hermes, my swiftfoot messenger. Tell me what you know of the divine
+Ippolita."</p>
+
+<p>"I know where she is, Signor Sotto-Prefetto," says Silvestro huskily.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me, by Venus and all her doves!"</p>
+
+<p>For answer the blushing boy looked appealingly at Alessandro, with eyes
+so deeply, limpidly, searchingly blue, with lips so tenderly parted,
+with a smile fluttering so timidly, and limbs so drooping under their
+disguise, yet so quickly transformed from frightened lad's to bashful
+beauty's, that&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Saints of the Heavenly Court&mdash;ah, God of Love!" cried Alessandro; and
+the Sub-Prefect fell upon his knees before the goatherd.</p>
+
+<p>Later you might have seen that same goatherd enthroned in the hermit's
+armchair, his hands locked in his lap, his legs modestly disposed, his
+head gracefully bowed, a blush on his burnt cheeks, his long lashes
+casting a shade, his breath coming and going with a pretty haste&mdash;and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+at his feet a splendid gentleman, booted and cuirassed, who poured out
+voluble assurances of eternal respect, of love undying, of the sovranty
+of Venus Urania, and the communion of beautiful minds.</p>
+
+<p>"I will see you again; yes, I will certainly see you again, since you so
+desire it," said Silvestro, after a good deal of this. "And I will give
+you what you ask, if it is in my power. But you must trust me so far:
+you must go away from here, and wait till I send word. I shall owe you
+every gratitude, every reward I can give you. Now, however, you must let
+me go; and I must take with me the goatherd, who is as innocent of the
+Jew's death as I am."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, I will do all that you wish," sighed Alessandro. "Sacred lady, I
+will do it. But surely you will have pity upon a humble slave who has
+served you long and faithfully, and now is putting himself in peril for
+your pleasure. Pay me my poor fee, lady. Enrich me boundlessly with what
+costs you so little."</p>
+
+<p>So he urged, until&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Well," says Silvestro, "I will do it. Rise up, Messere; take what you
+will."</p>
+
+<p>Messer Alessandro shut his eyes, and slowly rose to his feet. Having
+kissed the goatherd's hand, he very delicately kissed the goatherd's
+proffered cheek. "I am paid immeasurably, most holy one," he said. "Lead
+now; I will do what you desire."</p>
+
+<p>Out sped Silvestro into the wood, the Sub-Prefect bareheaded behind him.
+In a glade not far from the hermitage sat the two archers. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> horses
+were tethered to one tree, Castracane to another. Seeing their chief,
+the men sprang to attention; their astonishment at what followed was no
+greater than Castracane's. Silvestro (that timid slave), now as bold as
+brass, walked straight to him, the Sub-Prefect tiptoeing behind.</p>
+
+<p>"Loose him, Signore," says Silvestro.</p>
+
+<p>The Sub-Prefect with a knife cut his bonds. "Your will is done."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, Signor Alessandro: God be with you. Come, Pilade."</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro took Castracane by the hand, but not before the gentleman had
+kissed his own with profound respect. Then Silvestro led his friend away
+through the trees, and the Sub-Prefect was understood to say&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"We have been on the wrong scent, men. Mount. To the city&mdash;Avanti!"</p>
+
+<p>"What's all this? Whither now?" stammered Castracane.</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro squeezed his hand. "Oh, dearest, let us go to the cave&mdash;let us
+go to the cave on the hill!"</p>
+
+<p>Castracane felt his friend trembling. Trembling is infectious; he began
+to tremble too.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes, we will go to our cave," he agreed in a quick whisper.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="BX" id="BX"></a>X</h2>
+
+<h3>CYMON FINDS HIS IPHIGENIA</h3>
+
+<p>They struggled upwards through the bushwood and starry flowers. It was a
+scented night, the air heavy with the burden of midsummer. The fireflies
+spread a jewelled web before their faces, great white moths flapped and
+droned about them. On they pushed, their hands locked through all
+hazards of brake or briar: neither would let go for a whole world, but
+Silvestro was always in front, leading Castracane for this once. One
+knew the way as well as another; but Silvestro led it. They rounded the
+hill-top.</p>
+
+<p>"Here we are at last," said Silvestro. "Let us sit here, and look at the
+splendour of the night. Oh, Pilade! Oh, dear friend! How couldst thou do
+so much for me?"</p>
+
+<p>"What else could I do?" said he gruffly. "You never killed the pig-Jew."</p>
+
+<p>"Nor did you, Pilade. Tell me why you gave yourself up."</p>
+
+<p>"Because you didn't do it, of course."</p>
+
+<p>"But you didn't do it either?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, but I knocked you down."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you do it because of that; or because&mdash;because you like me?"</p>
+
+<p>Pilade grunted. "Suppose I did?"</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro sighed, and leaned his head on his friend's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></p><p>"O wondrous night!" said he, whispering. "Look, the stars are like
+moons."</p>
+
+<p>It was certainly a wonderful night&mdash;a night of enormous silence, of
+great steady stars, of gold-dusted air, of a sky like a purple dome
+encrusted with jewelled lights. The two boys sat together, blinking at
+so much speechless glory. Castracane's arm was round his fellow's
+shoulder; that fellow's lips parted, and his breath came soft and
+eager&mdash;yet too quickly for ease. It was certainly a night of wonder.</p>
+
+<p>Castracane's arm slipped down to Silvestro's waist; Silvestro sighed,
+and snuggled into the haven it made.</p>
+
+<p>"O holy night!" said he. "Now might miracles happen, and we be by."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," said Castracane, "the miracle of choice would be an angel with a
+basket of bread and cheese&mdash;or a beautiful maiden to come and lie in
+one's arms."</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro thrilled. Castracane gave a responsive squeeze, and went on.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not too sure, you must know, that one has not happened already. To
+see you lead that signore by the nose! You came swimming among the
+tree-stems like an angel. You might have knocked me down with a feather.
+And how he kissed your hand! Miracles! Why, if you had been the maiden I
+dream about, he couldn't have been more respectful. If you want
+miracles, for example!"</p>
+
+<p>"I do want them, Pilade. I want them very much." Silvestro sighed again,
+and leaned his cheek till it touched his friend's.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span></p><p>A shock transfused Castracane; he was caught by the starry influences.
+Suddenly he turned his mouth towards that blushing flower, and kissed
+Silvestro. Silvestro thrilled but lay close.</p>
+
+<p>"Buon' Dio, ecco miracolo!" said Castracane hoarsely, and kissed again.</p>
+
+<p>Again his nestling companion gave no sign but a quiver.</p>
+
+<p>Castracane surveyed the stars. "A miracle has certainly happened," he
+said. "I feel very queer. My head swims, fingers and toes tingle; I seem
+to have hot lead in my legs. It may be that I am empty. I think it is a
+miracle; but as yet I see no angel."</p>
+
+<p>Some quicker thrill of what he held made him look at Silvestro. At the
+same moment Silvestro slowly turned his head, and looked at him. What
+each saw in the other's face beyond a white moon-shape, what shining of
+truth in the eye, what expectancy, what revelation in the lips, I know
+not. Two pair of lips, at least, met and stayed together.</p>
+
+<p>"O Dio!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Pilade! Oh, carissimo!" She abandoned herself to joy.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>You</i> are the angel, the miracle! You are&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, I am not an angel; but oh, I love you, dearly!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, la Madonna!"</p>
+
+<p>"I am Ippolita! I love you!"</p>
+
+<p>"You love me? You are mine then&mdash;come."</p>
+
+<p>"Andrea," said Castracane next morning, "I think the others will be back
+before noon. You must wait here till they come. I am going to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> take
+Silvestro over La Venda to see my mother, and confess to our curate. It
+is good for the soul."</p>
+
+<p>"Silvestro looks well this morning," said Andrea, with his mouth full of
+bread. "What a colour of dawn! What shining eyes! He would make a proper
+Madonna for a Mystery&mdash;eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"He would," said Castracane laconically; "a most proper Madonna. With a
+<i>Bambino</i> on his lap&mdash;eh, Silvestro."</p>
+
+<p>Silvestro blushed; Castracane pinched his cheek, which made matters
+worse.</p>
+
+<p>They took the road together through the deep hedges of the valley. Monte
+Venda rose before them, dark with woods. Castracane's arm was round
+Silvestro's waist: every twenty yards they stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"To think of it!" cried Castracane, on one of these breathless halts.
+"You to be like any one of us&mdash;breeched, clouted, swathed&mdash;and a lovely
+lass within your shirt&mdash;Madonna!"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think me lovely?" asked Ippolita devoutly. "I have heard that
+till I have been sick to death of it; but from you I shall never be
+tired of knowing it."</p>
+
+<p>"Blessed Angel!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Pilade, my love!"</p>
+
+<p>They loitered on.</p>
+
+<p>"You see that I am not what you thought me," said Ippolita, with an arch
+look. "You thought I had killed a Jew."</p>
+
+<p>"Never, per Bacco!" cried Castracane. "That I'll swear to."</p>
+
+<p>"You thought I was a boy, even last night, dearest."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span></p><p>But that he denied. "Santissimo! Did I treat you like a boy, I ask
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>"You knocked me down once, Pilade."</p>
+
+<p>"Every honest man knocks his wife down once," said Pilade gravely.</p>
+
+<p>"And then you kissed me."</p>
+
+<p>"I can kiss you again," said Pilade; and did.</p>
+
+<p>I repeat, Padua is a freakish city. The Sub-Prefect writes madrigals in
+vain. Castracane, the goatherd, sends Silvestro sprawling, and wins the
+golden Ippolita for a willing bride. What are we to make of it? <i>Deus
+nobis h&aelig;c otia fecit.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_DUCHESS_OF_NONA" id="THE_DUCHESS_OF_NONA"></a>THE DUCHESS OF NONA</h2>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>"L'Anima semplicetta, che sa nulla,</div>
+<div>Salvo che, mossa da lieto fattore,</div>
+<div>Volentier torna a ci&ograve; che la trastulla."</div>
+<div class="i10">&mdash;<i>Purg.</i> xvi. 88.</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a name="CI" id="CI"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h3>BOCCA BACIATA</h3>
+
+<p>"Not unprosperous is your Erasmus in England," wrote that man of wiles
+to one Faustus, a poet; and then&mdash;"To touch upon one among many
+delights, there are girls in this land divinely fair&mdash;soft, easy, and
+more wooing than any of your Muses. Moreover, they have a custom which
+cannot be too much honoured. Wheresoever you go a-visiting, the girls
+all kiss you. With kisses you come in, with kisses depart; returning,
+they kiss you again. Cometh one to you, the kisses fly between; doth she
+go away, with kisses you are torn asunder; meeting in any place, kisses
+abound. Go where you will, it is all kisses. Indeed, my Faustus, had you
+but once tasted of lips so fragrant and so soft, not for a time only,
+but to your end of days, you would choose to be a pilgrim in this
+England." By no means the only stranger to be charmed by our welcoming
+girls was Erasmus. Amilcare Passavente, of a darker blood, found such
+kisses sweet: those of one at least he vowed to call his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> own. What he
+made of them, what they of him, what other diverting matter appertains
+to the kisser and the kissed, you shall understand who care to read.</p>
+
+<p>Mary was her name in our Lord, Lovel that of her father in the flesh, a
+respectable wharfinger of Bankside. Molly, Mawkin, Moll Lovel, "Long
+Moll Lovel," and other things similar she was to her kinsfolk and
+acquaintance, who had seen her handsome body outstrip her simple mind.
+Good girl that she was, she carried her looks as easily as a packet of
+groceries about the muddy ways of Wapping, went to church, went to
+market, gossiped out the dusk at the garden gate, or on the old wharf,
+after the 'prentices had gone, linked herself waist to waist with maiden
+friends. Up river or down, she trafficked in a wherry, and took the
+waterman's tender glances as part receipt for his hire. In a word, this
+winsome, rosy creature, grown hardy in a kind soil, adventured herself
+at ease among them that might have been her poets, adorers, or raveners,
+nor thought to be cheapened by the liberty she employed. She was rather
+shy with strangers, conscious of her height, awkward under observation,
+blushing to know she blushed; but simple as the day, pleased with
+flattery, pleased with other trifles,&mdash;trinkets, snatched kisses, notes
+slipped into the prayer-book, etc. She told her mother everything before
+she went to bed, sat on her father's knee when she was too old and much
+too tall for it, dreamed of lovers, hid trembling when they came, had
+palpitations, never told a fib or refused a sweetmeat; she was, in fact,
+just the honest, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>red-cheeked, pretty, shy simpleton of a lass you will
+meet by the round dozen in our country, who grows into the plump wife of
+Master Church-warden-in-broadcloth, bears a half-score children, gets
+flushed after midday dinner, and would sooner miss church than the
+postman any day in the year. Such was Molly Lovel at nineteen, honestly
+handsome and honestly a fool, whom in Bankside they knew as Long-legged
+Moll.</p>
+
+<p>To Amilcare Passavente, the young merchant-adventurer from Leghorn,
+ravished as he was by the spell of her cool lips, she became at once "La
+divina Maria," or shorter, "La Diva"; and in a very light space of time,
+when his acquaintance with her and hers with his tongue had ripened, she
+had quite a nosegay of names: Madonna Collebianca (my Lady Whitethroat),
+Donna Fiordispina, La Bella Rosseggiante, were three among three dozen
+flowers of speech, picked from a highly scented garden of such for her
+adorning. Amilcare translated them in his hoarse, eager voice, helped on
+by his hands (which were rapid) and his beseeching eyes (which had the
+flattery of deference), not only to Molly apart, but to all or any of
+her acquaintance who could listen without giggling. Molly pressed her
+bosom; her friends, as they loitered home, said in each other's ears,
+"Blessed Lord, what will become of Gregory Drax?" Gregory Drax was the
+broad-girthed young master of a trading-smack which coasted between
+London and Berwick, and was even at that hour in Kirkley Roads, standing
+off Yarmouth.</p>
+
+<p>All a summer this endured, but went no <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>further while Amilcare, new to
+the blunt ways of the English, was unable to stomach their cropped
+speech any better than their sour beer. Those who heard his florid
+paraphrase took it gravely, yet held by their "Moll Lovel." They wished
+that Gregory Drax might have a fair wind home; they wondered what Master
+Lovel was about; trusted that the black-eyed rascal (whose speech was
+too glib, surely, to be honest) would not make a fool of the girl. He
+very soon showed them that, whatever else he did, he intended to make a
+woman of her. Let them hold, said he (for once expressing his contempt),
+to their "Molly Lovel"&mdash;the name was the Shadow. He would hold, as at
+that moment he was very devoutly holding, Molly herself&mdash;aha! the
+blessed Substance. And when the young Molly let herself go whither her
+soft desires had long since fled; when she felt the heart of Amilcare
+jumping against hers, his cheek, his lips, his soft syllabling, her own
+breathless replies&mdash;then at last Amilcare, quite enraptured, finding
+everything about her wonder and delight, made shift to catch up some
+waft of her very tongue, closer savour of her very home, and called her
+on high his adorable, his unending, his altogether soul-devastating,
+destroying mistress, "Madonna Mollavella." Good Master Lovel the
+wharfinger neither knew his daughter nor his father's name in this
+long-drawn compound of liquids; he was troubled, very doubtful, anxious
+for Gregory Drax; but all Lombardy and the Emilian March came to know it
+in time. Amilcare rode down opposition. Eloquence! Were ever such cries
+to great Heaven, such <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>invitations to Olympus, slappings of the
+forehead, punchings of ribs, in Wapping before? Molly in tears on her
+mother's breast, Amilcare on his knees, the neighbours at the door:
+Master Lovel, good man, abominated such scenes. Father Pounce married
+them at St. Saviour's in Southwark; money abounded, the dowry passed
+from hand to hand. On a gusty November morning there sailed out of the
+London river the barque <i>Santa Fina</i> of Leghorn, having on board
+Amilcare Passavente and Donna Maria his wife, bound (as all believed)
+for that port, and thence by long roads to their country of
+adoption&mdash;not Pisa, nor Lucca, nor any place Tuscan; but Nona in the
+March of Emilia. No; Erasmus was not the only traveller whirled about by
+English kisses, nor Molly Lovel the only simple witch in turn bewitched.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CII" id="CII"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h3>AMILCARE: COMMERCE AND THE AFFECTIONS</h3>
+
+<p>Molly was a handsome fool: let there be no doubt about that. There was
+no romance in her, though sentiment enough. She lacked the historic
+sense; and if she thought of Rome at all, supposed it a collocation of
+warehouses, jetties, and a church or two&mdash;an unfamiliar Wapping upon a
+river with a long name. Her sensations on the voyage were those of
+sea-sickness, on the golden-hazy Campagna those of home-sickness
+unaffected. Affectation of any sort was far from her. If she was happy
+she showed her white teeth, if wretched she either pouted or cried; if
+she liked you there were kisses, if she distrusted you she grew red. But
+she distrusted no one. Why should she? Since every act of hers was, in
+seeming, a caress of personal intention, every one loved her. As for her
+husband, when he was not sacramentally engaged, he mutely raved to the
+stars, protesting by his dimmed eyes, moving lips, and strained-out arms
+how every breath she took was to him also an inspiration. Her frankness,
+the truth lucent in her eyes, her abounding receptivity,&mdash;for she
+believed everything she was told and objected to nothing,&mdash;her sweet
+long body, the tired grace<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> with which she carried her lovely head, her
+tender, stroking ways, the evenness of her temper (which only that of
+her teeth could surpass),&mdash;all this threatened to make of Amilcare a
+poet or a saint, something totally disparate to his immediate proposals.
+His nature saved him for the game which his nature had taught him.</p>
+
+<p>In that great game he had to play Molly (though he loved her dearly)
+must be, he saw, his prime counter. Coming to England to negotiate bills
+of exchange, he had Molly thrown in. She would do more for him than
+rose-nobles. He ecstatised over his adorable capture; but saw no reason
+in that why he should not lay it out to advantage. It would not cheapen
+in the chaffer; on the contrary, give him the usufruct for a few years,
+and he would be not only the happiest but the most considerable of men.
+Triumphant Bacchus! (so he mused to himself) what had he not gained? A
+year's pay for his men, the confidence of the "Signori" of Nona, the
+acclamations of the Piazza and the Council Chamber at once&mdash;and Molly
+Lovel. Hey! that was best of all. For her sake, and by her means, he
+would be Capitano del Popolo. What else? That would do for a beginning.
+If Molly could turn his head, she could turn other heads, he supposed. A
+turned head meant a disponable body, a bending back, an obsequious knee,
+even a carcase at a quick hand's discretion; votes in Council, delirium
+in the Piazza, <i>Te Deum</i> in the Church. Amilcare knew his countrymen: he
+that knows them half as well will have no trouble in conceiving how
+these trade-calculations can consist with a great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> deal of true love.
+And what was Amilcare's trade? His trade was politics, the stock whereof
+was the people of Nona, the shifty, chattering, light-weight spawn of
+one of those little burnt-brick and white cities of the Lombard
+Plain&mdash;set deep in trees, domed, belfried, full of gardens and fountains
+and public places&mdash;which owed their independence to being too near a
+pair of rival states to be worth either's conquering. There were some
+score of these strewn over Southern Emilia and Romagna in those days,
+and the time was almost at hand, and with it the man, to sweep them all
+into one common net of wretchedness. But Amilcare had no clear thought
+of that. For the moment Nona was as peaceful as Forl&igrave;, or Rimini, or
+Pesaro, or Faenza, thanks to him and his "Centaurs"&mdash;that famous band of
+free riders he had levied from the Tuscan hills. Very much at his mercy,
+safe under the eye of his trusted Secretary, awaiting his return, he
+fully intended that peace to continue when she fell huddling to him. It
+would, indeed, be his care; for it was a maxim of Italian politics that
+no man willingly stirs after dinner.</p>
+
+<p>The situation was still pretty delicate; he had done little more than
+win foothold. In the late struggles with Parma he had intrigued with
+great address; sold himself and his Centaurs to Farnese, brought that
+thick-necked hero up to the very walls of Nona, then (in the nick of
+time) resold himself at double the price to the city he was besieging,
+and routed his yesterday's master by an attack in flank just as the
+Nonesi were carrying the trenches in front. In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> the excitement of that
+wonderful hour&mdash;Farnese in full flight, himself borne on men's shoulders
+round the Piazza, thanksgiving in the cathedral, clouds of incense,
+clashing bells, wine running in the Fontana delle Grazie&mdash;he had for a
+moment been tempted to believe the times ripe for a proclamation:
+"Amilcar, Dei Gratia, Nonarum Dux," etc. He had his treble wages in his
+pocket, the hearts of the whole city throbbing at his feet. He was a
+young man: tempted he certainly was. But Grifone (the Secretary) touched
+his elbow and showed a straightened lip. He would not risk it. He
+contented himself with a footing, the Palazzo Bagnacavallo rent-free,
+and the title of "Gonfalonerius Populorum Libertatis," which looked
+passably well about a broad seal. "Pater Patriae," "Nonarum Dux," the
+control of the bread-tax,&mdash;all should be added to him in time, if only
+the Borgia could be fed elsewhere. At the thought of that hearty eater
+stalled in the Vatican, he felt that he might indeed thank God for his
+lovely Molly. With her for decoy even that game-bird might be lured.
+Lying on the poop of the <i>Santa Fina</i>, his dark eyes questing over her
+face, her hands among his curls, he seemed to Molly the wonder of the
+world. So of her world he was; but he meant to be that of his own&mdash;a
+very different world.</p>
+
+<p>He was a lithe, various creature, this Amilcare Passavente, his own
+paradox. Quick as a bird of prey he was, and at times as inert; dark as
+night, eagle-faced, flat-browed, stiff and small in the head,
+clean-featured, with decisive lips. A<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> very fluent speaker, hoarse in
+voice, but cunning in the vibrations he could lend it, he was in action
+as light and fierce as a flame; at rest as massive as a block of stone,
+impervious to threats or prayers or tears. Women loved him easily, men
+followed him blindly, and both for the same reason&mdash;that they believed
+him ruthless to all but themselves. Ruthless, indeed, he had been, and
+was to all and sundry. Molly was the one apparent exception, and in her
+eyes he was perfect. For her immediate comfort this may have been true
+of him. He was a brave lover.</p>
+
+<p>He taught her to falter endearments in his own tongue: he was <i>carino,
+caro amico, anima mia, sovrano del mio cuor</i>, and many other things yet
+more intimate. In return he gave her a homage which was not without a
+certain depth because it was done with foresight. He taught her to be
+his slave by professing himself hers, and so touching her generosity as
+well as her humility. At all this she was very apt. There was a fund of
+deep affection in the girl, the makings of an excellent wife, a devoted
+mother&mdash;far more stuff than should go to serve as toy for a man's idle
+hours. Also she was very demonstrative, by no means averse (quite the
+contrary, indeed) to demonstrations on his part. She loved to walk
+belted by his arm, loved to put her head on his shoulder, or have her
+chin lifted that eyes or lips might be kissed. These favours, which his
+nation was accustomed to keep at home, she wore without
+self-consciousness abroad. It enchanted Amilcare, not only as a thing
+beautiful in itself, but as a clear source of profit in his schemes. He
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>pictured the havoc she would work in a hall full of the signori&mdash;keen
+men all&mdash;when she sailed through the rooms offering her lips to whoso
+would greet them "English fashion." Why, the whole city would be her
+slave&mdash;eh, and more than the city! Bentivoglio of Bologna, Il Moro of
+Milan, Ordelaffi, Manfredi, Farnese, the Borgia, the Gonzaga, D'Este of
+Ferrara, Riario, Montefeltro, Orsini&mdash;by the Saint of Padua, he would
+face them each with his beautiful wife; charm them, turn their heads,
+and then&mdash;<i>ping</i>! Let the neatest wrist win the odd trick. Very pleasant
+schemes of witchery and silent murder did he make as the <i>Santa Fina</i>
+drove him through the dark blue waters on his honeymoon, and at last
+brought him up to point out to his adoring instrument a low golden
+shore, a darker line of purple shadow beyond, and in the midst a white
+tower which gleamed like snow. "Civitavecchia, my queen among ladies!
+Rome beyond it; beyond that Nona&mdash;Nona and glorious life for thee and
+me!" he cried, as he waved her towards these splendid things.</p>
+
+<p>But Molly snuggled closer to him and sighed.</p>
+
+<p>He, very sensitive to alien moods, was conscious of the jar. "You are
+sad, beloved?" he asked her softly. "You are thinking of your own land?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, dearest; not that now. I was thinking only&mdash;but it is
+foolishness of a fool," said Molly, hiding her face.</p>
+
+<p>"You cannot be a fool, blessed one, since you are not so much as human
+as I see you now," he whispered, holding her close. "You are a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> rosy god
+at this moment, my treasure. You are all colour of dawn, auroral, colour
+of tender fires. Tell me your thought, my holy one."</p>
+
+<p>She whispered it back. "It was&mdash;that you will be full of business at
+Nona, Amilcare. You will have no time to love your poor Molly."</p>
+
+<p>The rogue was fishing for protestations, and got them.</p>
+
+<p>"Love you!" he cried. "Ah, tell me how long I have to live, and I will
+tell you the hours of my love, O my soul!"</p>
+
+<p>"But you will be abroad, a-horseback, with your captains, in the
+tents&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes, that must be so," he owned. "But I shall love you the more
+for that, Molletta."</p>
+
+<p>She pretended to pout, fidgeted in his arm, arched her neck.</p>
+
+<p>"But how shall I know it, Amilcare, if I am not there?"</p>
+
+<p>"By what I do to you when I return, dearest love," cried he; and
+thereafter, speaking by signs, was better understood.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CIII" id="CIII"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h3>MARKET COVERT</h3>
+
+<p>They made Rome a day or two after that little tender and exchange of
+vows, having disembarked amid a crowd of clamorous Amilcares in
+rags&mdash;she could see some dear trait of him in each; trailed across the
+bleached marches (with the Sabine Hills like a blue hem beyond); caught
+the sun at Cervetri, and entered the dusty town by the Porta
+Cavalleggieri on one of those beaten white noons when the shadows look
+to be cut out of ebony, and the wicked old walls forbidden to keep
+still. The very dust seems alive, quivering and restless under heat. St.
+Peter's church, smothered in rush mats, was a-building, the marble
+blocks had the vivid force of lightning; two or three heretic friars
+were being hailed by the Ponte Sant' Angelo to a burning in the Vatican;
+Molly was almost blind, had a headache, a back-ache, and a heart-ache.
+Amilcare, who had fallen in with a party of lancers by the way, had
+ridden for a league or two in vehement converse with their lieutenant.
+To him there seemed more to say than ever to her. She felt hurt and
+wanted to cry.</p>
+
+<p>At their inn they learned the news&mdash;that is, Amilcare learned it, for
+Molly was languishing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> upon a bed, forgotten and mercifully forgetting.
+Pretty news it was. Don Cesare, it appeared, had stabbed the Duke of
+Gandia, his brother, three nights ago, and thrown him into the Tiber.
+The body had only been fished out yesterday; it had nine wounds in it,
+including one in the throat big enough to put your fist in. It was a
+sieve, not a body: perforated! His Holiness? Ah, he could be heard even
+here, howling in the Vatican, like a bitch in an empty house. Don Cesare
+was in hiding, reported at Foligno. To-morrow there was to be a Holy
+Conclave&mdash;all the Cardinals. God knew what Alexander had or had not in
+his mind, the conscience-stricken old dog. It was known what he had not
+in his house, at least. Vannozza had been thrice refused admission; so
+also La Bella Lucrezia. Think of it!</p>
+
+<p>This was very grave news to Amilcare's private ear. Cesare was his
+deadly enemy, the one man he honestly feared; the one man, consequently,
+he wanted to meet. He was still brooding over it when the broad-backed
+butcher they call Il Drudo slammed him on the back.</p>
+
+<p>"Fortune is with you, Passavente&mdash;the slut! She gives you time to
+breathe. The Borgia had a sinking of the stomach; he hankered after a
+filling of Lombard sausage a little while since. Gandia cut in, and
+Cesare cut in, <i>per Bacco</i>! But mark my words, Amilcare, the appetite
+will return. You will have the Duke in your March before many days.
+Therefore my advice to you is&mdash;Avoid Foligno; fortify Nona."</p>
+
+<p>Amilcare looked his man in the face. "And my advice to myself, Galeotto,
+is&mdash;Seek Foligno,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> and so fortify Nona. <i>Addio.</i>" He went out like a man
+who has found his way.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, what the devil did the fellow mean by that?" cried Il Drudo, with
+his thick fingers out.</p>
+
+<p>"Devilry expresses it," said a sly secretary in black.</p>
+
+<p>Molly in dreams, soft as a child and glossy with sleep, looked too
+beautiful for a disturbing hand to dare anything that night. It would
+have been the act of a brute, not Amilcare's act. In small things he was
+all gentleness. He crept into bed like a cat, fearful of waking her, and
+next morning contrived, by a fit of coughing, to waken her no more than
+half. The rest he did by methods equally adroit, until by imperceptible
+degrees she learned that Rome might give no ease to her feet. He had her
+in the saddle and all the baggage-mules away an hour after the sun.</p>
+
+<p>Arrived at Foligno, he found that his great enemy was at sanctuary in
+the Convent of Olivet, biting his nails in a red fume there. Hidden
+behind spires of cypress, Olivet stood outside the walls, a sun-dyed
+white building deep under brown eaves. Cesare, it was reported, was
+quite alone with his moods, now consumed by fidgety remorse for what he
+might have lost in his brother's blood, now confident and inclined to
+blusterous hilarity, now shuddering under an obsession of nerves. In any
+guise he was dangerous, but worst of all when the black fit of suspicion
+was upon him. So he now seemed; for being told who waited upon him, he
+refused point-blank to see anybody. Amilcare, at the door, heard his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>"Vattene, vattene! Non seccami!" ("Out, out! Don't pester me!") rocking
+down the dim passages of the house; and Molly, whom this sudden new
+expedition had bereft of what wit she had, turned pale to hear the
+roaring beast.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, love, love, love, let us run away! I like not this empty place,"
+whimpered the girl, holding her husband's arm; but he gently removed her
+hand, kissed it, and held it.</p>
+
+<p>"Courage, dear one; I shall be by thy side. Much depends upon this
+adventure," he urged in fervent whispers, knowing how much to a tittle.</p>
+
+<p>To the monk who came out, distended with Cesare's explosives, he
+addressed himself in a vernacular too fluid for Molly to catch up.</p>
+
+<p>"I pray you, reverend brother, recommend me yet once more to the feet of
+his Resplendency, saying that not I alone supplicate his favours. Add
+that I have with me, to present, my most beautiful wife, that she may
+assure him with her own lips how very much she is his slave."</p>
+
+<p>The pantomime of piteous beseeching hands, of eyebrows exquisitely
+arched, told more than his words. They showed to a hair's breadth how
+far he expected, how far was prepared, to tempt his customer. No pedlar
+before a doorful of girls' sidelong heads could more deftly have
+marketed his wares. The monk, too, sidled his head; he pursed his mouth,
+furrowed with a finger in his dewlap, tried to appraise the wares. But
+to allow this would have been to forestall the market.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, for love of the saints, go, my brother!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> he was entreated, with
+gentle persistence; and so worked upon, he waddled away.</p>
+
+<p>Amilcare let fall a hearty sigh, and considered Molly with anxiety. He
+had not dared to say a word to her of what her entertainer was, or what
+her part should be. Premeditation might throw her out of balance,
+conscious art might exhibit her a scheming courtesan; just in her
+artlessness lay all her magic. No, no; he trusted her. She was still
+adorably English&mdash;witness her on the ship! He could see how she would
+do, how the sight would ravish him, lover as he was; for the rest, he
+must trust to his early calculations. Yes! he was ready to stake
+everything upon this move. The Borgia would be at her feet: so at his
+feet also. Oh, wise, wise Amilcare!</p>
+
+<p>"His Eminence the Duke will receive your Lordship," said the returning
+monk, and turned once more to lead the way.</p>
+
+<p>"My saint, my lamb, my meek burnished dove!" breathed Amilcare in a
+glow, and pressed her to his heart behind the frate's broad back.</p>
+
+<p>Cesare, magnificently tawny in black velvet, was in a window, raking
+with a white hand at his beard, a prey evidently to cross-tides of
+fever. When his visitors were announced he looked sharply round; but
+Molly was hooded, her face deep in the shade. Of Passavente he had not
+the slightest concern. That hero was prostrate, bowing and chattering,
+and explaining with his hands.</p>
+
+<p>Molly stayed twittering by the door, wonderful because she saw her King
+of Men cringing like a footboy before a shorter than himself. True,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> it
+was case of a duke; but she had not known such dealings in Wapping.
+There men doffed caps to my Lord or his Grace; they gave and took their
+due, but did not writhe on the floor. And then this particular duke's
+blockish inattention to what her lord was saying filled her with
+concern. There he leaned, and there he looked out of window at the
+twinkling acacias, and there he picked his beard. Amilcare's tact must
+have deserted him, since he could let this simple slave turn critic. But
+the part, in any case, was difficult. Presently the Duke threw him a
+hasty phrase, a sort of <i>pish, man</i>! which cut him off in the midst of a
+period, and walked towards Molly in the doorway. Amilcare flew before on
+tenterhooks. Cesare came graciously on&mdash;it was curious to see how his
+face had cleared. Molly dropped a curtsy, covering herself closer with a
+hand at the hood's tie. Cesare showed his teeth, held out both his
+hands. Passavente, with a displaying air full of alacrity and deference,
+unveiled his wife, and she went forward to greet his Grace.</p>
+
+<p>She had been uncovered as by a dealer, but even so thrilled to feel his
+touch upon her shoulders, and showed herself blushing with the emotion,
+lovelier for love. Cesare was really startled to see how vividly
+beautiful she was; but, with more command of himself than the other
+trafficker, was careful not to show it. He smiled yet more sunnily; his
+words were some pleasant, friendly compliment. Molly, guessing it so,
+came nearer, took his open hands, and put up her face for his kiss.
+C&aelig;sar Borgia took a deep breath before he accepted of the rest. Then he
+did kiss<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> her, twice. He was ridiculously pleased, very much in
+confusion for a little while. Since he could say nothing and she had
+nothing to say, the pair of them stood hand-clasped, smiling, dim-eyed
+and red in the face, like two glad children&mdash;Amilcare, anxious mothering
+hen, clucking about them. The Duke, having recovered himself, murmured
+some courtesy, and led his captive to a seat in the window. His
+half-dozen English words and her six Italian, his readiness, her
+simplicity, put matters on a friendly footing: very soon Molly was
+chattering like a school-girl. Cesare was enchanted; he recovered his
+gaiety, forgot his bloody hands, his anxieties, schemes, fret at
+inaction. He ordered a meal to be served at once, kept Molly close to
+his side, heaped her plate, pledged her in wine. He went so far as to
+forget all common precautions and eat whatsoever was put before him.</p>
+
+<p>Be sure Amilcare missed nothing. He saw all, perhaps more than all: he
+was used to deal with men. Thought he to himself, "Hey! If this was my
+house of Nona, <i>amico</i>, and the time six months hence, you would sleep
+where you supped." But Cesare had no thought of Amilcare until the end.
+Then he clapped him on the shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"My Passavente," he cried, "you have gone far on your pearl-fishing and
+dived deeper than most of us, but by our hope of salvation you have
+found a jewel of price! And ah, Madonna," he said, with his burning eyes
+on the girl, "you have brought the sun into Italy. You shall be called
+<i>Principessa della Pace</i>, who heal all sorrow and strife by the light of
+your face."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span></p><p>"I humbly thank your Grace," said Molly, very grateful; but Amilcare
+dropped upon one knee.</p>
+
+<p>"Splendour," says he, "deign to visit our poor house in Nona, if you
+would learn what willing service is."</p>
+
+<p>"My friend, be sure of me," said the Borgia, and meant it. "Do you bid
+me come, Princess?" His looks ate her up.</p>
+
+<p>Molly hung her head. "I shall in all things serve your Grace," said she,
+with a curtsy. She kissed him again, and then Amilcare took her away.</p>
+
+<p>The Borgia wrote sonnets that night.</p>
+
+<p>"Mollavella, pearl of ladies," whispered her ardent husband, when they
+were on the North Road and in the thick of the violet Roman night,
+"never have I felt such joy in you as this day." He looked up at the
+massed company of the stars. "Fiery in all that galaxy, yonder I see my
+own star!" he cried in a transport. "Behold, it points us dead to the
+North. O Star, lit by a star! 'Tis you have set it burning clear, my
+glorious Princess."</p>
+
+<p>"Dearest heart, I shall die of love," sighed swooning Molly, out of
+herself at such praise. "But indeed I have done little enough for you as
+yet."</p>
+
+<p>"More than you think, or can dream," he answered, and spoke truly; for
+the girl saw nothing in their late visit but a civility done to a great
+lord.</p>
+
+<p>"If the Duke comes to Nona, Amilcare, I will try to put him at his
+ease," she said after a little.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p><p>"Try, try, dear soul; it is all that I wish."</p>
+
+<p>"He seemed not so to me when first we went to him, Amilcare."</p>
+
+<p>Amilcare shrugged. "Eh, per la Madonna&mdash;!" he began, as who should say,
+"Being known for his brother's butcher, how should he be?" But he stayed
+in time. "He has many enemies," he added quietly.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CIV" id="CIV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>MARKET OVERT</h3>
+
+<p>Nona, little city of domes and belfries and square loggias, all in a
+cluster behind brown walls; with gates of Roman masonry, stolid Lombard
+church, a piazza of colonnades and restless poplar trees; of a splayed
+fountain where the Three Graces, back to back, spurt water from their
+breasts of bronze&mdash;Nona, in our time, is not to be discerned from the
+railway, although you may see its ranked mulberry-trees and fields of
+maize, and guess its pleasant seat in the plain well enough. It is about
+the size of Parma, a cheerful, leisurely place, abounding in shade and
+deep doorways and <i>caf&eacute;s</i>, having some thirty churches (mostly baroque),
+a fine Palazzo della Ragione in the principal square, and the remains of
+a cathedral of the ninth century glooming behind a monstrous fa&ccedil;ade of
+the seventeenth, all whitewash, cornucopias, and sprawling Apostles.
+Thus it seems now to the strayed traveller who, breaking his journey at
+Castel Bolognese, simmers for four hours in an omnibus along with
+priests, flies, fleas, and old women. The <i>cort&egrave;ge</i> from Papal territory
+saw a vastly different city of it when it approached the gates in the
+early spring of 1494. The young leafage shimmered like a veil of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> golden
+gauze, the poplar buds were pink and brown, the chestnuts had all their
+candles afire; larks by dozens were abroad in the clear sky. Below the
+old Rocca del Capitan Vecchio&mdash;a grizzled and blind block of masonry on
+a spur of limestone, which held not a few of Ezzelin's secrets&mdash;two
+miles from Nona, stood a company of boys and girls in white garments,
+their laps full of flowers. Their shrill song of welcome hailed the
+riders, and to the same hopeful music they went on. The towers were all
+standing in those days, the battlements intact; at every gate stood a
+guard. The Cathedral of the Santi Apostoli had no Apostles; its great
+front was a cube of unfinished brick; but colonnades ran in all the
+streets, row after row of beautifully ordered arches; over them were
+jutting cornices enriched with dancing children, sea monsters, tritons,
+dolphins, nymphs blowing conches, Nereus, Thetis, and all their sleek
+familiars, moulded in red clay. The fountain shone, the displayed Graces
+jetted their crystal store; from every window hung carpets, on every
+tower a gonfalon, from every church belfry came the riot of bells. The
+people were massed at the gates, at the windows, on roofs and loggias
+and balconies&mdash;a motley of orange and blue, crimson and green. Soldiers
+lined the ways, priests with banners were on the steps of their
+churches. "Evviva, Amilcare! Evviva, Madonna Inglese!" ran like a river
+of sound from the gates about the streets, until, in the Piazza Grande,
+where the Signoria waited in the solemn estate of brocade and ermine,
+the volume of it had the throbbing roll of breakers on a cliff. Thud
+upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> thud came "Evviva!" each with a shock which made pale Molly catch
+her breath; more than once or twice her eyes swam, and she felt herself
+wag helpless in the saddle. But Amilcare, snuffing wine, was in his
+glory, idol of a crowd he despised and meant to rule. Proud he looked
+and very greatly a ruler, firm-lipped, with a high head, and a flush on
+his dark cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>At the steps of the Palazzo della Ragione he halted, cap in hand. The
+trumpeters shrilled for silence, the Secretary of the Republic read a
+Latin speech; everybody applauded what nobody understood. Amilcare, at
+the end of it, swung off his horse and ran up the steps. He embraced the
+orator, embraced the signori one after another; greetings flashed about,
+tears, laughter, clappings on the back. But he kept his head throughout:
+it was seen that he wished to present his wife. Present her! Enthusiasm
+grew frenzied; he had to battle his way down the steps to regain her
+side. He lifted her lightly down; hand in hand they went up the steps
+again. Molly excelled herself, was the wonder of the whole city. How she
+curtsied to their lordships&mdash;what a figure she had for that grace&mdash;how
+tall, how supple, and how slim! When she gave her rosy cheek to each in
+turn, there was a kind of caught sob audible in the crowd. The
+simplicity of the act brought tears to tender eyes: men laughed or
+looked haggard, according as the trouble took them; women, more at home
+with tears, clung to each other as they cried. A marvel all believed
+her&mdash;an angel clean from heaven; the kiss of peace, <i>la bocca della
+Carit&agrave;</i>! A young Dominican became inspired;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> he showed the whites of his
+eyes, he spumed at the lips, began to mutter, with gurglings in the
+throat. At last his words broke strangling from him&mdash;"O mouth of
+singular favour! O lips of heavenly dew!" he stuttered, with a finger on
+high seesawing to the rhythm: "O starry eyes conversant with the aspect
+of angels!" He dropped down plump in a fit, barely heard at the palace
+door; but all the square surged with his cry&mdash;"O mouth of singular
+favour! O starry eyes! Evviva Madonna!"</p>
+
+<p>Men and women all told, Molly must have been forty times kissed. Twice
+forty times would not have sufficed for the candidates who jostled,
+strained, and prayed between the soldiers' pikes below the steps. It
+would be difficult to say which sex her pretty artlessness pleased the
+more: she made the women cry, the old men prophesy, the young men dream
+dreams. Certainly, there was nobody who thought ill of her for a
+performance so glaringly counter to Italian ways, whose men kiss each
+other while they keep their women at home. The thing was so transparent,
+done in such pure good faith, there was no room for judgment in it. She
+went among that people as, in these days, a child still might go. To
+those bullet-headed captains, grim and shaven close; to those painted
+great ladies, whose bare necks looked the more naked for their jewels;
+to those cruddled, be-robed old men; to the dapper sons of them; to
+their stiff-laced daughters&mdash;Molly went blushing, smiling, shy, and
+glad, and to each she gave her fresh cheek and the balm of her English
+lips. O mouth of singular favour! O starry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> eyes! She bereft them of
+compliments by her speechless welcome, overcame policy by having none,
+led captivity captive. Amilcare might hover behind her with plots, a
+delighted and forgotten shade: Molly Lovel of Bankside was Duchess of
+Nona, and might have been Queen of Italy, if all Italy had stood in the
+Piazza Grande. She was throned at a banquet, escorted home by the
+Signoria bareheaded; she was serenaded all night by relays of citizens,
+by straining poets, by all kinds of music. She had not a wink of sleep
+till morning, nor the faintest idea what it was all about.</p>
+
+<p>There was no withstanding the popular voice; the Nonesi went mad to be a
+Duchy, with Molly for Duchess. Amilcare might be thrown in. They
+besieged the Bagnacavallo <i>Cortile</i>; they wrote sonnets and madrigals,
+and sang them day in, day out. Amilcare, acting with admirable
+discretion, kept very much to himself; he sent his beautiful wife on to
+the balcony twice a day to be saluted, and (more sparingly) let her work
+for him among the higher sort with her lips, her blushes, and her
+friendly grey eyes. He was humble in the Council, sober beneath the
+heaped-up honours of the popular voice, stern only with his mercenaries.
+A fortnight of this swept him to the top of his hopes. A deputation,
+with a laurel crown and the title of <i>Dux</i> in a casket, waited upon him.
+He had expected it for a week, and carefully dragooned his Molly.</p>
+
+<p>"I must refuse the thing," he told her, "for your dear sake, my angel.
+The fatigues, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> affairs of a Ruler of State are incredible. I will
+never let you bear them. The signori may pluck their beards out by the
+roots. I am resolved." Molly wept to hear him.</p>
+
+<p>When the great morning came&mdash;a luminous April day of showers and warm
+wind&mdash;he was as good as his word. Molly, shining with pride in him
+(herself wearing the day's "uncertain glory"), saw him fold his arms in
+face of the pompous line of men his seniors, compress his mouth, shake
+his cropped head. The deputation was much taken aback, the crowd drove
+hither and thither; she saw head turned to head, guessed at wounds which
+certainly any one there was incapable of feeling. She, however, felt
+them, rose up from her chair, laid a hand upon her lord's arm: they saw
+her plead with him. Oh, lovely sight! with her they too began to plead:
+"Piet&agrave; di Nona, Signore! Piet&agrave; di noi, Madonna!" She was their graceful
+choragus; or rather, she, like some slim daughter of the
+Greeks&mdash;Iphigenia or another&mdash;voiced the protagonist's part; and they
+wailed after her, a chorus of elders. Finally, she knelt to him, wound
+her arms about his hips, put up her entreating face. The comedy was
+played out. Amilcare showed himself shaken; he stooped to her, lifted
+her in his arms, embraced her. "O mouth of singular favour!" etc. The
+convocation broke up in sobs, psalmody, and kisses on the cheek.
+Amilcare and his wife were led to the broad window and out on to the
+loggia. There stood Molly in all the glow of her happy toil,
+quick-breathing, enraptured, laughing and afire. The crown was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> on her
+head, by her side her sceptred lord; and below the people cheered and
+howled. "Udite, citt adini, il vostro Capitano!" cried the heralds.
+"Duca! duca! Evviva Amilcare, Duca!" cried the throng. Then Amilcare
+pointed to the crowned girl. "Evviva la Madonna di Nona!" he brayed like
+a tube of brass. So as Madonna di Nona they knew her to the end.
+Amilcare was crowned with his laurel wreath in the Santi Apostoli; <i>Te
+Deum</i> was sung. Nona started on her new career&mdash;benevolent despotism
+tempered by a girl's kisses.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CV" id="CV"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h3>GRIFONE&mdash;AMATEUR OF SENSE</h3>
+
+<p>Grifone must now be lifted into the piece, Grifone the grey-eyed,
+self-contained little Secretary, whose brain seemed quicksilver, whose
+acts those of a deliberate cat, whose inches were few, whose years only
+tender. One of Amilcare's rare acts of unpremeditated humanity had been
+to snatch him, a naked urchin of nine, from Barga, when (after a night
+surprise) he was raining fire and sword and the pains of hell upon that
+serried stronghold of the hills.</p>
+
+<p>"Eh, Signore, Signore!" had whined the half-famished imp, padding by the
+condottiere's stirrup.</p>
+
+<p>"Va via, vattene al diavolo!" a musketeer growled at him, and tried to
+club him down.</p>
+
+<p>Amilcare looked, as one might idly glance at a shrew-mouse in the path.
+He saw a brown body pitifully lean, a shock black head, a pair of
+piercing grey eyes. Further, he saw that the child had not on a stitch
+of clothing, and that he was splashed to the knees with drying blood.</p>
+
+<p>"What now, Baby?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Lift me into the saddle, Signore," said the boy, with a propitiating
+grin; "I am getting my feet wet."</p>
+
+<p>The little dog had a humorous twist to his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> eyebrow, and it was true
+enough that the kennels were running red.</p>
+
+<p>"Whose blood is that on your legs, my lad?" Passavente stayed his
+charger.</p>
+
+<p>Grifone shrugged. "Misericordia! Who knows? My father's perhaps; my
+mother's more certainly, since my father ran away. My mother would have
+run too, but she had no time. Eh, take me up, Signore! I cannot swim."</p>
+
+<p>Amilcare swung him up by the hand, so saved his life. Next day Grifone
+saved his.</p>
+
+<p>They burnt a monastery in the plain and ransacked a chestful of
+correspondence.</p>
+
+<p>"Death of Christ!" swore Passavente, "I can't read this Latin. Go and
+fetch me a monk and a rope."</p>
+
+<p>The monk, a plausible rogue, began to read: little Grifone stood by the
+table. At a certain point he broke into the recital with an emphatic
+word: "Liar!"</p>
+
+<p>"What the deuce does this mean?" fumed Amilcare in a rage.</p>
+
+<p>"The monk is deceiving your Lordship," said Grifone; "the sense is the
+opposite of what he reports."</p>
+
+<p>It seemed that the boy knew Latin&mdash;at any rate enough to hang a few
+monks. Hanged the poor devils were, and after that very much was made of
+Grifone. Amilcare took him through all his campaigns, had him well
+taught, gave confidence for confidence, and found by the time he was at
+Nona, making his "Gran Tradimento" of Farnese, that he could not get on
+without him. The accepted remedy for such a state of the case was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> to
+kill the youth at once. Amilcare did not do that, and at first was able
+to bless himself for his second forbearance. Grifone was privy to all
+his master's hopes and safeguards; Grifone wrought upon the Signoria,
+cajoled the clergy, bamboozled the <i>popolani</i>, descended even to the
+ragamuffins in the gutters, and taught them how to shout "Duca! Duca!"
+when his master went proudly a-horseback, or to scribble his effigy in
+great chalk circles on the city walls. Though it may be true that
+Molly's graces brought Amilcare the crown of Nona, it must be added that
+neither Molly nor her Duke could have got in at all if Grifone had not
+been there to oil the hinges of the gates.</p>
+
+<p>He had the soft purring ways of a cat, the tact of a Jesuit, the
+penetration of a money-lender, the sensibility of a musical amateur, and
+the morals of a maid-of-honour. He had extraordinary command over
+himself; he seemed able to do everything, and wishful to win nothing.
+There never was a young man (as a matter of fact) who wanted so much or
+asked so little. It was the very boundlessness of his desires which
+reined him in. The appetite of the C&aelig;sars would not have represented
+his, all the gratification they could have commanded would have been for
+him but a whet. If he had a weak side it was his own astuteness: he
+could not always see how unutterably foolish a man might be if he were
+let alone. Another foible he had&mdash;intellectual appreciation of beauty
+pushed to fainting-point. His senses were so straitly tied to his brains
+that to pluck at one was to thrill the other. Made on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> a small scale, he
+was pretty rather than handsome, had quiet watchful eyes, a smiling
+mouth, very little hands and feet. He seldom dressed out of black
+velvet, and if he wanted a man assassinated had the thing done at so
+many removes that it was always entered "private quarrel" or "love
+affair" in the reports of the City Watch. He generally chose friars for
+business of the sort, because they could be about at night without
+suspicion, and their hanging sleeves gave them such a pull. For cup or
+fruit work he found ladies the only possible agents. No one in Nona
+would dream of taking wine from a man; and as for presents of figs,
+Grifone was maturely of opinion that the last and present Pontiffs had
+exhausted that pretty artifice. Finally, you can easily understand how
+useful Duke Amilcare found a demure lad of this kind in the matter of
+moulding his new State.</p>
+
+<p>When his master brought him a mistress he gave her great attention. Like
+all clever fellows, he was at first disposed to set down her simplicity
+to her credit; but after watching her for some time, he decided that
+here was actually a soul clear as glass&mdash;thing of inestimable value in a
+country where lying was an axiom of politics&mdash;and his respect for her
+quickened into something more. If she had been only beautiful she would
+never have attracted him as she did. There were plenty of women in Italy
+handsome enough for his needs (the flower of whose amours were mostly
+for the mind); but simpletons were rarer. This tall wistful girl told
+the truth&mdash;but told it incredibly! Think of this. Shortly after the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+coronation, Bentivoglio, the chalk-faced tyrant of Bologna, came with an
+army on his way to Forl&igrave;. He had an old grudge against Nona. Finding
+himself within a league of its walls, his men lusty and well-fed, his
+artillery in great train, Nona (as he judged it) in ferment&mdash;he
+blockaded the place, and in due time summoned it to surrender. Amilcare
+laughed at him, told his wife (in secret) that he would attack on the
+morrow, and went to the Council. While he was there came a new summons
+from Bentivoglio, a messenger with a white flag. Word was sent to the
+Duke; the Duke could not be found. "Oh," said one, "seek Madonna for
+answer." This was done.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell the Lord of Bologna," says Molly, "that we attack to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>The man bowed himself away. You should have seen Amilcare's face when
+this was reported to him; he rated his lovely Molly like a fish-fag.
+Then he had an interview with Grifone; told him the whole story.</p>
+
+<p>Grifone stared. "Ebbene, Monsignore," said he, "your Grace will do well
+to attack."</p>
+
+<p>"Attack, man? when the fellow knows we are coming! Are you mad?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not so, my lord," replied the Secretary. "Bentivoglio does not know you
+are coming. What he knows is that you have <i>said</i> you are coming."</p>
+
+<p>Well, at last Amilcare saw what Grifone had seen from the first, the mad
+results which might be won by a truth-telling Duchess. The Nonesi did
+attack. Bentivoglio, of course, not expecting them, was scattered over
+the maize fields, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> never collected his force again until his own
+territory was reached. That was why he could not help the Lady of Forl&igrave;.
+"Per Bacco," said Grifone to himself, "truth in Italy is soused in the
+mud at the well's bottom; in England it seems to lie in a pan. This
+pretty creature is as shallow as a crystal cup, where you may study
+Truth, like a blue jewel, in an inch of water." He went about
+thoughtfully the rest of that day. This new-discovered quality of
+Molly's was a thing very beautiful in his eyes. The conclusion he came
+to was that he was about to fall in love with the lady. "And that, after
+all," was his comment, "might not be a bad thing, if (as is probable) it
+become necessary to make her my consort." Then he went happily to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>Grifone's proposals to himself were still very simple. Shortly, they
+were to get a throne for his master in order that he might the more
+easily acquire one for himself. "My legs," he said frankly, "are too
+short to get up without a footstool." Amilcare was to have been the
+footstool. But then Molly came into play. At first she seemed to make
+the simple thing simpler. Amilcare was a strong man, but stiff. Grifone
+was sure he would bungle in his handling of Molly; this truth-telling
+beauty, this flawless jewel in a cup, would baffle him; he would neither
+see it the fine nor the delicate tool it was. He worked best with a
+bludgeon which, as it did brute's work, might be brutishly handled. So
+far well&mdash;he might trust Amilcare to wreck himself. Unfortunately, it
+seemed only too likely he might involve Molly in the mess. That danger
+was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> looming; already he set her to decoy-work which the girl herself
+(Grifone could see) did not relish. The ladies of Nona were gay and
+free&mdash;too free. Molly recoiled visibly, more than once. The men were
+worse. Incredible as it seemed to Grifone, they actually ravaged this
+tender honeysuckle spray to drench themselves with the scent. Molly,
+beautifully patient, courteous, meek as she was, cast a scared, paling
+face about the assembly now and again: some of the talk, too, cut her
+very deep. Grifone was already too much interested in her to stomach
+this. He decided to make discreet love to his Duchess by a way of his
+own. The Nonesi (gluttons!) abused her favours; he would refuse them. He
+would fast where Nona feasted, and be the only unkissed guest at her
+receptions.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CVI" id="CVI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>GRIFONE ENTERS THE MARKET</h3>
+
+<p>The first opportunity he had he took. The Palazzo Bagnacavallo was
+thrown open to all worthy citizens, the rooms (since no one in those
+courting days was held unworthy) were crowded. Ladies, soldiers,
+churchmen, humanists in brocade, poets in velvet, a Cardinal, a
+cross-eyed Greek who had forsaken usury at Trebizond for moral
+philosophy at Nona; Madonna Diamante, too receptive wife of the Count of
+Cornuto; Madonna Smeralda, her discreet friend; Madonna Saphira; Madonna
+Rubina; frizzed young nobles in parti-coloured hose; humble abbates,
+uncured and incurable; a monk crowned with laurel for a sonnet; and a
+Knight of the Holy Ghost in retirement;&mdash;these were some of the company
+among whom Duchess Molly was paraded by her discerning lord, to carry
+her smiles of welcome and her pretty ways. Grifone, grave, attentive, in
+black, was there, be sure, waiting his turn. It came, and with it Molly,
+blushing and overwrought, new from the very kindly salutations of the
+Greek. To Grifone she proffered a greeting which was no less kind
+because her heart was troubled. Her well of trust in mankind was not yet
+dry. Grifone took her hand and bent over it; it was as much as he did to
+brush it with his lips. Molly wondered at him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span></p><p>"You should be Messer Grifone, my Lord's secretary," she said,
+faltering.</p>
+
+<p>"Alas, I have that misfortune," replied the youth, with averted eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I know you very well," said Molly, "but see now that I have
+offended you. What is my injury, Signore? What have I done?"</p>
+
+<p>"Madonna," said Grifone (but so low that no other could hear him),
+"believe me that the offence is none of your wilful making. It is,
+however, irremediable. Nothing but misfortune could overcome such
+misfortune as mine; and that I pray Heaven to keep far from you."</p>
+
+<p>"Alack! good Grifone, what sayings are these for a day that should be
+happy?" urged the warm-hearted girl, with eyes ready to fill.</p>
+
+<p>"Madonna, let me endure the thought of them alone, I entreat your
+Grace."</p>
+
+<p>"Never, while I live, Grifone. You make me most unhappy. Will you not
+kiss me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never, while I live, Madonna, if I am to live honest."</p>
+
+<p>Molly went white and red, and stood hesitating, uncertain whether to cry
+or be angry. Either might have been a vent for her distress, which was
+real. Commanding herself with pains&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I will require you to speak with me after supper," she said, after a
+pause for the struggle.</p>
+
+<p>Grifone bowed his head and backed away from her. She, being boundless in
+capacity for the affections of her kind, spent the interval with an
+aching heart.</p>
+
+<p>Directly supper was done she hunted for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> Secretary. The affair had
+by now throbbed itself into a question of her physical ease. Her
+heartstrings were at a dangerous stretch, she quivering at the point of
+tears. Master Grifone, for his part, had taken very good care that the
+Duke of Nona should be occupied, and himself not hard to find. Molly
+came upon him in a gallery of arras; caught him crouching there with his
+face hidden in his hands. She went to him at once, full of the trouble
+he showed her, sat by him, put her arm round his neck, and tried to draw
+his head up. Grifone turned her a white, miserable face.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" he said, husky with reproach, "ah! you have come with the ardours
+of an angel leaping in you; yet no cruelty could in truth be sharper."</p>
+
+<p>"Cruel? Cruel? Oh, Grifone, nobody has ever said this of me before!"
+whimpered poor Molly. She was swirling in wilder water than she knew.</p>
+
+<p>"The cruelty is unconscious, yet none the less bitter for that," he
+complained; and then, all at once, he turned fiercely to rend her.
+"What! When I throb for your footfall, or when I lean swooning to the
+wall for the scent of your hair as you pass; when I urge against your
+chamber door that I may feed upon the sound of your breath, or hunt for
+broken bread under your table that I may grow drunk on what your fingers
+have touched! When I go raving at night, weeping by day, with a knife in
+my heart, tears that scald my eyes! When with these pains to endure,
+these perils to skirt, heights to fly, you will speak, touch me, breathe
+upon me, tempt me to greet you with kissing of the lips&mdash;ah, heaven and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>
+hell! it is over-much. I would be an honest man, look you. I have a
+master to serve, I bid you remember. It is true enough that I love you
+out of all measure; there is no sin in that which I cannot help; but
+misery there is, by our Saviour. The sin is gaping all about me, itching
+here, aching there, gnawing and groping without cease, or stint, or
+allay. Yes, yes, I know this is true&mdash;God help me! I love you
+deplorably; but I will not touch you. You are the ever-blessed thing to
+me; but I will make you the ever-abhorred thing, <i>anathema maranatha</i>. I
+love you, I worship you, I adore you; you are my saint, my church, my
+altar, my soul's peculiar food; you shall be my devil, his hell, his
+cauldron, my venomous offence. And all this you shall be that I may love
+you yet more, yet incomprehensibly more, and (withal) live honest. I
+will hate you because I adore you. Ah! and I will prove whether by
+hating you most of all I cannot drown myself in love." He threw himself
+out of her reach, and rocked with hidden face.</p>
+
+<p>Here was pretty hearing for a pretty bride. Molly, with heaving bosom,
+stood abashed and dumb, and troubled profoundly. Not only had she never
+tried to stem so fierce a torrent of love, nor ever shuddered under such
+dry heat in men's words&mdash;she had never yet dreamed of so much passion in
+men created. And glorious passion, too, it seemed, so stern and
+repressed&mdash;a passion which hugged a fetter, a splendid misery of denial.
+Of course she had nothing to say; she never had anything to say; yet she
+longed to say or do something. Her interest in all these fine things
+was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> painful, if delicious; and it never occurred to her for a moment
+that it could be a sin to listen where it was evidently such a virtue to
+declare. She was conscious of no disloyalty to Amilcare in so listening,
+in being so troubled, in displaying her trouble so unaffectedly. Poor,
+poor, good Grifone! So very noble, so white and miserable; Heaven knows
+she would have satisfied him if she could. With her, to feel was to
+touch (if I may so put it); quite instinctively she stretched out her
+arms to draw him home; the good fool would have kissed his tears away if
+he had had any, giving him for comfort what he had screamed upon as a
+torment. But that was a talent denied to Grifone: he could not cry. All
+the same, she was at the point to kiss him, when he once more prevented
+her&mdash;this time without violence.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, my lady, my lady," he said, with a smile whimsically sad, "have a
+little pity on a torturing wretch!"</p>
+
+<p>Molly now covered her face and freely sobbed. The scene was
+heartrending, and Grifone judged that he might give the finishing
+stroke. He stood over her where she was flung (the poor humble soul),
+and laid his fingers lightly on her silken shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Love makes a good reader of a man," he said slowly, drawling his words.
+"Long ago I discerned the clear stream of truth which is the issue of
+your love. Henceforward there is a secret pact between us two, a secret
+wholly honourable, since I have only told it that you might be won over
+not to dare me too far. Being honourable, you (who are the fountain of
+honour) will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> keep it. We go our two ways, we look not on each other, we
+greet not, neither speak what either knows. Chance will throw us much
+together; yet this law we will punctually observe. To me the hour will
+say&mdash;'Guard thee, Grifone, thy sweet enemy draws near.' To you&mdash;'Now
+goodness be thy guide, Molly, lest thou art a cause of stumbling to thy
+brother.' So let it always be."</p>
+
+<p>He left her then, knowing very well that he had sworn the good girl to
+faith inviolable, and given her the subject of perennial thought.</p>
+
+<p>And so he had. Molly kept his secret, honoured it, honoured him. She
+came by tortuous ways of her hoodblind heart to glory and exult in both;
+nor had she the wit to discern how or by what stealthy degrees the pain
+and longing she pitied in him grew to be more pitiable in herself. She
+watched him wonderfully in those crowded days of court life which
+followed, and when she was blinded by her tears, held him as a martyr
+who, for her sake, lay quivering under the knife. It shows the length of
+her road, that she was never aware how much more in her sight he was
+than Amilcare, the man of her election. Amilcare, it is true, was
+greatly occupied: one cannot be a duke for nothing. Not home affairs
+only (though discontent was never far off) called him from home: the
+times were full of the shock of alarms; thrones toppled; there were
+rumours of moving hosts beyond the Alps. Cesare, the flame-coloured
+Borgia, was still meditating his kingdom in Romagna; already the Lady of
+Forl&igrave; was flogging her sulky lieges into some sort of action for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> her
+defence. Now, Nona lay dead in the Borgia's way, and unless the Borgia
+could be hoodwinked again as he had been hoodwinked before, Nona need
+not cease to be a Duchy, but Amilcare would cease to be a Duke. No
+wonder the man was a lacklove just now. He intended to play Molly for
+his great stake; meantime he must be more of a duke than he was,
+recognised as such by other powers, by dukes firmly rooted, by grudging
+republics, or tyrants in thin veils.</p>
+
+<p>And while he was consolidating his throne&mdash;ruffling here, fawning
+there&mdash;Grifone was always before Molly's eye; always plucking at her
+poor heartstrings; always holding up his grave patience, his bleeding,
+his most eloquent refusals, for her wonder. Wonder, indeed, she did, and
+much more than that. The thought sat upon her like a brooding evil
+spirit, frayed her nerves to waste. He used to move her so much by this
+policy of negation that she found herself panting as she sat among her
+women; or when from her throned seat at table she saw his pale profile
+burn like a silver coin in the dusk, the pain of her heart's beating
+well-nigh made her suffocate. Her troubles came to be day-long; he
+haunted her by night. When she began to ask the Virgin Mary how long she
+could endure, it was the signal to herself that she could endure no
+more. She sent for him then, and implored him brokenly&mdash;sobbing,
+kneeling before him&mdash;that he would leave her. Grifone bowed his head.</p>
+
+<p>Next day Amilcare (or some other) told her that the Secretary was to be
+absent for some months arranging alliances abroad. He went without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
+seeing her or bidding any farewells. She was prostrate for three or four
+days, could hardly drag herself to church, or away from it when she had
+once gained its cool sanctuary aisles. After that she got better and
+more her old self. The relief was as delicious as the grief had been;
+she was really happy. Then she found that she was beginning to dread his
+return. This was exactly what he had desired: he was a most astute young
+man.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CVII" id="CVII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>A PEDLAR'S ROUND</h3>
+
+<p>Grifone's tour of negotiation lasted very nearly six months&mdash;months of
+comparative ease for Molly, neglected by husband and shadowing lover
+alike. During this time the latter visited every important court in
+Italy, except Naples, whither he cared not, and Parma, whither he dared
+not venture&mdash;the object of his journey being, of course, to secure his
+master's acknowledgment by a better title than the throats of a marketed
+crowd. It would be as interesting as it was surprising to see the little
+craftsman at work, the ingenuity with which he plied his handful of
+tools, the proud patience with which he endured snub after snub, his
+bland passivity and extraordinary rebound. First of all, he went to
+Rome, ever the pivot of danger to an Italian diplomat. Molly's portrait,
+done in his best manner by Dosso of Ferrara, was presented to Duke C&aelig;sar
+of Valentinois.</p>
+
+<p>In this, the lady with loose hair and a still looser robe (spangled with
+stars it was, and slipped off one white shoulder) was sitting in a green
+wilderness feeding lions with <i>confetti</i>. On a cedar near by, were
+several parrots and a pale owl, and from a low-swinging branch a great
+speckled snake stooped downward to embrace Molly's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> waist in a dry fold,
+and with his head writhed forward to lick her chin. It was a pleasing
+piece; Don Cesare was ravished. The seed planted in him at Foligno
+germinated, produced a bud, before long a triumphant flower. Not only
+would he come to Nona, and that soon, but the Holy Father sent the
+Golden Rose to "his dearest daughter in Jesus Christ, Maria, by the same
+grace Duchess of Nona." O mouth of singular favour!</p>
+
+<p>With the scent of this rare blossom, Grifone went off to tickle the
+nostrils of the North. But he must not delay us. Bologna he dared to
+visit: thither the ducal pair must needs go anon. Milan received him to
+some purpose; Venice received him to none at all. Barbarigo was not Doge
+for nothing. Ferrara was busy with thoughts of piety, the whole court
+barefoot, howling "Fac me plagis" between the garden walls. In other
+places he cried his wares, and reached Nona again in the heats of July.</p>
+
+<p>He found his lovely mistress in a shaking fever, languid under the
+breathless heat of the plain, yet never at rest. He found her large-eyed
+and bodeful, horribly nervous of him. She had been longing to see him,
+yet every day made vehement prayer that she might never look on him
+again. When she knew that he was indeed in the palace, she shut herself
+into her chamber with a crucifix, and spent the whole day at the window
+peeping from behind a curtain. Grifone saw the shape of her in it, saw
+her hand at the selvage.</p>
+
+<p>"Courage, Grifone, mio caro," he assured<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> himself; "she is afraid of
+thee." He resumed his state of armed respect, Molly her tossing nights
+and pacing days. Affairs were something awry within the Duchy, yet
+Grifone assured his Lord they were likely to be much more awry out of
+it. Madonna Duchessa must certainly be shown about&mdash;otherwise, an
+avalanche. Preparations were pushed on. By October the Duke and Duchess,
+with a great train set out&mdash;actually for Bologna, but nominally for
+Milanese territory. Lodovico, of that great principality, would have
+been mortally affronted if he believed Bentivoglio to have been
+considered first. Therefore the visit to Bologna was to be a dead
+secret, performed by the principals almost unattended. Meantime Grifone
+(who loved mystification) prepared litters with a dummy Duke and Duchess
+to go under escort to Borgo San Donnino. He and his wagging escort duly
+entered that city: excuses to the Podest&agrave; secured him a covered passage
+to the palace. Once there, unfortunately, the populace clamoured for a
+view, insisted upon their Graces' appearance. Grifone had to set his
+dolls at a window. There they stared, embraced, while three Ciceronian
+orations were delivered from the piazza, and all the merchant-guilds
+marched round it with banners and torches. Next morning he got them off
+safely by some stroke of good luck; but his joke got wind in time, came
+round to Cesare Borgia's ears, and at last was repeated against Nona.
+For no other reason could this absurd incident claim your ears.</p>
+
+<p>At Bologna, also, all had gone well with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> real adventurers&mdash;up to a
+certain point Bentivoglio the tyrant (whose name is surely the grimmest
+of his pleasantries) having seen the lovely Molly, was disposed to
+forgive her that disastrous veracity which (you remember) had prevented
+him before. He was so favourably impressed that Amilcare (who never
+missed a chance) left him alone with her for two hours in the garden
+after supper. At the end of that time Molly came to him, stumbling over
+her dress in her haste, flushed and in tears. They must leave Bologna at
+once, she declared; she would die else, or never look her husband in the
+face. The man had insulted her, was horrible, most wicked. Amilcare, her
+dear lord, must go and avenge her, etc., etc.</p>
+
+<p>Here was a pother. What could be done? Grifone, of course, had he been
+there, would have drawn his master's sword for him, dragged him out of
+the room, and sent him back in half an hour's time with a bloody
+testimony of nothing on the blade. Molly would have been pacified,
+Bentivoglio snug abed, the sword none the worse for a little pig's
+blood. But Grifone was at Borgo jigging his dolls and listening to
+Cicero, and Amilcare lost his head. He pooh-poohed the whole affair;
+Molly grew pale, stopped crying. Amilcare began to feel himself&mdash;come,
+come, she was reasonable after all. He condescended to explain the fine
+uses of Italian statecraft, the wife's part, the husband's part. He was
+most explicit; Molly grew white, ended by fainting. Amilcare carried her
+to bed; she refused to sleep with him. He raged; she cared nothing. She<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
+was wild with terror, shame, discovery of her lover's worth, and of her
+love's. He had to beg her pardon on his knees, made an enemy of
+Bentivoglio, a fool of himself, and left next morning in a tearing
+passion.</p>
+
+<p>Grifone, who met his master at Cremona, lost no time in seeing that
+something had gone counter, and very little in finding out what it was.</p>
+
+<p>"Leave it to me, my good lord," he said comfortably; "I will explain it
+to Madonna in another way."</p>
+
+<p>Before they went to bed he had a little guarded talk with his Duchess,
+half excusation of his absence which might have aggravated her alarms,
+half condemnation of Amilcare; the whole, consequently, a veiled eulogy
+of himself.</p>
+
+<p>Molly was very quiet at first, subdued and miserable, but sincerely
+grateful. To express this, she fell into her natural way, a way of
+little timid tendernesses, little touchings of the arm, urgings of the
+cheek. Grifone received them rigidly; she was reduced to tears.
+Thereupon he kissed her ardently, twice, and fled. She remained a long
+while in the dark, breathless, limp, awed, and absurdly happy. Next
+morning he was as distant as the Alps and quite as frosty. At dusk they
+reached Milan.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever Duke Ludovic (titular of Bari, actual of Milan) may have
+intended to ensue, he gave them a proper reception. Cardinal Ascanio
+himself came to the city gate with clergy and the Council; cavalry, a
+parti-coloured array, pennoned and feathered, escorted them to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> the
+castle. There, on the steps within the great courtyard, the Moor
+himself, sumptuous in silver brocade, and Donna Beatrice his wife; there
+his tired sister, Duchess Bona, and her by no means tired daughter,
+Bianca Maria of the green eyes, stood panoplied to await them. Trumpets
+announced the greetings that passed; yet another fanfare the greetings
+that were to come when within the hall, at the foot of the broad
+staircase, they found and kissed the hands of the anxious little Duke
+Galeazzo Gian and his pretty wife&mdash;pair of doomed children, even then in
+the cold shadow of their fate.</p>
+
+<p>Half-hearted, fainting Molly went through her little part with the
+accustomed success. Her pretty English-Italian, her English lips, again
+her eager hands, so anxious to search friends out, found their sure way
+to one at least. Bianca Maria, affianced of the Roman King, delighted to
+kiss and be kissed, announced herself the shy girl's lover. Pleasure
+broke over her face, broke the glaze of her bottomless eyes with a gleam
+like the sun's when in still water it betrays deep green paths of light.</p>
+
+<p>She was an enigmatic rogue, so clever that to most she seemed of
+unplumbed stupidity. Those blank green eyes of hers, that waxen face,
+that scarlet impenetrable mouth, her even gait and look of ruminating,
+look of a dolt&mdash;who knew Bianca Maria? Not Maximilian the mild-mannered
+King; not Duke Ludovic (that creased traitor) who schemed her marriage;
+not altogether Lionardo, who painted half her portrait and taught her
+much of his wisdom; certainly not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> poor Molly of Nona. All Milanese were
+her lovers, and here was another heart, Molly's, to wit, laid open and
+soothed by the little witch's quick hand-stroke. Bianca Maria had all
+her secrets with all her love in the first hour of their embracery.</p>
+
+<p>The two girls sat clasped in one chair in that pretty time of dressing
+when half is undone and half's to do. Molly, feeling a fool but loving
+to have it so, sat in the lap of the younger, who mothered her.</p>
+
+<p>After many days Lionardo, who forgot nothing and never her whom he thus
+happened on, glorified her as the Virgin Mary on the knees of Saint
+Anne. The indefinite smile, the innocent consciousness, the tender
+maiden ways! Wife, mother, handmaid of high God, he thought of her as of
+Molly in <i>apotheosis</i>; dutiful for love's sake, yet incurably a child,
+made for the petting place.</p>
+
+<p>"Grifone the Secretary is your lover, my Molly," said Bianca Maria the
+wise.</p>
+
+<p>Molly admitted the sobering truth, and the other pinched her lip.</p>
+
+<p>"Take care of him, my dear. He is more perilous than that stiff husband
+you now have. The husband is a trading fool. He uses you as a carrot to
+induce donkeys. The other is more curious, and has no use for donkeys.
+He will use you otherwise."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, how will he use me then?" said open-eyed Molly. She was vaguely
+ill at ease; but the other shammed stupid. All she could be brought to
+add was&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I will take care of you if I can. You will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> never do here, nor should
+ever have come&mdash;a lamb among our Lombard wolves. Had you no English
+lover, to kill Amilcare and prevent it?"</p>
+
+<p>Molly thought of Gregory Drax, who had been upon the North seas at the
+time. Gregory Drax used to lean over the garden gate chewing straws.
+This he did by the hour together, to the perfect satisfaction of himself
+and understanding of the neighbours. Molly could not think that it would
+have led to the slaying of Amilcare.</p>
+
+<p>"What was he like, this Gregorio?" asked Bianca Maria, suddenly alert
+when she had got his name smoothly.</p>
+
+<p>Molly did her best&mdash;ruddy, blue-eyed, always blushing and laughing,
+fair-haired, very long arms. He was a <i>marinajo</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"He sounds to be so," said Bianca Maria. Then she clapped her hands and
+summoned Lionardo.</p>
+
+<p>The great man had no sooner appeared (noiselessly in the doorway, the
+inscrutable grey-beard) than she kissed her friend and bade her go with
+her women to the appointed quarters of the Nonesi. Lionardo gravely
+saluted her as she went rosy out. He had seen the Virgin in the lap of
+Saint Anne and cared no more for the poor original.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear Lionardo," said the girl in the chair to the most learned man of
+her day, "you shall do me the favour to write a letter in Latin to a
+certain English lord, Messer Gregorio Dras, <i>Marinajo</i>, Londra."</p>
+
+<p>"Principessa," said the great man, "I am ready. Recite your letter."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span></p><p>"To her very singular good lord," the letter began&mdash;the only one, so
+far as I know, written by the Empress Bianca Maria to England; certainly
+the only one she ever wrote to Wapping. The conceit of it was as
+follows: That the lovely Lady Molly was at Nona on the confines of
+Emilia and Romagna, wife of a man who would shortly be murdered in order
+that she might become the mate of the assassin; that a very great lord,
+son of the Holy Father, was intending for those parts, and would
+probably take the same means to secure himself the position of her third
+husband. The writer proposed that the Lord Gregorius, whose virtue and
+celerity of judgment were well known throughout Italy, should journey
+out to Nona with all reasonable despatch and repossess himself of the
+lady. "Thus your lordship," it concluded, "may happily become fourth
+husband of a lady, whose charms are of a sort so noble and perdurable
+that they are unlikely to suffer from the arduous duties their
+excellence involves. Yet such haste as is compatible with your
+worshipful degree in the realm of England may be recommended. From
+Milan, etc., in the year of our thankful Redemption 1494."</p>
+
+<p>"How shall we send our letter speediest, my Merlin?" His enchantress
+laid her emerald spell over him&mdash;O incomparable witch! Such sorcery
+exalted him always. He lifted her question upon one of his towering
+flights.</p>
+
+<p>"The wings of birds, if we could use them, were admirable for the
+purpose, Princess," he replied. "But, for the moment, the difficulty of
+instructing such messengers is insuperable. And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> not only so, but it is
+probable that the Lord Gregorio, seeing such an envoy to his hand, might
+put a bolt into it, and itself into the pot, without interrogatories
+delivered or answers made. So messenger and message would alike be
+boiled. Another way occurs to me, which arises out of this
+consideration. We stand, each bather of us, in a lake of air. A lake?
+Rather, an illimitable ocean of it spread over land and sea, in which
+the very mountain-tops do blink. Should not, then, the pulsing of our
+thought, as it rings outward from us, be discernible in the ripples
+about the Lord Gregorio's ears? Obviously it should. But the reading of
+such ripples would be a nice matter; and again we lack means, and again
+the time, to instruct his lordship. Once more&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you dream your subtleties, and my letter gets cold," said Bianca
+Maria, pouting. "You are now just as you sit watchfully when you should
+be painting my picture."</p>
+
+<p>"It is then that I am painting my hardest, Princess Saint Anne," he
+returned. "But leave with me your letter. It shall go in a man's bosom
+to-morrow morning."</p>
+
+<p>High affairs of State are not settled in a week, nor dukes so apt at
+billing as a pair of girls. Duke Ludovic would not declare himself to
+every adventurer; Duke Amilcare was too patently adventurous to disclose
+all his hand. Then came Grifone, with a game of his own. Blind each of
+one eye, they set to dealing their cards for beggar-my-neighbour.</p>
+
+<p>Now Ludovic feared one man in all Italy, and so did Amilcare. That was
+the one man in all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> Italy whom Grifone respected, on whom he thought he
+could honestly rely. Thought he to himself, "Can their Serenities be
+leagued against this man in my service? Can they not, by our risen
+Lord?" He fancied that they might.</p>
+
+<p>To this end he proposed to his master, very shortly, the assassination
+of Borgia by means of the lovely Molly. Let her, at a private banquet,
+inveigle him to drink a cup.</p>
+
+<p>"Suggest this to the Duke of Bari," he said. "I think your lordship will
+not be disappointed. Substantial pledges must be exacted, of course; he
+must tread in deep enough to leave a footmark or two visible 'twixt
+Milan and Nona."</p>
+
+<p>Amilcare thought well of this advice and followed it. Ludovic,
+incredulous at first and breathless, took a fortnight to ponder. He
+consulted Cardinal Ascanio, consulted his astrologers, took the test of
+the opening Virgil. His eye lighted upon the portentous words: "Tant&aelig;
+molis erat Romanam condere gentem." Who would have twittered after
+those? He sought his guest and told him roundly that if the thing went
+well he would send an envoy to the court at Nona, and support the new
+Duchy with moral force.</p>
+
+<p>Amilcare did not believe him, naturally, nor did he greatly care for
+moral forces. He stipulated for an envoy at once, an invitation for
+himself and his wife to Bianca Maria's wedding, and for a loan of twenty
+thousand ducats in specie.</p>
+
+<p>Ludovic boggled horribly at this; but they accorded at last. The envoy
+was to go then and there, the invitation should be sent when the Borgia
+had agreed to visit Nona, and the money<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> when he was within a day's ride
+of that city. Reduced to cipher-writing, this treaty was placed below
+the visible Host on the high altar of Sant' Eustorgio; the allies
+received the Communion, and after another week's festivities the Duke
+and Duchess of Nona went home.</p>
+
+<p>At parting, the two girls clung together.</p>
+
+<p>"We shall never meet again, child," cried the chosen Empress. "I am sure
+of it."</p>
+
+<p>Molly kissed her. "Are we not to come to your marriage, dear Bianca?"</p>
+
+<p>"My marriage?" cried the other. "You will as likely see me there as that
+shadow of a name which will be my bridegroom. You will see my
+simulacrum, a plastered effigy of me. I shall be stiff with gold-dust
+and diamonds; a doll marrying a doll's bed-gown. Why should I be there
+if his ever-august Majesty is represented by a puff of silly breath?
+Pray, never look for Bianca Maria in the Queen of the Romans. The Queen
+of the Romans is a doll, windy ruler of the name of a people; Bianca
+Maria Sforza, daughter of thieves, has been your friend, as you will
+see. She has provided for your third husband an honest man. Now kiss me
+for the last time and, by Heaven, go quickly, or I shall keep you here
+for my soul's health."</p>
+
+<p>The fierce little hungry creature threw her arms round Molly's neck and
+kissed her like a lover.</p>
+
+<p>Molly was melted into tears. "Oh, Bianca, you bewilder, you terrify me!
+What is this of husbands and your soul?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, my soul!" cried she. "Do you think so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> highly of it as to suppose
+it will survive this marriage, or so lightly as not to care? My soul,
+poor child, is in the case with your lovely body. It is the tied bird of
+all these fowlers."</p>
+
+<p>"Alas, alas! But I cannot understand," Molly wailed; but the other
+caught her the closer.</p>
+
+<p>"That you do not understand, Carina, is your salvation. It proves you
+immortal. Now go. No! kiss me, kiss me!"</p>
+
+<p>They were parted at last; and though they did meet again, they kissed no
+more.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CVIII" id="CVIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>PRIVATE TREATY</h3>
+
+<p>To a most elaborately penned invitation the Borgia responded by half a
+dozen words scrawled by his secretary. He would be in the March at such
+and such a time, and would spend such and such a day in Nona.</p>
+
+<p>He had heard from Amilcare; he replied to Molly. The insult was glaring,
+even to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Is this tolerable, my lord?" said the meek beauty, incensed at last.</p>
+
+<p>Amilcare shrugged. "It may not have to be borne very long," said he.
+"For my part I am accustomed to reckon a gift by its use to me, not by
+the sacking round about it." He was now beyond his wife's depth: she
+neither followed nor tried to follow him.</p>
+
+<p>In these days she saw but little of her lord, and could have wished it
+less. He, who in action was as cheerful a soul as you could wish to
+serve, was harassed by the long expectances of diplomacy, and in the
+routine work of governing most grim. The Nonesi had come to hate him a
+good deal, but to fear him more. Expenses were incalculable, the taxes
+grew; there were riots. Savage snaps of speech in the Council did harm;
+imprisonments followed, then some unaccountable sudden deaths. High and
+low alike, none knew where the blow might fall, but all flinched at it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span></p><p>In these distresses Molly served him well, for she at least was
+universally loved. If the Duke had a man stabbed, the Duchess took such
+sweet consolation to the widow that none could murmur long. To watch her
+warm tears flow was in itself a solace; to feel her arms, to win her
+kissing mouth, quickened those doubtful poor souls.</p>
+
+<p>Furtively also, Grifone was on her side; a neat phrase here and there
+made her position plain to the most infidel in the city. It is true that
+while he helped her there he tortured her otherwhere inexpressibly. He
+hardly ever left her now, and her heart bled to see him go in fear of
+her; she prayed night and day that he might have strength to shake off
+this biting, cruel love. It never entered her head that she could
+console him by perfidy to a perfidious husband; it had entered Grifone's
+head a hundred times, but he always put it out. He could afford to wait
+for what, after all, he only valued as a concession to vulgar opinion.
+In thought she had been his for a year; and in the mind he lived most
+deliciously. It was, no doubt, his full intent to make her his in all
+the grossness of the fact, but not until he had got rid of Amilcare, or
+induced Amilcare to get rid of himself. This was what the stiffnecked
+Condottiere was now doing as fast as his best enemies could have wished.
+His people hated him so bitterly that he would certainly have worn
+mail&mdash;had not Molly been his mail. They spared him because they loved
+her, and believed that he still had her heart. "Amilcar, uxoris gratia,
+Dux," was now the fact. Grifone could have destroyed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> belief and him
+together by a lift of the eyebrow; but he wanted more than that, so
+waited on.</p>
+
+<p>The little fellow was really extraordinary. Luxurious as he was to the
+root, and effeminate; hating as he did cold water, cold food, the cold
+shoulder; one and all of these shuddering things he had schooled himself
+to bear without a blink. He grew even to take a stern pleasure in the
+bitterness they cost him, as he turned them to his uses and reckoned up
+his balance at the bank. Amilcare snarled at him, cut his words out of
+his mouth, struck him, kicked him once like a yard-dog. Grifone added it
+all to his store.</p>
+
+<p>But as the day for Duke Cesare's visit drew near, Molly began to be much
+again in her husband's thoughts&mdash;how far she would go in this maturer
+time. She had charmed the man once before, at Foligno; she had charmed
+everybody. But then she had been charmed herself. Subsequently she had
+charmed Bentivoglio, not so happily but that she endangered her own
+spell. That was the present trouble, for hitherto her charm had lain
+precisely in herself, in the little everyday acts which were her own
+nature. Bentivoglio had reasonably wanted more: so would Borgia want
+very much more. Could Molly be brought, not to surrender all he wanted,
+but to make him want? Amilcare, growing tense between his difficulties,
+felt that explanations must be given and received, felt also that they
+must come from himself&mdash;in fact, Grifone had declined them&mdash;and felt
+that he was not strong in such work. Direction he could give, but not
+explanation. However, he must try.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span></p><p>On a vivid morning of early summer, when the lemon-trees in the
+<i>cortile</i> looked as if they had been cut out of metal, and the planes
+and very poplars were unwinking in the thick blue air, Amilcare came
+into his wife's room. She had not expected him; he found her lying
+dishevelled and unbusked, with all her glossy hair tumbled loose. Very
+much a maiden still, notwithstanding her year and a half of troublous
+marriage, she jumped up directly she saw him, and, blushful, covered her
+neck. Amilcare, finding her and the act adorable together, took her in
+his arms and kissed her; then he led her back by the hand to the
+window-cushions and made her sit upon his knee. He began to play with
+her hair.</p>
+
+<p>"What a silken mesh, my Molly! What a snare for a man in this lovely
+cloud! How fragrant of roses! Ah, most beautiful wife, you could lead
+all Italy by a strand of this miraculous hair."</p>
+
+<p>She was pleased with his praises, touched and grateful; she kissed him
+for them. So they grew more friendly than they had been ever since the
+Bentivoglio had shocked her modesty and faith in him at once. Amilcare
+rattled on; love-talk comes easily to the Italian tongue, whose very
+vocables are caresses.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually he drew in and in to the Borgia, centre of all his spinning
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>"There is a lover of yours, for instance!" he said, comically aghast;
+and Molly laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Amilcare, you make all the world to be my lover, all the world to
+look at me through your eyes. Believe it, they see me truer than you do.
+I am a very simple person."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p><p>Amilcare began to count upon his fingers, one hand meeting the other
+round Molly's caught waist.</p>
+
+<p>"The Borgia, the Count of Cavalcalupo, Oreste Colonna, Negroponte, three
+Bishops at Sesto, Bianca Maria, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, Ordelaffi,
+Benti&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She stopped him there with a hand on his mouth. "Pah, the horrible man!"</p>
+
+<p>Amilcare gaily struggled for vent, and&mdash;"voglio!" he concluded the word.
+"You may not relish the trophy, my wife; but him you undoubtedly
+charmed. And now Don Cesare is coming. Him also it will be as needful as
+easy to please."</p>
+
+<p>Molly turned in her husband's arms to consider him. Something in his
+tone (rather than the words he had used) struck bodefully upon her.
+Amilcare was kissing her hair and would not give over: she cast down her
+eyes unsatisfied.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope I may always please my lord's friends," she said in a low voice.</p>
+
+<p>Amilcare settled himself yet more luxuriously in his cushions, and
+looked at the ceiling.</p>
+
+<p>"You must charm him, my soul," he said intensely; "you must charm him. I
+am in his hands, in his way; he has sought my ruin and I believe still
+seeks it. Twice he has tried to poison me, once to have me stabbed; if
+he tries again he will succeed. Nothing can turn Don Cesare from his
+path but a woman. Therefore, you must charm him, ravish his eyes. You
+know very well how to do that."</p>
+
+<p>Molly stared, grew red, began to stammer.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> "But how can I&mdash;? Oh,
+Amilcare, what do you ask of me?"</p>
+
+<p>Then he looked at her, severely but without malice. She noticed for the
+first time the cold-steel hue in his eyes, the complete absence of
+friendliness&mdash;a tinge which his men knew very well, and other men's men
+even better.</p>
+
+<p>"I ask of you, my Molly, that the man be put at his ease," he said
+deliberately (happy in ordering at last); "more, that his direction be
+turned. He must be made high-hearted, full of glorious hope, not
+counting cost, keen in pursuit. He must blow off the cobwebs of his
+doubt; rather, these must shred from him as he flies in chase. I cannot
+afford his distrust. I can do nothing without you. Light of Heaven! am I
+asking too much? Or do you suppose that my safety with the Borgia is not
+yours also?" He shrugged his intolerable indignation and threw back his
+head. Thus he avoided to look at his wife.</p>
+
+<p>She still sat upon his knee, but like an alien, bolt upright, reasoning
+out her misery with wide tearless eyes, and a hand to press her bosom
+down. Shocks were no more for her&mdash;she had learned too much; but these
+things seemed like hard fingers on a familiar wound, which opened the
+old sore and set it aching. The part he now put to her had only to be
+named to be shown for horrible; was yet too horrible to be named; yet
+had to be named.</p>
+
+<p>"You ask of me to charm your enemy," she said in a still, fascinated
+voice (as if she were forced by a spell to speak obscenity): "to beguile
+your enemy&mdash;to make him&mdash;make him&mdash;seek me? Him,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> the man who tried to
+murder you? Charm him? Charm him? Lead him to pursue?"</p>
+
+<p>She could hardly drag the words out of her, but Lord! what a fool she
+was. At least, Amilcare thought so. The plainest duty, the easiest; this
+childish woman's game! He jumped up, quivering with nerves on edge, and
+the sympathy between the pair lacked even touch. Molly found her feet,
+stood brooding before him, all her hair about her lowered face.</p>
+
+<p>To see her thus, a mute, a block, maddened Amilcare. He clenched his
+fists. "Yes, Madam"&mdash;his words bit the air&mdash;"you shall charm this enemy
+of mine, if you please; this assassin, this ravener of other men's
+goods. You shall charm him in the way you best know&mdash;you and your
+nation. Bentivoglio I excused you: he was not worth your pains. Borgia I
+shall not excuse you. I showed you to him with this only view; I asked
+him here, I speak to you now, with this only view. You are adorable in
+every part, if you choose to be. Italy has no woman like you, so
+winning, so much the sumptuous child: such tall buds shoot only in the
+North. To it, then! Charm him as you charmed me. Teach him&mdash;<i>Santo
+Dio</i>!&mdash;teach him to die for a smile. At least afford him the smile or
+the provocation of it: the rest shall be my affair. Soul of Christ! am I
+to miss this astounding opportunity? Never in the world. I bid you by
+all you hold sacred to do your duty. Am I plain enough?"</p>
+
+<p>He was. She had grown as grey as a cloth, could say nothing, only motion
+with her dry lips. But she bent her head to him, and stretched out her
+hands in token of obedience to law.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span></p><p>"Good," said Amilcare; "my wife understands me." And he went out then
+and there to his Council. His conviction of her submissiveness (and of
+other things about her to modify it) may be gauged by the fact that he
+never saw her again (except ceremonially) until a certain moment after
+the dinner with Borgia.</p>
+
+<p>Grifone saw her all the more for that. What he saw satisfied him that
+she was in terrible trouble. She slunk about, to his view, as if beaten
+down by shame. He had seen young girls in that strait very often, when
+the first step had been taken, the first flush faded from the venture,
+the first after-knowledge come. They always went as though they were
+watched. More than that, he discerned that she was nearly broken for
+want of a counsellor: he caught her long gaze fixed upon him sometimes.
+She seemed to be peering through him, spoke to herself (he thought) as
+she sat vacantly upon her throne, or at table among the quick wits, with
+all her spying ladies to fence her in. If any one addressed the word to
+her she flushed suddenly and began to catch after her breath. He could
+see how shortly that breath came, and how it seemed to hurt her. If she
+answered at all, it was stupidly and beside the purpose; then she would
+look conscious of her dulness, grow uncomfortably red, be at the point
+to cry. All this, while it could not but gratify him, made him a little
+sorry too.</p>
+
+<p>One night, at a very brilliant assembly given by the notorious Donna
+Smeralda Buonaccorso, he saw her standing forlorn on the terrace, like a
+lonely rock in the sea&mdash;the most beautiful woman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> in Nona and the most
+splendidly attired, absolutely alone in all that chattering, grimacing
+crowd. The Duchess of Nona! This consideration alone moved him to real
+pity&mdash;for to be great and unfortunate has a freakish way of touching
+your heart&mdash;it moved him quietly towards her, to whisper in her ear&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Madonna"&mdash;(and Heaven! how she started), "Madonna, what you need now is
+the courage of your race. But courage, I well know, comes only by
+confidence, and confidence is what I can give you. Trust for trust; will
+you hear me?"</p>
+
+<p>But she looked piteously at him, as if she had been found out, and put
+her hands to her ears.</p>
+
+<p>"I dare not hear you! I dare not! How can you speak to me when I have
+never asked&mdash;never thought? Ah, leave me, Grifone. I have not heard you
+yet: ask me not&mdash;but go!"</p>
+
+<p>It was she that went, that hurried from him, stumbling in her haste,
+like a hunted thing. He could see no more of her that night, so with a
+shrug turned to his quiet amusement. There were women there pleasant
+enough. It was true that he wanted but one woman superlatively; but it
+was eminently Grifone's maxim that, failing that which you need, you
+should take that which you can get.</p>
+
+<p>The last stage in the education of Molly, Amilcare found must positively
+be left to the Secretary.</p>
+
+<p>On the night before Duke Cesare's arrival, when every other preparation
+had been made, Grifone came into his master's room, late. He said
+nothing, nor got any greeting; but he placed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> a little phial on the
+table, and waited. Amilcare looked at it, did not touch it. It was a
+very small phial, half full of a clear liquid.</p>
+
+<p>"You prepared it yourself, Grifone?"</p>
+
+<p>Grifone nodded pleasantly.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I may rest assured&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"You may, my lord."</p>
+
+<p>"I will ask you to make all arrangements, Grifone. When the time comes
+you will take the cup to Madonna Duchessa, with a hint of so much as may
+be necessary to provide against mischances. Will this be done?"</p>
+
+<p>"Punctually and surely, Excellence." The Secretary retired with his
+bottle.</p>
+
+<p>Amilcare sat on with a tight smile which neither waxed nor waned, but
+seemed frozen on his face. He may thus have sat for two or three hours,
+his eyes fixed on a point at the table's edge. That point, whatever it
+was, a speck of dust, may be, seemed to grow and grow till it was
+monstrous and a burden intolerable to endure. Amilcare, with an effort,
+stretched out his hand and cuffed at it. He knocked a book off the table
+by this means, then started, then swore at himself. Twice after this he
+spoke, smiling all the while. "Is it now indeed?" he asked, raising one
+eyebrow; "is it now indeed?" Then he got up, stretched himself noisily,
+and lay down as he was on the sofa, to sleep in a moment.</p>
+
+<p>Molly lay with a young maid of hers that night and never had a wink.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CIX" id="CIX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE LAST BIDDING</h3>
+
+<p>That golden Duke of Valentinois had a pompous reception from his august
+ally at Nona. Amilcare, riding like Castor, at one with his horse, went
+out at the head of his court to meet him. The Centaurs lined the way
+with a hedge of steel. Hat in hand, the Duke of Nona rode back with his
+guest to the garlanded gates. There, a fluttered choir, all virgins and
+all white, strewed flowers; from that point to the Piazza Grande one
+song came leaping on the heels of another. On the steps of the Duomo
+were the clergy in brocade, a mitred bishop half smothered under his
+cope in their midst. The two Dukes dismounted, and hand in hand entered
+the church; the organ pealed; the choir burst out with the chant, <i>Ecce,
+Rex tuus venit</i>; and then (seeing Cesare had once been a Cardinal),
+<i>Ecce Sacerdos magnus</i>. The smoke of incense went rolling to the roof,
+<i>Te Deum</i> spired between the rifts; an Archbishop intoned the Mass of
+the Holy Ghost. Cesare, in white satin, golden-headed, red-gold in the
+beard, cloaked and collared with the Golden Fleece, knelt in the middle
+of the dome; beside him the hawk-faced Amilcare, splendid in silver
+armour, knelt also&mdash;but stiffly; whereas the Borgia (graceful in all
+that he did) drooped easily forward on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> his <i>prie-dieu,</i> like the
+Archangel Gabriel who brought the great tidings to Madonna Maria.
+Amilcare, at that rate, was like Michael, his more trenchant colleague,
+that "bird of God."</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop, who knew perfectly well why the Duke had come to Nona, and
+why Nona's Duke wanted him there, preached a sermon which the saving
+Italian virtue of urbanity prevented from being either monstrous or
+ridiculous. Before the altar the two lords kissed each other. One of
+them had tried and the other was about to try murder as a political
+expedient; but that was no reason why good manners should not prevail.
+Decent ceremony was always a virtue of the race.</p>
+
+<p>Half an hour before dinner Grifone (who had not been to church) stood
+before his mistress, who had not been suffered to go. He had a flagon in
+his hands, of silver gilt, like the calyx of a great flower whose stem
+was sheathed in the clustered wings of angels, whose base was their
+feet. He held it in both hands as if it were a chalice.</p>
+
+<p>Molly, beaten out and white, looked at it dully, but did not seem to see
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"Madonna mia," said the youth, "this is the loving-cup which I am to
+hand to you after dinner, and which you are to hand to Duke Cesare."</p>
+
+<p>He hardly heard her answer, but judged by the shaping of her lips that
+it was, "Well, Grifone?"</p>
+
+<p>"Duke Cesare will ask you to sip of it first, Madonna."</p>
+
+<p>His looks were piercing; yet she was too far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> gone to be disturbed by
+such as those. She even smiled faintly at his emphasis.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Grifone?" she asked again, in that same dry whisper. "How shall
+that be harm to him if I do it?"</p>
+
+<p>Grifone blew out his lips. "Harm, <i>per Dio</i>! None at all, but common
+prudence on his part. No harm to him, lady; but to you obeying him,
+destruction, death!"</p>
+
+<p>Molly stared. Her breath came hollow from her mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"Death, Grifone?" she faltered, and then pored over his face again.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded his words into her.</p>
+
+<p>"Death, Madonnina."</p>
+
+<p>The girl tottered to her feet&mdash;had to balance like a rope-dancer to keep
+upon them.</p>
+
+<p>"But then&mdash;but then&mdash;O Saviour!"</p>
+
+<p>She threw her arms up. He thought she would fall, so put one of his
+round her waist. He felt her heart knocking like a drum, pressed her
+closer, drew her in and kissed her, with a coaxing word or two. She
+tried to collect herself&mdash;alas! her wits were scattered wide. Her head
+drooped to his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>After that there began the most pitiful business. She was pleading with
+him in a whining, wheedling, silly voice, which would have broken down
+an Englishman. Grifone himself was pricked. It was like a child,
+frightened into slyness, coaxing its mother.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear Grifone, dear Grifone! You will not hand me the cup. Oh, please,
+please, please!"</p>
+
+<p>Grifone kissed her. "Why, what can I do?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> he said. "My lord has ordered
+it so, dear one."</p>
+
+<p>She took no notice of his familiarities; indeed, the tone they lent his
+voice may have soothed the poor affectionate wretch. But she only wrung
+her hands at his news.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, no! 'Tis impossible! No, no, he could never do it!"</p>
+
+<p>"I can repeat his words," said the inexorable Grifone; "he said&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Then she sprang away from him as if he had whipped her, and crouched in
+a corner, at bay. She began to rave, seemingly in a high delirium,
+pointed at him, wagged her arm at him, mowing the air.</p>
+
+<p>"Never repeat them, never repeat them. I shall die if you do!"</p>
+
+<p>Grifone set down his cup, ran forward and embraced her. "My lovely lady,
+my adorable Molly!" he murmured, in a passion of admiration for her
+transformed, unearthly beauty.</p>
+
+<p>She noticed nothing of him or his doings, lay lax in his arms. She
+stared, gulping down horror; she looked like some shocked Addolorata
+come upon the body of her dead Son. And so, perhaps (since all good
+women mother their lovers or lords), she was face to face with her dead.
+Tears came to blot out her misery; she could not stay their fall. They
+anointed also the burning cheeks of young Grifone, and drove him outside
+himself with love. He kissed her softly again, with reverence, and
+whispered&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Courage, sweet lady; I shall be with you. I have it all in hand. The
+end for you and me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> shall be happiness undreamed of yet. The Duke comes
+in a quarter of an hour." Then he left her alone.</p>
+
+<p>"The affair will go by clockwork," he assured himself. "Neither fast nor
+slow, but by clockwork." He had an ingenious mind, and loved mechanics.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CX" id="CX"></a>X</h2>
+
+<h3>WITH ALL FAULTS</h3>
+
+<p>At the coming out from church the two Dukes (mentally at least)
+separated; their paths coincided, but not their thoughts, nor their
+behaviour. By common consent, as it appeared, Amilcare at once resumed
+the obsequious, Cesare the overbearing part. Amilcare talked
+profusively, smirked, grimaced, pranced by the other's side, writhed his
+hands, in copious explanation of nothing at all. Cesare shrugged. The
+amount of disdain an Italian can throw into a pair of dull eyes or an
+irritable shoulder, the amount of it another will take without
+swallowing, can still be studied whenever a young lieutenant of the line
+sits down to breakfast in a tavern, and the waiter slaves for his penny
+fee. Yet, depend upon it, the cringer has balanced to a nicety the
+sweets and sours of boot-blacking against the <i>buona mano</i>; the rest is
+pure commerce. So now, the deliberate insolence of the flushed Borgia
+towards his host was a thing to be dumb at; yet Passavente redoubled his
+volubility.</p>
+
+<p>Going up the steps of the Palazzo Bagnacavallo, the guest plumply told
+his entertainer to bring out the woman and go to the devil with his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+cackling. Amilcare laughed all over his face at the best joke in the
+world, and bowed to the earth. Thus humoured they went in to dinner.</p>
+
+<p>Molly, in fold over fold of silk gauze which let every lovely limb be
+seen as glorified in a rosy mist, met them in the ante-room, and
+thenceforth the Borgia had eyes for nothing but the beauty of her. The
+moment he saw her, he drew, as once before, a sharp breath; she greeted
+him in her fashion; he was moved to a fit of trembling.</p>
+
+<p>From that time forth Amilcare was as though he were not. The Roman
+waited for no invitation and disregarded those he got. Would his Grace
+be pleased to dine? His Grace went on pouring out his talk to the
+wonderful rose-coloured lady. Amilcare, patient to excess, watched.
+Presently Cesare said, "Madama, shall we go to dinner?" and to dinner
+they went, Amilcare rubbing his hands behind them.</p>
+
+<p>They found the table prepared&mdash;a very low one; divans to sit upon; none
+but Grifone, pale and respectful, in the little painted chamber.</p>
+
+<p>All this had been carefully provided. The Duke's suite dined in another
+wing of the palace; the choir of minstrels, who held the passage between
+them, had mail under their cassocks, and two-edged swords made for
+thrusting. They were fifty strong. Every page-in-waiting in the hall and
+long cool passages was a "Centaur" armed to the teeth. Don Cesare, it
+seems, had walked into a steel trap at last. Do you wonder that Amilcare
+could afford a supple back?</p>
+
+<p>But as the delicate meats succeeded each other&mdash;each duly tasted by
+Grifone before a morsel<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> went to plate&mdash;there was one, in the surge of
+her terrors, struck dumb with what was, rather, wonder. The magnificent
+Cesare went his road over the feelings of his host; the host bowed and
+waved his hands. Why should he not? Never one word of answer, never a
+gleam of attention did he win from the Roman. Why should he care? His
+wife was doing her duty, his enemy was webbed: what else could matter?
+The Italian shrug goes deeper than the shoulders; sometimes it strokes
+the heart of a man. The very indignities heaped upon the adventurer made
+his revenge the sweeter nursling.</p>
+
+<p>But Molly, the tall English girl, burning in her shameful robe, saw it
+vastly otherwise. That a man could bend so low! That she should ever
+have loved a man with such a stooping back! To think of that made (for
+the moment) every other degradation light. Her part as yet was one of
+sufferance: to look handsome, languid with the excess of her burden of
+beauty; to smile slowly, to keep her eyes on her lap. Pure passivity all
+this, under which the miserable soul could torture in secret. As she
+often had a back-ache, it was easy to wilt among her cushions; as she
+was always mute before flattery, to smile was as simple as to frown and
+meant no more; as she was ashamed of herself and her husband, she could
+hardly hope to lift her honest eyes, or temper her furious blushing.</p>
+
+<p>It would be untrue to say that the Borgia's eager under-current of
+love-language stirred her not at all. Even to her the man's fame made
+his homage a tribute; something it was, beyond<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> doubt, to be courted by
+the greatest prince in Italy. And he had not touched her yet. Amilcare,
+whose desperate grinning made his jaws ache, noticed so much as he
+watched her, fidgeting in his place. His nails were for ever at his
+teeth: when the fruit should come in he was to slip out, and Grifone to
+crown the work. Meanwhile, the flagrant unconcern for his whereabouts
+shown by the victim might have stung a blind worm to bite, or excused
+any treachery. Amilcare had no rage at all and felt the need of no
+excuse. All his anxiety was that Cesare should enmesh himself deep
+enough; and then&mdash;! The thought of what should happen then set his head
+singing a song as mad as Judith's.</p>
+
+<p>The still Grifone stood behind his mistress and saw Cesare's golden head
+sink near and yet nearer to her shoulder. He watched his arm over the
+back of her seat, and how his other hand crept towards the lady's idle
+pair. The room held those four, and them not long. In his time Amilcare
+muttered some excuse and tiptoed out.</p>
+
+<p>Cesare was saying, "Ah, give me love&mdash;love only&mdash;else I must die!"</p>
+
+<p>Molly answered nothing with her lips, but in her bosom prayed
+ceaselessly for pity.</p>
+
+<p>"Love me, pledge me with your lips, let me drink of you, O my soul!"
+sighed the Duke.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco, Madonna," said Grifone, and handed her the cup.</p>
+
+<p>"The chalice of love!" cried Cesare, straining towards the white girl.
+"Drink to me, my heart, and I will drink from thee!"</p>
+
+<p>Molly still held the cup, though the liquor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> curved brimming at the lip.
+Her eyes were sightless, her head shaking with palsy.</p>
+
+<p>"Drink, drink, my soul!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, my lord, yes, yes; I must drink very deep," she said, and raised
+the cup.</p>
+
+<p>"Pshutt!" said Grifone.</p>
+
+<p>She turned like a caught beast, wild and blanched with horror. She rose
+suddenly, swaying on her feet, entangled one of them in her long robe
+and stumbled forward to stay herself by the table. She looked like some
+spurred Bacchante, lurching over the board with the great flagon a-nod
+in her hand. Cesare made to catch her in his arms, and reached for the
+cup; but then she screamed with all her might and threw the accursed
+thing crash upon the pavement.</p>
+
+<p>"Treachery! Treachery!" Molly shrieked; and again, "Treachery! O God, he
+has made me a devil!" She threw her head up, herself tumbled back upon
+the cushions; knew nothing of Grifone's "Go, go, go, my lord; the house
+is quick with murder!" and when she opened her eyes at last saw Amilcare
+standing grim and grey before her.</p>
+
+<p>Who can say what shall best reveal a man, whether love or hate or fear?
+Or how to know which of these three passions stripped her this Amilcare
+naked? Naked he was now, and she found that she had never known him. The
+colour of his face was that of old white wax; his mouth seemed stretched
+to cracking point, neither turned up at the corners nor down, but a
+bleak slit jagged across his face. He fastened her with his hard eyes,
+which seemed smaller than usual, and had a scared look, as if he was
+positively disconcerted at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> what he read as they glimmered over his
+wife. In one of his hands (never still) he had a long knife, very lean
+in the blade.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, what do you want of me more, Amilcare?" It was Molly spoke first,
+in a whisper.</p>
+
+<p>He croaked his reply. "I am going to kill you."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! oh! You are going to kill me, my lord?"</p>
+
+<p>"You have sold me to my enemy. He is your lover."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no! I have no lover, Amilcare; I have never had a lover."</p>
+
+<p>"Liar!" he thundered. "If he had not been your lover you would not have
+spared his life. There can be no other reason. I am not a fool."</p>
+
+<p>To Grifone that was just what he appeared. To her some ray of her own
+soul's honest logic showed at the last.</p>
+
+<p>"Amilcare!" she cried out, on her knees, "Amilcare, listen, I pray you.
+I have done you no wrong; I implore you not to hurt me; I have done you
+honour. It was because I loved <i>you</i> that I saved his life. I speak the
+truth, my lord, I speak the truth."</p>
+
+<p>"I have never thought you to speak otherwise; but I have been wrong, it
+appears. The excuse is monstrous. I am going to kill you."</p>
+
+<p>The miserable girl turned him a pinched face. She searched for any shred
+of what she had known in him, but all the deadly mask of him she saw
+told her nothing. She began to be witless again, to wring her hands, to
+whimper and whine.</p>
+
+<p>Amilcare looked fixedly at her, every muscle in his face rigid as stone.
+So, as he ruminated, some whisp of his racing thought caught light<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> from
+his inner rage, flared blood-bright before him, and convulsing him drove
+him to his work.</p>
+
+<p>"Gross trull!" He sprang at her with his knife in the air. Molly
+shrieked for mercy; and before he could be on her Grifone whipped out
+his dagger and stabbed his master under the stabbing arm.</p>
+
+<p>Amilcare jerked in mid-career, constricted and turned half. But the blow
+had gone too deep and too true. He fell horribly, and Molly knew no
+more.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CXI" id="CXI"></a>XI</h2>
+
+<h3>FROM AN AMATEUR'S CABINET</h3>
+
+<p>Grifone received his swooning lady into his arms and held her there to
+his great content, triumphing in her beauty and successful capture.
+Truly the adventure had gone by clockwork: he might say (he thought)
+that there was not one step in it but had been schemed to an eighth of
+an inch; and when you have to bring temperamental differences into
+account, the chances of Italian politics, the influence of climate, the
+panic alarms of a ridden mob&mdash;and still succeed, why, then you may
+lawfully be happy. Happy he was, but Molly was tall and he a
+light-weight. Moreover, he wanted to wipe his blade and be off. He
+judged it prudent, therefore, to bring her to herself again, and so did
+by sousing her liberally with cold water.</p>
+
+<p>Molly, as soon as she could see, was aware of him kneeling by her side
+and of his arms about her. Before she had done gasping he began to kiss
+her.</p>
+
+<p>"My heart of hearts, my lovely soul, my lady Moll! Mine altogether by
+the act of my arm!" were some of his fiery words.</p>
+
+<p>There were others yet more explicit, which left no doubt of his passion,
+nor any ray of doubt of his intentions. Grifone took everything for
+granted, as he had from the beginning.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span></p><p>"My charmer," he said, "I have saved you from ignominious death; but I
+have saved myself also from a death by no means agreeable to me. It was
+impossible that our love could have held us much longer at a distance
+from each other, impossible that we could have still suffered a third
+person to usurp our privileges. If that stabbed stabber under the table
+had not misunderstood you so grotesquely&mdash;the gross-witted hog!&mdash;he
+would have lived, and I died of jealousy. A far from pleasant death, you
+will allow; worse in that it would have involved your own. For I should
+have had to kill you too, my dearest joy: so much would have been owing
+to my self-respect. Things, you see, could not have turned out more
+fortunately; the fellow trapped himself. We may be happy&mdash;we will be
+wildly happy&mdash;you shall see!"</p>
+
+<p>It may be doubted whether Molly heard anything of this exposition; she
+may well have missed one or two steps in a carefully reasoned argument.
+Hers was that state of absorbent lassitude when the words and acts put
+to you sink into the floating mass of your weakness. The late shocking
+grief hovers felt about you: a buzz of talk, a rain of caresses, hold
+the spectre off, and so are serviceable&mdash;but no more. The cold cheek,
+the clay-cold lips, the long, lax limbs of the poor doll were at his
+service. She saw nothing through her dim eyes, made no motion with her
+lips, sobbed rather than breathed, endured tearlessly rather than lived
+awake her misery. Misery is not the word: she had been sent down to hell
+and had come back dumb to earth, neither <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>knowing why such torment was
+hers, nor thinking how to fly a second questioning. Had she been capable
+of a wish, a prayer, or of begging a favour, who can doubt what it would
+have been? Death, oh, death!</p>
+
+<p>Grifone's face was so near to hers, that not to kiss her would have been
+an affectation; but when he began to make plans, he released her, sat
+up, and spoke as though he were discussing theory.</p>
+
+<p>"There is very much to do, my love," said he, "but I think I see my way
+clear. It is instant flight, to begin with, for one of the household may
+be here any moment, or Don Cesare return. Such an one would have but to
+open the window and cry, 'Treason, ho!' to secure our being torn to
+pieces&mdash;not for any love the Nonesi bear that carrion; but because not
+one of them could resist the chance of kicking his benefactors. It is
+reasonable, after all. Instant flight, my dear, if you please. But
+whither? you will ask. Luckily I can take you to a pretty safe place, of
+which I have the key and <i>custode's</i> goodwill in my pocket. You know the
+Rocca del Capitan Vecchio outside the Latin Gate? We go there for our
+terrestrial paradise. Shawl your lovely head, therefore, stoop your
+glorious shoulders, and obey me exactly."</p>
+
+<p>He got up as he made an end of speech, drew her gently to her feet, and
+showed her how to muffle herself in the hood of a man's cloak. He bound
+the rest of the garment about her waist with his belt, pinned up her
+skirt and petticoat as high as her knees, and gave her his own
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>stockings and shoes. Then he helped himself to his dead master's pair,
+to his sword and velvet gown; and&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Now," he said, "we may start by the privy garden."</p>
+
+<p>He led the way. It was a golden afternoon of late summer; the shadows
+were lengthening as the air grew tired and cool, all the place was full
+of that vast peace in which a day of strenuous heat sinks to rest. The
+faint breeze in the myrtles was like a sleeper's sigh:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbr&aelig;&mdash;" murmured Grifone to
+himself, as he slipped among the cypresses over the grass. Molly
+followed him with faltering knees, nearly spent. As always, she was at
+the mercy of a clear head, never masterless when a man was near her.
+Morally, nervously, she seemed to be dead; so she followed her new lord
+as meekly as she had followed her old&mdash;that one to Nona across the seas,
+this one by gloomy, pent ways through the stale-smelling streets of the
+city to the Rocca del Capitan Vecchio.</p>
+
+<p>Meekly enough she went, yet not so far nor so meekly but that she gave
+Grifone a genuine surprise. It seems that the air, the exercise,
+precautions, what-not, had cried back her escaped wits: certain it is
+that, once in the storm-bitten old fortress, she thanked her leader and
+rescuer with a tremulous sweetness all her own, and then&mdash;by Heaven and
+Earth!&mdash;urged him gently to go back, "lest her honour should be breathed
+upon."</p>
+
+<p>Her honour! Grifone, the romancer, turned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> sick with amazement. He was
+dumbfounded, could not believe his ears, nor yet his eyes; that there
+before him should stand that drooping, flagged, pitiful beauty, always
+at his discretion, now wholly at his mercy within nine-foot walls, and
+talk to him with wet eyes and pleading lips of the Cardinal Virtues.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as he could collect himself he put this before her in a whirl of
+words.</p>
+
+<p><i>Santo Dio!</i> Timidity, prejudice, after what had passed! In what
+possible way or by what possible quibble of a priest could anything stay
+them now from the harvest of a sown love&mdash;two years' sowing, by the
+Redeemer, two years' torture; and now&mdash;a solid square fortress on a
+naked rock, deemed impregnable by anything but black treachery! Let him
+make assurance incredibly secure: say the word, and he would go and
+silence the old <i>custode</i> for ever. It was done in a moment&mdash;what more
+could he do?</p>
+
+<p>So he prayed; but Molly was a rock at last. She ignored everything but
+the fact that she could never survive the night if he stayed in the
+fortress-tower. Such, she assured him, was the fixed habit of her
+extraordinary race. She made no pretence of mourning her dead husband;
+indeed, her horror of him set her shuddering at his mere name; nor did
+she affect to deny that she loved Grifone. It made no difference. She
+was luminously mild, used her hands like a Madonna in a picture, was
+more lovely and winning in the motions of her little head, the wistful
+deeps and darks of her eyes, the pathetic curve of her mouth, than any
+Madonna short of Leonardo's. Grifone threw up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> his arms; such a pass
+confounded him; he had no tools to pick this sort of lock. Oh, but the
+thing was impossible! Two years' longing, the husband dead&mdash;why, they
+might marry, even, if she would. Perhaps that was what she needed? If
+so, he would risk his life in the city again to find a priest. But,
+think of it, formalities at this hour!</p>
+
+<p>Molly smiled and blushed; she was sorry for her friend and would have
+consoled him if she could; but the thing was so obvious. Did not Grifone
+see?</p>
+
+<p>Grifone did not see; he tore his hair, he threatened, prayed, raved,
+commanded, coaxed, swore by God and the Devil, clung to her
+knees&mdash;useless!</p>
+
+<p>"Dear friend," she said, and stroked his hot hair, "you have served me
+well. Never serve me now so ill."</p>
+
+<p>She beat him. From that moment, when love was dead, he began to hate
+her. She was safe from what she feared. Everything he might have waived
+but that, a clean blow at his own conceit. The end was near.</p>
+
+<p>Their colloquy, so frenzied on his part, so staid and generous at once
+on hers, was barely over before the hum of many voices crept upon them,
+a slow, murmurous advance, out of which, as the hordes drew near, one or
+two sharp cries&mdash;"Seek, seek!" "Death to the traitor!"&mdash;threw up like
+the hastier wave-crests in a racing tide. Again they heard (and now more
+clearly), "Evviva Madonna! La Madonna di Nona!" and then (more ominous
+than all) a cry for Cesare Borgia: "Chiesa! Chiesa!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span></p><p>At this last Grifone, who had been biting his fingers shrewdly, wrung a
+nail apart till the blood came. His was the desperate caught face of a
+stoat in a trap.</p>
+
+<p>"What is this crying without?" said Molly in a hush.</p>
+
+<p>"Pest! I must find out," said Grifone.</p>
+
+<p>He climbed to a high window and looked down into the moonlight. "The
+Nonesi in force. Cesare Borgia and the troops. Hist! He is going to
+speak to them; they are holding him up." He strained to listen&mdash;and it
+seems that he heard.</p>
+
+<p>"Citizens," said the Borgia, in fact, "I pledge you my sacred word that
+the Duchess shall be delivered to you whole and in honour. She shall be
+in the Palace within an hour. The Secretary who has her there, who
+stabbed his master and (as I learn from Milan) hatched all the plot,
+must be left to me. Madonna Maria saved my life at the peril of her own.
+She has no more devoted servant than I am. Trust me to prove it."</p>
+
+<p>"Chiesa! Chiesa! Madonna! Heed the Duke!" cried the mob. And then, "Let
+the Duke go up and win us our lady."</p>
+
+<p>"That he shall never do," said Grifone, and came down from the window.</p>
+
+<p>Molly, seeing the cunning in his eyes, backed to the wall.</p>
+
+<p>Time does not serve, and pity forbids, that I should dwell upon this
+misery. What she may have wailed, what he withstood who loved her once,
+I have no care to set down at large. He strangled her with cruel,
+vivacious hands, and then (since time had pressed, and all his passion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+not been pent in one wicked place) fell to kissing the flouted clay.
+Getting up from this tribute, he was faced by Cesare Borgia and his men;
+by Cesare who, used to such stratagems as this of late, had had the
+whole story out of Ludovic at Milan, and forestalled Nona by buying up
+the troop of "Centaurs" before ever he entered the city. Thus had
+Amilcare been sold by his own purchase, and thus Grifone griped in his
+own springe. Cesare found him, I say, and Grifone knew in the first
+crossing of their eyes that his hour had come.</p>
+
+<p>He bore it without a wink, and lucky he might think it that for Cesare
+also the time was short. He was sooner dead than he dared to hope, and
+died cursing the name of Borgia. But that was a seasoned name.</p>
+
+<p>"The populace is on fire, Highness," reported a breathed captain. "It
+clamours for the Duchess of Nona. We can hardly hold them much longer,
+strong as we are. We must show her, though I perceive that her
+Excellency has fainted."</p>
+
+<p>"She is dead, man," said Cesare shortly, wiping his pair of daggers.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a pity, Highness. <i>Ma&mdash;&mdash;!</i>" He shrugged the end to his period.</p>
+
+<p>Cesare looked at the girl and shrugged in his turn.</p>
+
+<p>"Luckily it is dark. We must play them that trick they played on Borgo
+San Domino. She must be put in a litter, and at the palace see to it
+that the lights are behind her before ever you set her up in the window.
+Do what you can for us, Ercole."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span></p><p>They worked their best to compose that pitiful dead. She had suffered
+much, and showed it. Her wide eyes were horrible. And there was little
+time for more than to order her dress and neck-jewels, and to smooth out
+her brown hair.</p>
+
+<p>"H'm," said Cesare, "you have made little of it; but at a distance it
+may serve our turn until the troops arrive. Is the litter below? Good.
+<i>Avanti!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The church bells rang all night, and all night the Piazza Grande was
+alive, a flickering field of torches and passing and repassing throngs.
+"Evviva Madonna! Hail, Duchess of Nona!" were the cries they gave. And
+above, at an arched window, haloed by candle-light, the staring lady of
+the land, stiffened and relaxed, played out the last functions of her
+generous body, in return for the people's acclamation.</p>
+
+<p>Bianca Maria, Queen of the Romans by virtue of proxy and the Sacrament,
+spurred into the city of Nona next noon at the head of a plumed escort.
+There, at the fatal window, she saw the whole truth in a flash.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>O lasso!</i> Her third husband was her last, I see," she said, and bit
+her lip to sting the tears back.</p>
+
+<p>"Majesty," said Cesare, hat in hand at her stirrup, "it is not quite so.
+Grifone was not quick enough for the other fellow. Messer Death is
+actually her second husband."</p>
+
+<p>"Now I have something for which to thank our Lord God," said Bianca
+Maria. "Let her be decently buried, but not here."</p>
+
+<p>It was, however, explained that for reasons of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> policy the Duchess of
+Nona must share tombs with the Duke. Serviceable in death as in life,
+there where she was marketed lies her fragrant dust; fragrant now, I
+hope, since all the passion is out.</p>
+
+<p>I almost despair of winning your applause for poor Molly Lovel, yet will
+add this finally in her justification. Women are most loved when they
+are lovely, most lovely when they are meek. This is not to say that they
+will be worthily loved or loyally: there are two sides to a bargain. Yet
+this one thing more: they are neither meek nor lovely unless they love.
+And since Molly Lovel, on my showing, was both in a superlative degree,
+it follows that she must have loved much. She was ill repaid while she
+lived; let now that measure be meted her which was accorded another
+Molly whose surname was Magdalene.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="MESSER_CINO_AND_THE_LIVE_COAL" id="MESSER_CINO_AND_THE_LIVE_COAL"></a>MESSER CINO AND THE LIVE COAL</h2>
+
+<h2><a name="DI" id="DI"></a>I</h2>
+
+<p>It is not generally known that the learned Aristotle once spent the
+night in a basket dangled midway betwixt attic and basement of a castle;
+nor that, having suffered himself to be saddled for the business, he
+went on all-fours, ambling round the terrace-walk with a lady on his
+back, a lady who, it is said, plied the whip with more heartiness than
+humanity. But there seems no doubt of the fact. The name of the lady
+(she was Countess of Cyprus), the time of the escapade, which was upon
+the sage's return from India in the train of the triumphant
+Alexander&mdash;these and many other particulars are at hand. The story does
+not lack of detail, though it is noteworthy that Petrarch, in his
+"Trionfo d'Amore," decently veils the victim in a periphrasis. "Quell'
+el gran Greco"&mdash;there is the great Grecian, says he, and leaves you to
+choose between the Stagyrite, Philip of Macedon, and Theseus. The
+painters, however, have had no mercy upon him. I remember him in a
+pageant at Siena, in a straw hat, with his mouth full of grass; the lady
+rides him in the mannish way. In pictures he is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> always doting, humbled
+to the dust or cradled in his basket, when he is not showing his paces
+on the lawn. By all accounts it was a bad case of green-sickness, as
+such late cases are. You are to understand that he refused all
+nourishment, took delight in no manner of books, could not be stayed by
+the nicest problems of Physical Science&mdash;such as whether the beaver does
+indeed catch fish with his tail, the truth concerning the eyesight of
+the lynxes of B&oelig;otia, or what gave the partridge such a reputation
+for heedless gallantry. But it would be unprofitable to inquire into all
+this; Aristotle was not the first enamoured sage in history, nor was he
+the last. And where he bowed his laborious front it was to be hoped that
+Messer Cino of Pistoja might do the like. It is of him that I am to
+speak. The story is of Selvaggia Vergiolesi, the beautiful romp, and of
+Messer Guittoncino de' Sigibuldi, that most eminent jurist, familiarly
+known as Cino da Pistoja in the affectionate phrasing of his native
+town.</p>
+
+<p>Love-making was the mode in his day (which was also Dante's), but Master
+Cino had been all for the Civil Law. The Digest, the Pandects, the
+Institutes of Gaius and what not, had given him a bent back before his
+time, so that he walked among the Pistolese beauties with his eyes on
+the ground and his hands knotted behind his decent robe. Love might have
+made him fatter, yet he throve upon his arid food; he sat in an
+important chair in his University; he had lectured at Bologna (hive of
+sucking Archdeacons), at Siena, at Perugia. Should he prosper, he looked
+to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> Florence for his next jump. As little as he could contrive was he
+for Pope or Emperor, Black or White, Farinata or Cerchi; banishment came
+that road. His friend Dante was footsore with exile, halfway over
+Apennine by this time; Cino knew that for him also the treading was very
+delicate. Constitutionally he was Ghibelline with his friend Dante, and
+such politics went well in Pistoja for the moment. But who could tell?
+The next turn of the wheel might bring the Pope round; Pistoja might go
+Black (as indeed she did in more senses than one), and pray where would
+be his Assessorship of Civil Causes, where his solemn chair, where his
+title to doffing of caps and a chief seat at feasts? Cino, meditating
+these things over his morning sop and wine, rubbed his chin sore and
+determined to take a wife. His family was respectable, but Ghibelline;
+his means were happy; his abilities known to others as well as to
+himself. Good! He would marry a sober Guelphish virgin, and establish a
+position to face both the windy quarters. It was when his negotiations
+to this end had reached maturity, when the contract for his espousals
+with the honourable lady, Monna Margherita degli Ughi, had actually been
+signed, that Messer Cino of Pistoja was late for his class, got cold
+feet, and turned poet.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="DII" id="DII"></a>II</h2>
+
+<p>It was a strange hour when Love leaped the heart of Cino, that staid
+jurisconsult, to send him reeling up the sunny side of the piazza
+heedless of his friends or his enemies. To his dying day he could not
+have told you how it came upon him. Being a man of slow utterance and of
+a mind necessarily bent towards the concrete, all he could confess to
+himself throughout the terrible business was, that there had been a
+cataclysm. He remembered the coldness of his feet; cold feet in mid
+April&mdash;something like a cataclysm! As he turned it over and over in his
+mind a lady recurred with the persistence of a refrain in a ballad; and
+words, quite unaccustomed words, tripped over his tongue to meet her.
+What a lovely vision she had made!&mdash;"Una donzella non con uman' volto (a
+gentle lady not of human look)." Well, what next? Ah, something about
+"Amor, che ha la mia virt&ugrave; tolto (Love that has reft me of my manly
+will)." Then should come <i>amore</i>, and of course <i>cuore</i>, and <i>disi&ograve;</i>,
+and <i>anch' io</i>! This was very new; it was also very strange what a
+fascination he found in his phrenetic exercises. Rhyme, now: he had
+called it often enough a jingle of endings; it were more true to say
+that it was a jingle of mendings, for it certainly soothed him. He was
+making a goddess in his own image; poetry&mdash;Santa Cecilia!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> he was a
+poet, like his friend Dante, like that supercilious young tomb-walker
+Guido Cavalcanti. A poet he undoubtedly became; and if his feet were
+cold his heart was on fire.</p>
+
+<p>What happened was this, so far as I am informed. At the north angle of
+the church of San Giovanni fuori Civitas there is a narrow lane, so dark
+that at very noon no sunlight comes in but upon blue bars of dust
+slant-wise overhead. This lay upon Cino's daily beat from his lodgings
+to the Podest&agrave;;<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> and here it was that he met Selvaggia Vergiolesi.</p>
+
+<p>She was one of three young girls walking hand in hand up the alley on
+their way from early mass, the tallest where all were tall, and, as it
+seemed to him when he dreamed of it, astonishingly beautiful. Though
+they were very young, they were ladies of rank; their heads were high
+and crowned, their gowns of figured brocade; they had chains round their
+necks, and each a jewel on her forehead; by chains also swung their
+little mass-books in silver covers. Cino knew them well enough by sight.
+Their names were Selvaggia di Filippo Vergiolesi, Guglielmotta
+Aspramonte, Nicoletta della Torre. So at least he had always believed;
+but now, but now! A beam of gold dust shot down upon the central head.
+This was Aglaia, fairest of the three Graces; and the other two were
+Euphrosyne and Thaleia, her handmaids. Thus it struck Cino, heart and
+head, at this sublime moment of his drab-coloured life.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span></p><p>Selvaggia's hair was brown, gold-shot of its own virtue. In and out of
+it was threaded a fine gold chain; behind, it was of course plaited in a
+long twist, plaited and bound up in cloth of gold till it looked as hard
+as a bull's tail. Her dress was all of formal brocade, green and white,
+to her feet. It was cut square at the neck; and from that square her
+throat, dazzlingly white, shot up as stiff as a stalk which should find
+in her face its delicate flower. She was not very rosy, save about the
+lips; her eyes were grey, inclined to be green, the lashes black. As for
+her shape, sumptuous as her dress was, stiff and straight and severe, I
+ask you to believe that she had grace to fill it with life, to move at
+ease in it, to press it into soft and rounded lines. Her linked
+companions also were beauties of their day&mdash;that sleek and sleepy
+Nicoletta, that ruddy Guglielmotta; but they seemed to cower in their
+rigid clothes, and they were as nothing to Cino.</p>
+
+<p>The lane was so narrow that only three could pass abreast; it was
+abreast these three were coming, as Cino saw. On a sudden his heart
+began to knock at his ribs; that was when the light fell aslant upon the
+maid. He could no more have taken his eyes off Selvaggia than he could
+have climbed up the dusty wall to avoid her. Lo, here is one stronger
+than I! At the next moment the three young rogues were about him, their
+knitted hands a fence,&mdash;but the eyes of Selvaggia! Terrible twin-fires,
+he thought, such as men light in the desert to scare the beasts away
+while they sleep, or (as he afterwards improved it for his need) like
+the flaming sword of the Archangel,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> which declared and yet forbade Eden
+to Adam and his wife.</p>
+
+<p>Selvaggia, in truth, though she had fourteen years behind her, was a
+romp when no one was looking. There were three brothers at home, but no
+mother; she was half a boy for all her straight gown. To embarrass this
+demure professor, to presume upon her sex while discarding it, was a
+great joke after a tediously droned mass at San Jacopo. Nicoletta would
+have made room, even the hardier Guglielmotta drew back; but the wicked
+Selvaggia pinched their fingers so that they could not escape. All this
+time Messer Cino had his eyes rooted in Selvaggia's, reading her as if
+she were a portent. She endured very well what she took to be the
+vacancy of confusion in a shy recluse.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Messer Cino, what will you do?" said she, bubbling with mischief.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Madonna, can you ask?" he replied, and clasped his hands.</p>
+
+<p>"But you see that I do ask."</p>
+
+<p>"I would stop here all the day if I might," said Messer Cino, with a
+look by no means vacant. Whereupon she let him through that minute and
+ran away blushing. More than once or twice she encountered him there,
+but she never tried to pen him back again.</p>
+
+<p>Little Monna Selvaggia learned that you cannot always put out the fire
+which you have kindled. The fire set blazing by those lit green swords
+of hers was in the heart of an Assessor of Civil Causes, a brazier with
+only too good a draught. For love in love-learned Tuscany was then a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+roaring wind; it came rhythmically and set the glowing mass beating like
+the sestett of a sonnet. One lived in numbers in those days; numbers
+always came. You sonnetteered upon the battlefield, in the pulpit, on
+the Bench, at the Bar. Throughout the moil of his day's work at the
+Podest&agrave; those clinging long words, in themselves inspiration, <i>dis&igrave;o,
+piacere, vaghezza, gentilezza, diletto, affetto,</i> beautiful twins that
+go ever embraced, wailed in poor Cino's ears, and insensibly shaped
+themselves coherent. He thought they were like mirrors, so placed that
+each gave a look of Selvaggia. Before the end of the day he had the
+whole of her in a sonnet which, if it were as good as it was
+comfortable, should needs (he thought) be excellent. The thrill which
+marked achievement sent the blood to his head; this time he gloried in
+cold feet. He wrote his sonnet out fair upon vellum in a hand no scribe
+at the Papal Court could have bettered, rolled it, tied it with green
+and white silk (her colours, colours of the hawthorn hedge!), and went
+out into the streets at the falling-in of the day to deliver it.</p>
+
+<p>The Palazzo Vergiolesi lay over by the church of San Francesco al Prato,
+just where the Via San Prospero debouches into that green place. Like
+all Tuscan palaces it was more fortress than house, a dark square box of
+masonry with a machicollated lid; and separate from it, but appurtenant,
+had a most grim tower with a slit or two halfway up for all its windows.
+Here, under the great escutcheon of the Vergiolesi, Cino delivered his
+missive. The porter took it with a bow so gracious that the poet was
+bold to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> ask whether the Lady Selvaggia was actually within.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, surely, Messere," said the man, "and moreover in the kitchen with
+the cookmaids. For there is a cake-making on hand, and she is never far
+away from that business."</p>
+
+<p>Cino was ravished by this instance of divine humiliation; so might
+Apollo have bowed in the house of Admetus, so Israel have kept sheep for
+Rachel's sake. He walked away in most exalted mood, his feet no longer
+cold. This was a great day for him, when he could see a new heaven and a
+new earth.</p>
+
+<p>"Now I too have been in Arcady!" he thought to himself, with tears in
+his eyes. "I will send a copy of my sonnet to Dante Alighieri by a sure
+hand. He should be at Bologna by this." And he did.</p>
+
+<p>Madonna Selvaggia, her sleeves rolled up, a great bib all about her
+pretty person, and her mouth in a fine mess of sugar and crumbs,
+received her tribute sitting on the long kitchen-table. It should have
+touched, it might have tickled, but it simply confused her. The maids
+peeped over her shoulder as she read, in ecstasy that Madonna should
+have a lover and a poet of her own. Selvaggia filched another handful of
+sugar and crumbs, and twiddled her sonnet while she wondered what on
+earth she should do with it. Her fine brows met each other over the
+puzzle, so clearly case for a confidence. Gianbattista, her youngest
+brother, was her bosom friend; but he was away, she knew, riding to Pisa
+with their father. Next to him ranked Nicoletta; she would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> be at mass
+to-morrow&mdash;that would do. Meantime the cook produced a most triumphal
+cake hot and hot, and the transports of poor Messer Cino were forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>Dante's reply to his copy was so characteristic that I must anticipate a
+little to speak of it. He confined himself almost entirely to
+technicalities, strongly objecting to the sestett with its three rhymes
+in the middle, upon which Cino had prided himself in no small degree.
+The only thing he seemed to care for was the tenth line, "A dolce morte
+sotto dolce inganno," which you may render, if you like, "To a sweet
+death under so sweet deceit"; but he said there were too many "o's" in
+it. "As to the subject of your poem," he wrote in a postscript, "love is
+a thing of so terrible a nature that not lightly is it to be entered,
+since it cannot be lightly left; and, seeing the latter affair is much
+out of a man's power, he should be wary with the former, wherein at
+present he would appear to have some discretion, though not very much."
+This was chilly comfort; but by the time it reached him Cino was beyond
+the assault of chills.</p>
+
+<p>Equally interesting should it be to record the conversation of Monna
+Selvaggia with her discreet friend Nicoletta; yet I cannot record
+everything. Nicoletta had a lover of her own, a most proper poet, who
+had got far beyond the mere accidence of the science where Cino was
+fumbling now; you might say that he was at theory. Nicoletta, moreover,
+was sixteen years old, a marriageable age, an age indeed at which not to
+have a lover would have been a disgrace. She had had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>sonnets and
+<i>canzoni</i> addressed to her since she was twelve; but then she had two
+elder sisters and only one brother&mdash;a monk! This made a vast difference.
+The upshot was that when Cino met the two ladies at the charmed spot of
+yesterday's encounter he uncovered before them and stood with folded
+hands, as if at his prayers. Consequently he missed the very pretty air
+of consciousness with which Selvaggia passed him by, the heightened
+colour of her, the lowered eyes and restless fingers, Also he missed
+Nicoletta's demure shot askance, demure but critical, as became an
+expert. A sonnet and a bunch of red anemones went to the Palazzo
+Vergiolesi that evening; thenceforth it rained sonnets till poor little
+Selvaggia ran near losing her five wits. It rained sonnets, I say, until
+the Cancellieri brought out the black Guelphs in a swarm. Then it rained
+blood, and the Vergiolesi fled one cloudy night to Pitecchio, their
+stronghold in the Apennine. For Messer Cino, it behoved him also to
+advise seriously about his position. To sonnetteer is very well, but a
+lover, to say nothing of a jurisconsult, must live; he cannot have his
+throat cut if there is a way out.</p>
+
+<p>There was a very simple way out, which he took. He went down to Lucca in
+the plain and married his Margherita degli Ughi. With her Guelph
+connections he felt himself safer. He bestowed his wife in the keeping
+of her people for the time, bought himself a horse, and rode up to
+Pitecchio among the green maize, the olive-yards, and sprouting vines to
+claim asylum from Filippo, and to see once more the beautiful young
+Selvaggia.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTE:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> So the Pistolesi described at once their government and the
+seat of it.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="DIII" id="DIII"></a>III</h2>
+
+<p>There is hardly a sonnet, there are certainly neither <i>ballate</i>,
+<i>canzoni</i>, nor <i>capitoli</i> which do not contain some reference to Monna
+Selvaggia's fine eyes, and always to the same tune. They scorch him,
+they beacon him, they flash out upon him in the dark, so that he falls
+prone as Saul (who got up with a new name and an honourable addition);
+they are lodestones, swords, lamps, torches, fires, fixed and ambulatory
+stars, the sun, the moon, candles. They hold lurking a thief to prey
+upon the vitals of Cino; they are traitors, cruel lances; they kill him
+by stabbing day after day. You can picture the high-spirited young lady
+from his book&mdash;her noble bearing, her proud head, her unflinching
+regard, again the sparks in her grey-green eyes, and so on. He plays
+upon her <i>forte nome</i>, her dreadful name of Selvaggia; so she comes to
+be Ferezza itself. "Tanto &egrave; altiera," he says, so haughtily she goes
+that love sets him shaking; but, kind or cruel, it is all one to the
+enamoured Master Cino; for even if she "un pochettin sorride (light him
+a little smile)," it melts him as sun melts snow. In any case,
+therefore, he must go, like Dante's cranes, trailing his woes. It
+appears that she had very little mercy upon him; for all that in one
+place he records that she was "of all sweet sport and solace amorous,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>
+in many more than one he complains of her bringing him to "death and
+derision," of her being in a royal rage with her poet. At last he cries
+out for Pity to become incarnate and vest his lady in her own robe. It
+may be that he loved his misery; he is always on the point of dying,
+but, like the swan, he was careful to set it to music first. Selvaggia,
+in fact, laughed at him (he turned once to call her a Jew for that)
+egged on as she was by her brother and her own vivacious habit. She had
+no Nicoletta at Pitecchio, no mother anywhere, and a scheming father too
+busy to be anything but shrugging towards poets. She accepted his rhymes
+(she would probably have been scared if they ceased), his services, his
+lowered looks, his bent knee; and then she tripped away with an arm
+round Gianbattista's neck to laugh at all these praiseworthy attentions.
+As for Cino, Selvaggia was become his religion, and his rhyming her
+reasonable service. His goddess may have been as thirsty as the Scythian
+Artemis; may be that she asked blood and stripes of her devotees. All
+this may well be; for, by the Lord, did she not have them?</p>
+
+<p>Ridolfo and Ugolino Vergiolesi, the two elder brothers of Selvaggia, had
+stayed behind in Pistoja to share the fighting in the streets. They had
+plenty of it, given and received. Ridolfo had his head cut open, Ugolino
+went near to losing his sword arm; but in spite of these heroic
+sufferances the detested Cancellieri became masters of the city, and the
+chequer-board flag floated over the Podest&agrave;. Pistoja was now no place
+for a Ghibelline. So the two young men rode up to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> the hill-fortress,
+battered, but in high spirits. Selvaggia flew down the cypress-walk to
+meet them; they were brought in like wounded heroes. That was a bad
+day's work for Messer Cino the amorist; Apollo and the Muses limped in
+rags, and Mars was the only God worth thinking about, except on Sundays.</p>
+
+<p>Ridolfo, with his broken head-piece, was a bluff youth,
+broad-shouldered, square-jawed, a great eater, grimly silent for the
+most part. Ugolino had a trenchant humour of the Italian sort. What this
+may be is best exampled by our harlequinades, in which very much of
+Boccaccio's bent still survives. You must have a man drubbed if you want
+to laugh, and do your rogueries with a pleasant grin if you are inclined
+to heroism. Ridolfo, reading Selvaggia's sheaf of rhymes that night, was
+for running Master Cino through the body, jurist or no jurist; but
+Ugolino saw his way to a jest of the most excellent quality, and
+prevailed. He was much struck by the poet's preoccupation with his
+sister's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Candles, are they," he chuckled, "torches, fires, suns, moons, and
+stars? You seem to have scorched this rhymester, Vaggia."</p>
+
+<p>"He has frequently told me so, indeed," said Selvaggia.</p>
+
+<p>"It reminds me of Messer San Giovanni Vangelista," Ugolino continued,
+"who was made to sing rarely by the touching of a hot cinder."</p>
+
+<p>Selvaggia snatched the scrolls out of her brother's hand. "Nay, nay, but
+wait," she cried, with a gulp of laughter; "I have done that to Messer
+Cino, or can if I choose." She turned over the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> delicate pen-work in a
+hurry. "Here," she said eagerly, "read this!"</p>
+
+<p>Ugolino scampered through a couple of quatrains. "There's nothing out of
+common here," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"Go on, go on," said the girl, and nudged him to attend.</p>
+
+<p>Ugolino read the sestett:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>"'His book is but the vesture of her spirit;</div>
+<div>So too thy poet, that feels the living coal</div>
+<div>Flame on his lips and leap to song, shall know,</div>
+<div>To whom the glory, whose the unending merit;</div>
+<div>Nor faltering shall his utterance be, nor slow</div>
+<div>The mute confession of his inmost soul.'"</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Reading, he became absorbed in this fantastic, but not unhandsome piece;
+even Selvaggia pondered it with wide eyes and lips half parted. It was
+certainly very wonderful that a man could say such things, she thought.
+Were they true? Could they be true of any one in the world&mdash;even of
+Beatrice Portinari, that wonderful dead lady? She had never, she
+remembered, shown this particular sonnet to Nicoletta. What would
+Nicoletta have said? Pooh, what nonsense it was, what arrant nonsense in
+a man who could carry a sword, if he chose, and kill his enemies, or,
+better still, with his head outwit them&mdash;that he should turn to pens and
+ink and to fogging a poor girl! So Selvaggia, not so Ugolino. He got up
+and whispered to the scowling Ridolfo; Ridolfo nodded, and the pair of
+them went off presently together.</p>
+
+<p>Oblique looks on Cino were the immediate outcome. He knew the young men
+disliked him, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> cared little for that so long as they left him free
+to his devotions. A brisk little passage, a rally of words, with a bite
+in some of them, should have warned him; but no, the stage he had
+reached was out of range of the longest shots.</p>
+
+<p>Said Ugolino at supper: "Messer Giurisconsulto, will you have a red
+pepper?"</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, Messere," replied Cino, "it is over hot for my tongue."</p>
+
+<p>The huge Ridolfo threw his head back to laugh. "Does a burnt man dread
+the fire, or is he only to be fired one way? Why, man alive, my sister
+has set a flaming coal to your lips, and I am told you burst out singing
+instead of singeing."</p>
+
+<p>Cino coloured at this lunge; yet his respect for the lady of his mind
+was such that he could not evade it.</p>
+
+<p>"You take the language of metaphor, Messere," said he, rather stiffly,
+"to serve your occasions. You are of course within your rights. However,
+I will beg leave to be excused the red pepper of Messer Ugolino."</p>
+
+<p>"You prefer coals?" cried Ugolino, starting up. "Good! you shall have
+them."</p>
+
+<p>That was all; but the malign smile upon the dark youth's face gave a
+ring to the words, and an omen.</p>
+
+<p>Late that night Cino was in his chamber writing a <i>ballata</i>. His little
+oil-lamp was by his side; the words flowed freely from his pen; tears
+hot and honest were in his eyes as he felt rather than thought his
+exquisite griefs. Despised and rejected of men was he&mdash;and why? For the
+love of a beautiful lady. Eh, Mother of God, but that was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> worth the
+pain! She had barely lifted her eyes upon him all that day, and while
+her brothers gibed had been at no concern to keep straight her scornful
+lip. Patience, he was learning his craft! The words flowed like blood
+from a vein.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>"Love struck me in the side,</div>
+<div>And from the wound my soul took wing and flew</div>
+<div>To Heaven, and all my pride</div>
+<div>Fell, and I knew</div>
+<div>There was no balm could stay that wound so wide."</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>At this moment came a rapping at his door. He went to open it, dreaming
+no harm. There stood Ridolfo and Ugolino with swords in their right
+hands; in his left Ugolino carried a brazier.</p>
+
+<p>"Gentlemen," said Cino, "what is the meaning of this? Will you break in
+upon the repose of your father's guest? And do you come armed against an
+unarmed man?"</p>
+
+<p>The pair of them, however, came into the room, and Ridolfo locked the
+door behind him. "Look you, Cino," said he, "our father's guests are not
+our guests, for our way is to choose our own. There is a vast difference
+between us, and it lies in this, that you and the like of you are
+word-mongers, phrasers, heart-strokers; whereas we, Master Cino, are, in
+Scripture language, doers of the word, rounding our phrases with iron,
+and putting in full-stops with the point when they are needed. And we do
+not stroke girls' hearts, Cino, but as often as not break men's heads."</p>
+
+<p>Cino, for all his dismay, could not forbear a glance at the speaker's
+own damaged pate. "And, after all, Messer Ridolfo, in that you do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> but
+as you are done by, and who will blame you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hark'ee, Master Giurista," broke in Ugolino, "we have come to prove
+some of these fine words of yours. It will be well for you to answer
+questions instead of bandying them. Now did you, or did you not report
+that my sister Selvaggia touched your lips with a coal and set you off
+singing?"</p>
+
+<p>Cino, with folded arms, bent his head in assent: "I have said it,
+Messere."</p>
+
+<p>"Good! Now, such singing, though it is not to her taste, might be very
+much to ours. In fact we have come to hear it, and that you might be
+robbed of all excuse, we have brought the key with us. Brother, pray
+blow up the brazier."</p>
+
+<p>Ridolfo, with his great cheeks like bladders, blew the coals to a white
+heat. "Now then," he said, grinning to Ugolino, "now then, the concert
+may begin."</p>
+
+<p>Cino, who by this time had seen what was in the wind, saw also what his
+course must be. Whatever happened he could not allow a poet to be made
+ridiculous. It was ridiculous to struggle with two armed men, and
+unseemly; but suffering was never ridiculous. Patience, therefore! He
+anticipated the burly Ridolfo, who, having done his bellows-work, was
+now about to pin his victim from behind.</p>
+
+<p>"Pray do not give yourself the pain to hold me, Messere," said he; "I am
+not the man to deny you your amusement. Do what you will, I shall not
+budge from here."</p>
+
+<p>He stood where he was with his arms crossed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> and he kept his word. The
+red cinder hissed upon his lips; he shut his eyes, he ground his teeth
+together, the sweat beaded his forehead and glistened in his hair. Once
+he reeled over, and would have fallen if Ridolfo had not been there to
+catch him; but he did not sing the tune they had expected, and presently
+they let him alone. So much for Italian humour, which, you will see,
+does not lack flavour. It was only the insensate obtuseness of the gull
+which prevented Ugolino dying of laughter. Ridolfo was annoyed.</p>
+
+<p>"Give me cold iron to play with another time," he growled; "I am sick of
+your monkey-tricks." This hurt Ugolino a good deal, for it made him feel
+a fool.</p>
+
+<p>Will it be believed that the infatuate Master Cino spent the rest of the
+night in a rapture of poetry? It was not voiced poetry, could never have
+been written down; rather, it was a torrent of feeling upon which he
+floated out to heaven, in which he bathed. It thrilled through every
+fibre of his body till he felt the wings of his soul fluttering madly to
+be free. This was the very ecstasy of love, to suffer the extreme
+torment for the beloved! Ah, he was smitten deep enough at last; if
+poetry were to be won through bloody sweat, the pains of the rack, the
+crawling anguish of the fire, was not poetry his own? Yes, indeed; what
+Dante had gained through exile and the death of Monna Beatrice was his
+for another price, the price of his own blood. He forgot the physical
+agony of his scorched mouth, forgot the insult, forgot everything but
+this ineffable achievement, this desperate essay, this triumph,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> this
+anointing. Cino, Cino, martyr for Love! Hail, Cino, crowned with thy
+pain! He could have held up his bleeding heart and worshipped it. Surely
+this was the greatest hour of his life.</p>
+
+<p>Before he left Pitecchio, and that was before the dawn came upon it, he
+wrote this letter to his mistress.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"To his unending Lady, the image of all lovely delight, the Lady
+Selvaggia, Cino the poet, martyr for love, wisheth health and
+honour with kissing of feet. Madonna, if sin it be to lift over
+high the eyes, I have sinned very grievously; and if to have great
+joy be assurance of forgiveness, then am I twice absolved. Such
+bliss as I have had in the contemplation of your excellence cometh
+not to many men, yet that which hath befallen me this night
+(concerning which your honourable brothers shall inform you if you
+ask them)&mdash;this indeed is to be blessed of love so high, so rarely,
+that it were hard to believe myself the recipient, but for certain
+bodily testimony which, I doubt not, I shall carry about me to my
+last hour. I leave this house within a little while and go to the
+hermitage of Santa Marcella Pistoiese, there to pray Almighty God
+to make me worthy of my dignities and to contemplate the divine
+image of you wherewith my heart is sealed. So fare you well!&mdash;The
+most abject of your slaves,</p>
+
+<p class="right">"<span class="smcap">Cino</span>."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>His reason for giving the name of his new refuge was an honourable one,
+and would appeal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> to a duellist. His flight, though necessary, should be
+robbed of all appearance of flight; if they wanted him they could find
+him. Other results it had&mdash;results which he could never have
+anticipated, and which to have foreseen would have made him choose any
+other form of disgrace. But this was out of the question; nothing known
+to Cino or his philosophy could have told him the future of his conduct.
+He placed his letter in an infallible place and left Pitecchio just as
+the western sky was throbbing with warm light.</p>
+
+<p>For the present I leave him on his way.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="DIV" id="DIV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<p>The third act of the comedy should open on Selvaggia in her bed reading
+the letter. Beautiful as she may have looked, flushed and loose-haired
+at that time, it is better to leave her alone with her puzzle, and
+choose rather the hour of her enlightenment. Ridolfo and Ugolino were
+booted and spurred, their hooded hawks were on their wrists when she got
+speech of them. They were not very willing witnesses in a cause which
+now seemed to tell against themselves. Selvaggia's cheeks burned as with
+poor Cino's live coal when she could piece together all the shameful
+truth; tears brimmed at her eyes, and these too were scalding hot.
+Selvaggia, you must understand, was a very good girl, her only sin being
+none of her accomplishment; she was a child who looked like a young
+woman. Certainly she could not help that, though all the practice of her
+race were against her. She had never sought love, never felt to need it,
+nor cared to harbour it when it came. Love knocked at her heart, asking
+an entry; her heart was not an inn, she thought, let the wayfarer go on.
+But the knocking had continued till her ears had grown to be soothed by
+the gentle sound; and now it had stopped for ever, and, Pitiful Mother,
+for what good reason? Oh, the thing was horrible, shameful,
+unutterable!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> She was crying with rage; but as that spent itself a great
+warm flood of genuine sorrow tided over her, floated her away: she cried
+as though her heart was breaking; and now she cried for pity, and at
+last she cried for very love. A pale ethereal Cino, finger on lip, rose
+before her; a halo burned about his head; he seemed a saint, he should
+be hers! Ugolino and Ridolfo, helpless and ashamed before her outburst,
+went out bickering to their sport; and Selvaggia, wild as her name,
+untaught, with none to tutor her, dared her utmost&mdash;dared, poor girl,
+beyond her strength.</p>
+
+<p>Late in the afternoon of that day Cino, in the oratory of his hermitage,
+getting what comfort he could out of an angular Madonna frescoed there,
+heard a light step brush the threshold. The sun, already far gone in the
+west, cast on the white wall a shadow whose sight set his head spinning.
+He turned hastily round. There at the door stood Selvaggia in a crimson
+cloak; for the rest, a picture of the Tragic Muse, so woebegone, so
+white, so ringed with dark she was.</p>
+
+<p>Cino, on his feet, muttered a prayer to himself. He covered his scarred
+mouth, but not before the girl had caught sight of it. She set to
+wringing her hands, and began a low wailing cry.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, terrible&mdash;ah, terrible! That I should have done it to one who was
+always so gentle with me and so patient! Oh, Cino"&mdash;and she held out her
+hands towards him&mdash;"oh, Cino, will you not forgive me? Will you not? I,
+only, did it; it was through me that they knew what you had said.
+Shameful girl that I am!" She<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> covered her face and stood sobbing before
+him. But confronted with this toppled Madonna, Cino was speechless,
+wholly unprepared by jurisprudence or the less exact science of love for
+such a pass. As he knew himself, he could have written eloquently and
+done justice to the piercing theme; but love, as he and his fellows
+understood it, had no spoken language. I do not see, however, that
+Selvaggia is to be blamed for being ignorant of this.</p>
+
+<p>Yet he had to say something, since there stood the weeping girl, all
+abandoned to her trouble. "I beseech you, Madonna," he was beginning,
+when she suddenly bared her face, her woe, and her beauty to his
+astonished eyes, looking passionately at him in a way which even he
+could not misinterpret.</p>
+
+<p>"Cino," she said brokenly, "I am a wilful girl, but not wicked, ah, no!
+not hard-hearted. I think I did not understand you; I heard, but would
+not hear; it was wantonness, not evil in me, Cino. You have never
+wearied of telling me your devotion; is it too late to be thankful? Now
+I am come to tell you what I should have said long before, that I am
+grateful, proud of such love, that I receive it if still I may,
+that&mdash;that"&mdash;her voice fell to a thrilled whisper&mdash;"that I love you,
+Cino." Ah, but she had no more courage; she hid her blushes in her hands
+and felt that now she should by rights sink into the earth.</p>
+
+<p>Judge you, who know the theory of the matter, if this were terrible
+hearing for Messer Cino. Terrible? It was unprecedented hearing; it was
+a thing which, so far as he knew, had never <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>happened to a lover before.
+That love should go smooth, the lady smile, the lady love, the lady woo?
+Monstrous! The lady was never kind. Where was anguish? Where martyrdom?
+Where poetry and sore eyes? Yet stay, was not such a thing in itself a
+torment, to be cut off your martyrdom?</p>
+
+<p>Cino gasped for breath. "You love me, Madonna?" he said. "You love me?"</p>
+
+<p>Selvaggia nodded her head in her hands; she felt that she was blushing
+all over her body.</p>
+
+<p>Cino, at this new stab, struck his forehead a resounding smack. "This is
+terrible indeed!" he cried out in his distress; whereupon Selvaggia
+forgot to be ashamed any more, she was so taken by surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean, Cino?" she began to falter. "I don't understand you."</p>
+
+<p>Cino plunged into the icy pool of explanation, and splashed there at
+large. "I mean, I mean"&mdash;he waved his hands in the air&mdash;"it is most
+difficult to explain. We must apprehend Love aright&mdash;if we can. He is a
+grim and dreadful lord, it appears, working out the salvation of the
+souls of poets, and other men, by great sufferings. There is no other
+way, as the books teach us. Such love is always towards ladies; the
+suffering is from them, the love for them. They deal the darts, and
+receive the more devotion. It is not to be otherwise&mdash;could not
+be&mdash;there can be no poetry without pain; and how can there be pain if
+the lady loves the poet? Ah, no, it is impossible! Anciently, very long
+ago, in the times of Troy, maybe, it was different. I know not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> what to
+say; I had never expected, never looked, nor even asked&mdash;ah, Madonna,"
+he suddenly cried, and found himself upon his knees, "what am I to say
+to you for this speech of yours?"</p>
+
+<p>Selvaggia, white enough now, froze hard. "Do you mean," she said slowly,
+in words that fell one by one, like cuts from a deliberate whip, "do you
+mean that you do not love me, Messer Cino, after all?"</p>
+
+<p>"You are a light to my eyes and a lantern to my feet," Cino murmured:
+but she did not seem to hear.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean," she went on, "that you are not prepared to be&mdash;to be
+my&mdash;my betrothed?"</p>
+
+<p>It was done: now let the heavens fall! She could not ask the man to
+marry her, but it came to the same thing; she had practically committed
+that unpardonable sin; she had approached love to wedlock, a mystery to
+a bargain, the rapt converse of souls in heaven to a wrangle over the
+heeltaps in a tavern parlour. She was a heretic whom any Court of Love
+must excommunicate. The thing was so serious that it brought Cino to his
+feet, severe, formal, an Assessor of Civil Causes. He spread out his
+hands as if to wave aside words he should never have heard. He had found
+his tongue, for he was now contemplating the Abstract.</p>
+
+<p>"Be very sure, most sacred Lady," said he, "that no bodily torment could
+drive me to such sacrilege as your noble humility leads you to
+contemplate. No indeed! Wretchedly unworthy as I am to live in the light
+of your eyes, I am not yet fallen so far. There are yet seeds of grace<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>
+within me&mdash;of your planting, Madonna, of your planting!" She paid no
+heed to his compliments; her eyes were fixed. On he hurried. "So far,
+indeed, as those worldly concerns go, whereof you hint, I am provided
+for. My wife is at Lucca in her father's house&mdash;but of such things it is
+not fitting we should speak. Rather we should reason together of the
+high philosophy of love, which&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But Selvaggia was gone before he could invite her on such a lofty
+flight; the wife at Lucca sent her fleeting down the mossy slopes like a
+hare. It was too dark for men to see her face when she tiptoed into
+Pitecchio and slipped up to her chamber. Safe at last there, she
+shivered and drowsed the night away; but waking or sleeping she did not
+cease her dreary moan.</p>
+
+<p>Cino, after a night of consternation, could endure the hermitage no
+more; the problem, he was free to confess, beat him. Next day,
+therefore, he took horse and rode over the mountains to Bologna, intent
+upon finding Dante there; but Dante had gone to Verona with half of his
+"Inferno" in his saddlebag. Thither Cino pursued and there found him in
+the church of St. Helen, disputing with the doctors upon the Question of
+the Land and the Water. What passed between the great poet and the less
+I cannot certainly report, nor is it material. I think that the tinge of
+philosophy set here and there in Cino's verses, to say nothing of a
+couplet or two which give more than a hint of the "Vita Nova," may
+safely be ascribed to that time. I know at least that he did not cease
+to love his beautiful and wild Selvaggia,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> so far as he understood that
+delicate state of the soul which she, perverse child, had so signally
+misapprehended. The truth may well be that he was tolerably happy at
+Verona, able to contemplate at his ease the divine image of his lady
+without any interference from the disturbing original. He was, it is
+said, meditating an ambitious work, the history of the Roman Polity from
+Numa to Justinian, an epic in five and twenty books, wherein Selvaggia
+would have played a fine part, that of the Genius of Natural Law. The
+scheme might have ripened but for one small circumstance; this was the
+death of Selvaggia.</p>
+
+<p>That healthy, laughing girl, Genius of Nature or not, paid the penalty
+of her incurable childishness by catching a malaria, whereof she died,
+as it is said, in a high delirium of some eight hours. So it seems that
+she was really unteachable, for first she had spoiled Cino's martyrdom,
+and next, by the same token, robbed the world of an epic in twenty-five
+books. Cino heard of it some time afterwards, and in due season was
+shown her tomb at Monte della Sambuca high on the Apennine, a grey stone
+solitary in a grey waste of shale. There he pondered the science of
+which, while she was so strangely ignorant, he had now become an adept;
+there, or thereabouts, he composed the most beautiful of all his rhymes,
+the <i>canzone</i> which may stand for an elegy of the Lady Selvaggia.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>"Ay me, alas! the beautiful bright hair,&mdash;"</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Ay me, indeed! And thus he ends:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>"Ay me, sharp Death! till what I ask is done</div>
+<div>And my whole life is ended utterly,&mdash;</div>
+<div>Answer,&mdash;must I weep on</div>
+<div>Even thus, and never cease to moan <i>ay me</i>?"<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>He might well ask. It should be accorded him that he was worthy of the
+occasion: the poem is very fine. But I think the good man did well
+enough after this; I know that if he was sad he was most melodiously
+sad. He throve; he became a professor; his wife bore him five children.
+His native city has done him what honour she could, ousted his surname
+in favour of her own, set up a pompous monument in the Cathedral Church
+(where little Selvaggia heard her dull mass), and dubbed him once and
+for all, <i>L'amoroso Messer Cino da Pistoja</i>. That should suffice him. As
+for the young Selvaggia, I suppose her bones are dust of the Apennine.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTE:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> The translation is Rossetti's.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_JUDGMENT_OF_BORSO" id="THE_JUDGMENT_OF_BORSO"></a>THE JUDGMENT OF BORSO</h2>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Unde proverbii loco etiamnunc usurpatur, pr&aelig;teriisse Borsii
+tempora."&mdash;<i>Este Chronicle</i>.</p></blockquote>
+
+<h2><a name="EI" id="EI"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h3>THE ADVENTURERS</h3>
+
+<p>It is happily as unnecessary as it would be unwise to inquire into the
+ancestry of Bellaroba, a meek-eyed girl of Venice, with whom I have here
+some concern. Her mother was La Fragiletta, of the Old Ghetto, and her
+father may have been of the Council of Ten, or possibly a Doge. No one
+could deny it, for no one knew his name. It is certain that his daughter
+was not christened as she was called, equally certain that the nickname
+fitted her. <i>Bella roba</i>, a pretty thing, she always had been for her
+mother's many friends; <i>bella roba</i> in truth she looked, as La
+Fragiletta fastened her dark red dress, stuck a bunch of carnations in
+the bosom of it, and pulled up the laces round her slim neck, on a
+certain May morning in or about the year 1469. "The shape you are,
+child," said that industrious woman, "I can do nothing for you in
+Venice. It is as timid<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> as a nun's. Ferrara is the place of all the
+world for you. I look forward to your speedy establishment in a city
+where a girl may be like a flagstaff and yet not thought amiss."</p>
+
+<p>Bellaroba looked humbly at herself in the glass; though she could see
+that she was pretty, it was not to be denied that she was thin. Ah, no;
+she did not take after her mother. Here she sighed to remember that her
+bosom friend, Olimpia Castaneve, took after hers only too well, and was
+to accompany her fortune-hunting in Ferrara for precisely opposite
+reasons. Was this fair? she wondered. She, Bellaroba, was to go because
+she was of a piece with the Ferrarese; Olimpia, because she could
+furnish a provoking contrast. She was an affectionate, docile creature,
+this shrinking Bellaroba, absurdly young, absurdly your servant; but
+tears smarted in her eyes as she stood adorned for sacrifice&mdash;in her
+tight crimson dress, lace at her neck and wrists, a jewel on her
+forehead, a chain in her hair, and a cold block of lead dragging at her
+heart. She had never denied any one anything, and certainly not her
+mother. Her tears glistened as she blinked, her lip was shaky; she was
+kissed a good-bye none the less, and went down the steps to join Olimpia
+huddled in the gondola.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-bye, my child," cried Madam Fragiletta from the doorway. "Be wise;
+remember what I have told you. Never see a priest the wrong side of the
+grille, and obey Monna Nanna in everything. I shall have a mass for you
+at San Zan to-morrow, and another on your birthday, which I shall never
+forget."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span></p><p>The morning was misty and sharp, Madam Fragiletta was very much
+undressed, and loved her bed. She waved her hand gallantly to Bellaroba,
+who still stood up wistful in the gondola; she did not wait for it to
+shoot the bridge or round the square corner of the <i>rio</i>, but turned
+shrugging to the house. There was no reasonable probability that these
+two would ever meet again. Short outlooks govern La Fragiletta's trade,
+and Providence, it seems, has little to do with it.</p>
+
+<p>Olimpia Castaneve, the muffled brooder in the poop, was cold, cross, and
+still. Bellaroba snivelled, but she was scornful under her cloak, and no
+word passed between the pair until they were in the great blunt-nosed
+barge, heading against a crisping tide for Chioggia. Then, as the sun
+shot through the mist and revealed the lagoon, one broad sheet of silver
+and blue, the shawls were opened, limbs went luxuriously at the stretch;
+you could see and hear chatter the couple of adventurers if you cared.
+Bellaroba you have seen already&mdash;very gentle, very simple, very unformed
+without and within. She had pretty ways, coaxing and appealing ways.
+When she asked a question it was with lifted eyebrows and a head on one
+side. She would take your hand without art, and let you hold it without
+afterthought. It was the easiest thing in the world to kiss her, for she
+suffered it gladly and quite innocently; it came as naturally as to a
+cat to rub his cheek on your chair or swinging foot. Yet the girl was as
+modest as a Clare. If you had presumed on your licence to make<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> love to
+her, it would not have been her scorn (for she had none), but her
+distress that would have set you back in your place. God knows what La
+Fragiletta might have taught her. It is certain she was all unlettered
+in love up to that hour. Bellaroba was not only modest by instinct, but
+that better thing, innocent by preoccupation.</p>
+
+<p>In all this she was a dead contrast to her handsome friend Olimpia
+Castaneve, who was really a beauty of the true Venetian mould. As sleek
+and sumptuous as a cat, as splendidly coloured as a sunburnt nectarine,
+crowned with a mass of red-gold hair, as stupid as she was sly, and as
+rich as she was spendthrift, the lovely Olimpia had been sent
+adventuring to the bees of Ferrara, not as lacking honey for Venice, but
+as being too great a treasure for her mother's house. Her mother was La
+Farfalla&mdash;a swollen butterfly in these days&mdash;and frankly said that she
+could not afford such a daughter. Olimpia had no instructions; in fact,
+needed none. She went cheerfully out to what Monna Nanna and the Blessed
+Virgin should prepare for her, without kisses (which she garnered
+against the lean years) and without reserves. She neither condemned her
+mother nor approved. Perhaps she had not the wit; assuredly she lacked
+the energy. She was remarkably handsome in her hot Venetian way, richly
+coloured, brown-eyed, crimson-lipped, bosomed like a goddess and shaped
+like a Caryatid. She half closed her eyes, half opened her lips, smiled
+and drowsed and waited. You would have thought her melting with love;
+she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> was ciphering a price, but being slow at figures, she hid herself
+(spiderwise) in a golden mesh. Olimpia was nearly always complaisant,
+had no reticences, no conscience, few brains. She was luxury itself,
+fond of the fire, fond of her bed, fond of her dinner. Admittedly
+self-absorbed, she was accustomed to say that she knew far too much
+about love to fall into it. It was a reflection as serious as she could
+make it; but Love is very apt to take such sayings amiss. Olimpia out of
+love might make men miserable; in it, what might she not do? I am about
+to tell you.</p>
+
+<p>At Chioggia they were to await a shipload of merchants and pack-mules
+expected from Ancona; but the wind proved counter when their barge had
+weathered Malamocco, and that which dis-served them befriended the
+northering freight. They found the train of beasts awaiting them,
+saddled and loaded, restless to be off. Chioggia to Ferrara, by the road
+they would go, is a handsome fifty miles.</p>
+
+<p>In that company, as they neared, they observed a calm-eyed youth with a
+delicate, girlish face, and wonderful shock of light gold hair all about
+it. He stood alone on the mole, one knee bent, a hand to his hip, and
+soberly surveyed the group on the barge. He made a charming little
+picture there&mdash;seemed indeed posed for some such thing; he was
+charmingly pretty himself, but for all that, he had a tragic touch upon
+him, a droop of the lip, or the eyelid, perhaps. One could hardly say,
+yet never miss it. Even Olimpia noticed the shadow across him. As they
+touched&mdash;"Look, look, Bellaroba," she whispered, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> nudged her
+friend&mdash;"that boy! Did you ever see such a lovely child?"</p>
+
+<p>Bellaroba drew a long breath. "I think he is as lovely as an angel," she
+replied, her eyes fascinated. And her saying was equally true. He was
+such a demure boy-angel, bright-haired, long and shapely in the limb, as
+the painters and carvers loved to set in Madonna's court, careful about
+her throne, or below the dais fiddling, or strumming lutes to charm away
+her listlessness. Moreover, Angioletto was the name he went by, though
+he had been christened Dominick. And he came from Borgo San
+Sepolcro&mdash;far cry from windy Chioggia&mdash;a place among the brown Tuscan
+hills, just where they melt into Umbria; and he was by trade a minstrel,
+and going to Ferrara. Of so much, with many bows, he informed the two
+girls, being questioned by Olimpia. But he looked at Bellaroba as he
+spoke, and she listened the harder and looked the longer of the two.</p>
+
+<p>Everything about him seemed to her altogether gracious, from the silky
+floss of his gold hair to his proper legs, sheathed in scarlet to the
+thighs. He was as soft and daintily coloured as a girl, had long curved
+lashes to his grey eyes, a pathetic droop to his lip, the bloom as of a
+peach on his cheeks. But you could never mistake him for a girl. His
+eyes had a critical blink, he looked to have the discretion of a man. A
+fop he might be; he had a wiry mind. A fop, in fact, he was. He had a
+little scarlet cap on his head, scarlet stockings, peaked scarlet shoes:
+for the rest he was in green cloth with a blue<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> leather belt about his
+waist. He had fine lace ruffles at his wrists, a fine line of white at
+his throat, and in his ears (if you could have seen them) gold rings.
+Just the pampered young minion of any Tuscan court, a precocious
+wrappage of wit, good manners, and sensibility, he looked what he spoke,
+the exquisite Florentine, to these broad-vowelled Venetian lasses; did
+not smile, but seemed never out of temper; and was certainly not timid.
+Self-possessed, reticent he was; but not timid. That was proved.</p>
+
+<p>When the cavalcade was on the point to start, Angioletto stepped forward
+and took Bellaroba by the hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Little lady," says he to his blushing captive, "I have a mule for the
+road which I am assured is a steady pacer. Will you be my pillion?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, Messere," said Bellaroba in a twitter, and dropped him a
+curtsy of her best.</p>
+
+<p>"Excellent!" he cried gaily. "I can see that we are to be friends." So
+she was led away.</p>
+
+<p>He helped her on to the mule in no time, showed her how she must hold
+him round the middle, how closely and how constantly; he explained how
+little there was to fear, for all that such a manner of going was as
+venturesome to her as a steamer would have seemed to Ulysses, that great
+captain. It was then that Olimpia (watching all this) proved Angioletto
+not timid, for she saw him conclude his precepts to her friend by
+kissing her cheek in the easiest manner. "H'm," thought the wise
+Olimpia, "I pray that Bellaroba may be careful."</p>
+
+<p>She herself accepted the services and part of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> the horse of a lean
+Ravennese, a Captain of Lances&mdash;two yards of sinew and brown
+leather&mdash;who told her that his name was Mosca, and his heart bleeding at
+her feet. Olimpia smiled beautifully upon him, but was careful; took a
+share of the courser, but gave in return nothing more than a hand on its
+master's belt. He wanted much more, and showed it. Olimpia, far from
+coy, hinted an exchange. She needed her bearings; did this apparent hero
+know Ferrara? The Mosca snorted, threw back his head at the word.
+Ferrara? cried he, did he know it! Saints and Angels, who could know it
+better? "Ferrara?" he went on to shout, appealing to gods and men, "the
+gayest court in all Italy&mdash;the cleanest air, the most laughing women,
+the&mdash;pest! It is a place of holy days and feasts&mdash;all music, loving, and
+delight! But you will see, my dear; I will see that you see." Olimpia
+must know more exactly than this, and so she told the Mosca. He could
+deny her nothing; so as they rode between the grey swamps of the lagoon,
+he poured out his understanding in his own fashion. His oaths made her
+gasp, but the facts atoned for that. By the bones of God, but he served
+a great lord of that city&mdash;Guarino Guarini by name, whose blade was the
+longest, the oftenest out, and the cleanest cutter, as himself was the
+lightest heart, and most trenchant carver of men in Borso's fief. The
+good captain carried his loyalty to the edge of his simplicity, and left
+it there for Olimpia to handle. "By the cheeks of the Virgin, my dear, I
+know what I know. My young master has an eye which, whether it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> say
+'Come' or 'Go,' needs not say it twice. He is as fine and limber as a
+leopard on the King of England's shield, of a nature so frank and loving
+that I suppose there is hardly a lady in Ferrara could not testify to
+it&mdash;unless she were bound to the service of his Magnificence the Duke.
+Why! Yourself might make a shift to be my little friend, and never
+repent it, mind you&mdash;no, no, I may be battered, my dear, but I am
+seasoned; I have great experience: you would not repent, and shall not,
+by the Face on the Handkerchief! But happen you see my master, happen he
+wear his brocade of white and gold&mdash;it is all peacocks' eyes, my
+seraphic heart, in gold and blue upon snowy white&mdash;happen again he look,
+'Come' at you&mdash;why, off you trot as a hound to the platter, and I speed
+you thither with open heart. Thus walks his world, Guarino Guarini, my
+noble master."</p>
+
+<p>Olimpia had a colour, and flew it now most becomingly in her cheeks. It
+was a wholesome, healthy, happy colour, born of her growing excitement;
+the Captain highly approved of it. She thus earned more information.
+Guarino Guarini, it appeared, though not of the reigning family, was
+very near the throne. He had married one of the d'Este ladies, Madama
+Lionella, legitimised daughter of Duke Borso, and was now ignoring the
+fact to his own and her entire satisfaction. Upon the Countess's score,
+Captain Mosca had not very much to say. "A great-hearted lady, amorous,
+generous, a great lover," he allowed; "a pretty taste for music and
+singing she has, is a friend of poets and such like. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>antechamber is
+full of them; and there they are&mdash;on promotion, you understand. But
+though she has a wonderful free spirit, she is no beauty, you must know.
+Her mouth is too big, and her eyes are too small. It is a kissing mouth,
+as we say, my dear, and a speaking eye&mdash;and there you have Madama
+Lionella, who loves minstrels."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me," said Olimpia here, "who is that pretty gentleman with my
+friend? Is he not a minstrel?"</p>
+
+<p>The Captain turned in his saddle and, when he had observed, snorted his
+disdain.</p>
+
+<p>"That sprout, my deary?" said he. "Some such dapper little
+chamber-fellow, I'll warrant you. A lap-dog, a lady's toy, with a piping
+voice and an eye for mischief. Yes, he'll be for climbing by Madama
+Lionella's back-stair. He has the make of it&mdash;just the doll she loves to
+dandle." Which was all the Captain had to say for Angioletto.</p>
+
+<p>Little as it was, it was more than Angioletto had to say for Mosca. He
+was, indeed, serenely indifferent to the lean brown man. From the moment
+of their setting out, he and Bellaroba had wagged tongues in concert,
+and before they had made a dozen miles each knew the other's story to
+the roots. Angioletto's was no great matter. The Capuchins at Borgo had
+taught him his rudiments, his voice had taken him into the choir, his
+manners into the sacristy. He had been Boy-Bishop twice, had become a
+favourite of the Warden's, learnt Latin, smelt at Greek, scribbled
+verses. Then, one Corpus Christi, he got his chance. There was to be a
+Pageant&mdash;"Triumph,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> he called it&mdash;a Triumph of Love and a Triumph of
+Chastity, wherein by the good offices of his friend the Warden he was
+chosen for the part of Love. It was to be assumed that he pleased, for
+Chastity (who was a great lady of the place) took him into her service;
+and there he stayed until, as he explained, she married again. She had
+been a widow, it seems, when she took part in the Triumphs.</p>
+
+<p>Bellaroba was much interested.</p>
+
+<p>"Was the lady kind to you, Angioletto?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, very kind."</p>
+
+<p>"But you had to go, you say?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. It was judged better."</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't quite see. If she was kind I wonder why you judged it
+better to go, or why she did."</p>
+
+<p>"It did not rest wholly with us," said Angioletto.</p>
+
+<p>Bellaroba did not pursue the subject. But after a short pause&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"And are you now from her house?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto shook his head. "That was a very long time ago," said he;
+"two years at least. I am eighteen, you must know. When I left the
+Marchioness she gave me a handsome present. It sufficed to take me to
+Perugia&mdash;to the University there; it afforded me two years' study in the
+liberal arts, and my outfit for this present venture into the bargain."</p>
+
+<p>"And do you know what you will do at Ferrara, Angioletto?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, quite well."</p>
+
+<p>"What will you do?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span></p><p>"I will marry you, Bellaroba," the boy replied, as he turned suddenly,
+put his arms about her and took a long kiss.</p>
+
+<p>Bellaroba, in a bath of love, made him free of her lips. For a while the
+mule had to do his pacing alone.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Angioletto, Angioletto," whispered the girl, with a hidden face, "I
+have never been happy like this before."</p>
+
+<p>"You will never be unhappy again, dearest, for I shall be with you."</p>
+
+<p>For the time there was no more talk, since the broken murmurs of their
+joy and wonder cannot be so described. The billing of two doves on an
+elm was not more artless than their converse on the mule's back.</p>
+
+<p>The girl brought prose in again, as became a daughter of Venice. What
+had led Angioletto to Ferrara?</p>
+
+<p>"The Blessed Virgin," he promptly replied, and she sighed a happy
+acquiescence in so pious a retort.</p>
+
+<p>"But what else?"</p>
+
+<p>For answer Angioletto drew a silk-bound letter from his breast. "This
+epistle," he said, "promises me employment and fame almost as certainly
+as you promise me bliss. It is from a Cardinal of my acquaintance to a
+noble lady of Ferrara, by name Lionella, daughter of Duke Borso himself,
+and wife to one Messer Guarino Guarini, a very great lord. The lady is
+patroness of all poets and minstrels. Consider our fortunes made, my
+joy."</p>
+
+<p>"They must be made since you believe it,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> Angioletto," said Bellaroba
+with faith. "I have never seen any one like you, so beautiful and so
+wise at once."</p>
+
+<p>The compliment provoked kisses. Angioletto embraced her again; again
+conversation became ejaculatory, and again the mule tripped over the
+reins. He learned before the day was out to allow for this new hindrance
+to his way; he tripped no more. The lovers continued their rapt
+intercourse all that May-day journey through the rice-fields, until at
+Rovigo (half hidden in a mist of green) they halted for the night.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="EII" id="EII"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h3>ARMS AND THE MANNIKIN</h3>
+
+<p>The hubbub of the inn-yard, where shouting merchants wrestled for
+porters, and donkeys brayed them down, the narrowed eyes of Olimpia, the
+sardonic grin of the gaunt Mosca, brought our lovers back into the real
+world. They faced their foes together with insensible meeting and
+holding of young hands. Angioletto did his best not to feel a detected
+schoolboy, and did succeed in meeting the Captain's terrific looks.
+Bellaroba made no attempt at heroism. Her blush was a thing to be seen.</p>
+
+<p>"Bellaroba, come with me, my child," said Olimpia severely; but
+Angioletto kept her hand.</p>
+
+<p>Captain Mosca fiddled at his sword-hilt.</p>
+
+<p>"Would you like spitted lark for supper, Madonna?" he asked with
+meaning.</p>
+
+<p>Olimpia burst into a shrill laugh, and Angioletto, who had the pluck of
+a little gamecock, turned to his partner in guilt.</p>
+
+<p>"And you, Madonnetta," he said sweetly, "what do you say to <i>boars head</i>
+larded?"</p>
+
+<p>Bellaroba giggled in spite of herself&mdash;for she was terribly
+frightened&mdash;but again Olimpia, the grand indifferent, pealed her
+delight. The Captain glared round about him over a tossing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> sea of bales
+and asses' ears; getting small joy of that, he scowled portentously at
+the little minstrel and took a stride forward.</p>
+
+<p>"Look you, sprigling," said he, "you have to do with a man of deeds; a
+man, by Saint Hercules, of steel."</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto was fired, cheek and eye. He never faltered.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I had to do with a man of sense," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"If you do not drop that lady's hand, my lad&mdash;" growled the Mosca.</p>
+
+<p>"What then, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then," the Captain roared, "by the ante-chambers of Paradise, she shall
+cling to carrion!"</p>
+
+<p>Bellaroba with a little cry fell to her knees; Olimpia bit her finger;
+Angioletto shrugged.</p>
+
+<p>"You have better lungs than manners, Captain," he said quietly. "These
+ladies of ours are fatigued with travel and tired of fasting. Moreover,
+I apprehend a bale of carpets on my back at every moment. We will, so
+please you, sup. If you and the lady whom you escort will do me the
+honour of sharing my table we can arrange other matters at our leisure.
+I have always understood that encounters before ladies are make-believe;
+but your experience should inform you how far that is true. By leave,
+Signor Capitano."</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon he lifts up the praying Bellaroba, kisses her forehead, and
+hands her into the inn as bold as a Viscount. One or two tongues were in
+one or two cheeks; one hand at least clapped him on the shoulder for a
+"little <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>assassin"&mdash;a compliment: the honours were his to that present.
+Olimpia followed after him, very much impressed with the thought that
+the sooner she could exchange Mosca for Mosca's master the better for
+her. In the rear of the procession stalked that gaping hero swearing
+rapidly under his breath to keep himself in some sort of countenance.</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto's assurance, and with it his luck, held out the evening. Not
+otherwise could he have cleared himself of the mess. He fairly froze
+Mosca by the coolness of his assumptions.</p>
+
+<p>"I will fight you as soon as you choose, and with your own weapons,
+after supper," said he, "but it is only fair to warn you that you will
+be killed."</p>
+
+<p>"How so, by the King of Glory!" cried the Captain.</p>
+
+<p>"The wagging finger of Fate, sir," replied Angioletto readily, "and the
+conjunctions of the stars. My horoscope was taken at Foligno with the
+utmost exactitude. Mars himself, for reasons of his own, seems to have
+presided over my begetting. More than that, though I have not the least
+desire to take your life&mdash;should not, indeed, know what to do with
+it&mdash;it will be impossible for me to avoid it. I am really very sorry.
+Your case is just on a parallel with that of the younger Altopasso who,
+on this very day a year ago, insisted upon fighting with me. It is true
+that I do not pretend to love or even to approve of you, Captain; I
+consider that your legs have outgrown your brains. But for all that, I
+should be sorry to think that for want of a little ordinary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> politeness,
+or for shanks out of due measure, an honest man had lost his life.
+However, I fear the affair has gone too far."</p>
+
+<p>The Captain grew purple and green by turns. The room of full tables was
+all agog. He let out an oath which I omit.</p>
+
+<p>"The affair has not gone so far as this blade shall go, turkey-poult,"
+he thundered.</p>
+
+<p>"Make yourself quite easy on that point, my good sir," said Angioletto,
+cracking a walnut; "your sword shall fly the length of the room. I have
+a pass that is irresistible. You cannot fight planets, Captain."</p>
+
+<p>"I have never tried yet, by our Lord," the Captain admitted, "but no one
+has dared to doubt my valour, and, planet or no planet, I'll run you
+through."</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto smiled at another walnut. "I find the conceit admirable,"
+said he, "yet you will perish so sure as this city is Rovigo and a
+titular fief of my mistress's master."</p>
+
+<p>"A straw for your mistress, little egg," cried the suffocating Captain.</p>
+
+<p>"I will give it to Countess Lionella as your dying gift, Signor
+Capitano."</p>
+
+<p>The name smacked him in the face; he shook his head like a worried bull,
+or as a dog shakes water from his pelt. Olimpia, too, was interested,
+and for the first time. With face fixed between her hands, she leaned
+both elbows on the table, watching.</p>
+
+<p>"Is the Countess Lionella your mistress?" she asked. Angioletto made her
+a bow; the company applauded a popular name. Olimpia turned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> a glance
+upon her Captain, which said as plainly as she could have spoken,
+"Finish him for your master's sake." But it had no meaning for the
+champion, who possibly knew more about his master than he had been
+minded to declare.</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto tapped the ground with his toe. "Come, Master Captain," he
+said, "before your blood cools."</p>
+
+<p>"Have no fear, bantam," said a jolly Dominican in his ear, "that toad's
+blood was never hot." It certainly looked like it. The Captain scratched
+his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Look ye now, youngster," he said at last, "I serve his worship Count
+Guarino Guarini, who is the husband of Madama Lionella; and lucky for
+you that service is. Otherwise, by the truly splintered Cross, it had
+gone hard with you this night."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, brava, brava!" cheered the dining-room, and then hooted the Captain
+to his bench.</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto put up his little hanger with a curt nod in his enemy's
+direction. "For the Countess's sake I spare you to the Count, Captain
+Mosca; though what precisely your value may be to his Excellency I do
+not at present understand."</p>
+
+<p>Thereupon he turned to his poor Bellaroba, took her in his arms before
+them all, kissed her eyes dry of tears, and ended by drawing a rueful
+smile from her lips. The dining-room found him admirable throughout; but
+Olimpia got up, yawning.</p>
+
+<p>"Come, child, it is time for bed," she declared, "I suppose even this
+entertainment must have a term." There was no gainsaying it. The lovers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>
+were torn apart by the moral force of Olimpia's attendance; but not
+until it was demonstrated that, though good-night is a word of two
+syllables, it needs four lips, and is therefore capable of infinite
+extension.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, my child, I hope you are satisfied with this little day's work,"
+said Olimpia, half undressed.</p>
+
+<p>For answer, Bellaroba, upon her friend's neck, dissolved in a flood of
+happy tears.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="EIII" id="EIII"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h3>HOW THEY CAME TO FERRARA</h3>
+
+<p>That was a fair sight which greeted the travellers at the close of the
+next day&mdash;the towers of Ferrara rising stately out of a green thicket.
+The lovers trilled their happiness to each other: surely nothing but
+pleasure and a smooth life could come out of so treeful a place!</p>
+
+<p>"In our Venice, you must know," said Bellaroba, "we set great store by
+green boughs, having so few of them. We think that harshness and clamour
+may hunt the canals, but that birds can sing in gardens of a world
+really joyful. What a cloud of green trees&mdash;look, look how near the sky
+comes to them! Oh, my Angioletto, we are going to be so happy!" And the
+young girl laid her hot cheek on her lover's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>He, though her premises were undeniable, had his doubts. Her words set
+him wondering what was to be the end of this light-hearted adventure.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear," said he, "if trees get in a man's way of villainy or
+incommode his pleasures he will cut them down, depend upon it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, silly boy," she cried, and gave him a peck of a kiss, "and does
+not that prove what I say, that there are no villainies in Ferrara? For,
+see, the trees are as thick as a forest." She made<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> him laugh again
+before many paces. His ringing tones caught the ears of Captain Mosca,
+and set that great man scowling.</p>
+
+<p>"If I don't get a crumb down that yapping gullet, call me not Mosca," he
+grumbled.</p>
+
+<p>"Speak a little louder, Signor Capitano," said his pillion.</p>
+
+<p>"Your pardon, Madonna Olimpia," he answered, "but I believe I was
+breathing a prayer on account of the little love-boy yonder."</p>
+
+<p>Olimpia laughed. "I love him as much as you do, I dare swear," said she;
+"but he may be very useful. Remember that I am but a poor gentlewoman
+with my fortune to make."</p>
+
+<p>"Give me the making of it, my angel," cried the Captain, crushing his
+heart with his fist. "You shall have the most crowded <i>cortile</i> in
+Ferrara. May I give you a humble bit of advice?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly you may."</p>
+
+<p>"It will be this, then, that you hold off from Monna Nanna and keep
+yourself very much to yourself. Between us we can arrange a pretty
+future. I know Monna Nanna better than becomes me. Believe me, the
+acquaintance would become you still less. But with such talents as I
+have&mdash;and they are all yours&mdash;I can arrange for you a most proper
+dwelling-place which shall cost little and bring much in."</p>
+
+<p>"But we cannot live there alone, Captain."</p>
+
+<p>"Hey! I am beforehand. I parry with the head, my duchess," cried the
+delighted Mosca. "I have thought of all that. There is an old lady of my
+friendship in the city, by name Donna Matura. She is something decayed
+in estate o' these days,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> has fewer crusts than teeth, poor soul, but
+has mingled with the highest. She will be all that you could wish, and
+you more than she could hope for. Think of it, lady, think of it."</p>
+
+<p>"I will," said Olimpia, who had already done so. There is no doubt that
+she and the Mosca understood each other.</p>
+
+<p>They were now riding up the long lime-tree avenue which leads to the
+Sea-Gate of Ferrara; soon they entered Ferrara itself, that city of warm
+red brick, of broad eaves, of laughter, and, as it were, a fairy-tale,
+bowered in rustling green. The streets ran wide between garden walls and
+the massy fronts of great square houses; they were full of a traffic
+which seemed that of a prosperous people bent upon pleasure. Happy
+ladies rode by with hawks or leashed dogs, or crowns of flowers.
+Cavaliers, in white and yellow, ribboned, slashed, curled, and
+feathered, went in and out of the throng to keep an assignation, or to
+break one. The priests joked with the women, the very urchins coaxed for
+kisses. Every street corner had its lovers' tryst, never a garden walk
+without its loitering pair, never a lady came out of a church door but
+there stood a devout adorer to beg a touch of holy water from her
+finger-tip.</p>
+
+<p>"How happy this people is," cried Bellaroba, flushed and sparkling, to
+her little lord. "Everybody loves everybody else."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear, we have nothing to do with their loves; we are going to be
+married," replied Angioletto, looking straight before him.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Angioletto," said she, as meek as a mouse.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span></p><p>Olimpia, who was not thinking of marriage, was highly entertained.
+There was a press of grooms and led horses, richly caparisoned, outside
+the open doors of a new and very spacious palace. Round about them
+crowded people of a meaner sort, and beggars not a few; but a lane was
+kept to the gateway by soldiers in red and yellow, who bore upon their
+breasts a quartered coat of eagles and lilies.</p>
+
+<p>"Hist!" said Mosca, pulling up his horse. "This is the fine new palace
+of the Duke, which he calls his Schifanoia. He is evidently expected in
+from his hawking. The greatest falconer you ever knew, my life! I do
+assure you."</p>
+
+<p>"That may very well be," said Olimpia, "for I have never known one at
+all."</p>
+
+<p>"You shall know this one before I die, and another who is my most noble
+master," cried Mosca, "or I am your kennel-dog for nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"Let us wait a little and see this hawking Duke of yours," Olimpia said,
+with a gentle pressure of her arms about the Captain's middle.</p>
+
+<p>"Blood of blood," sighed the Mosca, "I am as wax in the candle of you,
+my soul."</p>
+
+<p>Olimpia pulled down her hood. Her patience was rewarded in no long time
+by the sound of an approaching cavalcade; presently she saw the nodding
+plumes of riders and their beasts at the end of the street. Knights,
+squires, and ladies rode with their reigning prince: he himself with two
+young men, magnificently dressed, came in advance of the troop, and at a
+great pace.</p>
+
+<p>Olimpia judged her time well. At the moment Duke Borso drew rein to turn
+into his gates she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> threw back her hood and looked him full in the face,
+as if to dower him with all the splendour of her beauty. The sly,
+humorous face of the old fox twitched as his eyes caught the girl's. He
+looked a prude with a touch of freakishness in him; his pursed mouth
+seemed always to be strangling a smile, the issue of the strife always
+in doubt. Now, for instance, though Olimpia said to herself that she was
+satisfied, she could never have denied that he disapproved of her, while
+nobody could have maintained it. Borso had shot upon her a piercing
+glance the minute in which he had turned his horse; Mosca had had the
+benefit of another; then he had acknowledged in military fashion the
+waving caps and kerchiefs at the gates and had passed into the
+courtyard.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you may be satisfied, my soul," said the Mosca. "Borso will never
+forget us now: it is not his way. But look, look!" Another pair of eyes
+was at work, belonging to a very handsome, ruddy youth who had been at
+the Duke's left hand. Olimpia needed no nudge from the Captain to tell
+her who this noble rider might be. Guarino Guarini for a florin! And so
+it was.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Mosca, "that is my most intrepid master. The flaxen lad in
+silver brocade, who was on the other side, is Teofilo Calcagnini, of
+whom I know little more than that he is Duke Borso's shadow. You shall
+hardly see them apart. The other, my charmer, the other is our man.
+Leave me to deal with him. Come now to the inn. To-morrow you shall have
+your hired<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> house, and the next day company for it more to your taste
+than lean old Mosca."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall never forget you, my Captain," said the really grateful
+Olimpia; and said truer than she knew. "Come," she added, "we should
+seek out Bellaroba and her little sweetheart. There must be an end of
+that pretty gentleman, my friend."</p>
+
+<p>"By the majesty of King Solomon, there shall be an end," Mosca swore,
+and pricked his horse.</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto and his lady-love had been better exercised than to think of
+dukes. They had thought of religion.</p>
+
+<p>They passed by the Schifanoia at a sober walk, regardless of the crowd.</p>
+
+<p>"My heart," Angioletto said, "there is here what I suppose to be the
+most famous shrine in Romagna. I mean that of the Madonna degli Greci, a
+pompous image from Byzantium, which proceeded undoubtedly from the
+<i>bottega</i> of Saint Luke. If that Signore had been as indifferent a
+painter as he was great Saint (which is surely impossible), we should do
+well to visit his Madonna. Her holiness is past dispute; there are very
+few miracles which she could not perform if she chose. As well as
+burning a candle apiece before her face, we could lay our prayers and
+new love at her feet. Beyond question she will hear and bring us good
+luck. What do you think?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think as you think, Angioletto," said Bellaroba, and held him closer.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go then. I know the way very well."</p>
+
+<p>So they went to the tune which the young lad sang under his breath, and
+before long came to a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> piazza, not very broad, but flagged all over and
+set about with stately brick buildings, having on the left the stone
+front of a great church, tier upon tier of arches interlaced. The door
+of it was guarded by two stone lions, and above the porch was the figure
+of a buxom lady with a smile half saucy, half benevolent, to whom
+Angioletto doffed his cap.</p>
+
+<p>"They call her Donna Ferrara," he explained. "This is the Duomo. Let us
+go in."</p>
+
+<p>They dismounted; a lame boy held the mule; they entered the church.</p>
+
+<p>It was very large, very dark, and nearly empty. Angioletto put his arm
+round Bellaroba's waist, and they began to pace the aisle in
+confidential talk.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are you going to live in this place, Bellaroba?" he asked her.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. Olimpia knows. There was a Monna Nanna we were to live
+with, I think. But Olimpia will decide. I must do as she wishes."</p>
+
+<p>"But why?"</p>
+
+<p>"She is older than I am&mdash;two years. Besides I always have. And my mother
+commanded it."</p>
+
+<p>"Your last appears to me the only reason worth a thought. Do you not
+want to know what I think of it, Bellaroba?" He bent his head towards
+her. Her answer, the flutter of a quick little kiss, pleased him. "Well,
+I will tell you," said he. "I think we should be married at once&mdash;this
+very minute. I do indeed."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" said Bellaroba, blushing beautifully.</p>
+
+<p>"I can see that you are pleased at this, my dear," Angioletto said,
+looking at her. They<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> were head for head level, these children. "But
+what would Olimpia say?"</p>
+
+<p>Bellaroba paused for strength to tell the painful truth.</p>
+
+<p>"She would say 'Fiddlesticks,' Angioletto."</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto frowned. "Ah! what is to be done?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Bellaroba looked down, plucked at her skirt, saw Angioletto's hand
+peeping round her waist. It seemed difficult to say, and yet what she
+did say was very simple: "We have not asked Olimpia, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"No," Angioletto answered; "we have had no time yet. But we will, of
+course."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, of course," said she, who kept her eyes hidden, and spoke very low.
+"Oh, of course. But&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, dearest?"</p>
+
+<p>"Could we not&mdash;would it not be wiser&mdash;of course you know best,
+Angioletto!&mdash;might we not ask her&mdash;afterwards?"</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto kissed her.</p>
+
+<p>"You are as wise as you are lovely, my little wife. Come, let us find
+the Madonna degli Greci." And he led her away by the hand.</p>
+
+<p>They found her in the north transept, in a little fenced chapel all
+starry with tapers and gleaming gold and silver hearts. As it was the
+eve of Pentecost she was uncovered; they could see her dark outline with
+its wrought metal ring about the head. Half-way down was another metal
+ring; Bambino's head should be in there.</p>
+
+<p>Both the hand-fasted pilgrims fell to their knees: Bellaroba crossed
+herself, and then hid<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> her face with her left hand, Angioletto with his
+right. After a silence, about the space of two Hail Mary's, the youth
+looked resolutely up at Madonna, and began to speak to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Holy and most glorious Virgin, Mother of God," said he, "we, thy
+children, have sought thee first in this famous city of Ferrara, because
+we are sure that thou wilt love us even more than we love each other,
+and wilt be glad to share our secret. We are going to marry each other
+at this moment, Madonna, and thou shalt be the priest. There can be none
+better, since thou hadst in thy womb for many months the great Priest of
+all Christians, our sublime Redeemer. Now, behold, Madonna, how I wed
+this my wife, Bellaroba. With this ring, which was given me by a very
+great lady," and he took a ring from his breast, "I wed my wife, placing
+it upon her finger in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
+Holy Ghost. I do not endow her with my worldly goods, for thou knowest I
+have none. I do not worship her with my body at this moment, but in the
+meantime I worship her unfeignedly with my mind, just as I worship thee
+with my soul. It appears, therefore, that I have wedded her enough. It
+is useless, most sacred Lady, to ask her whether she will honour and
+obey me, because of course she will, seeing that she loves me with all
+her good heart. Such as we are&mdash;very young, quite poor, but much thy
+servants&mdash;thou knowest whether thou canst be happy in this mating. I
+believe that thou canst. Now, therefore, since she is mine, she shall
+say with me three <i>Aves</i> and a <i>Paternoster</i>,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> likewise the <i>Credo</i>, or
+so much of it as she can remember. And, O Madonna, trust me to cherish
+her, and do thou intercede for us. <i>Per Christum Dominum
+nostrum</i>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Amen</span>."</p>
+
+<p>"Bellaroba, my wife, look at me," he said, and the girl looked up
+wondering. He took her happy face between his hands, and kissed her two
+eyes, her forehead, and her mouth. Then they said the appointed prayers,
+and rose to their feet to return; nor did they forget the candles, but
+purchased them at the door of an old lady, who had a basketful to sell.</p>
+
+<p>Coming out of the church into the sun again, they encountered the
+scrutiny of Olimpia. Captain Mosca, slapping his booted leg, was holding
+the horse.</p>
+
+<p>"Where have you two children been?" said Olimpia. "Mischief in a corner,
+eh? You have missed the sight of Duke Borso and a gilded company."</p>
+
+<p>"We have been saying our prayers to Madonna of the Greeks," said
+Bellaroba meekly.</p>
+
+<p>"There are red flames in your cheeks, child, and a ring on your finger.
+Did you find those in the church?"</p>
+
+<p>"Madonna gave them to me, Olimpia."</p>
+
+<p>"So, so, so! Do you begin by robbing a shrine, pray?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, Madama Olimpia," said Angioletto, "we have only taken from the
+shrine what is our due."</p>
+
+<p>Not the least of the minstrel's parts was that of speaking as though he
+had something weighty in reserve. Olimpia, though by nature dull, was
+also sly. She had a suspicion about Angioletto now;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> but a
+quick-shifting glance from one to the other of the pair before her
+revealed nothing but serenity in the boy, and little but soft happiness
+in the girl. She opened her lips to speak, snapped them to again, and
+turned to the Captain and affairs more urgent than the love-making of
+babies. It was the hour of supper; the question was of a lodging.
+Captain Mosca knew an inn&mdash;the "Golden Sword"&mdash;where decent
+entertainment could be had for the night. As no one could deny what
+nobody knew anything about, it was decided. They sought and found the
+"Golden Sword," and put up with it, and in it. The supper party was, at
+least, merry, for Angioletto led it. He sang, he joked, made love, spent
+money, was wise, unwise, heedless, heedful. He charmed a grin at last
+into the very Captain's long face. That warrior, indeed, went so far as
+to drink his health in wine of Verona. He and his
+Olimpia&mdash;unhesitatingly his in the gaiety of the moment&mdash;drank it out of
+the same glass. "Love and Ferrara!" cried Captain Mosca, with a foot on
+the table. "Love in Ferrara," said Angioletto, and stroked Bellaroba's
+hair. So everything was very friendly and full of hope. At a late hour,
+and for excellent reasons, Olimpia kissed Bellaroba good-night, was
+herself kissed by Angioletto, and withdrew. Captain Mosca prayed
+vehemently for further and better acquaintance with his friend "the
+divine poet," and his pretty mistress. So went Bellaroba's marriage
+supper.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="EIV" id="EIV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>"WHY COME YE NAT TO COURTE?"</h3>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>"Le donne e i cavalier, gli affanni e gli agi,</div>
+<div>Che ne invogliava araore e cortesia."</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The little house&mdash;discreet affair of eaves modest as drooped eyelids, of
+latticed windows, of wistaria before and a bower of willows behind&mdash;was
+found and furnished out of the girls' store and the Captain's credit.
+Donna Matura, a brown old woman, hideous, toothless, and inclined to
+swooning, was installed as duenna. She was, indeed, owner of the house
+and furniture, for which Olimpia paid and the Captain promised to pay;
+but that did not appear until much later. There was a great charm, not
+without a certain deal of luxury, in the place. Of course there was a
+garden&mdash;a bright green nest of flowering trees and shrubs; in the middle
+was a grass-plat; in that, again, a bronze fountain, which had the form
+of three naked boys back to back, and an inscription to the effect that
+it had been set up by a certain Galeotto Moro, in the days of Marquess
+Lionel, "in honour of Saints Peter and Paul and of the Virgin Deipara,"
+upon some special occasion of family thanksgiving. The weeping
+willows&mdash;themselves fountains of green&mdash;sprayed over a stone seat. The
+place bore signs of an <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>honourable past; it was falling now gently to a
+comely decay; but it answered every purpose. All promised well. So much
+Captain Mosca was given to understand; yet it was hinted that his
+promises were not complete. "My life and soul," cried he on his knees in
+the garden, "the little affair is a matter of three minutes." It proved
+to be a matter of more than three months and was then accomplished in
+another way and with other results than had been looked for. Thus it
+was.</p>
+
+<p>When Angioletto had been assured of the nesting of his mate, he dressed
+himself point-device and went to Court to deliver his credentials. He
+found the lady upon whom so much depended, at the Schifanoia. Madama
+Lionella d'Este, wife of the Count Guarino Guarini, was a
+fresh-coloured, lusty young woman of three and twenty, not at all in
+love with her husband, but very much in love with love. The Captain of
+Lances had said truly when he shrugged her off as no beauty.
+Large-limbed she was, the shape of a boy, with a long mouth and small
+eyes, full-lipped, big in foot and hand. Yet she was a very merry soul,
+frank if not free in her speech and gesture, and though liable to bursts
+of angry temper, for the most part as innocent of malice as a tiger cub.
+If you remember her an Este, you will forgive her much, excuse her
+everything, and rather like her.</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto, who found her sitting on the grass among her ladies,
+advanced with great ceremony and many bows. Madama did not get up; no
+one did; so Angioletto had to step gingerly into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> a ring of roguish
+women to deliver his letter. Lionella scampered through it, reddening
+with pleasure; she beckoned him with smiles to sit beside her.</p>
+
+<p>"We are making rose-garlands to adorn our pretty heads," she said,
+laughing. "Come and sit by me, Angioletto, and sing to us. Who knows but
+what, if you are good, we shall not crown you with one of them?"</p>
+
+<p>It was a great merit of Angioletto's that he always took things and men
+(especially women) as he found them. Such as they were he could be for
+the time. He was by no means waxen; elastic rather. Down he plumped,
+accordingly, cross-legged by his new mistress, and warbled a canzone to
+the viola which enchanted the lady.</p>
+
+<p>"More, more, more!" she cried, clapping her hands. "Oh, boy, I could
+have you a prince for less than that! What a throstle-pipe you have!"</p>
+
+<p>It was, as he afterwards found out, of her habit to be for ever at
+extremes; but just now, not knowing how to take her, he sang on all the
+better for her praise; and he had her next wriggling in an ecstasy over
+a trifle he made up on the spur of the moment&mdash;a snatch wherein roses
+and a girl's face (Bellaroba's, be sure) took turns to be dominant. At
+the end of this pretty piece the Countess Lionella fairly took his own
+face between her hands, crumpled his lips into a bud and kissed them
+full. Angioletto coloured, though no one else did. It was evidently
+quite harmless, and afterwards he was ashamed of his shame.</p>
+
+<p>As it was, a diversion of a different order<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> broke in upon the next song
+which, so soon as he had picked up his nerve, he adventured. One of the
+Maids of Honour looked quickly over her shoulder, and "Hist, Madama! The
+Duke!" she said, with wide eyes and a blush.</p>
+
+<p>The song ceased, the whole company, Lionella included, scrambled to
+their feet. Duke Borso, his portly body swaying like a carriage on
+springs, his hands behind him, and attended by a tall young man, very
+splendid and very blonde, came across the grass towards them. Angioletto
+could not decide whether to think him rogue or prude. His puckered face
+twitched, his eyes twitched, his pursed-up lips worked together; it was
+again as if he were struggling with a laugh. He wore his tall square cap
+well off his forehead, and looked what he really was&mdash;a strong man
+tired, but not yet tired out, of kindness. The benevolence seemed
+inborn, seemed fighting through every seam of the pompous face.
+"Madonna! his generous motions work him into creases, as if he were
+volcanic soil," thought Angioletto. Watching him narrowly as he came, he
+decided that this was a master to be loved if not admired, respected but
+not feared. "I should get the worst of a bout with him," thought he;
+"but I had rather it were with him than with Apollo." That title was
+just, as the reflection shrewd. Teofilo Calcagnini would have made a
+terrible tutor to Master Pha&euml;ton.</p>
+
+<p>Duke Borso bowed shortly to the standing maids, and favoured Angioletto
+with a keen eye before he set a hand on his daughter's shoulder. She
+looked a pleased welcome as he began to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> stroke her hair. "Ah, they love
+the man," thought Angioletto; "good!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, chick," said Duke Borso, "you are like a cage of singing-birds
+scared by the cat."</p>
+
+<p>"Your Grace shall judge whether we are too scared to sing," replied his
+laughing daughter. "Come," she added, turning to Angioletto, "tune your
+viol and pipe to it again, my little poet."</p>
+
+<p>The Duke made a wry mouth. "Hey, I have no ear for music, my dear," said
+he.</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto was ready for him. "If your Magnificence will permit," he
+said, "I will take care not to offend his honourable ear. I will say my
+piece, with no more music than will serve to tie word to word. May it be
+so, Magnificence? Have I liberty, Madam?" He bowed, smiling, from one to
+the other of the great people.</p>
+
+<p>He was a very courtly and charming little person, this Tuscan youth.
+Above all he had a ready address. So bright and strong, and yet so
+deferential did he look, pleading his cause among them, Lionella could
+have kissed him again for nothing more than his dexterity.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you shall do whatever you like, Angioletto!" she cried.</p>
+
+<p>Borso's eyes twinkled, and he primmed his lips. "I do not go so far as
+Madama, Master Angioletto, but I shall be pleased to hear what you are
+pleased to give me." He fell into an attitude of profound attention.</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto, having bowed once more, began.</p>
+
+<p>It so happened that Lorenzo de' Medici, that monster of genius, had not
+long printed his <i>Caccia col falcone</i>. Angioletto had it by heart<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>
+against his need; using it now he could never have made a better
+choice&mdash;as, indeed, he guessed. It was as good as a play to watch
+Borso's wary eyes at the commencement of this piece, and to see them
+drop their fence as the declamation went on. Lorenzo begins with a
+pretty description of the dawn on Tuscan hilltops&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>"Era gi&agrave; rosso tutto l'oriente,</div>
+<div>E le cime de' monti parien d'oro," etc.</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Borso, neither approving nor disapproving, kept his head disposed for
+more. At</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>"Quando fui desto da certi rumori</div>
+<div>Di buon sonagli ed allettar di cani"</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>he began to blink; with the quick direction to the huntsman&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>"Deh, vanne innanzi, presto Capellaio,"</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>he stifled a smile. But the calling of the hounds by their names broke
+down his guard. Angioletto shrilled them out in a high, boyish voice&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>"Chiama Tamburo, Pezuolo e Martello,</div>
+<div>La Foglia, la Castagna e la Guerrina,</div>
+<div>Fagiano, Fagianin, Rocca e Capello,</div>
+<div>E Friza, e Biondo, Bamboccio e Rossina,</div>
+<div>Ghiotto, la Torta, Viola e Pestello,</div>
+<div>E Serchio e Fuse e'l mio Buontempo vecchio,</div>
+<div>Zambraco, Buratel, Scaccio e Pennecchio...."</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Every muscle of the keen old hunter was now quivering; his eyes were
+bright, his smile open and that of a child. To the last word of the
+poem&mdash;and it has length&mdash;he followed without breath the checks, the
+false casts, the bickering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> of the huntsmen, the petty incidents of a
+breezy morning in the marshes, nodding at every point, missing nothing,
+cracking his fingers, cheering under his breath, with delight
+undisguised and interest unalloyed. The moment it was ended he seemed
+prime for a burst of heedless comment; but he stopped, shut his lips
+with a snap, and became the inscrutable ruler of a fief of the Empire
+once more. But Angioletto knew that he had pleased him, for all that he
+walked off as he had come, without word or sign.</p>
+
+<p>He had pleased every one. Homing to his nest in the Borgo, he caught his
+little Bellaroba in his arms with a rapture none the less because it had
+been earned at a stretch. It was long before he could find time and
+breath to lead her into the garden and have the story out. Olimpia,
+coming down to look for them in the dusk, found that a seat for two
+would easily hold one more. It should be added of Angioletto that he
+suppressed the incident of the Countess Lionella's salute.</p>
+
+<p>At supper there were evidences that, whatever had been Angioletto's
+fate, all had not gone so well with the Captain of Lances. Not that
+appetite failed him; indeed, he ate the more for his taciturnity. Yet
+not repletion made him sigh, for he sighed consumedly before he began
+and rather less when he had finished, as though the kindlier juices of
+our nature had got to work to disperse the melancholic. Angioletto
+rallied him upon his gloom, but to no purpose. The meal was a silent
+one; almost the only conversation was that of the minstrel's foot with
+Bellaroba's under the table.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span></p><p>The truth was, that of conversation the Captain had had enough before
+supper&mdash;a very short colloquy with his Olimpia. In it he was brought to
+confess that he had seen his patron that morning. "Well?" had been
+Olimpia's commentary&mdash;a shot which raked the Captain fore and aft. Well,
+he desperately admitted, there was nothing actually arranged:
+<i>patienza</i>! His most noble master had been greatly harassed with
+affairs&mdash;the Duke's approaching visit to Rome, the precise forms which
+must be observed, the punctilios, the hundred niceties of etiquette;
+"Ah, <i>patienza</i>!" urged the sweating Mosca.</p>
+
+<p>Patience, she saw, was the only wear; but, per Bacco, he should learn it
+too! She was in a high rage. The Captain was given to know that Ferrara
+was a great city, with more houses in it than one; in fine, he was shown
+the door. Supper first was an extreme and contemptuous condescension of
+Olimpia's, urged by the thought that a fed Mosca might be a more
+desperate Mosca, while a lean one would be desperate only for a meal.</p>
+
+<p>A true relation of what passed in the Palazzo Guarini may serve to show
+how just she had been. The Count had received news of his henchman's
+attendance with a nod, had kept him waiting two hours in the <i>cortile</i>,
+then remembered him and bid him upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, dog," said the young lord, from his dressing-table, "and why the
+devil are you so late to report yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, Excellence, believe me&mdash;" began to stutter the Captain.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span></p><p>"That is exactly what I will not do, my man. Who was that wench at your
+back yesterday?"</p>
+
+<p>The Captain rubbed his hands. "Excellence, a wench indeed! A golden
+Venetian&mdash;glorious! Dove-eyed, honey-tongued, and very much your
+lordship's servant, I do assure you."</p>
+
+<p>"You are so completely and at such length a fool, Mosca," said Count
+Guarini, with a yawn, "and strive so desperately to be rascal in spite
+of it, that I am almost sorry for you. Tie me these points, my good
+fellow, get me my sword, and go to the devil with your golden Venetian."</p>
+
+<p>That, believe me, had been all. Therefore Captain Mosca, as he slunk out
+into the dark after supper in obedience to his inexorable Olimpia, felt
+that he must be more ingenious than he had supposed. At the same time it
+is only fair to say that when he had spoken so hopefully of his affair
+to the lady on the pillion he had believed every word of his own story.
+A man puts on spectacles to suit his complexion: the Captain's was
+sanguine.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="EV" id="EV"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h3>FORTUNE WITH THE DOUBLE BLADE</h3>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>"Similemente agli splendor mondani</div>
+<div>Ordin&ograve; general ministra e duca,</div>
+<div>Che permutasse a tempo li ben vani,</div>
+<div>Di gente in gente, e d'uno in altro sangue."&mdash;<i>Inf.</i> vii. 77.</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Angioletto had cause to believe in that star of his, for it never
+wavered in the course it held. Borso's court found him much to its
+taste. The men, however tall, of looks however terrible, bent their
+height and unbent their scowls to him; he was the pet of all the women;
+the very Fool, saturnine as he was (with a bite in every jest), had no
+gibe to put him to the blush withal. He made money, or money's worth, as
+fast as friends. A gold chain with a peregrine in enamel and jewels came
+to him by the hands of the Chamberlain; nothing was said, but he knew it
+was from the Duke. Countess Lionella could not reward him enough&mdash;now a
+jewel, now a gold cup, at one time a purse, at another a crystal phial
+filled with Jordan water. And so it went, the star waxing ever. He could
+have maintained the discreet house by Porta Angeli out of his earnings,
+and he did; but you have to pay for your luck somehow, and it very soon
+happened that he could not maintain himself in it. He was only too
+popular. The Count Guarino wanted him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> at the Palazzo Guarini; the
+Countess insisted that he should remain in bond at the Schifanoia; the
+august couple wrangled publicly over his little body.</p>
+
+<p>"What, Madam," cried the Count, "is it not enough that you absent
+yourself from my house? Must you keep my friends out of it also?"</p>
+
+<p>"He was accredited to me, my lord," said the lady, "to me, therefore, he
+shall come."</p>
+
+<p>"Good madam," returned Guarini, "I admire your taste as a man, but
+deplore it as a husband. I think the little poet will do better with
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"Stuff!" cried the Countess, "I might be his mother."</p>
+
+<p>Said the Count: "Madam, I need not deny it; yet it is very evident that
+you are not his mother." He spoke with some heat.</p>
+
+<p>Lionella was mightily amused. "Jealousy, my lord?" She arched her fine
+brows.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know the word, Madam," he answered her, touched on a raw.
+Jealousy appeared to him as the most vulgar of the vices.</p>
+
+<p>"Prove that to me!" the Countess pursued him. Guarini made her a bow.</p>
+
+<p>"Perfectly, Contessa," said he. "You shall have your poet, and he shall
+be my friend." Wherein the Count showed that to be a gentleman it may
+sometimes be necessary to appear a fool.</p>
+
+<p>The matter was thus settled, and Angioletto ravished from his nest.</p>
+
+<p>His last night at home&mdash;<i>a casa</i>, as he loved to call it&mdash;need not be
+dwelt upon. Bitter-sweet it was, yet his courage made it more sweet
+than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> bitter. Bellaroba was tearful, clung to him, kissed and murmured
+incoherently because of sobbing. He loved her more than ever for that,
+but as became a prudent husband, thought to say a word in season.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear," he said in her ear, as he held her close, "you are very young
+to be a wife, and too young to be properly left alone with such
+companions as your Olimpia, whom I distrust, and Monna Matura, whom I
+abhor. But what can I do? I must make our fortunes, and pray to God that
+your beauty do not mar them. Follow my advice, my injunctions even, and
+it will not. Keep much at home, go not abroad unattended or uncovered.
+Your hooded head makes you surpassingly beautiful; you need not fear to
+be a figure of fun. At the same time it shields most of your sacred
+person from profane eyes. The great shield of all, however, is to have
+business before you when you are from house. Go briskly about
+this&mdash;whether it be market, mass, or mischief&mdash;and no one will look at
+you twice. At home it should be the same. There may be visitors; if
+Monna Olimpia can contrive it, there will be a good many. You may judge
+of their quality by her anxiety to receive them. Be guarded then, my
+dear, and go by contraries. They will not find the pattern of the carpet
+so interesting as you should do. Give them prose for their poetry,
+vinegar for their sweet wine, bitter herbs when they look to you for
+cane of sugar. Keep your honeycomb for him who is trying to earn it.
+Think where I am going, my Bellaroba! To what temptations, blessed
+Lord!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> to what askings, to what suggestion of wanton dealing! Remember
+that in all this I shall have your honour to keep, as you have mine. Say
+a great many prayers, my little heart, for the welfare of my soul and of
+yours; lock your door at night; let Monna Matura go with you to mass and
+confession; and&mdash;and&mdash;oh! my wife, my little wife, but I love not the
+leaving of you!" And so these poor children cried on each other's
+breasts, and so fell to the unspoken tongue of Love's elect. Next
+morning he went early, leaving her kissed in bed.</p>
+
+<p>He saw her once again, spent a most blissful two hours in her company,
+before the Countess Lionella took it into her head to shelter from the
+summer heats in a villa she had above Monselice. Thither Angioletto was
+forced to go in her train. He found it intolerable, went with a heart of
+lead; for so cheerful a soul he was what he looked, parched and wan.
+This lasted a week. Then came a paper, scrawled with brown ink marks,
+which, after much study, he took to imply&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"<span class="smcap">My love Angileto</span>, I love you more every day. I cry a good deal for
+lack of you. I kiss you two hundred times, and will be good and
+happy,</p>
+
+<p class="right">"Your dutiful &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<span class="smcap">Belaroba</span>."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>This revived him amazingly: he went singing about the gardens which hung
+upon the side of the grey hill, and composed a pastoral comedy to be
+acted by the Countess's ladies in the Temple grove.</p>
+
+<p>Lionella very openly and without afterthought made love to him. He was a
+charming little lad, it is true; but quite apart from that, he was the
+only male creature above servant rank in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> household. I describe him
+so because I cannot bring myself to call him a man; but he was quite man
+enough for the lady's intent. It is a surprising instance of the tact
+there was innate in the youth that he checked every undue liberty on the
+part of his mistress without endangering her self-respect or his own
+high favour. Perhaps he allowed matters to go a little too far. His were
+times of artless Art and of franchise&mdash;immoral, yet mainly innocent.
+Children call each other pet names, hold hands, kiss, and no one is
+hurt. So it was in Ferrara when Borso ruled it. <i>Pr&aelig;teriere Borsii
+tempora!</i> True enough. There were those who saw that tuneful time in the
+shaping; we, alas! look down on the splintered shards. But we know that
+if Assyrian balm was ever for the world's chaffer it was in the days of
+Borso, the good Duke.</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto loved his Bellaroba with all his heart: no debonair Lionella
+could decoy him to be untrue. But he was debonair himself, of high
+courage, and mettlesome; and he may have gone a little too far. He was
+now become her confidant, secretary, bosom friend. Whence came the shock
+of crisis.</p>
+
+<p>One morning Lionella called for him in a hurry. He found her, an amused
+frown on her broad brows, pacing the terrace walk, holding an open
+letter in her hand. The moment he came in sight the Countess ran towards
+him, drew his arm in hers, and began to speak very fast.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear boy," she said, "I am in a fix. You shall advise me how to act,
+the more willingly I hope, as you are in a sense the contriver of all
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> mischief. You know the Count my husband well enough to agree with
+me that he is a man of gallantry. He has proved it, for it is plain that
+he would never have left me (to my great content) to go my own gait
+unless it had been worth his while. I do him perfect justice, I believe.
+He has never thwarted me, nor frowned, nor raised an eyebrow at an act
+or motion of mine. Never but once, and that was when I proposed to take
+you into my service. Don't blush, Angioletto, it is quite true. He then
+raised, not his eyebrows&mdash;at least I think not&mdash;but some little
+objections. I said that I was old enough to be your mother&mdash;no, no, that
+also is true, my dear! He answered, 'No doubt; but it is very evident
+that you are not his mother.' That again may be true, I suppose?
+However, the affair ended in great good-humour on both sides, and here
+you are, as you see! But now the Count sends me this letter, in which he
+says&mdash;let me see&mdash;ah! 'Your ladyship will remember my not ungenerous
+conduct in the matter of the little poet, Angioletto, on whose account
+you had certain benevolent dispositions to gratify'&mdash;neatly turned, is
+it not? 'I have now to propose to you, turn for turn, a like favour to
+myself, which is that you shall take into your service a young
+gentlewoman of Venice, who is but newly come to Ferrara'&mdash;What is the
+matter, Angioletto? You put me out. Where was I? Oh, yes&mdash;'She is
+respectably bred, very modest, very diligent, very pious, moderately
+handsome.'&mdash;My dear boy, if you want to sit down, by all means say so.
+We will sit together here.&mdash;'The name she goes by with those who know
+her is Bellaroba.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>&mdash;Bellaroba, indeed! Well&mdash;'I am very sure that you
+will have no reason to regret my excellent choice on your behalf; and it
+is the more timely because I learn from Fazio that one of your women has
+fallen sick of the small-pox'&mdash;and so on. The Count is occasionally
+sublime. I like particularly the list of the young lady's qualifications
+and the reference to his own kindness to myself. Now, what am I to say?
+I see you are puzzled. Well, I will give you time."</p>
+
+<p>What Angioletto himself was to say is more to the purpose. I think it
+much to his credit that his first ascertainable emotion after the buffet
+of assault was one of wildest exultation at the prospect. It shows that
+he had never for a moment distrusted the meek little partner of his
+fortunes. Whisps of such doubt did afterwards float across his pretty
+morning picture, but he put them away at once. Next came worldly wisdom.
+True Tuscan that he was, his instinct was to decline perilous rapture if
+waiting might bring it on easy terms. For a long time he weighed instant
+joy against policy. Finally, as he was more Italian than Tuscan, and
+more boy than either, he decided to jump the danger. The vision of
+Bellaroba shy in the rose-garden, of himself crowning her soft hair,
+bending over her, kissing her upturned face; of the Countess behind one
+thicket looking for him, and the Count behind another looking for
+Bellaroba&mdash;it was too much to resist!</p>
+
+<p>"Madama," he said, "it is hardly for me to advise in such delicate
+matters. I should not, by right, dare say what I am about to say upon
+your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> invitation. Yet if I were his nobility, Count Guarino Guarini, not
+the least of my pleasant moments would be that in which I could say, 'I
+have a noble lady to wife, for she honours me as I have honoured her.'"</p>
+
+<p>That was a very dextrous remark, vastly pleasing to the Countess. She
+kissed the speaker then and there, wrote her letter hot-head, talked
+about it all that day, and worked herself into such a fever of curiosity
+that she cut short her villeggiatura by six weeks, so as the sooner to
+see the girl who could inspire her with such admirable ideas of her own
+magnanimity. She even grew quite enthusiastic upon her husband's
+account, almost sentimental about him. This much the wily Angioletto
+(who did not study character for nothing) had allowed for in his
+calculations.</p>
+
+<p>It is by no means certain that the Countess was as wise as her guide.
+The facts which induced the letter were these. Guarini had chanced upon
+an early mass at San Cristoforo and Bellaroba kneeling at her prayers.
+She, all unconscious of any presence but her own and her Saviour's, was
+looking up to the Mother who had made Him so, dim-eyed, and smiling
+rather tenderly. Her lips framed petitions for the coming home of
+Angioletto. She had hooded her head as he commanded, and it became her
+as he had foreseen. With her added cares of wifely duty this gave a
+sober look to her untameable childish bloom; she was almost a
+business-like beauty now. To Guarino the pathetic appealed more nearly;
+to him she seemed a pretty nun, a wood-bird caged.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> He never took his
+eyes off her&mdash;she caught him in a soft mood and ravished him. A little
+saint in bud, he swore; a wholesome, domestic little household goddess,
+meek and very pure, who would carry home her beauties unaware and oil
+the tousled heads of half a dozen brothers and sisters. Homeliness is
+neither Italian word nor virtue; but just as it describes Bellaroba, so
+an inkling of its charm thrilled the young lord who saw her. Could one
+cage such a gossamer thing? Fate had done it, why not he? At least he
+could not lose sight of her. He tracked her to the house under the wall,
+saw the door scrupulously shut upon her, wandered up and down the street
+for half an hour, returned a laggard to his palace&mdash;and yet had her full
+in vision. She possessed him until mass-time following: the same things
+happened. Guarino was hit hard; he took certain steps and got
+information which tallied with his better instincts. It guided also his
+subsequent efforts, for obviously the more direct remedies would not
+meet his case. Therefore, he wrote to the Countess, as you have seen.
+Her reply delighted him, and the rest was very easy. Borso signed the
+order of appointment, boggling only at her name. "Buonaroba I know,"
+said he. "What am I to think of Bellaroba, Guarino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Your Grace shall be pleased to think that his daughter has chosen her
+for her own person," said the Count.</p>
+
+<p>"Hum," said Borso, and signed the parchment.</p>
+
+<p>Then came another scrawl for "my love Angilotto," in which the
+miraculous news was told.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span></p><blockquote><p>"Olimpia took it very ill," she wrote, "but the Signor Capitano
+talked her happier&mdash;at least, he stayed a long time. I hope you
+will think it all for the best. I am very good, and kiss you many
+times,</p>
+
+<p class="right">"Your &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<span class="smcap">Belaroba</span>."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Olimpia had indeed been very cross, as Captain Mosca would have
+testified. She had not, at any rate, talked <i>him</i> any happier: that he
+would have upheld with an oath. The experienced man knew the whip of
+sleet on his bare skin; but this was worse than any winter campaign; it
+left him dumb and without the little ease which shivering gives you. It
+had not been a question so much of talking as of keeping his feet.
+Olimpia, when the news came, had raged like a shrieking wind about the
+narrow house. "My dearest life! Soul of my soul!" was all the Captain
+had to fend the blast. It was no time for endearments&mdash;Olimpia raved
+herself still. Tears, floods of them, followed, whereat the Captain
+melted also and wept. He did foolishly. Demoniac gusts of laughing
+caught and flung him to the rafters, chill rages froze him where he
+fell. He lost his little store of wit, sagged like a broken sunflower,
+and was finally pelted from the door by a storm of Venetian curses, in
+which all his ancestors, himself, and any descendants he might dare to
+have, were heavily involved. Bellaroba, trembling in her bed, heard him
+go with a sinking heart. "Olimpia will come and murder me now," she said
+to herself.</p>
+
+<p>But Olimpia slept long where she fell, and next morning decided to
+garner her rage.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="EVI" id="EVI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>ENDS AND MEANS</h3>
+
+<p class="center">"Amor che a null' amato amar perdona."</p>
+
+<p>Bellaroba, who pleased the Countess, for the same reasons, no doubt, did
+not please the Count. It is possible to be too demure, and very little
+good to have domestic charm if you shut the door upon the amateur.
+Lionella had never had so much of her lord's society as during the month
+that followed her return to Ferrara. She did not complain of this; on
+the contrary, the more the maid held off and the man pursued, the more
+Lionella was entertained. Angioletto, invited to share her sport, proved
+dull. She confessed to more than one of her women (including Bellaroba)
+that if she had not been very much in love with the poet she would have
+thought him a fool. You see that she made no secret of her weakness. The
+fact is, she did not consider it a weakness; whereby you have this
+remarkable position of affairs at the Schifanoia, that Bellaroba was
+invited to be a student of her husband's amours, and he of hers.
+Considering the state of their secret hearts this might have led to
+matter of tragic concern; if they had loved less it would have done so.
+As it was, they were quite indifferent. Their hours were a series of
+breathless<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> escapades&mdash;romance at fever heat. Stolen meetings before
+dawn among the dewy rose-bushes, chance touchings, chance kisses,
+embraces half tasted, and looks often crossed&mdash;of such were their days
+at the Schifanoia. Meantime a coiled ladder watched out the sun from a
+myrtle thicket, of which and its works came their happy nights. Then, as
+she lay in his arms, the Maid of Honour vanished in the child who was so
+lovely because she so loved; she could prattle, in the soft Venetian
+brogue, of boundless faith in her little lord, of her simple admiration
+of him and all he did, of her wonder and delight to be loved. She could
+tell him of what she could do, and of how much she could never do, to
+please him and pay him honour. And Angioletto would nod gravely at each
+point that she made, and kiss her now and then very softly to show her
+that he was perfectly satisfied. So soon as the first swallow twittered
+in the eaves, or the first pale line of light trembled at the casement,
+he had to fly. But he waited in the rosery till she came tiptoe out; and
+then the day's alarms and the day's delight began. Eh! It was a royal
+month, a honeymoon indeed!</p>
+
+<p>But it could not last&mdash;barely saw its round of eight and twenty days.
+Lionella was a lady born, as it were, in the purple. Command sat lightly
+on her; she had never been disobeyed. She now grew querulous, exacting,
+suspicious, moody, sometimes petulant, sometimes beseeching. It gave
+Angioletto the deuce's own time now and then; but he might yet have
+weathered the rocks&mdash;for his tact was only equalled by his good
+temper&mdash;if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> the Countess had not precipitated matters. There came a day,
+and an hour of a day, when she spoke to him. She had spoken before; her
+ambitions had always been verbal&mdash;but now they were literal, all the
+"t's" were crossed. That was a moment for Angioletto to take with quick
+breath.</p>
+
+<p>He took it so. Instead of hinting at his duty, or hers, he blundered out
+the fact that he did not love her.</p>
+
+<p>"Dog," cried the Countess, "do you dare to tell me that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Madama, I do indeed," he answered sadly, for he saw his house about his
+ears.</p>
+
+<p>Lionella checked herself; she bit her lip, put her hands ostentatiously
+behind her back.</p>
+
+<p>"You had better leave the house, Master Angioletto," said she drily,
+"before I go further and see to it."</p>
+
+<p>He bowed himself out. Then he sought his poor Bellaroba, found her in
+the garden, drew her aside without trouble of a pretext, and told her
+the whole story.</p>
+
+<p>"My lovely dear," he said, "I am a broken man. There has been a terrible
+scene with Madama, in which she got so much the worst of it that I was
+very triumphantly ruined. You behold me decked with the ashes of my
+scorched prosperity. What is to be done with you? For I must go."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Angioletto," cried Bellaroba, trembling and catching at his breast,
+"won't you&mdash;can't you&mdash;ruin me too? Then we shall be happy again."</p>
+
+<p>He pressed her to his heart. "Dearest dear,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> he said, half laughing,
+half sobbing, "you are quite ruined enough. Stay as you are. I will see
+you every night What! By the Mass, are you not my wife?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I am, Angioletto. But nobody thinks so&mdash;not even any priest."</p>
+
+<p>"Eh!" he cried, "but that is all the better. Only you and I and Madonna
+the Virgin of the Greeks know it. She never blabs secrets, and you dare
+not, and I can't. So you see it is well arranged."</p>
+
+<p>She loved him most of all in this gay humour, and provoked him to new
+flights.</p>
+
+<p>"But, you wild boy, how can you see me when you are ruined?" she asked,
+all her roses in flower at the fun of the thing. "How can you be in the
+Schifanoia if you are thrust out of it?"</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto, with a mysterious air, kissed her for answer. "Leave that to
+me, my dear," he said. "Never have another of the maids to sleep with
+you, and lock your chamber door. Now I must go, because I am kicked out.
+Good-bye, my bride; I shall see you long before another dawn."</p>
+
+<p>She let him go at last, and turned to her duties with less sighing than
+you would have supposed, and no tears at all. Her belief in the wisdom,
+audacity, and decision of her Angioletto was absolute. She had never
+known him to fail. Yet if she chanced to think of the towering Count
+Guarini plying her with flowers and sweatmeats, she shivered to remember
+her citadel naked of all defences. This made her feel homesick for her
+lover's arms. Like a sensible<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> girl, therefore, she thought of the Count
+as little as possible; still less of another sinister apparition, that
+of the obsequious Captain Mosca, craning his lean neck round the corners
+of her vision, grinning from ear to ear.</p>
+
+<p>Free of the Schifanoia (whose dust he was yet careful to keep upon his
+shoes for the sake of her it harboured), Angioletto walked briskly down
+the street, shaping his course for the Borgo. He had been rounding a
+plan even while he was announcing to Bellaroba that he had it cut and
+dried; and now he was to execute it. True, it was a little extravagant,
+depended too much, perhaps, upon other people's estimations of him
+tallying with his own; but you will have found out by this time that the
+youth was a realist. Ideas stood for things with him; and, as he said,
+if he could not make them stand so to his auditory he was no poet. This
+was a heresy he could not allow even supposititiously. The idea was
+excellent; the thing, therefore, no less. Therefore he concluded that he
+should not fail of his plan.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond the Porta Angeli, in Borso's day, was to be found a huddle of
+tenements&mdash;fungus-growth upon the city wall&mdash;single-storied,
+single-roomed affairs, mostly the lodging of artificers in the lesser
+crafts. Among them all there was but one of two floors, a substantial
+red-brick little house with a most grandiloquent chimney-stack. And very
+rightly it was so, for it belonged to the Court chimney-sweep.</p>
+
+<p>On this eventful noon Sor Beppo, the sweep, was sitting on his doorstep
+in the sun, eating an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> onion, one of many which reposed in a vinegar
+bath on his knees. He was quite black, save where a three-days beard
+lent a gleam of snow to chaps and chin; being toothless, he was an
+indifferent performer upon the onion. But his hearing was as keen as his
+eyesight. He caught Angioletto's vivacious heeltaps upon the flags, and
+peered from burly brows at the smart little gentleman, cloaked,
+feathered, and gaudy, who looked as suitable to his dusty surroundings
+as a red poppy to a rubbish heap.</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto, stopping before him, took off his scarlet cap with a
+flourish.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, young stabbing blade," said Beppo, "and who may you be?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sir," replied the youth, "I am a poet." Beppo rubbed his shooting chin
+with a noise like the scraping of nutmegs.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said he, "I'll not deny that it's a trade, and a lawful trade;
+but for my part I sweep noblemen's chimneys and am proud of it. Shake
+hands, poet."</p>
+
+<p>They shook hands, with great cordiality on the poet's part.</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down, poet," said Beppo.</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto sat on the doorstep beside him without a word.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you have an onion, my friend?" the old fellow went on to ask.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, Sor Beppo, but I have already dined. Let me rather talk to
+you while you finish your meal."</p>
+
+<p>"It is not so much a meal as a relish," said the sweep. "But talk
+away&mdash;we'll never quarrel over terms."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span></p><p>"I hope not," Angioletto took him up; "because I have done with
+poetising and have a mind to try your trade."</p>
+
+<p>Beppo, his mouth full of onion, paused in his bite to gape at this
+dapper page, who, all scarlet and white as he was, talked after such a
+fashion.</p>
+
+<p>"How'll that be now?" he said. "You've never come all this way to crack
+a joke?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, never in the world, my friend," cried Angioletto. "I am in
+earnest."</p>
+
+<p>"You may be as earnest as a friar in the pulpit, and yet pretty bad at
+chimney-work, young master. What do you know of it, pray?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing at all," replied Angioletto, as if that helped him.</p>
+
+<p>"Look at that now," cried the triumphant Sor Beppo.</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon me, Master Beppo," said the youth, "you cannot look at it yet,
+but you very soon shall. Have you a chimney to hand?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, I might have that," the old man agreed, with a chuckle which ended
+as a snort. "There might be a chimney in my house that's not been swept
+for thirty year, having little time and less inclination to sweep 'em
+for nothing but glory. But, happen there were such a piece of work, what
+then?"</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto pointed into the house. "Is that the chimney, Beppo?"</p>
+
+<p>Beppo nodded. "That might be the chimney in question, my gentleman."</p>
+
+<p>With a "By your leave, Sor Beppo," Angioletto stepped delicately into
+the room. He threw down cloak and cap, unstrapped girdle and hanger,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+stripped off his doublet, and stood up in shirt and breeches. Beppo
+watched him, all agape, too breathless to chew. Before he could
+interfere&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"By the Saints, but he's in!" he cried with arms thrown up. "Eh, master,
+come you back, come you back!"</p>
+
+<p>"What do you want?" a muffled voice came from the chimney. Beppo sawed
+the air.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you play the fool up there, my boy, don't you do it! That's as
+foul as the grave, that chimney is. I'll have ye on my soul as long as I
+live, and I can ill afford it, for I've a queasy conscience in my black
+shell." He seemed to be treading on pins.</p>
+
+<p>He was answered, "We will talk of your conscience and its shell when I
+come back. Take off my shoes, will you?"</p>
+
+<p>A neat leg was pushed into the fireplace; then another. Beppo did the
+office, meek as an acolyte. Then he sighed, for the legs drew up the
+chimney and vanished in dust.</p>
+
+<p>"There goes a lad of spirit to his gloomy end," murmured brokenly the
+sweep, as he looked at the little red shoes in his hand. "I would not
+have had that come to pass for twenty gold ducats. But, Lord! who'd 'a
+thought it of a Court spark, that he should be as good as his word? Not
+I, used to Courts as a man may be." He fell to scratching his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Hey, hey!" he cried, as there was a prodigious scuffling up the
+chimney. "Now he strangles, now he strangles!" A shower of soot came
+down. Beppo flacked about the room; then two heavy objects fell. Beppo
+crept up. "Mary <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>Virgin, he's killing birds," he said, in an awed
+whisper, and picked up two owls with wagging heads. The recesses of the
+chimney were still very lively. "Eh, there he is again," said the old
+sweep. "What now?" Down came a rat, squeaking for its life, then three
+in succession, very silent because their necks were wrung. "This is
+better than a cat any day of the seven," said Sor Beppo. "What a diamond
+of a poet! He should be crowned with laurel-twigs if I were Duke Borso
+in all his glory. Being but Beppo the sweep, he shall be free of my
+mystery the moment he's free of my chimney-stack."</p>
+
+<p>He could await Angioletto's coming now with equal mind. The lad had
+approved himself. I leave you to judge of the welcome he got when,
+breathless, scratched, and sable as the night, he showed his white teeth
+at the door. Beppo, in fact, fell weeping on his neck. By this simple
+device Angioletto was enabled to keep his word, and Bellaroba to find
+him black but comely.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="EVII" id="EVII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE CAPTAIN'S TREADINGS</h3>
+
+<p>While Angioletto and his Bellaroba dwelt in a paradise, none the less
+glorious for being as sooty as the darkness which veiled it, the estate
+of Captain Mosca, that hungry swordsman, was most unhappy. Divorced from
+bed and board, cast off by his mistress, and not yet adopted by his
+master, the poor man felt dimly about for supports, conscious that his
+treadings had well-nigh slipped. At such a time the gentle eyes of
+Bellaroba&mdash;nobody's enemy&mdash;courted him, like a beam of firelight on a
+rain-scoured street, with a smiling invitation to share the peace within
+doors. He hung uneasily about the gateways in these days, cold-elbowed
+by the lackeys, ignored by the higher sort, unseen by the quality; he
+burnished the lintels with his shoulder-blades, chewed many straws,
+counted the flagstones, knew the hours by the signals of his stomach.
+Then, if by hazard Bellaroba should come dancing by with a "Good
+morning, Signor Capitano," a "<i>Come sta?</i>" or, prettier still, a bright
+"<i>Sta bene?</i>" what wonder if the man of rage humbled himself before the
+little Maid of Honour? What wonder, again, if she, out of the
+overflowings of her happiness, should give him an alms?</p>
+
+<p>No wonder at all, but pity there should be; for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> the Captain played an
+unworthy part. I suppose his standard was not very high. I know he was
+hungry; I know that nothing degrades a man so low as degradation&mdash;since
+what he believes himself, that he is; but I find it hard to excuse him
+for draining Bellaroba of her little secrets. Judas that he was, he took
+her sop, and then sold her for thirty pieces of silver.</p>
+
+<p>The draining of a well so limpid was the easiest thing in the world. She
+was too absurdly happy, too triumphant altogether in the successful
+craft of her brilliant little lord, to be continent. She dealt in
+semi-transparent mystery with her manipulator from the moment he had won
+her compassion. Her secret was none from the first, or it was like the
+secret which a child will tell you, all the louder for being said in
+your ear.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear little friend," said the smirking Captain, when he had it,
+"what you tell me there is as wine in my blood. I declare it sets me
+singing tunes."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, but he is wonderful, my Angioletto," said she, and her eyes grew
+larger for the thought of him.</p>
+
+<p>"For a stripling of his inches he beats any cock that ever fought a
+main," Mosca declared; "blood of Blood, but he does! What and if he did
+square up to me&mdash;do I bear a grudge? Never, upon my body."</p>
+
+<p>"You will not&mdash;you would not&mdash;ah, tell Olimpia of this, Signor
+Capitano?" she hazarded. The Captain stroked one eye with the back of
+his finger. He looked pityingly upon her with the other.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span></p><p>"Ah, my dear soul," he said, sighing, "could you think it of old
+Mosca?"</p>
+
+<p>Bellaroba hastened to disclaim. "No, no, no, I did not think it, Signor
+Capitano. But for a minute I had a little fear. Olimpia never loved
+Angioletto at all, and I don't think she loves me very much&mdash;now."</p>
+
+<p>"To be plain with you, my lamb," said the Mosca, "she has no such vasty
+love for me. I have not set foot within her door since a certain day you
+may remember."</p>
+
+<p>The girl shivered. "If I remember it! Ah, Madonna delle Grazie, she had
+a devil that day!"</p>
+
+<p>"She had seven, I'm sure of it," cried the Captain. "So I leave you to
+judge how much of your story she may worm out of me."</p>
+
+<p>He so beamed upon her, kissed her hands with such a lofty stoop, that
+she felt ashamed of herself, and begged his pardon.</p>
+
+<p>This brought the Captain to his knees. "By the God who made the Jews,"
+he swore, "I leave not this raw flagstone till you have unsaid those
+words!"</p>
+
+<p>In the end, after a prodigious fuss, he drifted away down the corridor
+and left her to go about her business.</p>
+
+<p>But he drifted not very far. He felt himself full of affairs which were
+as meat and drink to his spirit starved by neglect. It was so great a
+thing to have a pretext for approaching Count Guarini. That young lord
+had a way like a keen-edged knife. You might weave a whole vestment
+about your errand, fold upon fold of ingenious surmise, argument <i>pro</i>,
+argument <i>con</i>; Guarino Guarini<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> would dart eyes upon you&mdash;slash! he had
+rent your fabric and discovered you naked underneath, a liar ready for
+the whip. Nor, to do him justice, did he ever fail to apply it. Truth
+was, indeed, the only key to Guarino's chamber.</p>
+
+<p>Truth, and timely truth, was what the Captain felt he had at last. With
+it he braved the supercilious doorkeeper; with it he forced the fellow
+to lift his intolerable eyelids.</p>
+
+<p>"By the powers of darkness, my friend," he said, "it will be a bad day's
+work for you if you deny me this time." So he won his admission and
+faced his master.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Mosca, your lie," said the Count, with his cold-steel delivery.
+Mosca did not stumble.</p>
+
+<p>"Master," he said, "I can do you service."</p>
+
+<p>"Do it then," whipped in the Count.</p>
+
+<p>"I can tell your Excellence why he succeeds no better with La
+Bellaroba."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" The Count was suspicious, but interested.</p>
+
+<p>"The little lady has a lover."</p>
+
+<p>"Body of a dog!"</p>
+
+<p>"Body of Angioletto, Excellence."</p>
+
+<p>"Angioletto? That spaniel? How many more laps will he cradle in? Cut his
+tongue out, my good fellow, and then come to me again."</p>
+
+<p>"Excellence, may I speak?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so. Speak."</p>
+
+<p>The Captain waited no further invitation, but told the whole story from
+the beginning. Guarino thought upon it for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"He will come to-night?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span></p><p>"Certain, Excellence."</p>
+
+<p>"Then we have him. You have done well, Mosca&mdash;it was time, my friend,
+for you are an expensive hack to keep at grass. Now listen. Take
+Bellaroba away&mdash;command of the Contessa, of course. Take her to the
+little house in the Borgo. Make all fast, and return here in time for
+the steeple-jack. When you have him in the trap, run him through the
+body, raise the devil's uproar, and denounce him to the patrol. Do you
+understand me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perfectly, Excellence."</p>
+
+<p>"Take my purse from the table and off with you then."</p>
+
+<p>Captain Mosca bowed to the ground and backed out.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="EVIII" id="EVIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>FIRST MIDNIGHT CONVERSATION</h3>
+
+<p>The Borgo of Borso's day was, as you might say, a sucker of the city of
+the Po, a flowery crop of villas and gardens about the city's root.
+There was the discreet house which Captain Mosca had once chosen for his
+Olimpia; there also was that which Guarino Guarini maintained for his
+(or any) Bellaroba. It is probable that there were many such houses in
+the Borgo; it was a very pleasant place, heavy scented with lilac and
+hawthorn in the spring, drowsy all the summer through with rustling
+leaves and the murmur of innumerable bees. The place was quiet; there
+was no traffic, no hint of the city bustle; on the other hand there was
+the notoriety which must always attach to any act done where no others
+are doing. Time, day-time especially, hangs heavy in the Borgo. One
+machinates in the face of many green shutters, which are not necessarily
+dead because they are shut.</p>
+
+<p>This reasoning does not attack the sagacity of Count Guarini, for the
+only circumstance which could give it force was entirely unknown to him.
+He did not know that the Borgo held Bellaroba's friend, Olimpia, or that
+it sheltered under the same roof Olimpia, the Captain's enemy. He knew
+nothing of Bellaroba's friends and cared<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> nothing for the Captain's
+enemies. But, as a matter of history, the proceedings of Mosca upon that
+eventful day were of the greatest possible interest to Signorina
+Castaneve. Donna Matura, trust her, had not failed to report his first
+appearance, stork-like, in the Borgo. No subsequent voyage of his into
+those parts (and he made many) was lost upon Olimpia. Captain Mosca,
+honest man, made a preposterous accomplice. His rusty cloak, the white
+of his observant eye, the craning of his neck, the very angle of his
+sword&mdash;cocked up for frolic like a wren's tail&mdash;spoke the profuse
+conspirator. He spent money liberally, seemed to have plenty more, had
+his finger to his nose with every other word. He brought a troop of
+underlings; a bevy of young women under his orders turned the little
+shuttered house out of doors&mdash;at every window carpets, curtains,
+hangings of all sorts, fluttered as if for a triumphal procession.
+Flowers came in stacks: "H'm!" said Olimpia, "there's a woman in this."
+A couple of asses brought skins of wine. "That will be wash for the lean
+hog himself," she added. From that time forth she never left her
+shutter. To make herself the more sure she gave orders to Donna Matura
+to close all the shutters alike. Captain Mosca, on one of his returns to
+the Borgo, looked up at the blind green eyes of his former haven and,
+chuckling, rubbed his hands. This artless outlet to his feelings was
+interpreted for what it was worth behind the shutter.</p>
+
+<p>By six of the evening Mosca, seeing Olimpia's house still keep a dead
+face, threw off the last<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> remnant of his cares and bade himself be
+merry. "My handsome friend is either asleep or on a journey, it
+appears," said he to himself. "That, on the whole, is well. I cannot
+think she would be pleased at the advent of little Bellaroba riding
+pillion to me. Still less would the honour about to be paid the young
+lady afford her any gratification. Least of all would her observations
+on the subject tend to clear the air. No, no. Everything is for the
+best, it seems, and the world still a tolerable place. Now for my little
+wood-bird." He paid and dismissed his work-people, then rode off himself
+to fetch Bellaroba. And Olimpia, from her shutter, watched him go.</p>
+
+<p>There was no trouble on the child's score. The Countess was away; a
+feigned message from her was enough. Had she been at home and in a good
+humour, she would have accorded a real one, no doubt; so the deceit was
+quite harmless. Bellaroba demurred a little that she could not in person
+warn Angioletto, but the Captain begged her to have no fears. Time
+pressed; it was evident the Countess's service was urgent. Yet the
+Captain swore by all that he held sacred&mdash;to be sure no great things,
+but Bellaroba could not know that&mdash;to deliver her message to the lad
+with his own hand. "For," said he, and confirmed it with an oath, "if I
+don't see him this very night it will be a pity:" words which were
+afterwards thought to have been prophetic by the curious in such
+matters. So Bellaroba entrusted him with her scrawl to "My love
+Angilotto," and the Captain chewed and swallowed it when she was not
+looking. Then he lifted her to his horse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> and rode with her into the
+green-sheltered Borgo, just as it was settling into twilight. And
+Olimpia, from her shutter, saw them come.</p>
+
+<p>I spare you the picture of her fury: it was not seemly, for all it was
+very white and still. The sight of a handsome girl shuddering in a cold
+stare under the grip of an evil spirit can never be pleasant; and where
+the experienced Donna Matura shrank from what she saw and heard, it
+becomes not me to tread. Donna Matura was of her country, that cheerful,
+laughing Midland of the Po, and neither felt the Venetian throb of
+pleasure nor conceived the excesses of Venetian pain. Extremes touch on
+the Lagoon. Donna Matura saw her gold-haired mistress white and drawn,
+saw her witless shaking, saw her tear and rend herself, heard her jerked
+words of loathing, blasphemy, and obscene defiance&mdash;and fairly fled the
+house. "For," as she said, "if words of man or woman could bring the
+rafters about our ears, or open a pit to send us lightly whither we all
+must go who have heard them, those words which Madam Olimpia spat about
+her must surely do it." So much she confessed to afterwards, but no
+more; for she stayed nothing more.</p>
+
+<p>Olimpia may have leaned twisting against her wall for about an hour,
+mouthing insane babble from her blued lips. It was at least quite dark
+when she came to herself, lit the lamp, wiped the cold beads from her
+forehead, smoothed and bound her hair. She was not herself, nor looked
+to be so; she had a face completely colourless, lips like grey mould,
+and burning black eyes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> But her hand was steady; she hardly winked; her
+breath, which came through her nose, was even, though it whistled rather
+sharply. Whatever she was about&mdash;and she seemed to be acting a part&mdash;she
+did with extraordinary care, down to the changing of her crimson dress
+for a dark green one. The former had been loose and clinging, made of
+velvet; the dark green was of cloth, fitted her close, and, as she
+ascertained by a few gestures, gave free play to her arms. She knocked
+off her heeled Venetian shoes, whose clatter was familiar to the house,
+and bound on flat-soled sandals instead. Over her head she had a black
+lace scarf, on her hands leather gauntlets. Lastly, she took from a
+press a long, double-edged knife, felt its temper, and stuck it inside
+her stocking, under the garter. She made a final hasty sweep of the room
+with her unquiet eyes as she went out of it.</p>
+
+<p>The door of the house she knocked upon was opened by a page, who asked
+her business.</p>
+
+<p>"Mosca, Captain Mosca, is my business," said she in a whisper.</p>
+
+<p>"The Signor Capitano is occupied, Madonna," replied the boy.</p>
+
+<p>"I know it, I know it," she answered. "But my business is the lady's
+business also. I must see them both&mdash;and at once. Let me pass."</p>
+
+<p>The page vowed and swore by all the company of Heaven that those were
+her actual words. He was put to the torture and cried in the most
+heartrending manner; but he held to it, so long as he could hold to
+anything, that the visitor had said "her business was the other lady's
+business."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> What a further application of the question might have
+brought we cannot tell, since he fainted before it could be tried. "The
+boy Gasparo appeared to take no further interest in the elucidation of
+the truth," reported the judges, "and we recommend that he be chastised
+for contumacy." He was, at any rate, no witness of the scene which
+followed Olimpia's entry. There was that about her, a subdued haste, a
+deliberation, a kind of intensity got by rote, which fascinated the
+youngster and left him staring in the hall.</p>
+
+<p>Olimpia walked across it alone, went straight to a door at the bottom on
+the right-hand side, turned the handle, and entered. There was a table
+spread with supper; there was Captain Mosca seated at it eating a peach
+from his wine-glass; there was Bellaroba, flushed and marred with tears,
+leaning against the further wall. She gave a little gasp of fear when
+she saw what the doorway framed; after that she followed Olimpia about
+the room with the same incurable fascination which the page-boy had
+felt. Olimpia shut the door as softly as she had opened it, and as
+softly shot the bolt.</p>
+
+<p>Then it seemed that Mosca felt her presence, for he turned, saw, and
+jumped up with a cry mingled of fear and rage. It was found out
+afterwards that he was unarmed. This will explain his alarm. Disastrous
+honesty! his sword was upstairs in the bed.</p>
+
+<p>There followed a most curious scene. The Captain stood up by the table
+and dogged Olimpia with his narrow eyes. When she advanced,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> he backed;
+when she stopped, he stopped. In this manner, eyeing each other without
+a blink, they made the round of the table. Bellaroba cowered by the
+wall; pursued and pursuer brushed against her in turn. She shivered and
+moaned a little at every touch; but they were too intent upon their game
+to know that she was there. In the second round, Mosca, who was again
+close to her, reached out his hand for a knife from the table. Quick as
+thought Olimpia was at him, reached across and drove her knife through
+his hand into the wood. Mosca howled, but his fear by now was such that
+he must be free to run as before, though he maimed himself. He tore his
+hand away and left Olimpia holding a fixed blade. She wrenched it out
+and made a pounce. The miserable Mosca turned to Bellaroba. He laid what
+he had left of hands upon her shoulders; he pulled her from the wall; he
+set her before him and hugged her close to his breast. Thus he made her
+back a shield against the long knife, and with her he fenced and held
+off his enemy for minutes more. Olimpia, horribly busy, scorched the
+girl's neck with her breath&mdash;but she never made to hurt her.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the end. Olimpia made a lunge at his right side. The Captain
+hugged Bellaroba there. At the next moment the long knife was below his
+left arm, buried to the hilt, and defender and defence rolled heavily to
+the floor. Olimpia walked to the table and helped herself to the
+Captain's Val Pulicella.</p>
+
+<p>The watch (whom the page had roused after Mosca's first cry) broke in by
+the window, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span>disentangled Bellaroba, bound the hands of both prisoners
+behind their backs, and marched them and the boy off to the Castle.
+Count Guarini, coming in an hour later, found his murdered lieutenant
+for his only guest.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="EIX" id="EIX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+<h3>SECOND MIDNIGHT CONVERSATION</h3>
+
+<p>In that same night of mine and countermine Duke Borso, who had broken up
+the circle early by reason of his toothache, went wandering the long
+corridors of the Schifanoia under the sting of his scourge. He found his
+spacious pleasure-house valueless against that particular annoy, but (as
+always) he was the more whimsical for his affliction. Nothing works your
+genuine man of humour so nearly as himself. The sight of his own image,
+puffed and blinking in nightcap, bed-gown, and slippers, when he came
+upon it in a long mirror, set him chuckling. He paused before the absurd
+epitome to apostrophise, wagged a finger at it, and got wag for wag. "We
+might be two drolls in a pantomime!" said he to his double. "Your arm,
+gossip:" he crooked an elbow. "It seems," he continued, "that we are
+both sufferers, my poor fellow! Magnificence goes drooping; a swollen
+estate does not forbid a jowl of the same proportions; and give me leave
+to tell you, brother, that we have each of us been better dressed in our
+day. Fie, what a pair of quills below your gown; and what a sorry diadem
+to stand for two duchies and a marquisate of uncertain age! Duke and my
+brother, if we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> were to be spied upon by any of our Court just now, what
+sort of a reverence should we get, think you? Eh, you rogue, as much as
+we deserve! I will tell you, good Borso, my own poor opinion of these
+things. A Duke who cannot be dukely in his shirt, a Pope who is but an
+afflicted biped between the blankets, is no Duke at all, is a Pope by
+toleration. There should be some such test at every crowning of our
+sort. Souse a Bishop in his bath before you let him warm his chair; cry
+'Fire!' on the stairs of the Vatican and watch your Pontiff-elect
+scudding over the Piazza in his sark, before the Conclave sing <i>Veni
+Creator</i>. Judge of your Emperor with a swollen nose, blacken your Dukes
+in the eye: if they remain Dukes and Emperors you may safely obey them.
+They are men, Borso, they are men! Yes, you spindle-shanked rascal, you
+may well wince. Do you ponder how you would stand assay? So do I ponder
+it, brother, and doubt horribly." He clapped his hand to his face.
+"Steady now, steady, here comes another bout. Ah, Madonna of the
+Este&mdash;but this is a shrewd twinge! Fare you well, brother Fat-chops. I
+must walk this devil out of me." He waved a hand to his brother of the
+looking-glass and slippered away, groaning and sniggering to himself. So
+he walked and was philosophical till two of the morning. At that hour he
+was ready to drop with fatigue; but his pains had left him. "I will
+sleep, by the grace of Heaven," he said. He plumped down in the
+embrasure of a door, prepared to follow his humour: the door yielded and
+he with it. "Who am I to outrage a lady's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> chamber?" he muttered, half
+asleep. "To be sure she seems to invite me. Let us look at this
+complaisant sleeper." He went into the room. A glimmering lamp burned
+before a shrine, enough to show him to a decent four-post bed, empty.
+"By the great god Pan!" cried Borso, "my luck holds. Courage! I am not a
+Duke for nothing, then." He shut and bolted the door, slipped into the
+bed and was asleep in three minutes. It was twenty minutes after two.</p>
+
+<p>At the stroke of three, with a scarcely perceptible rustling, Angioletto
+slid down the chimney and stepped into the room. He carefully brushed
+himself with a brush which hung by the hearth. The chimney was by now
+thoroughly clean, however. He next washed his face and hands, undressed,
+and crept softly to the bed. Very quietly he inserted himself between
+the sheets, very softly kissed the shoulder of the sleeper; very soon he
+was as sound as his bedfellow.</p>
+
+<p>The Duke awoke, as his habit was, with the first light, and saw the
+curly head on the pillow beside him. He whistled softly to himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, by the tears of the Virgin," said he, "how did this lady come in?
+It would be as well to know it, since plainly I must go out." He sat up
+in bed, clasped his knees, and frowned a little. "It is clean against
+the traditions of my house," he ruminated, "but I think I will go. And
+the sooner the better."</p>
+
+<p>Suiting action to word, he had one foot on the floor when Angioletto,
+with a long sigh, opened his eyes, turned over, and saw him.</p>
+
+<p>"The devil!" said Duke Borso.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span></p><p>"Madonna," was his second venture, when he had recognised the
+impropriety of his first, "Madonna, I am this moment about to retire&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto, whose eyes had attained their fullest stretch of wonder,
+opened his mouth&mdash;but not to speak. He gaped at the lord of the land.</p>
+
+<p>"Madonna&mdash;" Borso began once more. Then the other found his voice&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Alas, my lord Duke, it is Madonna I thought to find. Where is my wife?"</p>
+
+<p>That was Borso's cue to stare.</p>
+
+<p>"Your wife?" he cried, "your wife! Heaven above us, man, why the devil
+should your wife be in my bed?"</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto, with the deepest respect always, suffered a smile to play
+askew about his lips.</p>
+
+<p>"Alas, Magnificence," he said, "if I dared I would ask him, why the
+devil he should be in my wife's bed?"</p>
+
+<p>It was the youth's way to preface his audacities by the assurance that
+he dared not utter them. But the retort pleased Borso. His eyes began to
+twinkle.</p>
+
+<p>"Look ye, young gentleman," said he, suppressing his wish to chuckle,
+"if this is your wife's bed, I am sorry for you, for I give you my word
+she has not been in it to-night. But I confess I should like to know why
+your wife has a bed in my house."</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto nodded gravely.</p>
+
+<p>"I should be the last person to deny your Grace's right to all
+information. Bellaroba is my dear wife's name, her country is Venice,
+her duties are to be about Madama Lionella's person.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> My own duties are
+to be about hers, so far as I may."</p>
+
+<p>"Fair and softly, my friend," said the Duke, "not so fast, if you
+please. Do you know that Maids of Honour may not marry without
+permission, and, in any case, may not be visited by their husbands
+during their service?"</p>
+
+<p>"Magnificence, she was not married without permission. Or rather, she
+was married before permission was needed."</p>
+
+<p>"Eh, how may that be now?" said Borso, tucking in his chin. "Did she
+come here as Signora Qualcosa?"</p>
+
+<p>"She came here as Bellaroba, Magnificence. No one knows of our marriage
+but your Grace and the Holy Virgin."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you are not married, but should be. That is your meaning&mdash;eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, by Heaven, Magnificence," cried Angioletto, "we are the most
+married couple in the world!"</p>
+
+<p>"H'm," was all Borso had to say to that. "And who made her of Madama's
+Court?"</p>
+
+<p>"It was your Grace."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, of course, of course, man! But why the deuce did I do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It was at the request of Count Guarino Guarini, Magnificence?"</p>
+
+<p>"Eh, eh! now I recollect. Ah, to be sure! That must be a very agreeable
+reflection for you at this moment, my friend," he said, with a sly look.</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto took the equivoque with dignity, "I have perfect confidence
+in my wife, my lord Duke."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span></p><p>Borso shrugged. "Well, it is your affair&mdash;not mine," he said. Then he
+changed his tone. "I think, however, we will come back to what is my
+affair as well as yours. Be so good as to tell me how you came here."</p>
+
+<p>"I came down the chimney," said Angioletto calmly. "I am by calling a
+chimney-sweep."</p>
+
+<p>"Upon my word," Borso said, "this is a fine story I am piecing together!
+How long have you been of that trade, pray?"</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto received this shot with firmness, even dignity. "I was
+formerly a poet attached to the Court, Magnificence. But when Madama
+turned me away it became necessary that I should see my young wife; so I
+became a chimney-sweep for the purpose."</p>
+
+<p>The Duke's mouth twitched too much for his own dignity. He pulled the
+bedclothes up to his nose, therefore, before he asked&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Why did Madama turn you away, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto, for the first time, was confused. He hung his head.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope your Grace will not insist upon an answer," he replied in a
+troubled voice.</p>
+
+<p>Borso looked keenly at him for a time. "No, I think I will not," said
+he. "Are you the lad who sang me the <i>Caccia col falcone</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"The same, my lord Duke."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought so. Now, sir, to come back to this performance of yours,
+which I suppose is not the first by any means&mdash;eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"It appears to be the last, my lord," said Angioletto ruefully.</p>
+
+<p>"I think it is the last," replied the Duke; "for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> I hope you understand
+that I can have you clapped into gaol for it."</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon, Magnificence&mdash;he can do more. He can have me hanged for it."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't agree with you," said Borso. "If my name were Ferdinand of
+Arragon, or Sforza, or della Rovere, yes; but being Borso d'Este, no."</p>
+
+<p>"Your Grace puts me to shame," said Angioletto, with feeling. "I am to
+take it then&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You shall take it as you please, my friend," Borso rejoined, with his
+chin once more upon his clasped knees. "For my part I propose to take
+<i>you</i> and keep you under lock and key for a season&mdash;as at present
+advised."</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto bowed, as well as one may who is sitting up in a very soft
+bed. His voice was quite meek.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall in all duty obey your Grace's directions, and will leave behind
+me but one small request, which I am persuaded Borso d'Este will not
+refuse his prisoner."</p>
+
+<p>"And what is that, my good friend?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is the care for the person and honour of my wife, my lord Duke,"
+answered Angioletto.</p>
+
+<p>This set Borso rubbing his nose. He thought before he spoke again.</p>
+
+<p>"As for your wife's person, my man," said he, "it will be as safe in my
+dominions as all persons, whatever their ages or conditions. Her honour
+is another affair. That is neither for me nor my laws, but for herself.
+And perhaps you will let me add that if to-night is a sample of her
+course of living, you are putting upon me a rather onerous charge."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span></p><p>"My Lord, my Lord," cried Angioletto here, "I will answer for my wife's
+honour with my last drop of blood. It is her person I cannot answer for
+if I am in prison."</p>
+
+<p>"I have told you that I will answer for her person, master poet. I would
+much rather leave her honour to you and your drops of blood. So you may
+go to the Castle with a clear mind. To the Castle, moreover, you shall
+undoubtedly go, if it is only to teach you that the possession of a wife
+is no passport to other men's chimneys. First, however, I will ask you
+to do me a small service, which is to go to my bedchamber and send me my
+gentlemen, my dresser, and my clothes. I am, you perceive, entirely at
+your mercy. You will follow these persons back to me here, and will then
+give yourself up as I shall direct."</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto, out of bed by this time, knelt to the Duke's hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I am your Grace's servant," said he. He hastily dressed himself and
+went about the business he was bidden on.</p>
+
+<p>"Madam the Virgin," said Borso, with a half-laugh, "that is a fine young
+man! If he had not made so free with my chimneys I would advance him.
+Advanced he shall be!" he cried out after a while. "Zounds! has not
+Guarino made free with his wife? Eh, but I fear it." He shook his
+nightcap at the thought. "A couple of days' reflection in a half light
+will do the lad no harm. He'll dream of his wife, or compose me some
+songs. Bellaroba, he called her. I remember the jade&mdash;a demure,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span>rosy-cheeked little cat, for ever twiddling her fingers or her
+apron-ends. Those sleek ones are the worst. Poor boy! I'll advance him.
+He shall be librarian, go secretary to Rome or Florence. I'll have him
+about my own person. By the Sons of Heaven, but he's as good as gold!
+Ah, I hear him."</p>
+
+<p>The Duke's gentlemen bowed themselves into the room, followed by the
+dresser.</p>
+
+<p>"Good morning, my friends," said Borso. "But where is my messenger?"</p>
+
+<p>"Magnificence, he is at the door," said the usher.</p>
+
+<p>"Bring him in, Foppa, bring him in," cried the Duke; "we know each other
+by now."</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto was introduced.</p>
+
+<p>"Master Angioletto," the twinkling old tyrant said, "get you downstairs
+to the Captain of the Archers. Say to him as follows: 'Captain, my lord
+the Duke begs you to conduct me surely to the Castle, and keep me
+prisoner there during his Grace's pleasure.' Will you oblige me so far?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shall obey you exactly, my lord Duke," said Angioletto, making a
+reverence.</p>
+
+<p>He went at once and gave himself up. In some quarter of an hour's time
+he was lodged in the Castle, in a cell upon the level of the moat. Next
+door to him on either side (though he knew nothing of it) were two women
+who had been brought in with a page-boy over night upon a charge of
+murder. Their case, indeed, was one of the first matters which engaged
+the attention of Duke Borso after mass.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="EX" id="EX"></a>X</h2>
+
+<h3>ORDEAL BY ROPE</h3>
+
+<p>The prison chills made Olimpia shiver, the prison silences made her
+afraid. The wavering moan of the page-boy, who had been tumbled on to a
+straw bed after his first bout of the question, drove home the reality
+of her situation, and made her sick. Olimpia was one of your snug pretty
+women; she loved to be warmed, coaxed, petted; liked her bed, her fire;
+liked sweetmeats, and to see people about her go smiling. Mostly, too,
+she had had her way in these matters, for she was a beautiful creature,
+smooth and handsome as a Persian cat. Jealousy, on this account, was a
+new experience; she had never suffered it before, did not realise it
+now. Besides, it was over; she had killed her faithless lover. But the
+dark, the cold, the silence, the calm enmity of the dim walls&mdash;these
+were but an intensification of familiar discomforts. She had always been
+afraid of the dark, often cold, often quelled by quiet, made sullen by
+indifference. She hated all this, and felt it all, in spite of the glory
+of the Captain's killing. It seemed more awful now, more unendurable
+than ever, because&mdash;she knew there was no good disguising it&mdash;because it
+stood for something else. Ah, ah! she was in danger. So sure as she
+thought of this, Olimpia's heart stood still, and then suddenly throbbed
+as if it must break.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> It surged up into her throat. Her tongue clove to
+her palate, she felt the bristling of her flesh, could hear her heart
+quite loud making double knocks at her side. The page-boy moaned to
+himself through it all; a rat hidden somewhere bore him company by
+scratching most diligently at the brickwork. She could not hear anything
+of Bellaroba&mdash;the only familiar thing in this vast black horror. The
+panic gained upon her till her head swam in it. She could not die! Ah,
+never, never, never, by Christ on His throne!</p>
+
+<p>The sickening futility of that final word, Never, in the face of the
+dead certainty announced by the inexorable walls, served to make the
+wretch's case the more desperate. Panic, chalk-white, staring
+panic-fear, swallowed her up: the next few hours flew by as minutes,
+while she was cowering and gibbering in a corner. Before the inevitable
+you either resign or rave yourself mad&mdash;there is no middle course.
+Bellaroba took the first. Sitting in her cell with her cheek pressed
+against the wall which (though she knew it not) penned also her
+Angioletto, she never opened her eyes, nor cried, nor moaned; but where
+she settled herself at her entry there she was found when they came to
+hale her to the judgment. She gave no trouble, made no sign; but she let
+down her hair to cover her bare neck, and if she blushed it was that
+folks should see her blood-smirched evening finery by the light of day.
+She was a very decent girl always, and this seemed to her horrible even
+in a pit of horrors. Olimpia, clinging to life, was driven upon the
+second course. It took two halberdiers to hold her up.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span></p><p>Borso had before him the deposition of the page-boy and the report of
+the watch. From the words of the first he suspected that both women were
+concerned&mdash;until he had heard the second. This was to the effect that
+the Captain's head had been cut off.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," said Borso to himself, "I am heartily sorry for my young
+friend the chimney-sweeping poet, but I can't think him a fool. He would
+never have married a woman who could cut off a man's head. Yet stay! It
+may be that she floored the Captain and that the other rounded off the
+job with that gratuitous touch. She&mdash;that other&mdash;was eating walnuts when
+the watch came, I gather. She could have cut a dead man's head off,
+never doubt it. Well, let us see, let us see."</p>
+
+<p>Then it was that he gave the order: "Bring the two women before me."</p>
+
+<p>He did justice ever in the open. A broad green field outside one of the
+gates served him for court. Two gibbets and an open pit stood for the
+terror of the law; he himself, on a gilt chair under a canopy, for the
+majesty of it. The day was bright, breezy, and white-clouded. The
+poplars twinkled innumerably, the long Este gonfalon flacked and
+strained in the wind. Spectators with soldiery to hedge them kept a wide
+square about the plain. From their side the figures in the midst&mdash;the
+red, gold, and white about the pavilion, the steel of the soldiers, the
+drooping women between them&mdash;were about as real as a handful of
+marionettes. It seemed impossible such puppets could decide issues of
+life<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> and death. But the red hangman and his machines were grim touches
+for a puppet-show.</p>
+
+<p>Olimpia Castaneve was brought forward first. She was more composed by
+now&mdash;the air, the sun, the cheerful colours of the court, had warmed
+her. She stood alone facing Borso. He, at first glance, remembered every
+shred of her; but he betrayed nothing. There was no one more blankly
+cool in this world than Borso on the judgment-seat.</p>
+
+<p>"What is your name, mistress?"</p>
+
+<p>"Magnificence, I am well known in Ferrara."</p>
+
+<p>"Your name," thundered the Duke, "by the face of the sky!"</p>
+
+<p>"Olimpia Castaneve."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you cut off the head of the Captain of Lances, who was called Il
+Mosca?"</p>
+
+<p>Olimpia was looking very handsome, and knew it.</p>
+
+<p>"Magnificence," she said, "my hand is on my heart." It was.</p>
+
+<p>"What the devil has that got to do with it?" asked Borso, looking about
+him for a reason.</p>
+
+<p>"Serenity, if my heart were guilty, it would burn my hand. If my hand
+were red, it would soil my heart."</p>
+
+<p>"Pouf!" said Borso, and puckered his face. "Stand back, Castaneve. Now
+for the little one. How are you called, baggage?"</p>
+
+<p>Bellaroba shivered a very little, and looked solemn.</p>
+
+<p>"Bellaroba, my lord."</p>
+
+<p>"Very pretty; but I must have more."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span></p><p>"There is no more, my lord. I am wife of Angioletto."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, well. I know Master Angioletto, and he me. We'll have him here, I
+think. Hi, you!" said he, turning to an officer of his guards. "Go and
+fetch the chimney-sweep."</p>
+
+<p>Ten minutes passed; then Angioletto came up between a detachment of men,
+unbound. He was not observed to falter throughout his course over the
+broad field; but his eyes were fever bright and colour noticeably high.
+Bellaroba did not look up at him; her eyelids fluttered, but she kept
+her head hung, and as for her blushes they were curtained by her long
+hair. He, on the contrary, directly he had bent his knee to the Duke,
+turned to where she stood, and, in face of the whole city, put his arms
+about her, and found a way to kiss her cheek. The broad ring of
+onlookers wavered; the twitches played like summer lightning over
+Borso's face.</p>
+
+<p>"Come here, Angioletto," he said. Angioletto drew near the throne.</p>
+
+<p>"You see now, my friend," the Duke continued in a low voice, "what may
+happen to one's wife if she keeps not her bed o' nights. A certain
+Captain Mosca has been stabbed. More than that, his head was attacked
+when he had ceased to take any interest in it, and cut off. I ask no
+words from you, no comments, no adjurations, for you are a prejudiced
+party. Your wife and this other woman between them have done the
+Captain's business. Mine is to find out how. Stand aside now and
+listen."</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto started, opened his mouth to speak&mdash;but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span> the Duke put up his
+hand. "Young man," said he sternly, "I am Duke of Ferrara, and you are
+my prisoner. Be good enough to remember that."</p>
+
+<p>Angioletto hung his head. Borso turned again to Bellaroba, but kept the
+other in his eye.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, missy, what had you to do with Captain Mosca's headpiece?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing, my lord."</p>
+
+<p>"What!" he roared. "Did you not cut it off?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, my lord."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not, girl? He was your enemy, I suppose?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think he was, my lord."</p>
+
+<p>"Think! Do you not know it? What did he want of you?"</p>
+
+<p>"He wanted to make me bad, my lord."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! So you stabbed him, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, my lord."</p>
+
+<p>"Come now, come now, girl. Look at your frock."</p>
+
+<p>She did look and was silent.</p>
+
+<p>"Well!" Borso continued, after a sharp glance at Angioletto. "Did your
+husband cut it off?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, my lord, he wasn't there&mdash;but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;but what?"</p>
+
+<p>"He would have killed him, my lord."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, the devil he would! Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because he loves me, my lord."</p>
+
+<p>"H'm. Well, Miss Bellaroba, where's your hand?"</p>
+
+<p>She held it out. "Here, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"What a little one! Well, put it on your heart. Now, how does it feel?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span></p><p>"It jumps, my lord."</p>
+
+<p>"Does it burn you, child?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, my lord; it's quite cold."</p>
+
+<p>"Stand down, Bellaroba. Castaneve, come forward."</p>
+
+<p>His face just now was a sight to be seen&mdash;crumpled, infinitely prim,
+crow-footed like an ivied wall; but extraordinarily wise; with that
+tempered resolve which says, "I know Evil and I know Good, and dare be
+just to either." He was thinking profoundly; every one could see it.
+Best of the company before him Angioletto, the little Tuscan, read his
+thought. His own was, "Unless I fear Justice I need not fear Borso.
+Dante saw the death of his lady to be just. Courage then!"</p>
+
+<p>"Mistress Castaneve," said Duke Borso, "you declare yourself innocent?"</p>
+
+<p>"Excellency, I do, I do! Ah, Mother of God!" The panic was creeping up
+Olimpia's legs, to loosen the joints of her knees.</p>
+
+<p>The Judge turned half. "Mistress Bellaroba, you also declare yourself
+innocent?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, my lord," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Diavolo!" muttered Angioletto, "he is not 'my lord'; he is
+'Magnificence.' I must scold her for this afterwards."</p>
+
+<p>"The position of affairs is this," said the Duke, aloud. "One of these
+prisoners is guilty of the deed, and the guilty one is the liar. Now, I
+will not put an innocent person to death if I can avoid it; and I will
+not put these women to the question, because I should wring a confession
+of guilt from each, and be no more certain than I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> was before. I may
+have my own opinion, and may have proved it on various grounds. That
+again, I do not care to obtrude. I do not see that I can better the
+precedent set me by a very wise man and patriarch, King Solomon of Zion.
+Let the women judge each other. My judgment is that the innocent of
+these two shall hang the guilty."</p>
+
+<p>The bystanders were silent, till one man shivered. The shiver swept
+lightly through the company like a wind in the reeds, and ran wider and
+wider till it stirred the farthest edge of the field. All eyes were upon
+the prisoners. Borso's blinked from below his shaggy brows, young
+Teofilo Calcagnini's were misty, Angioletto's hard and bright. Bellaroba
+had been motionless throughout, except when her lips moved to speak; she
+was motionless now. But Olimpia was panting. The unearthly quiet was
+only broken by that short sound for ten minutes.</p>
+
+<p>"Bellaroba," then said the Duke, "what say you? You declare that you are
+innocent. Will you hang the guilty and go free?"</p>
+
+<p>For the first time she looked up, but not at her judge. It was at
+Angioletto she looked, Angioletto at her.</p>
+
+<p>"No, my lord, I cannot," said Bellaroba in the hush. The wind shivered
+the reeds again, then fainted down.</p>
+
+<p>"Castaneve," said the dry voice, "what say you? You declare that you are
+innocent. Will you hang the guilty and go free?"</p>
+
+<p>The drowning Olimpia threw up her hands to clutch at this plank in the
+sea-swirl. Free! O God! The word turned her.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span></p><p>"Magnificence, I must, I must, I must!" She wailed, and fell a heap to
+the ground. Bellaroba covered her eyes. Teofilo Calcagnini shook the
+tears from his. Borso sat on immovably, working his jaws.</p>
+
+<p>It is at this point that the conduct of Angioletto touches the
+sublime&mdash;a position never accorded by posterity to his verse. It proves
+him, nevertheless, the greater artist to this extent, that he was
+equally the slave of the Idea, though working in more intractable stuff:
+himself, namely; his own little heart throbbing in his own young body.
+Therefore he deserves well of posterity, which finds his verses thin.
+Said Angioletto: "Yes, Bellaroba is my adorable wife, loved beyond all
+women, deserving beyond all price. Yet if she killed the Captain she is
+guilty of death, and the sentence is just whoever perform it. And if,
+being guiltless, she is hanged by the guilty, the action will glorify
+her; for it is the price she pays for clean hands."</p>
+
+<p>Then, in the midst of that waiting assembly, he called the girl to him
+by her name, took her face in both his hands and kissed it very
+tenderly, smiling all the time through his quick tears.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear little heart," said he, "your husband is proud of you. All that
+you have done is admirable in this black business. In a very short time
+I shall see you again. Though it is a higher flight than the Schifanoia
+chimney, it is quicker done. Trust me, Bellaroba; you know I have never
+failed you yet."</p>
+
+<p>He could say no more, but took her in his arms and held her there,
+speechless as he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> with inspiration. She, seeming to burn in the fire
+that consumed him, lay quite still, neither sobbing any more, nor
+shivering. So they clung together for a little. Then Angioletto lifted
+up his face from her cheek, and put her gently away from him.</p>
+
+<p>"Let justice be done, Excellency," he called out in his shrill boy's
+voice, "we have said our say to each other."</p>
+
+<p>Borso spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"Justice shall be done. The innocent has condemned the guilty: let that
+woman be hanged. We have learned the value of clean hands this day.
+Mistress Bellaroba, you have a man in ten thousand; Angioletto, my
+friend, you have what you deserve, a woman in ten million. It is not
+fair that the worth of you two should be known only to me and the
+Blessed Virgin; you shall tell it now to a priest. Come along, and let
+me have the whole story with my breakfast."</p>
+
+<p>Thus Duke Borso did judgment for his good town of Ferrara in times very
+remote from our own. The Ferrarese used to say that it needs a sound
+lawyer to know how to break the laws.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">THE END</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+</body>
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+Project Gutenberg's Little Novels of Italy, by Maurice Henry Hewlett
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Little Novels of Italy
+       Madonna Of The Peach-Tree, Ippolita In The Hills, The
+       Duchess Of Nona, Messer Cino And The Live Coal, The Judgment
+       Of Borso
+
+Author: Maurice Henry Hewlett
+
+Release Date: March 29, 2007 [EBook #20929]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Thierry Alberto, Juliet Sutherland, Martin
+Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY
+
+BY
+
+MAURICE HEWLETT
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE FOREST LOVERS," "PAN AND THE YOUNG
+SHEPHERD," "EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY," ETC.
+
+New York
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
+1899
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1899,
+By MAURICE HEWLETT.
+
+
+Norwood Press
+J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
+Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
+
+
+TO
+
+HIS FRIEND
+
+AND
+
+ITALY'S
+
+MAJOR-GENERAL JOSEPH BONUS, R.E.
+
+THE AUTHOR DEDICATES HIS BOOK
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                  PAGE
+MADONNA OF THE PEACH-TREE            1
+
+IPPOLITA IN THE HILLS               67
+
+THE DUCHESS OF NONA                137
+
+MESSER CINO AND THE LIVE COAL      225
+
+THE JUDGMENT OF BORSO              254
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY
+
+
+
+
+MADONNA OF THE PEACH-TREE
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+VANNA IS BID FOR
+
+
+Not easily would you have found a girl more winning in a tender sort
+than Giovanna Scarpa of Verona at one and twenty, fair-haired and
+flushed, delicately shaped, tall and pliant, as she then was. She had to
+suffer her hours of ill report, but passes for near a saint now, in
+consequence of certain miracles and theophanies done on her account,
+which it is my business to declare; before those she was considered (if
+at all) as a girl who would certainly have been married three years ago
+if dowries had not been of moment in the matter. In a city of maids as
+pretty as they are modest--which no one will deny Verona to be--there
+may have been some whose charms in either kind were equal to hers, while
+their estate was better in accord; but the speculation is idle.
+Giovanna, flower in the face as she was, fit to be nosegay on any
+hearth, posy for any man's breast, sprang in a very lowly soil. Like a
+blossoming reed she shot up to her inches by Adige, and one forgot the
+muddy bed wondering at the slim grace of the shaft with its crown of
+yellow atop. Her hair waved about her like a flag; she should have been
+planted in a castle; instead, Giovanna the stately calm, with her
+billowing line, staid lips, and candid grey eyes, was to be seen on her
+knees by the green water most days of the week. Bare-armed, splashed to
+the neck, bare-headed, out-at-heels, she rinsed and pommelled, wrung and
+dipped again, laughed, chattered, flung her hair to the wind, her sweat
+to the water, in line with a dozen other women below the Ponte Navi; and
+if no one thought any the worse of her, none, unhappily, thought any the
+better--at least in the way of marriage. It is probable that no one
+thought of her at all. Giovanna was a beauty and a very good girl; but
+she was a washerwoman for all that, whose toil fed seven mouths.
+
+Her father was Don Urbano, curate of Santa Toscana across the water.
+This may very easily sound worse than it is. In Don Urbano's day, though
+a priest might not marry, he might have a wife--a faithful, diligent
+companion, that is--to seethe his polenta, air his linen, and rear his
+children. The Church winked at her, and so continued until the Jesuits
+came to teach that winking was unbecoming. But when Can Grande II.
+lorded in Verona the Jesuits did not, and Don Urbano, good, easy man,
+cared not who winked at his wife. She gave him six children before she
+died of the seventh, of whom the eldest was Giovanna, and the others, in
+an orderly chain diminishing punctually by a year, ran down to
+Ferrantino, a tattered, shock-headed rascal of more inches than grace.
+Last of all the good drudge, who had borne these and many other burdens
+for her master, died also. Don Urbano was never tired of saying how
+providential it was that she had held off her demise until Giovanna was
+old enough to take her place. The curate was fat and lazy, very much
+interested in himself; his stipend barely paid his shot at the "Fiore
+del Marinajo," under whose green bush he was mostly to be seen. Vanna
+had to roll up her sleeves, bend her straight young back, and knee the
+board by the Ponte Navi. I have no doubt it did her good; the work is
+healthy, the air, the sun, the waterspray kissed her beauty ripe; but
+she got no husband because she could save no dowry. Everything went to
+stay the seven crying mouths.
+
+Then, on a day when half her twenty-first year had run after the others,
+old Baldassare Dardicozzo stayed on the bridge to rest from the burden
+of his pack--on a breezy March morning when the dust filled his eyes and
+the wind emptied him of breath. Baldassare had little enough to spare as
+it was. So he dropped his load in the angle of the bridge, with a
+smothered "Accidente!" or some such, and leaned to watch the swollen
+water buffeted crosswise by the gusts, or how the little mills
+amid-stream dipped as they swam breasting the waves. In so doing he
+became aware, in quite a peculiar way, of Vanna Scarpa.
+
+Baldassare was old, red-eyed, stiff in the back. Possibly he was
+rheumatic, certainly he was grumpy. He had a long slit mouth which
+played him a cruel trick; for by nature it smiled when by nature he was
+most melancholy. Smile it would and did, however cut-throat he felt: if
+you wanted to see him grin from ear to ear you would wait till he had
+had an ill day's market. Then, while sighs, curses, invocations of the
+saints, or open hints to the devil came roaring from him, that hilarious
+mouth of his invited you to share delights. You had needs laugh with
+him, and he, cursing high and low, beamed all over his face. "To make
+Baldassare laugh" became a stock periphrasis for the supreme degree of
+tragedy among his neighbours. About this traitor mouth of his he had a
+dew of scrubby beard, silvered black; he had bushy eyebrows, hands and
+arms covered with a black pelt: he was a very hairy man. Also he was a
+very warm man, as everybody knew, with a hoard of florins under the
+flags of his old-clothes shop in the Via Stella.
+
+Having spat into the water many times, rubbed his hands, mopped his
+head, and cursed most things under heaven and some in it, Master
+Baldassare found himself watching the laundresses on the shore. They
+were the usual shrill, shrewd, and laughing line--the trade seems to
+induce high mirth--and as such no bait for the old merchant by ordinary;
+but just now the sun and breeze together made a bright patch of them,
+set them at a provoking flutter. Baldassare, prickly with dust, found
+them like their own cool linen hung out to dance itself dry in the wind.
+Most of all he noticed Vanna, whom he knew well enough, because when she
+knelt upright she was taller and more wayward than the rest, and because
+the wind made so plain the pretty figure she had. She was very
+industrious, but no less full of talk: there seemed so much to say! The
+pauses were frequent in which she straightened herself from the hips and
+turned to thrust chin and voice into the debate. You saw then the sharp
+angle, the fine line of light along that raised chin, the charming turn
+of the neck, her free young shoulders and shapely head; also you marked
+her lively tones of _ci_ and _si_, and how her shaking finger drove them
+home. The wind would catch her yellow hair sometimes and wind it across
+her bosom like a scarf; or it streamed sideways like a long pennon; or
+being caught by a gust from below, sprayed out like a cloud of litten
+gold. Vanna always joined in the laugh at her mishap, tossed her tresses
+back, pinned them up (both hands at the business); and then, with square
+shoulders and elbows stiff as rods, set to working the dirt out of Don
+Urbano's surplice. Baldassare brooded, chewing straws. What a clear
+colour that girl had, to be sure! What a lissom rascal it was! A fine
+long girl like that should be married; by all accounts she would make a
+man a good wife. If he were a dozen years the better of four and fifty
+he might--Then came a shrug, and a "Ma!" to conclude in true Veronese
+Baldassare's ruminations. Shrug and explosion signalled two stark facts:
+Baldassare was fifty-four, and Vanna had no portion.
+
+Yet he remained watching on the bridge, his chin buried in his knotty
+hands, his little eyes blinking under stress of the inner fire he had.
+So it befell that La Testolina saw him, and said something shrill and
+saucy to her neighbour. The wind tossed him the tone but not the sense.
+He saw the joke run crackling down the line, all heads look brightly
+up. The joke caught fire; he saw the sun-gleam on a dozen perfect sets
+of teeth. Vanna's head was up with the rest, sooner up and the sooner
+down. Even from that height the little twinkling beacons from the bridge
+shot her through. He saw her colour deepen, head droop; she was busy
+long before the others had wrung their joke dry. "Soul of a cat!"
+grunted Baldassare between his teeth, "what a rosy baggage it is!" He
+waited a little longer, then deliberately passed the bridge, rounded the
+pillar by the steps, and went down to the women like a man who has made
+up his mind. Lizabetta of the roving eye caught the first hint of his
+shadow. Her elbow to Nonna's ribs, Nonna's "Pst!" in Nina's ear, spread
+the news. Vanna's cheeks flew the flag.
+
+"Buon' giorno, Ser Baldassare!" shrilled La Testolina, plump and
+black-eyed leader of mischief.
+
+"Giorno, giorno, La Testolina," growled the old man.
+
+Vanna, very busy, grew as red as a rose. The others knelt back on their
+heels; compliments of a homely sort flew about, sped on by flashing
+teeth. Baldassare's own were black as old channel-posts in the Lagoon,
+but in tongue-work he gave as sharp as he got. Then a wicked wind blew
+Vanna's hair like a whip across her throat, fit to strangle her. She had
+to face the day. Baldassare pondered her straight young back.
+
+"When Vanna's a nun she'll have no more trouble with her hair," quoth La
+Testolina, matchmaker by race.
+
+"When Vanna's a nun the river will be dry," said Vanna from between her
+elbows.
+
+"When Vanna's a nun the river, on the contrary, will be in flood." This
+from Baldassare.
+
+"Hey! what's this?" Caterina cried; and Nonna pinched her arm.
+
+"Adige will go crying that she comes no more to dip her arms," said the
+old man, with the utmost gravity and a broad grin. The women screamed
+their delight, slapped their knees, or raised witnessing hands to
+heaven; La Testolina caught Vanna round the waist and gave her a
+resounding kiss.
+
+"Compliments, my little Vanna, compliments!" Her voice pealed like a
+trumpet.
+
+"Vi ringrazio, signore," said Vanna under her breath, and La Testolina
+held up a tress of her long hair to the light.
+
+"When Vanna's a nun you would bid for that, eh, Baldassare?"
+
+"I will bid for whatever she will sell me," says he, with a blink.
+Whereupon the matchmaker made no more music. The scent was too hot for
+that.
+
+Yet for all his adventuring he got little reward; she turned him no more
+than the round of her cheek. Vanna never stayed her work, and he,
+ordinarily a silent man, paid no more compliments--yet ceased not to
+look.
+
+Going up the street at dinner-time, he made his bid. He limped by the
+tall girl's side without speech from either; but at the door he looked
+up queerly at her and pinched her ear.
+
+"Go in and feed the youngsters, my chuck," said he; "I know where to
+meet Don Urbano, and please Madonna you shall feed your own before
+long."
+
+"Yes, Ser Baldassare," says pretty Vanna in a twitter.
+
+The conference between the high contracting parties was wordy, bristled
+with the gesticulations of two pair of hands, and was commented on by
+all the guests in the "Fiore del Marinajo." The girl, said Don Urbano,
+was the very pride of his eye, prop of his failing years, a little
+mother to the children. She had had a most pious bringing-up, never
+missed the Rosary, knew the Little Hours of the Virgin, could do sums
+with notches in a stick, market like a Jew's housekeeper, sew like a
+nun, and make a stew against any wife in the _contrada_. Dowry, dowry!
+What did such a girl as that want with a dowry? She was her own dowry,
+by Bacchus the Thracian. Look at the shape of her--was that not a dowry?
+The work she could do, the pair of shoulders, the deep chest, the long
+legs she had--pick your dowry there, my friends! A young woman of her
+sort carried her dowry on her back, in her two hands, in her mouth--ah!
+and in what she could put into yours, by our Lord. Rather, it should be
+the other way. What, now, was Ser Baldassare prepared to lay out upon
+such a piece of goods? Baldassare shivered, grinned fearfully, and shook
+his head many times. Money was money; it was limited; it bore its value
+in plain figures upon its face: you knew where you were with money. But
+you could get wives cheaper than ducats, and find them cheaper value,
+soul of a cat! Besides, what was he? A poor pedlar, by his faith! At
+this he spread out his arms and dropped them with a flop upon his knees.
+The priest sat back in his chair and cast appealing looks at the
+rafters; the company chuckled, nudged each other, guffawed. Baldassare
+was made to feel that he had over-coloured his case. True, he admitted,
+he had a roof over his head, shared fortune with the rats in that. But
+look at the thing reasonably, comrades. Vanna would make another to
+keep; a girl of her inches must be an eater, body of a dog! Had his
+reverence thought of that? His reverence made a supreme effort, held up
+one pudgy forefinger, and with the other marked off two joints of it.
+"Of mortadella so much," he said; "of polenta so much"--and he shut one
+fist; "of pasta so much"--and he coupled the two fists; "and of wine, by
+the soul of the world, not enough to drown a flea! I tell you,
+Baldassare," he said finally, emboldened by the merchant's growing
+doubt--"I tell you that you ask of me a treasure which I would not part
+with for a cardinal's hat. No indeed! Not to be Bishop of Verona,
+throned and purfled on Can Grande's right hand, will I consent to
+traffic my Vanna. Eh, _sangue di Sangue_, because I am a man of the
+Church must I cease to be a man of bowels, to have a yearning, a tender
+spot here?" He prodded his cushioned ribs. "Go you, Ser Baldassare
+Dardicozzo," he cried, rising grandly in his chair--"go you; you have
+mistaken your man. The father stands up superb in the curate's cassock,
+and points the door to the chafferer of virgins!"
+
+The tavern-room, on Don Urbano's side to a man, beat the tables with
+their glasses; Baldassare had to surrender at discretion. The bargain,
+finally struck, was written out by an obliging notary on the
+scoring-slate. In the name of the holy and undivided Trinity it was
+declared to all men living and to be born, that Baldassare Dardicozzo,
+merchant of Verona, was obliged to pay to the reverend father in God,
+Urbano, curate of Santa Toscana in the Borgo San Giorgio, the sum of
+sixty florins Veronese and two barrels of wine of Val Pulicella, under
+condition that if within thirty days from those presents he did not lead
+in marriage Giovanna, daughter of the said reverend, he should be bound
+to pay the sum of one hundred and twenty florins Veronese, and four
+barrels of wine of Val Pulicella.
+
+The notary executed a monstrous flourish at the bottom--a foliated cross
+rising out of steps. On the last step he wrote his own name, Bartolo de
+Thomasinis; and then Baldassare, smiling as he should, but feeling as he
+should not, stuck his seal upon the swimming wax, and made a cross with
+the stile like the foundations of a spider's web.
+
+The affair was thus concluded; before the thirty days were up Vanna was
+taken to church by her father, and taken from it by her new master.
+Within a week she appeared at the doorway of Baldassare's little shop,
+very pretty, very sedate, quite the housewife--to sit there sewing and
+singing to herself from grey dawn to grey dusk.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+_TERTIUM QUID_
+
+
+A year passed, two years passed. Vanna was three and twenty, no more
+round but no less blooming in face and figure; still a reedy,
+golden-haired girl. But Baldassare was fifty-seven, and there was no
+sign of issue. The neighbours, who had nudged each other at one season,
+whose heads had wagged as their winks flew about, now accepted the
+sterile mating as of the order of things. Pretty Vanna, mother as she
+had been to her brothers and sisters, was to be a mother no more. There
+was talk of May and December. Baldassare was advised to lock up other
+treasure beside his florins; some, indeed, of the opposite camp gave
+hints none too honest to the forlorn young wife. The Piazza Sant'
+Anastasia at the falling-in of the day, for instance. Thus they put it.
+All girls--and what else was Vanna, a wife in name?--walked there arm in
+arm. Others walked there also, she must know. By-and-by some pretty lad,
+an archer, perhaps, from the palace, some roistering blade of a
+gentleman's lackey, a friar or twinkling monk out for a frolic, came
+along with an "Eh, la bellina!" and then there was another arm at work.
+So, for one, whispered La Testolina, dipping a head full of confidence
+and mystery close to Vanna's as the girl sat working out the summer
+twilight. The Via Stella was narrow and gloomy. The tall houses nearly
+met in that close way. Looking up you saw the two jagged edges of the
+eaves, like great tattered wings spread towards each other. When the
+green sky of evening deepened to blue, and blue grew violet, these
+shadowing wings were always in advance, more densely dark. There it was
+that Vanna worked incessantly, sewing seam after seam, patching,
+braiding, and fitting the pieces. By no chance at all did a hint of the
+sun fall about her; yet she always sang softly to herself, always wore
+her pretty fresh colours, and still showed the gold sheen in her yellow
+hair. Her hair was put up now, pulled smoothly back over her temples;
+she spoke in a low, sober, measured voice, and to La Testolina's sly
+suggestions responded with a little blush, a little shake of the head,
+and a very little sigh. "Ser Baldassare is good to me," she would say;
+"would you have me do him a wrong? Last Friday he gave me a silver piece
+to spend in whatsoever I chose. I bought a little holy-water stoup with
+a Gesulino upon it, bowered in roses. On Sunday morning he patted my
+cheek and called me a good girl. To say nothing of the many times he has
+pinched my ear, all this was very kind, as you must see. With what do
+you ask me to reward him? Fie!" La Testolina snorted, and shrugged
+herself away. Vanna went on with her sewing and her little song----
+
+
+     "Giovanottin, che te ne vai di fuora,
+     Stattene allegro, e cosi vo' far io.
+
+     Se ti trovassi qualche dama nuova,
+     L'ha da saper che tua dama son io."
+
+
+So sang she, innocently enough, whose sweethearting went no farther than
+her artless lips. There was not a spice of mischief in the girl. What
+she had told La Testolina had been no more than the truth: Master
+Baldassare was good to her--better than you would have believed possible
+in such a crabbed old stub of a man. He was more of a father to her than
+ever Don Urbano had been to anything save his own belly; but it was
+incontestable that he was not father to anything else. That alone might
+have been a grievance for Vanna, but there is no evidence that it was.
+Baldassare was by nature gruff, by habit close-fisted: like all such
+men, the more he felt the deeper he hoarded the thought under his ribs.
+The most he would venture would be a hand on her hair and a grunt when
+she did well; so sure as she looked up gratefully at him the old man
+drew off, with puckered brows and jaws working together. He may have
+been ashamed of his weakness; it is dead certain that no one in Verona,
+least of all Vanna herself, suspected him of any affection for his young
+wife. Mostly he was silent; thus she became silent too whenever he was
+in the house. This was against nature, for by ordinary her little songs
+bubbled from her like a bird's. But to see him so glum and staring
+within doors awed her: she set a finger to her lips as she felt the tune
+on her tongue, and went about her business mute. Baldassare would go
+abroad, stooping under his pack: she took her seat at the shop-door,
+threaded her needle, her fingers flew and her fancy with them. The
+spring of her music was touched, and all the neighbours grew to listen
+for the gentle cadences she made.
+
+So passed a year, so two years passed. Vanna was twenty-three, looking
+less, when along there came one morning a tall young friar, a Carmelite,
+by name Fra Battista, with a pair of brown dove's eyes in his smooth
+face. These he lifted towards Vanna's with an air so timid and so
+penetrating, so delicate and hardy at once, that when he was gone it was
+to leave her with the falter of a verse in her mouth, two hot cheeks,
+and a quicker heart.
+
+This Fra Battista, by birth a Bergamask, accredited to the convent at
+Verona by reason of his parts as a preacher, was tall and shapely, like
+a spoilt pretty boy to look at, leggy, and soft in the palm. His frock
+set off this petted appearance--it gave you the idea of a pinafore on
+him. He did not look manly, was not manly by any means, and yet not so
+girlish but that you could doubt his sex. His eyes, which, as I say,
+were soft as a dove's pair, he was not fond of showing; and this gave
+them the more searching appeal when he did. His mouth, full and fleshy
+in the lips, had a lovely curve. He kept it very demure, and, when he
+spoke, spoke softly. This was a young man born to be Lancilotto to some
+Ginevra or other; and, to do him justice, he had had his share of
+adventure in that sort at an early age. He had learned more out of Ovid
+than from the Fathers of Divinity, you may believe. Very popular he was
+in whatsoever convent he harboured, as a preacher famous all over
+Lombardy and the March,--in Bergamo, in Brescia, even as far as Mantua
+he had been heard of. The superior at Verona did his best to spoil him
+by endearment, flattery, and indulgence; but this was difficult, since
+he had been spoilt already.
+
+He passed down the Via Stella morning and evening for a week. Morning
+and evening his eyes encountered Vanna's. The third evening he smiled at
+her, the fourth morning he saluted her; the fifth evening he stopped and
+slipped in a gentle word; the first evening of the second week he
+stopped again, and that night, La Testolina being by, there was quite a
+little conversation.
+
+La Testolina had black eyes, a trim figure, and a way of wriggling which
+showed these to advantage. Fra Battista's fame and the possibility of
+mischief set her flashing; she led the talk and found him apt: it was
+not difficult to aim every word that it should go through and leave a
+dart in Vanna's timid breast. The girl was so artless, you could see her
+quiver, or feel her, at every shot. For instance, was his sanctity very
+much fatigued by yesterday's sermon? _Eh, la bella predica!_ What
+invocations of the saints, what heart-groping, what reachings after the
+better parts of women! It was some comfort to know that a woman had a
+better part at all--by the Saviour! for their handling by men gave no
+hint of it. Let Fra Beato--ah, pardon, Fra Battista she should have
+said--send some such arrows into men's hides! See them, for the
+gross-feeding, surly, spend-all, take-all knaves that they were! One or
+two she might name if she had a mind--ah! one or two in this very city
+of Verona, in this very Street of the Star, who--But there! Vanna must
+go and hear the Frate's next sermon, she must indeed. And if she could
+take her old curm-- Pshutt! What was she saying? How she ran on! She did
+indeed. Fra Battista, leaning against the lintel, kept his eyelids on
+the droop, seemed to find his toes of interest. But now and again he
+would look delicately up, and so sure as he did the brown eyes and the
+grey seemed to swim towards each other, to melt in a point, swirl in an
+eddy of the feelings, in which Vanna found herself drowning and found
+such death sweet. La Testolina still ran on, but now in a monologue. Fra
+Battista looked and longed, and Vanna looked again and thrilled. It grew
+quite dark; nothing of each other could they see and little know, until
+the friar put out his foot and found Vanna's. A tremor, beginning at her
+heart, ran down to her toes; Battista felt the flutter of it and was
+assured.
+
+When he left her that night he kissed her cold hand, then La
+Testolina's, which he found by no means cold, and moved off leisurely
+towards the Piazza dell' Erbe. Neither woman spoke for a while: La
+Testolina was picking at her apron, Vanna sat quietly in the dark
+holding her heart. She was still in a tremble, so ridiculously moved
+that when her friend kissed her she burst out crying. La Testolina went
+nodding away; and the end of the episode may be predicted. Not at one
+but at many sermons of the tall Carmelite did Vanna sit rapt; not for
+one but for every dusk did he stoop to kiss her hand. All Verona saw
+her devotion,--all Verona, that is, but one old Veronese. The essence of
+comedy being that the spectators shall chuckle at actors in a fog, here
+was a comedy indeed.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE SEED OF DISCORD
+
+
+When Vanna announced her condition the neighbours looked slyly at each
+other; when her condition announced Vanna, they chattered; the gossip
+sank to whispering behind the hand as time went on, and ceased
+altogether when the baby was born. That was a signal for heads to shake.
+Some pitied the father, many defended the mother: it did not depend upon
+your sex; sides were taken freely and voices were shrill when neither
+was by. Down by the river especially, upon that bleached board below the
+bridge, _ci_ and _si_ whistled like the wind in the chimneys, and the
+hands of testimony were as the aspen leaves when storms are in. Some
+took one side, some another; but when, in due season, it was seen what
+inordinate pride Baldassare had in the black-eyed _bambino_ there was no
+question of sides. He had ranked himself with the unforgivable party:
+the old man was an old fool, a gull whose power of swallow stirred
+disgust. Vanna had the rights of it, they said; such men were made to be
+tricked. As for Fra Battista's pulpit, it was thronged about with
+upturned faces; for those who had not been before went now to judge what
+they would have done under the circumstances. Having been, there were
+no two opinions about that. Messer Gabriele Arcangelo, some said,
+judging by the honey-tongue; San Bastiano, others considered him, who
+went by his comely proportions; and these gained the day, since his
+beardless face and friar's frock induced the idea of innocence, which
+Sebastian's virgin bloom also taught. The quality of his sermons did not
+grow threadbare under this adventitious criticism: he kept a serene
+front, lost no authority, nor failed of any unction. There was always a
+file at his confessional; and at Corpus Christi, when in the pageant he
+actually figured as Sebastian, his plump round limbs roped to a
+pine-stock drew tears from all eyes.
+
+Unhappily you have to pay for your successes. There were other preachers
+in Verona, and other eloquent preachers who, being honest men, had had
+to depend upon their eloquence. These were the enemy--Franciscans, of
+course, and Dominicans--who got wind of something amiss, and began to
+nose for a scandal. What they got gave them something besides eloquence
+to lean on: there were now other sermons than young Fra Battista's, and
+the moral his person pointed had a double edge. In fact, where he
+pointed with his person, the Dominicans pointed with their sharp
+tongues. The Franciscans, more homely, pointed with their fingers. Fra
+Battista began to be notorious--a thing widely different from fame; he
+also began to be uncomfortable, and his superior with him. They talked
+it over in the cloister, walking up and down together in the cool of the
+day. "It has an ugly look, my dear," said the provincial; "send the
+young woman to me."
+
+What of the young woman, meantime? Let me tell the truth: motherhood
+became her so well that she was brazen from the very beginning. No
+delicacy, no pretty shame, no shrinking--she gloried in the growing
+fact. When she was brought to bed she made a quick recovery; she
+insisted upon a devout churching, an elaborate christening of the
+doubtful son (whereat, if you will believe me, no other than Fra
+Battista himself must do the office!); thenceforth she was never seen
+without her _bimbo_. While she worked it lay at her feet or across her
+knee like a stout chrysalis; the breast was ever at its service, pillow
+or fount; when it slept she lifted up a finger or her grave eyes at the
+very passers-by; her lips moulded a "Hush!" at them lest they should
+dare disturb her young lord's rest. The saucy jade! Was ever such
+impudence in the world before? It drew her, too, to old Baldassare in a
+remarkable way. This the neighbours--busy with sniffing--did not see.
+She had always had a sense of the sweet root under the rind, always
+purred at his stray grunts and pats, taking them by instinct for what
+they were really worth; and now to watch his new delight filled her with
+gratitude--and more, she felt free to love the man. For one thing, it
+unlocked his lips and hers. She could sing about the house since Cola
+had come--they had christened him after good Saint Nicholas--because
+Master Baldassare was so talkative on his account. The old man sat at
+home whenever he could, in his shiny armchair, his cup of black wine by
+his side, and watched Vanna with the baby by the hour together, poring
+over every downward turn of her pretty head, every pass of her fingers,
+every little eager striving of the sucking child. There were, indeed, no
+bounds to his content: to be a father--poor old soul!--seemed to him the
+most glorious position in the world. Can Grande II. in the
+judgment-seat, the bishop stalled in his throne, the Holy Father himself
+in the golden chambers of his castle at Avignon, had nothing to offer
+Ser Baldassare Dardicozzo, the old-clothes man.
+
+Though the neighbours knew nothing of this inner peace, they could not
+deny that Monna Vanna, brazen or no, was mightily become by her new
+dignity or (as you should say) indignity. She was more staid, more
+majestic; but no less the tall, swaying, crowned girl she had ever been.
+She was seen, without doubt, for a splendid young woman. The heavy child
+seemed not to drag her down, nor the slant looks of respectable
+citizens, her neighbours, to lower her head. She met them with level
+eyes quite candid, and a smiling mouth to all appearance pure. When she
+found they would not discuss her riches, she talked of theirs. When she
+found them over-satisfied with their children, she laughed quietly as
+one who knew better. This was a thing to take away a woman's breath,
+that she should grow the more glorious for her shame. Party feeling had
+been stormy, like crossing tides, between those who held Baldassare for
+a gull and those who resented Vanna's unruffled brows. But now there was
+but one party. It was very well to hoodwink an old skinflint; but, by
+the Mass, not honest to flaunt your methods in the world's face. And
+since our own dignity is the skin upon which we rely for all our
+protection, while contempt for our neighbours is but a grease we put
+upon it for its ease, it was self-defence which brought it about that
+the party against Vanna grew ominously large, while Baldassare gained
+quite a host of sympathizers. The girl was now shunned, ostentatiously,
+carefully shunned. Even La Testolina was shy of her. But, bless you, she
+saw nothing of it--or cared nothing. She chattered to her grossly
+deceived husband, went (nominally, you may be sure!) confessing to the
+grossly deceiving friar, she cooed to her baby, warbled her little
+songs, looked handsome, carried herself nobly, as if she were the
+Blessed Virgin herself, no less. This could not be endured: a thousand
+tongues were ready to shoot at her, and would have shot but for fear of
+old Baldassare's grim member--reputed forked. While he was in the way,
+fat-headed fool, there was no moral glow to be won by a timely word. The
+tongues lay itching; two or three barren women in the Via Stella were
+hoarding stones.
+
+Then, just about the time when the prior of the Carmelites bid Fra
+Battista send him the young woman, Baldassare took the road for a round
+of chaffer which might keep him out of Verona a week. The Via Stella
+felt, and Fra Battista knew, that the chance had come.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE HARVEST OF LITTLE EASE
+
+
+Verona, stormy centre of strife, whose scarred grey face still wears a
+blush when viewed from the ramp of the Giusti garden, was in those times
+a place of short and little ease. The swords were never rusty. A warning
+clang from the belfry, two or three harsh strokes, the tall houses
+disgorged, the streets packed; Capulet faced Montague, Bevilacqua caught
+Ridolfi by the throat, and Della Scala sitting in his hall knew that he
+must do murder if he would live a prince. It seems odd that the suckling
+of a little shopkeeper should lead to such issues; but so it was. And
+thus it was.
+
+On the morning of Baldassare's setting-out for the Mantuan road, La
+Testolina--at that time much and unhealthily in Fra Battista's
+hire--came breathless to the Via Stella. Craning her quick head round
+the door-post, she saw Vanna sitting all in cool white (for the weather
+was at the top of summer), stooped over her baby, happy and calm as
+always, and fingering her breast that she might give the little tyrant
+ease of his drink. That baby was a glutton. "Hist, Vanna, hist!" La
+Testolina whispered; and Vanna looked up at her with a guarded smile, as
+who should say, "Speak softer, my dear, lest Cola should strangle in
+his swallow."
+
+But La Testolina's eyes were like pin-points, centring all her alarms.
+
+"You must come to the Carmelites, Vanna. There is a great to-do. The
+warden of San Francesco has been to the bishop, and the bishop is with
+Can Grande at this moment. You must come, indeed, at
+once--_subitissimo_!"
+
+Vanna laughed--the rich quiet laugh of a girl whose affairs are in good
+train, and all other affairs the scratch of a flea.
+
+"Why, what have I to do with the bishop and Can Grande, La Testolina?"
+says she. "My master is out, and I must mind the shop. There is baby
+too."
+
+"By Saints Pan and Silvanus, my girl, it will be the worse for you if
+you come not," said La Testolina, with a tragic sniff. "Eh, you little
+fool, don't you know that it is you and your brat have set all Verona by
+the ears?"
+
+Vanna had never thought of the ears of Verona, and knew not how to think
+of them now; but she saw that her friend was in a fever of suppressed
+knowledge. Therefore she shawled her head and her baby in her sea-blue
+cloak, locked the shop-door, and followed La Testolina.
+
+The sealed gates in the white convent wall were barred and
+double-locked. A scared brother cocked his eye through the grille to see
+who was there.
+
+"It is she," hissed La Testolina.
+
+"_Dio mio_, the _causa causans_!" cried he, and let them in through a
+cranny. "Follow me, mistresses, and God give good ending to this
+adventure," he prayed, as he slippered up the court.
+
+Vanna, blank and smiling, La Testolina with wandering, fearful eyes,
+followed.
+
+They found the prior sitting well back in his ebony chair and in
+meditation, his chin buried in his hand. Behind him (and behind his back
+his hands) was Fra Corinto the pittanciar, pockmarked, thin, and
+mortified. He looked the prior's reproach, and was.
+
+"Now, women," said the prior, testily--a fat and flabby old man with a
+sour mouth--"now, women, which of you is at the bottom of this accursed
+business? Where is the baby? Let me judge for myself."
+
+La Testolina, protesting her remarkable innocence by every quiver of her
+head, edged Vanna to the front. Vanna stood up, straight as a candle,
+and unveiled her bosom.
+
+"Do you want to see my little son, reverend prior?" she said. "Behold
+him here (_Eccololi_)." She held him out proudly in her arms, as if he
+were monstrance and she priest.
+
+Now whether it was that motherhood had fired a comely girl with the
+beautiful seriousness of a woman, so that she was transfigured before
+him; or whether some chance passage of the crossing lights played tricks
+with his vision--which it was, or whether it was both, I know not. He
+saw, or thought he saw, a tall, smiling lady, hooded in blue over white,
+holding up a child; he saw, or thought for a moment that he saw, the
+Image of all Mothers displaying the Image of all Sons. His fingers
+pattered over his scapular. "Eh, my Lady the Virgin! What dost thou
+here, glorifying this place?" As soon as he had said it he might have
+known that he was a fool; but Vanna's large grey eyes loomed upon him to
+swallow him up, her colour of faint rose glowed over him and throbbed.
+_Vera incessu patuit dea!_ "By her presence ye shall judge her," quoth
+the prior to himself, and hid his eyes.
+
+There was a hush upon all the group in the chamber, during which you
+could have heard afar off the nasal discords of the brethren in choir
+droning through an office. No one spoke. The prior's lips moved at his
+prayers; Fra Corinto looked frowningly before him; La Testolina was
+fidgety to speak, but dared not; Vanna, her long form like a ripple of
+moonlight in the dusk, cooed under her voice to the baby; he, unheeding
+cause of so much strife in high places, held out his pair of puckered
+hands and crowed to the company. So with their thoughts: the prior
+thought he had seen the Holy Virgin; Fra Corinto thought the prior an
+old fool; La Testolina hoped his reverence had not the colic; and Vanna
+thought of nothing at all.
+
+Fra Corinto it was (looking not for Madonna in a baggage), who, by
+discreetly coughing, brought his master back to his senses. The prior
+cleared his throat once or twice, looked at the young woman, and felt
+quite himself. Ridiculous what tricks a flicker of sunlight will play on
+the wisest of men!
+
+"Monna Vanna," said he, "I have not brought you here to judge between
+you and my brother Battista, now at discipline in his cell. The flesh,
+which he should have tamed, has raised, it appears, a bruised head for
+one last spite. My brother was bitten, and my brother fell into sin.
+Whether, as of old, the tempter was the woman, it is sure that, as of
+old, the eater was a man. I will not condemn you unheard, lest I incur
+reproach in my turn. But our order is in peril; the enemy is abroad,
+with Envy, Hatred, and Malice barking on their leashes. What can the
+poor sheep do but scatter before the wolves? Fra Battista, his penance
+duly done, must leave Verona; and you, my sister, must do penance, that
+God be not mocked, nor the Veronese upraised to mock Him."
+
+Of this solemn appeal, Vanna, to all seeming, understood not one word.
+True, she blushed a little, but that was because a prior was talking to
+her: her honest grey eyes were quite untroubled, her smile as tender as
+ever. She spoke as one deprecating temerity--that she should speak at
+all to so great a man--and by no means any judgment.
+
+"I am only a poor girl, reverend prior," said she, "most ignorant and
+thick-witted. Pray, what have I and my baby to do with these high
+matters of Fra Battista's error?"
+
+The prior grew angry. "Tush, my woman," he grunted, "I beg you to drop
+the artless. It is out of place here. Let me look at the youngster."
+
+"Yes, yes, mistress, let us see the child," said Fra Corinto, who
+croaked like a nightingale in June.
+
+Vanna moved forward on a light foot. "Willingly, reverend fathers," said
+she. "He is a fine child, they all say, and reputed the image of his
+father." A sublime utterance, full of humoursome matter, if it had been
+a time for humours.
+
+But it was not. La Testolina could not contain her virtuous
+indignation--for who is so transcendently righteous as your rascal for
+once in the right?
+
+"Hey, woman!" she cried shrilly, "what grossness is this? Do you think
+the whole city don't know about you?"
+
+Vanna turned quivering. "And what is it that the whole city knows but
+does not say, if you please?"
+
+The prior wagged helplessly his hands. Like Pilate, he would have washed
+off the business if he could. He looked at the two women. Eh, by the
+Lord! there would be a scene. But the whole thing was too impudent a
+fraud: there must be an end of it. He caught Fra Corinto's eyes and
+raised his brows. Fra Corinto was his jackal--here was his cue. He went
+swiftly to the door, set it open, came back and caught Vanna roughly by
+the shoulder. He turned her shocked face to the open door, and his dry
+voice grated horribly upon her ears.
+
+"Out with you, piece!" was what he said; and Vanna reeled.
+
+For a full minute she gaped at him for a meaning; his face taught the
+force of his words only too well. She sobbed, threw up her high head,
+bent it, like Jesus, for the cross, and fled.
+
+The old porter leered by his open gates. "He! he! They are all outside,"
+he chuckled--"Magpies and Dusty-hoods, Parvuses, Minors and Minims,
+Benets, and Austins, every cowl in Verona! Come along, my handsome
+girl, you must move briskish this day!"
+
+She heard the hoarse muttering of the men, and, a worse poison for good
+ears, the shrill venom of the women. Out of the gates she blindly went,
+and all the pack opened their music upon her. Stones flew, but words
+flew faster and stuck more deep. The mob, as she blundered through the
+streets, shuffling, gasping, stumbling at her caught gown, dry-eyed,
+open-mouthed, panting her terror, her bewilderment, her shame and
+amaze--the mob, I say, dizzied about her like a cloud of wasps; yet they
+had in them what wasps have not--voices primed by hatred to bay her mad.
+There was no longer any doubt for her: the pittanciar's word (which had
+not been "piece") was tossed from pavement to pavement, from balcony to
+balcony, out at every open door, shot like slops from every leaning
+casement, and hissed in her ears as it flew. It was a mad race. The
+Franciscans tucked up their frocks and discarded stones, that they might
+run and shout the more freely. The Dominicans soon tired: their end was
+served. The cloistered orders were out of condition; the secular clergy
+came to weary of what was, after all, but a matter for the mendicants.
+The common people, however, had the game well in hand. They headed her
+off the narrow streets, where safety might have been, and kept her to
+the Lung' Adige. Round the great S the river makes she battled her blind
+way, trying for nothing, with wits for nothing, without hope, or
+understanding, or thought. She ran, a hunted woman, straight before her,
+and at last shook off the last of her pursuers by San Zeno. Stumbling
+headlong into a little pine-wood beyond the gates, she fell, swooned,
+and forgot.
+
+It was near dark when she opened her loaded eyes--that is, there was no
+moon, but a great concourse of stars, which kept the night as a long
+time of dusk. The baby was awake, too, groping for food and whimpering a
+little. She sat up to supply him: though in that act her brain swam, it
+is probable the duty saved her. Fearing to faint again, she dared not
+allow herself to think; for children must be fed though their mothers
+are stoned from the gates. Vanna nursed him till he dropped asleep, and
+sat on with her thoughts and troubles. Happily for her, he had turned
+these to other roads than the Lung' Adige. She knew that if he was to be
+fed again she must feed also.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE MIRACLE OF THE PEACH-TREE
+
+
+Directly you were outside the Porta San Zeno the peach-trees began--acre
+by acre of bent trunks, whose long branches, tied at the top, took
+shapes of blown candle-flames: beyond these was an open waste of bents
+and juniper scrub, which afforded certain eatage for goats.
+
+Here three herd-boys, Luca, Biagio, and Astorre, simple brown-skinned
+souls, watched their flocks all the summer night, sleeping, waking to
+play pranks with each other, whining endless doggerel, praying at every
+scare, and swearing at every reassurance. Simple puppyish folk though
+they were, Madonna of the Peach-Tree chose them to witness her epiphany.
+
+It was a very still night, of wonderful star-shine, but without a moon.
+The stars were so thickly spread, so clear and hot, that there was light
+enough for the lads to see each other's faces, the rough shapes of each
+other. It was light enough to notice how the square belfry of San Zeno
+cut a wedge of black into the spangled blue vault. Sheer through the
+Milky Way it ploughed a broad furrow, which ended in a ragged edge. You
+would never have seen that if it had not been a clear night.
+
+Still also it was. You heard the cropping of the goats, the jaws' champ
+when they chewed the crisp leaves; the flicker of the bats' wings. In
+the marsh, half a mile away, the chorus of frogs, when it swelled up,
+drowned all nearer noise; but when it broke off suddenly, those others
+resumed their hold upon the stillness. It was a breathless night of
+suspense. Anything might happen on such a night.
+
+Luca, Biagio, and Astorre, under the spell of this marvellous night, lay
+on their stomachs alert for alarms. A heavy-wheeling white owl had come
+by with a swish, and Biagio had called aloud to Madonna in his agony.
+Astorre had crossed himself over and over again: this was the Angel of
+Death cruising abroad on the hunt for goats or goat-herds; but "No, no!"
+cried Luca, eldest of the three, "the wings are too short, friends. That
+is a fluffy new soul just let loose. She knows not the way, you see. Let
+us pray for her. There are devils abroad on such close nights as this."
+
+Pray they did, with a will, "Ave Maria," "O maris Stella," and half the
+Paternoster, when Biagio burst into a guffaw, and gave Luca a push which
+sent Astorre down.
+
+"Why, 'tis only a screech-owl, you fools!" he cried, though the sound of
+his own voice made him falter; "an old mouse-teaser," he went on in a
+much lower voice. "Who's afraid?"
+
+A black and white cat making a pounce had sent hearts to mouths after
+this: though they found her out before they had got to "Dominus tecum,"
+she left them all in a quiver. It had been a cat, but it might have been
+the devil. Then, before the bristles had folded down on their backs,
+they rose up again, and the hair of their heads became rigid as quills.
+Over the brow of a little hill, through the peach-trees (which bowed
+their spiry heads to her as she walked), came quietly a tall white Lady
+in a dark cloak. Hey! powers of earth and air, but this was not to be
+doubted! Evenly forward she came, without a footfall, without a rustle
+or the crackling of a twig, without so much as kneeing her skirt--stood
+before them so nearly that they saw the pale oval of her face, and said
+in a voice like a muffled bell, "I am hungry, my friends; have you any
+meat?" She had a face like the moon, and great round eyes; within her
+cloak, on the bosom of her white dress, she held a man-child. He, they
+passed their sacred word, lifted in his mother's arms and turned
+open-handed towards them. Luca, Biagio, and Astorre, goat-herds all and
+honest lads, fell on their faces with one accord; with one voice they
+cried, "Madonna, Madonna, Madonna! pray for us sinners!"
+
+But again the Lady spoke in her gentle tones. "I am very hungry, and my
+child is hungry. Have you nothing to give me?" So then Luca kicked the
+prone Biagio, and Biagio's heel nicked Astorre on the shin. But it was
+Luca, as became the eldest, who got up first, all the same; and as soon
+as he was on his feet the others followed him. Luca took his cap off,
+Biagio saw the act and followed it. Astorre, who dared not lift his
+eyes, and was so busy making crosses on himself that he had no hands to
+spare, kept his on till Luca nudged Biagio, and Biagio cuffed him
+soundly, saying, "Uncover, cow-face."
+
+Then Luca on his knees made an offering of cheese and black bread to
+the Lady. They saw the gleam of her white hand as she stretched it out
+to take the victual. That hand shone like agate in the dark. They saw
+her eat, sitting very straight and noble upon a tussock of bents.
+Astorre whispered to Biagio, Biagio consulted with Luca for a few
+anxious moments, and communicated again with Astorre. Astorre jumped up
+and scuttled away into the dark. Presently he came back, bearing
+something in his two hands. The three shock-heads inspected his burden;
+there was much whispering, some contention, almost a scuffle. The truth
+was, that Biagio wanted to take the thing from Astorre, and that Luca
+would not allow it. Luca was the eldest and wanted to take it himself.
+Astorre was in tears. "_Cristo amore!_" he blubbered, "you will spill
+the milk between you. I thought of it all by myself. Let go, Biagio; let
+go, Luca!" So they whispered and tussled, pulling three different ways.
+The Lady's voice broke over them like silver rain. "Let him who thought
+of the kind act give me the milk," she said; so young Astorre on his
+knees handed her the horn cup, and through the cracks of his fingers
+watched her drink every drop.
+
+That done, the cup returned with a smile piercingly sweet, the Lady
+rose. Saints on thrones, how tall she was! "The _bimbo_ will thank you
+for this to-morrow, as I do now," said she. "Goodnight, my friends, and
+may the good God have mercy upon all souls!" She turned to go the way
+she had come, but Astorre, covering his eyes with one hand, crept
+forward on three legs (as you might say) and plucked the hem of her
+robe up, and kissed it. She stooped to lay a hand upon his head. "Never
+kiss my robe, Astorre," said she--and how under Heaven did she know his
+name if she were not _what she was_?--"never kiss my robe, but get up
+and let me kiss you." Well of Truth! to think of it! Up gets Astorre,
+shaking like a nun in a fit, and the Lady bent over him and, as sure as
+you are you, kissed his forehead. Astorre told his village next day as
+they sat round him in a ring, and he on the wellhead as plain to be seen
+as this paper, that he felt at that moment as if two rose-leaves had
+dropped from heaven upon his forehead. Slowly then, very slowly and
+smoothly (as they report), did the Lady move away towards the
+peach-trees whence she had come. In the half light there was--for by
+this it was the hour before dawn--they saw her take a peach from one of
+the trees. She stayed to eat it. Then she walked over the crest of the
+orchard and disappeared. As soon as they dared, when the light had come,
+they looked for her over that same crest, but could see nothing
+whatever. With pale, serious faces the three youths regarded each other.
+There was no doubt as to what had happened--a miracle! a miracle!
+
+With one consent then--since this was plainly a Church affair--they ran
+to their parish priest, Don Gasparo. He got the whole story at last;
+nothing could shake them; no detail was wanting. Thus it was: the
+Blessed Virgin, carrying in her arms the Santissimo Bambino Gesu, had
+come through the peach-trees, asked for and eaten of their food, prayed
+for them aloud to Messer Domeneddio himself, and kissed Astorre on the
+forehead. As they were on their knees, she walked away, stopped, took a
+peach, ate it, walked on, vanished--_ecco_! The curate rubbed his head,
+and tried another boy. Useless: the story was the same. Third boy, same
+story. He tucked up his cassock with decision, took his biretta and
+walking-staff, and said to the three goat-herds:--
+
+"My lads, all this is matter of miracle. I do not deny its truth--God
+forbid it in a simple man such as I am. But I do certainly ask you to
+lead me to the scene of your labours."
+
+The boys needed no second asking: off they all set. The curate went over
+every inch of the ground. Here lay Luca, Biagio, and Astorre; the belfry
+of San Zeno was in such and such a direction, the peach-trees in such
+and such. Good: there they were. What next? According to their account,
+Madonna had come thus and thus. The good curate bundled off to spy for
+footprints in the orchard. Marvel! there were none. This made him look
+very grave; for if she made no earthly footprints, she could have no
+earthly feet. Next he must see by what way she had gone. She left them
+kneeling here, said they, went towards the peach-garden, stayed by a
+certain tree (which they pointed out), plucked a peach from the very top
+of it--this they swore to, though the tree was near fourteen feet
+high--stood while she ate it, and went over the brow of the rising
+ground. Here was detail enough, it is to be hoped. The curate nosed it
+out like a slot-hound; he paced the track himself from the scrub to the
+peach-tree, and stood under this last gazing to its top, from there to
+its roots; he shook his head many times, stroked his chin a few: then
+with a broken cry he made a pounce and picked up--a peach-stone! After
+this to doubt would have been childish; as a fact he had no more than
+the boys.
+
+"My children," said he, "we are here face to face with a great mystery.
+It is plain that Messer Domeneddio hath designs upon this hamlet, of
+which we, His worms, have no conception. You, my dear sons, He hath
+chosen to be workers for His purpose, which we cannot be very far wrong
+in supposing to be the building of an oratory or tabernacle to hold this
+unspeakable relic. That erection must be our immediate, anxious care.
+Meantime I will place the relic in the pyx of our Lady's altar, and mark
+the day in our calendar for perpetual remembrance. I shall not fail to
+communicate with his holiness the bishop. Who knows what may be the end
+of this?"
+
+He was as good as his word. A procession was formed in no time--children
+carrying their rosaries and bunches of flowers, three banners, the whole
+village with a candle apiece; next Luca, Biagio, and Astorre with larger
+candles--half a pound weight each at the least; then four men to hold up
+a canopy, below which came the good curate himself with the relic on a
+cushion.
+
+It was deposited with great reverence in the place devoted, having been
+drenched with incense. There was a solemn mass. After which things the
+curate thought himself at liberty to ruffle into Verona with his news.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE VISITATION OF THE GOLDEN FISH
+
+
+When a beast of chase--hart-royal, bear, or wolf--has been bayed and
+broken up, the least worthy parts are thrown to the curs which always
+come in at the heels of the pack. So it is with a kingly seat: the best
+of the meats, after the great officers of the household have feasted, go
+to the dependants of these; the peelings and guttings, the scum and
+scour of the broth, are flung farther, to the parasites of the
+parasites, the ticks on ticks' backs. Round about the Castle of Verona,
+where Can Grande II. misused the justice which his forefathers had set
+up, lay the houses of his courtiers; beyond them the lodgings of the
+grooms; beyond them again, down to the river's brink, were the stews and
+cabins and unholy dens, whose office was to be lower than the lowest,
+that there might still be degrees for the gentlemen of gentlemen's
+gentlemen. And since even cockroaches must drink, in this fungus-bed of
+misery there flourished a rather infamous tavern by the sale of _vino
+nostrano_, black and sour, of certain sausages, black also and nameless,
+speckled with white lumps, and of other wares whom to name were to
+expose. This was the tavern of the Golden Fish.
+
+On the evening of the day of the Translation of the Peach-stone, this
+tavern was full to suffocation. Stefano, the purple-faced host, in shirt
+and breeches, stood dealing the liquor from a tub. Two outlaws lay under
+the benches, partly for fear of a visit from the watch, partly because,
+having already fallen there once, they feared to fall there again if
+they rose. In one hand each held his knife, in the other his empty mug.
+Two ladies, intimates of theirs, Robaccia and Crucciacorda, sat
+immediately above them, with petticoats ready to make ambush the moment
+a staff should rattle at the door; round the table half a dozen shabby
+rogues bickered over their cards; Picagente, the hairy brigand, lay
+snoring across the threshold, and his dog on him; on a barrel in a
+corner a gigantic shepherd in leather, with bandaged legs and a patch
+over one eye, shut the other eye while he roared a hymn to Bacchus at
+the top stretch of his lungs. The oil-lamp flickered, flared, and
+gloomed, half drowned in the fumes of wine. A smell of wicked bodies,
+foul clothes, drink, and bad language made the air well-nigh solid. The
+hour was at the stroke of ten; outside the streets seemed asleep.
+
+In the middle of the uproar Stefano the host looked up sharply,
+listening.
+
+"Stop your devil's ferment, Malabocca!" he thundered at the shepherd;
+"stop it, or I'll split your crown."
+
+
+     "Bacco trionfante,
+     Amante e spumante,
+     Evviva l'ubbriacchezza!"
+
+
+roared Malabocca, screwing up his eye.
+
+Stefano brought down a mug full of wine upon his pate, which gave him a
+red baptism.
+
+"Mum, you blockhead, mum!" said his host "There is a stir outside the
+door I tell you!"
+
+The shepherd grew sober in a moment.
+
+There was a brief scramble in the room--then silence. The ladies'
+petticoats went farther than they were ever intended to go; Picagente
+rolled over and over till he reached cover under the table; the cards
+were hidden, all the players' heads buried in their elbows. Stefano blew
+out the light. Then they heard distinctly a fluttering knock at the
+door, timid but continuous.
+
+Feigning a yawn, Stefano growled, "Who's there at this hour?"
+
+The answer came in a woman's voice, saying, "Open, open, in the name of
+high God." It brought every head into the air again, but hushed every
+breath.
+
+The shepherd broke the silence with a groan. He brought his hand
+splashing on to his wet head, then fell to his knees and began to
+confess his sins.
+
+"My fault, my fault, my exceeding great fault! O Mary! O Jesus! _O nobis
+peccatoribus!_"
+
+Thus the shepherd, voicing the suspicions of the rest. So he became
+their prophet as well as their priest. He towered in the room.
+
+"I tell you, comrades, that the hour of our visitation is come. Not Can
+Grande and his hounds are hunting us this night; not the tumbril, the
+branding-irons, nor the cart's tail, are for us; but the pains of death,
+the fire eternal, the untirable worm, the trumpet of the Last Things!
+Who comes knocking in high God's name? Who saith 'Open'?--I will tell
+you: it is She who last night lit upon my village and my own sister's
+son. Eh! bodies of all dogs, what will become of us sinners?" Here the
+shepherd beat the drum of his breast as a signal before he fell flat on
+the floor.
+
+From behind his wailful voice the gentle knocking was heard running on.
+It had never ceased; it was insistent! Crossing himself desperately,
+Stefano slid back the bolts, then paused, then turned the key, then
+paused again to breathe hard, his hand upon the latch. He threw his head
+forward with a gesture of abandonment to what must be, flung wide the
+door, and dropped upon his two knees.
+
+Against a mild radiance, softer than any lamp could shed, was a tall
+shrouded woman's figure. They saw the round of her cloaked head, they
+saw the white stream of her under-robe run from a peak at her bosom in a
+broadening path to her feet. They saw the pure grey moon of her face,
+guessed by the dark rings where her eyes should be, watched with quicker
+awe the slow movement of her arms, lifted their own to what she held up,
+and to the running under-current of the two sobbing drabs muttered in
+one voice their remembered adoration.
+
+The tall shepherd rose up by the help of the table, swayed and spoke. No
+one knew his voice again, hollow as it was like the sea-grumble.
+
+"O Holiest, O Rose, O Stem of Sharon, O Tree of Carmel!" said he. "What
+wouldest thou with us sinners?"
+
+And the woman at the door said, "My friends, I have no roof to my head;
+will you take me in? I am hungry; have you no meat for my child and me?"
+
+The host in Stefano jogged the sinner to speak. "Surely, surely, sweet
+Lady! Surely, surely. I entreat your Graciousness to enter, to step in,
+to accommodate, to sit down, to be pleased to be easy, to--to--to--"
+inspiration failed him--"to sit down, in short," was his lame
+conclusion. His sweat (as he said next day) would have blinded any other
+man.
+
+Through the backing ranks of the scared company--Robaccia leaning face
+to the wall, sobbing her heart out; Picagente, the hairy brigand,
+breathing short and hard; the shepherd, glorified, exalted, bursting
+with prophecy; two thieves at their prayers and a wanton taking the
+words from them--through such an assembly the Lady of the Peach-Tree
+(who else, pray?) walked to the table. A soft grey light from without
+filled the room; there was no need of a lamp, nor did any eye then on
+watch fail to see all that followed. Bread and wine were served by
+Stefano on bent knee; bread and wine (but sparingly) did the Lady eat
+from cup and platter. That cup, that platter, encased in gold leaves and
+crusted with turquoise, are to this day in the Treasury. Crutches have
+been cast before them, hearts innumerable burn about them. When she had
+finished she sat a little while with her white cheek against her hand,
+whispering words in an unknown tongue (they said, who knew no baby
+language) to the child on her lap. He lifted up a little hand, and, "Eh,
+my son, my son," she said, "wilt thou take of me?" Then she gave him
+the breast, while not a soul said anything but prayers for half an hour.
+
+When the child slept the Lady folded up her dress, covered him with her
+cloak, and rose up in their midst.
+
+"Only the poor love the poor," said she, in those low tones which all
+Verona came to know by heart, "and only they who have little to eat give
+to them that have less. My little son will bless you for your charity;
+and I, good friends, will pray my Master to reward you when He comes.
+_Addio, addio_, be with God."
+
+Then she would have gone and left them crying had not Robaccia, the
+blowsy wench and good-for-naught, wailed aloud and caught her by the
+knees.
+
+"Mother, mother, mother!" whimpered this hardy rascal, "bless me a
+little more than the others, a very little more! I am bad--eh, God, I am
+vile, enough!--but I will never let thee go save thou kiss me."
+
+You could have heard the roomful of them catch breath together.
+Crucciacorda, the other woman, laughed horribly; the shepherd made a
+step forward to drag the slut away. But no! The light seemed to swell
+and grow towards that point where it threatens to be music, so charged
+with messages it is--it came undoubtedly from the heart of the Lady
+through her smile. For smile she did, as sweetly, as tenderly, as a
+breaking cloud. The sun of her smile was like a clean breath in the
+stivy den; and, behold, she took Robaccia by the hand and lifted her up,
+she encircled her with a mothering arm, and drew her close to her own
+breast. Her lips touched the bad girl's cheek, lingered for a moment
+there, wistfully withdrew; and Madonna of the Peach-Tree, none staying
+her now, went out into the dead street, and was seen no more of that
+company.
+
+The sun at noon looked down upon Verona at peace, upon her citizens at
+their prayers. Never was such a scene in the stormy little city before.
+All the bells of all the churches pealed all day--with no lack of arms
+to pull them. Men and women ran to and fro kissing whom they met, with a
+"Save you, brother!" "Save you, sister! well met, well met!" The Grey
+Brethren, the Black Brethren, the White Brethren of Carmel, held hands,
+and confessed to each other as many sins as they had time to remember.
+Can Grande went unarmed about his own city, Bevilacqua unbarred his
+door, Giusti married his mistress, the bishop said his prayers. The
+cripples at the church doors had no need to whine. As for the tavern of
+the Golden Fish, it smelt of lavender and musk and bergamot the day
+through. At one time there were eight litters with their bearers, eleven
+stallions, trapped and emblazoned, held by eleven grooms in livery,
+outside its door. The ladies of the litters were in the room upon their
+knees; the knights of the horses, their great helmets on their backs,
+knelt in the kennel praying devoutly. The wail of "Dies Irae" went down
+the Corso and up again, "Salve Regina" wavered over the sunny spaces of
+the Bra. In the amphitheatre, after an open-air mass, the
+Cardinal-Legate solemnly exposed the relics of last night's miracle,
+and a bodyguard of twenty noble youths, six chaplains, and a Benedictine
+abbot went to the suburb to escort into the city the curate with the
+Peach-stone. It was a glorious day, never to be forgotten in the annals
+of Verona. Charity and the open heart went side by side with compunction
+and the searching of the heart. Tears were shed and kissed away; kisses
+induced the fall of gentler tears. It might be stoutly questioned
+whether Verona held one unshriven soul, one sin unspoken, or one solace
+unawarded.
+
+It might be reasonably questioned, yet it must be denied. Within the
+walls of the friars of Mount Carmel were two uneasy spirits. Fra
+Sulpicio, the fat prior, was extended face downwards before the high
+altar; Fra Battista, the eloquent preacher, chewed his thumb in his
+cell. The pittanciar, on the other hand, was of the common mind. He was
+ambling down the Via Leoni with Brother Patricio of the Capuchins on one
+arm and Brother Martino of the Dominicans on the other, singing "In
+Exitu Israel" like a choir-boy. But the prior, who had half believed
+before, was sobbing his contrition into the pavement, and Fra Battista
+was losing faith in himself, the only faith he had.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+LAST CONSIDERATIONS OF CAN GRANDE II
+
+
+You are not to suppose that the spectacle of Verona garbed in a gown of
+innocence, singing hymns and weaving chaplets of lilies, was to go
+unnoticed by the ruling power. Can Grande II. was lord of Verona, a most
+atrocious rascal, and one of many; but, like his famous ancestor and
+namesake, he had a gibing tongue, which was evidence of a scrutiny
+tolerably cool of the shifts of human nature. Human nature, he had
+observed, must needs account to itself for itself. If it met with what
+it did not understand, it was prompt to state the problem in a phrase
+which it could not explain. The simplicity of the plan was as little to
+be denied as its convenience was obvious. It was thus that Can Grande
+II. understood the emotions of Verona; it was thus, indeed, that he
+himself, confronted with statements and an explanation which did not
+satisfy him, accounted to himself, like any mother's son of his lieges.
+He explained their explanation, but only by another inexplicable
+formula. The energy with which he expounded his own view to those about
+him betrayed, perhaps, a lurking uneasiness in the burly tyrant.
+
+"Pooh, my good lord," said he to the bishop, who had come full of the
+day's doings and night's report, "don't you know your own flock better
+than this? Did you ever hear a man with a broken limb attribute his
+mishap to other than Domeneddio? However drunk he may have been, however
+absurdly in a hurry--act of God! If it thunder and lighten of a summer
+night, if it turn the milk--a judgment! Luckily Monsignore has broad
+shoulders by all accounts; _per Bacco!_--He had need. Now then, look at
+this case. A belated woman with a baby stumbles upon a company of
+shepherds all in the twittering dark. Hearts jump to mouths, flesh
+creeps, hairs stand tiptoe--Madonna, of course! Whom else could they
+call her, pray? They don't know the woman: name her they must. Well! Who
+is there they don't know whose name comes readiest to the tongue?
+Madonna, of course. Good: _Ecco Madonna!_"
+
+This was very eloquently reasoned, but the bishop shook his head. "It
+was not a brace of goat-herds last night, Excellency, but a roomful of
+brigands and their trulls in the Golden Fish. The worst company in
+Verona, Excellency--the most brazen, the most case-hardened. But the
+story is the same from their mouths as from the lads'; not a detail is
+wanting; not one point gives the lie to another. Excellency, I would bow
+to your wit in any case but this. The affair is inexplicable short of a
+miracle."
+
+Can Grande knit his black brows; he objected to be crossed, and the more
+so when he had a sneaking thought that he was rightly crossed.
+
+"I should like to see my Lady this night with my own eyes, bishop," said
+he.
+
+"Hey, Excellency," cried the other, "there are many devout souls in the
+same case."
+
+Can Grande pished. "Devout jellyfish," he grunted; and then--"She seems
+to haunt one quarter, eh?"
+
+"It is so, Excellency, save that yesterday she must have passed through
+the Porta San Zeno unseen of the guard."
+
+"Have you interrogated the guard?" asked the tyrant, sharply.
+
+"It was done, Highness. Nothing entered between Compline and Prime but a
+couple of bullock-carts and a cavalcade of merchants from Brescia."
+
+"What was in the bullock-carts, bishop?"
+
+"Birch-bark, Excellency, for the yards."
+
+"H'm!" was all Can Grande had to say to this.
+
+He changed the conversation. "I have had the warden of the Minorites and
+the provincial of the Dominicans here this morning," he said, "about
+that accursed business of the rag-picker's wife. It is another example
+of what I told you just now, that these people attribute what they
+cannot understand to persons they can only dream about. They put down
+the whole of your miracles to a special reward for their zeal in
+hounding down the Carmelite and his mistress. They want the order
+expelled; I think they would like the house razed and the church washed
+out with holy water, or Fra Battista's blood--the latter for choice.
+Now, I cannot pull down religious houses, lord of Verona though I be,
+because a herd of frightened peasants have gone capering over the city
+singing, 'Salve festa dies.' I must really do the parties the honour of
+an interview before I draw the sword. Let me be sure which back I am
+going to score before I begin to carve. You had better bring the prior
+and Fra Lancillotto-Battista to me, and if you can collect the young
+woman and her brat, so much the better."
+
+"Alas! Excellency, I fear the young woman is in pieces," said the
+bishop. "She has never been heard of since the day of her expulsion."
+
+The advice, however, was good, the judgment good enough; but before it
+could be followed a stroke more telling than any Can Grande's sword
+could have made was wrought by Madonna of the Peach-Tree.
+
+On the night of that same day Can Grande was sitting in the palace with
+two chosen companions, as dare-devil as himself, waiting the hour of an
+assignation. It was about ten o'clock: at half-past the hour they were
+to go out cloaked into the streets, bent upon the lifting of a decent
+burgess's wife from her bed. Hence they were not in the castle, which is
+near San Zeno, but in the Della Scala Palace, in the very heart of the
+city. The two accomplices were Baldo Baldinanza, a grey villain, and
+young Francesco della Rocca Rossa. All three were armed with swords and
+daggers; the cloaks lay with the masks on the table. A servant came to
+the door, knocked, and waited. Can Grande, who (to be just) feared no
+eye upon his goings, shouted him into the room.
+
+"Well, son of a pig," was his greeting, "and what is it now?"
+
+The fellow, whose teeth chattered in his head, announced a veiled lady,
+very tall, who would not be denied. Baldinanza, grizzled and scarred as
+he was, took a quick breath and glanced at Rocca Rossa. The younger man
+was at no pains to conceal his emotions. His face ran the gamut from
+white to red, from red back again to white. It ended ashen. Neither
+looked at his master.
+
+"Let her in," said Can Grande; and each noticed how laboriously he
+spoke.
+
+The servant turned to obey: there in the doorway stood the Lady.
+
+Tall enough she was, her head seemingly about a foot from the cross-beam
+of the door. She was cloaked from crown to foot; nothing but the oval of
+her face, colourless white with lips very wan, and a droop to them
+inexpressibly sad, showed out of the dark column she made. The servant
+shrank into the passage and stayed there praying; of the three men at
+the table only one, Can Grande himself, had the spirit left to be
+courteous. He got up; the other two remained seated, Francesco with his
+face in his arms.
+
+"Madonna," began the tyrant; but she uncloaked her hand and put a finger
+to her sad lips.
+
+"I may not stay," she said, in a voice so weary that it drew tears to
+Baldinanza's wicked old eyes--"I may not stay; but I must warn you, Can
+Grande, before I go. Walk not in the streets this night, walk not by the
+Piazza, pass not the arched way; peril lies there. No sword shall help
+you, nor the royal seat you have,--enter it not. Now I have warned you;
+let me go."
+
+She put back her lifted hand under her cloak. Can Grande saw the round
+head of the Babe asleep. For five minutes after her disappearance no
+one spoke.
+
+Francesco was the first. He groaned, "God have mercy upon me a sinner,"
+between his hands. Then Baldinanza began to swear by all devils in
+Christendom and Jewry, not blasphemously, but in sheer desperate search
+for a little courage. Can Grande shook his head like a water-clogged
+hound, as if to get the ring of that hollow voice out of his ears. The
+first to rise was the eldest of the three. His eyes were very bright,
+and you could see the long scar plainly shining on his cheek.
+
+"I am a sinner too," said he, "but this night I will sleep clean." He
+made to go.
+
+"Do you desert me, comrade?" Can Grande asked.
+
+The old dog turned upon his master.
+
+"Mother of Pity!" he said in a whisper, "you are never going after
+this?"
+
+"I am going, good sir. What of you?" Baldinanza blinked hard. "I am your
+servant, Can Grande," he said shortly; "where you go I follow. That is
+how I read the Book of the Law."
+
+"Well, Checco," the tyrant went on, turning to the youngster still at
+the table, "what of you?"
+
+Francesco threw up his arms. "Never, Excellency, never!" he groaned in
+his anguish. "I dare not, I dare not!" He concealed neither his tears,
+nor his despair, nor his bodily fear.
+
+Can Grande shrugged. "Are you ready, Ubaldo?" he asked.
+
+Baldinanza bowed his head. The two men cloaked and masked themselves,
+and went out of the palace. The moon shone broad over the Piazza; it was
+a cold white night. They crossed at the farther corner, went up a few
+steps, and then were lost in the glooms of the arched way.
+
+They never came out alive. Six hired daggers hacked the life out of them
+and their hearts from their bodies. To this day the unwholesome place is
+called for a testimony the "Volto Barbaro," the horrid entry. So died in
+his sin Can Grande II., a man who feared nothing and won nothing but
+fear, and Can Signorio his son reigned in his stead. You might trust the
+cloth-white lackey and the stricken conscience of Francesco della Rocca
+Rossa to spread the news they had.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE REPROACHES
+
+
+A scared city of blank casements, a city of citizens feverishly asking
+questions whose answers they knew beforehand, a city of swift feet and
+hushed voices, was Verona on the morrow of Can Grande's murder. They
+carried the two torn bodies covered with one sheet to Sant' Anastasia,
+and laid them there, not in state but just huddled out of sight, while
+the bishop and his canons sang a requiem, and "Dirige" and "Placebo"
+went whining about the timbers of the roof. Nobody mourned the man, yet
+he had his due. His yellow-skinned wife knelt at his feet; Can Signorio,
+the new tyrant, frozen rigid, armed in mail, knelt at his head. The
+mercenaries held the nave, the bodyguard the door, archers lounged in
+the Piazza. All this parade of force was mere superfluity; Verona had no
+desire to revolt. The Veronese were for rending their hearts and not
+their rulers that day.
+
+In the afternoon the show of a trial-at-law was made. The depositions of
+the lackey, of Rocca Rossa, of the finders of the murdered, and the
+hunters for the murderers, were taken and recorded by the _Podesta_ in
+the presence of the council. After that the six unknown dastards were
+publicly condemned to death by the civil power from the loggia of the
+palace, and as publicly excommunicated by the bishop from the steps of
+the cathedral. It was felt on all hands that on this occasion the bishop
+had wielded the heavier arm: at least, in the absence of the criminals,
+he had brought his chances level. But what gave him most weight was that
+which had made the testimony of Francesco and the lackey overshadow
+every event of a week full of events--the interposition of Madonna of
+the Peach-Tree. Not a soul in the city was left to doubt; it might be
+said that not a soul was left to save, if faith can save you. The
+churches were packed from dawn to dark, not an altar in a chapel went
+bare of a mass. There were not enough of them. Altars were set up in the
+squares, and the street-ends blocked by a kneeling, bowing, weeping,
+adoring crowd. The bishop spoke the common mind when at Vespers that
+night he gave notice that he should go forthwith to purge the Carmelite
+church of the stain upon it, "at the request of my reverend brother the
+Prior Provincial of the Order." He set out then and there in solemn
+procession of the whole cathedral chapter. Rank formed on rank behind
+him till his ordered following trailed across Verona like a host.
+
+Now, although, as it has been said, and truly said, there was no soul in
+the city who doubted, there was one soul very much in doubt. That was
+Fra Battista's. The offer of purgation had come in frenzy from the lips
+of his prior; by its acceptance Fra Battista saw himself driven to one
+of two courses. He must destroy his reputation for obedience to
+heavenly commands which it had been rank heresy in him to overlook, or
+that other reputation he had won, for being a desperate lover, upon
+which he shrewdly surmised some of his fame depended. He may have been
+right about that--I am not here to defend him. If he admitted his guilt,
+he would be unfrocked; he would show like a chanticleer stripped of his
+hackles before his hens. If he denied it, he could never preach to the
+women again. Admit it? Be degraded? Eh, that would be a nasty shift!
+Deny it? Oh, preposterous! The whole day he battled with himself, voice
+crying against voice, without result. Observe, it was a mere case of
+expediency: he had no thought to own a fault or repudiate a slander--the
+fellow had no conscience at all. Expediency, indeed, was his conscience,
+his attention to it the ladder whereby he hoped to climb to the only
+heaven he knew. No imagination had he, but very tender senses.
+Applause--the hushed church, the following eyes, the sobered mouths, a
+sob in the breath--stood him for glory. He had worked for this, and, by
+the Lord! he had won it. And now he must lose it. Eh, never, never!
+Stated thus, he knew the issue of his battle. He knew he could not give
+up these things--eye-service, lip-service, heart-service--of which he
+had supped so thirstily. Rather be unfrocked, driven out of the city,
+reviled, and spit upon, than admit such a shame as that other: to prove
+himself a vapourer before his slaves, to be pricked like a bulging
+bladder, slit open like a rotten bag--God of the love of women, never,
+never in life! The other course, then? He pictured himself, the tall
+and comely youth, standing up alone before the grim assembly of elders,
+flinty old men who knew nothing of my Lord Amor, how he rides afield in
+a rose-coloured garment, throwing a flower and a dart to boy or girl as
+he goes. He saw a dewy-eyed Battista owning himself Love's priest. The
+women called him Sebastian for his beauty. A Sebastian he was, _per
+Dio!_ stuck all over with Amor's fiery darts. Like Sebastian, by his
+persecutors he would be stripped bare; like that martyr's enemies, they
+would wound his tender flesh; like Sebastian he would endure, casting
+his eyes upwards; and like Sebastian he would infallibly be wept by the
+women.
+
+If women will weep for you they will bleed for you; the fount of tears
+feeds a river as well as betrays a hidden well. Good, then; good, then!
+He saw a future in all this. From the other spike of the dilemma he saw
+nothing but his impaling; in this case, if he was impaled, balm at least
+would be laid upon his wounds. Fra Battista determined to brazen it out
+before Verona.
+
+They lit the tapers in the sanctuary betimes; and then all the brethren
+in their hoods sat in choir awaiting the bishop. With him and his clergy
+should come the reverend prior. Fra Battista was to stand on the
+rood-step to make his purgation. He would be backed by the light. So
+much of grace they would do him, that he should face a sea of dark, and
+be seen but in outline by it.
+
+The bishop's procession, long announced by the indefinable hum a great
+crowd breeds, swept up the nave with a slippering of countless feet.
+The bishop in purple, his canons in scarlet, his cross-bearer, his
+chaplains and singing-men, the bearer of his mitre, his ring on a
+cushion; after these the archdeacon and his chaplains, the clergy of the
+city, heads of religious orders, representatives of the civil arm, Can
+Signorio with the officers of his household; finally, the silent, eager
+people, edging past each other, whispering, craning their heads to see
+what there was and what there was not to be seen. So came Verona in a
+multitude to the great business of Fra Battista and the rag-picker's
+wife, in reality thrilling with but one thought: Madonna of the
+Peach-Tree was in the city, for any waking soul to see!
+
+After the penitential psalms, a litany, and the office appointed, the
+bishop stood with his back to the altar, and spoke _urbi et orbi_ from
+the text, "God, who in divers times and in divers places," etc. I cannot
+do more than report the sum of his discourse, which was that, as it was
+plain these late marvels had some root in the hidden ways of men's
+hearts, so it behoved him as a father to lay all such ways bare. That
+for himself, if he might speak as a man only, he was conscious of no sin
+unpurged which the apparitions might condemn, and certainly (alas!) of
+no graces of his own which they could have been designed to reward. Let
+each speak for himself. If there was any man in that vast assembly
+unshriven, let him confess now what his fault was; so that instant
+prayer might be made to their glorious Visitant for forgiveness by
+intercession. If, on the other hand, there was some Christian virtue
+blossoming in secret, let them (brethren) find it speedily out, that
+thanks might be given for mercies vouchsafed. It was noticed afterwards
+that the death by butchery of the feudal lord was passed by without a
+comment. There might have been reason for this in the circumstance that
+Can Grande II. had been warned of his sin, had nevertheless set out to
+commit it, and had died in the act, as it had been foretold. To discuss
+all this in the hearing of Can Signorio, his successor, might have been
+a task too delicate for the bishop. But I believe that the scent of the
+miraculous, which was all about him, was too much for him. He could nose
+out nothing beyond the line which that fragrance seemed to point. All
+his thoughts, with those of his auditors, were upon Madonna of the
+Peach-Tree, whom there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to connect with
+Fra Battista, his doings and undoings. No one detected this, so Can
+Grande may have been inspired. A great to-do, which no one had the
+rights of, was followed by mysterious appearances which no one pretended
+to understand. What more natural than that one mystery should be allowed
+to explain the other?
+
+The bishop having ended, the prior (who was very nervous) began. There
+were certainly foxes here and there in the vineyard, wild grapes on the
+vines as well as grapes. No community was so holy but that, through
+excess of zeal, over-inflamed by charity, it might nurture upon its
+bosom a fanged snake. Might he not allude to the detestable and
+never-enough-to-be-condemned sin of simony which, as they knew only too
+well, had fattened in the Dominican convent at B----? What should he
+say of that Friar Minor, the famous preacher of S----, who had been
+found dead of a surfeit of melons and white wine? Alas! he brought the
+taint of gluttony--a deadly sin--upon his order! Wonderful, then, would
+it be in such days as these if the most renowned of all orders and most
+venerable, that of Mount Carmel, should pass unscathed through the
+tempting fires! Not only wonderful, but in itself a snare. What a
+temptation to the sin of pride in the order! What a drawing on of others
+(too disposed already) to the sin of envy, to uncharitable speaking--ah,
+and to unlovely dealing! Let sin be owned, therefore, since men were
+born sinners; but let purgation be done, the wicked member plucked out,
+etc.
+
+He passed to the sin of Fra Battista--that promising young
+apostle--handled it soberly yet gingerly, hinted extenuating
+circumstances--the pride of life, young blood, the snares of women,
+Satan's favourite sitting-places, etc.--drew a tear or two from his own
+eyes and floods from La Testolina; and then called Fra Battista to come
+forth that he might purge himself or be purged by the canon law.
+
+Thus exhorted, Fra Battista, becomingly tonsured, delicately combed,
+with an aspect most meek and hands at a pretty droop, came demurely out
+of the friars' door into the full light of the chancel. To the bishop he
+bowed, to the altar he bent a knee, to his father in religion he bent
+both, to the hush in the nave he cast a glance of wistful appeal. It was
+truly aimed. They could see nothing of his face, nothing but the shape
+of him, yet the women were sure he made a wistful appeal. Many were
+affected; the anxiety to hear him was intense, the squeezing fearful. An
+enormous fish-seller from the Lago di Garda, who had come in express,
+leaned over La Testolina and ground a braized heel into her toes.
+"_Achi!_" whimpered the little laundress; but "Snakes of Purgatory!"
+said the other, "what's a toe more or less when Madonna is round the
+corner with a blessing for us in her maunch?"
+
+In a rapt silence, with no preface at all, Fra Battista made direct
+confession to all his gods (whether remote or throned within the
+sanctuary-rail) that he had committed the sin whereof he was accused. A
+perceptible shiver of sensation swept over the church, although
+everybody in it was sure, before he had uttered a word, what that word
+ought to be. Indeed he had never denied it; but not to deny is different
+from bold affirmation. The prior, whose avowal had also been tacit,
+looked pained: avowals are painful things. The bishop, more used to
+avowals, did his best to look shocked; the archdeacon (professionally
+enough) thought avowal the most indecent part of an indecent business.
+The Dominicans looked at each other, frankly delighted; the Friars Minor
+told each other what they had always said. What the people thought can
+only be guessed, for the nave was in darkness; but when Battista had
+made an end, a shuddering sigh came from a woman far down the church,
+and then stopped, hidden in some hasty new movement there which could
+not be accounted for. There seemed to be a stampede, a sudden rush to
+the side, the surging of some great unsuspected wave, which broke, as
+it were, in the midst of the throng, and washed an open space to right
+and left. Up in the choir, after the first surge of this wave (which
+made every heart beat), all ears heard the long-drawn following
+"Ah!"--not fear only, not expectation made real, but rather awe,
+expectation shown just. It began low and hollow, ran up to a hiss: then
+the silence was such that the cracking of a man's ankle-bone by the door
+sounded like a carter's whip to him upon the bishop's throne. In that
+deathly state the whole body of people remained breathless, waiting what
+was to ensue.
+
+Out of the dark, stealing (it appeared) from the middle of the nave and
+floating down the church upon a bodily silence, came a cold voice. Like
+a wind from the snow-mountains it came in a thin stream, before which
+Fra Battista shrivelled visibly.
+
+"O thou craven!" it said, "thou wicked man! what sin can be greater than
+thine? If thou hadst done this thing thou ownest to, it had gone better
+with thee than now, when thou standest a liar and boaster in a filthy
+cause. Wilt thou foul thyself, Battista, and think it honour? I tell
+thee that it was more tolerable for that stoned simple wretch than it
+shall be for thee; and it were better that men should go unsouled like
+the dogs, committing offence with their bodies, than souled horribly
+like thee, thou sinner of the mind, idolater of thine own image! Dost
+thou yet make slippery the ways of Mount Carmel, Battista? Dost thou yet
+hang the pearls which are the tears of Mary about thy neck? It shall be
+in such case that Carmel will be her holy hill no more, and those same
+pearls turned to leaden bulls to seal thee in Tophet. There is no mercy
+for the coward, and none for him that serves false gods. Go forth, thou
+groper after vainglory, kennel with the swine!"
+
+The voice ceased. Fra Battista, who had been rocking under its chill
+breath, fell with a thud. The bishop adored the altar; the
+rest--priests, monks, people alike--broke into "Salve Regina," so loud,
+so wild, the very church seemed to shake. At that time the west doors
+flung open of themselves, and a roaring wind swept round, disastrous to
+candles. A quick flicker of blue flame jagged across the nave; the
+thunder came instant, pealing, crackling, braying ruin, fading at last
+to a distant grumble; and then the rain. No one got home that night with
+a dry skin; but it was Madonna who had quenched the doubting of Fra
+Battista, and washed fragrant the memory of Vanna to whomsoever had
+loved her once. As her lovers in early days had been many, it follows
+that they all forgot in the delight of reminiscence any harsh judgments
+she had received.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE CROWNING PROOF
+
+
+The week went its way without further miracle; but Verona had supped
+full of miracles, and had need to digest. The signs and wonders she had
+witnessed, as one soul, in the church of the Carmelites had been so
+astonishing that you will easily understand how all little differences
+between order and order were forgotten. The root of disturbance--Vanna
+and her baby, Fra Battista and his luxurious imaginings, Baldassare and
+his addition--were also forgotten. Baldassare was at Mantua, Vanna had
+been stoned to death ("martyred" was now the word)--all was well. Fra
+Battista had been quietly ridded the very next morning: unfrocked, he
+took the way of the Brenner and the mountains, and Veronese history
+knows nothing further certainly of him. It is thought he may have got so
+far as Prague, where at any rate a perfervid preacher called Baptist von
+Bern was burnt for heresy in the year 1389--a spreader of anabaptistical
+doctrines he was, Gospels of the Spirit, Philadelphianism, and what not.
+Everything settled down to routine: Can Signorio to tyranny and
+coquetting with Visconti of Milan (who finally swallowed him up), the
+bishop to accommodating the claims of God, the Pope, and his temporal
+lord, to those of salvation and his stomach; and in like manner did
+every person in this narrative after his kind.
+
+Then, on a bright morning in early September, old Baldassare came
+limping up the Ponte Navi with his pack on his back, paused a minute on
+the bridge, as his habit was, to look down on the busy laundresses by
+the water, spat twice, and so doing was observed, threw a cracked "Buon'
+giorno, La Testolina!" over the side, and went on his slow way to the
+Via Stella.
+
+It was still very early, but not so early that Vanna was not in her
+shop-door sewing and crooning to the baby on her lap. She heard his step
+the moment he rounded the bottom corner of the street, blushed prettily
+from neck to temples, caught up the child, and went out to meet her
+lord. Standing before him in her cool cotton gown, there was no sun in
+the dusky place but what her halo of hair made, no warmth but that of
+her welcoming mouth. Half shyly she stopped, holding up the baby for him
+to see: it was not for her to make advances, you must understand; but it
+needed no magic to make one believe that what a man's wife should be to
+a man that was young Monna Vanna to her rag-picker. Baldassare blinked
+and tried to look harassed; the next minute he had pinched Vanna's
+cheek. She put the baby into his wiry old arms--a very right move of
+hers.
+
+"Eh, _bambinaccio_," he muttered, highly pleased, "it is good to see
+thee! So thou art come out to meet thy old dad--thou and thy little
+rogue of a mother? Come, the pair of ye, and see what my pack has in
+store."
+
+The baby crowed and bubbled, Vanna nested her arm closer in his ribs,
+and the trio went into the house.
+
+A keen shot from one eye sufficed to assure the old fellow that as well
+as a little beauty he had a domestic treasure to wife. The house was as
+fresh as her cheeks, as trim as her shape. "Now the saints be good to
+this city of Verona," said he, "as to me they have proved not amiss."
+This was great praise from Baldassare; his generosity gave it point.
+From his pack came a pair of earrings--wagging, tinkling affairs of
+silver and coral; next some portentous pins, shining globes like prickly
+pears; a coral and bells for Master Niccola, and a _scaldino_ of pierced
+brass for the adornment of the house. "Thank you, Baldassare," said
+Vanna to her blinking old master; then she kissed him. Before she knew
+where she was, before she could say, "Gia!" he put his arm round her and
+whispered in her ear. Then she clung to him, sobbing, laughing,
+breathing quick; and the rest it were profanation to report.
+
+Verona rubbed its eyes as it came out yawning to its daily work. There
+was the open shop, ever the first in the street; there the padrone;
+there, by the manger of Bethlehem, were the padrona and the baby, whom
+they had last seen huddling from their stones. Vanna wore her colours
+that morning; she was rosy like the dawn, she was smiling, she had very
+bright eyes. But there was a happy greeting for man or wife who looked
+her way; and when La Testolina came peeping to behold the discomfiture
+of Baldassare, Vanna's gay looks found her out, and "Buon' giorno, La
+Testolina," came more cheerfully from her than it had come from her
+husband on the bridge. All the little woman could do was to squat upon
+the threshold at her friend's feet and pretend that she was troubled
+with spasms.
+
+The crowning proof remains to be told. As La Testolina (who blazed the
+story abroad) is reported to have said, you might have drummed the guard
+out with her heart-beats. Vanna, by way of weaning her baby, it seems,
+was tempting him with gobbets of peach from a wine-glass. She bit a
+corner from the peach and tendered it in her lips to the youngster on
+her lap. The baby (a vigorous child) made a snap at it like a trout at a
+fly, and a gulp so soon as he had it. The peach was hard, the morsel had
+many corners,--went down bristling, as it were. Cola had his first
+stomach-ache, was hurt, was miserable, prepared to howl. At that moment
+La Testolina happened to look at him: she stared, she gasped, she reeled
+against the door-post.
+
+"Hey, Mother of Jesus!" she cried; "look at the baby!"
+
+"It was a corner-piece, I'm afraid," said Vanna, with great calmness;
+"but the natural juices will thaw it."
+
+"No, no, no! It is not that, woman," her friend went on feverishly--"it
+is not that! Look at his face, look at his face!"
+
+Vanna looked. "Well," she asked, "what of his face?"
+
+The _bambino_, to express his agony, was _grinning from ear to ear_.
+
+This was the last miracle wrought by Madonna of the Peach-Tree.
+
+
+
+
+IPPOLITA IN THE HILLS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE GLORIOUS IPPOLITA
+
+
+Almighty God, that supreme Architect, Who, alone among craftsmen, knows
+when to give and when to stay the rein, has chosen the Plain of Emilia
+to be, as it were, the garden of Italy, a garden set apart betwixt Alp
+and Apennine to be adorned within a garden; has filled it with every
+sort of fruit and herb and flowering tree; has watered it abundantly
+with noble rivers; neither stinted it of deep shade nor removed it too
+far from the timely stroke of the sun; has caused it, finally, to be
+graced here and enriched there with divers great and grave cities. Man,
+who has it not in him to be thrifty in so prodigal a midst, has here
+also thought it lawful to go free. Out of that lake of rustling leaves
+rise, like the masts of ships crowding a port, church towers, the
+belfries of pious convents, the domes and turrets of great buildings
+walled into cities. Among which, prized as they all are and honourably
+additioned,--Vicenza, Treviso, Mantua, Verona, Ferrara,--there is none
+more considerable than Padua, root of learning and grey cupolas, chosen
+to be the last resting-place of Antenor, King Priam's brother, and the
+first of Titus Livy.
+
+It is of Padua that I am now called upon to report certain matters which
+may seem strange to one who does not know her well: to the others,
+_verbum satis_. Whether it is their University (too famous, perhaps, for
+so quiet a place) or the suspiration of their greatest citizen which has
+kindled their wits; whether that cauldron of brick, the _Santo_,
+bubbling with silver domes, is the stem or flower of their exaltation;
+whether their seat at the head of a sun-steeped marsh (at whose mouth is
+Venice) hath itself unseated them; whether Petrarch set boiling what
+Saint Antony could not allay; what it was, how it was, who gave them the
+wrench, I know not--but the fact is that the people of Padua have been
+as freakish a race as any in Italy; at the mercy of any head but the
+aggregate's, pack-mules of a notion, galley-slaves of a whim, driven
+hither and thither in a herd, like those restless leaves (souls once)
+whose nearer sight first made Dante pitiful. Not that they, for their
+part, asked for pity or got it. Mostly they paid their tavern bills when
+the last cup had been drained and the last chorus led. When Ezzelin was
+master of the revels they paid in blood: that tower of his by the river
+is dark with it yet. Petrarch from his mountain-vineyard at Arqua tipped
+them a brighter stave: they broke their hearts for pretty women and had
+every one the comfort of a swanlike end, since sonnets are a knack. With
+Antony they flagellated, with Carrara defended walls, with Gattemelata
+knocked them down. Then Venice took what Padua could never keep; the
+Euganeans hailed on either side the Lion of Saint Mark; the Arts
+flourished; Squarcione cut out small-clothes and taught anatomy none the
+worse; Mantegna dreamed of Julius Caesar, smouldering while he dreamed;
+and Ippolita, the stone-mason's daughter, from too much courting fled in
+breeches to the hills. She, like all the Padovani, paid her score
+without flinching. It may have been run up without leave asked, but it
+was run up in her name. The rule in Padua was so; I never heard that she
+repined. Maybe that she had her money's worth; but of that you will be
+able to judge as well as I.
+
+Padua is a city set in meadows full of light; it is well spaced,
+plentifully watered, arcaded, green with gardens. The streets are like
+cloister-walks; as in Lucca, the plane is the sacred tree, and next to
+that flag of green on a silver staff, the poplar shows the city blushful
+in the spring and thrilling all a summer with the memory. It is a place
+of brick and marble, painted orange, brown, yellow, and warm white,
+where every cornerstone and every twig is printed sharply on a sky of
+morning blue.
+
+
+     "Quivi le mura son fatte con arte,
+     Che parlano, e rispondono a i parlanti."
+
+
+A tale of Padua should have the edge of a cut gem. So let Ippolita's be
+told.
+
+In her day--that day when, at sixteen years old or so, the sun briefly
+lit upon her golden head and showed her for the lovely girl she
+was--Padua was passing through a time of peace. Novello was dead at
+last, poor heroic gentleman, Verona was shaken off; Venice was
+supreme--easy, but unquestionably mistress of the Emilia. There was time
+to make madrigals, to make eyes, to make love, to imagine portraits.
+Mantegna was painting giants in the Eremitani and Bellini picking his
+brains, but not as yet a quarrel. The classics, the ingenuous arts,
+lovely woman--always interwoven when times are happiest--flourished in
+that sunny place: it was not really wonderful that Ippolita the
+stone-cutter's daughter, classically fair, indisputably a beauty, should
+win all seeing eyes and be the despair of all rhymers. Given the vision
+to the visionary (and both came in their time), she might be trusted
+with the rest; for she was remarkable by contrast; there were none like
+her. The Paduan girls are all charming, and mostly pretty. Ippolita was
+neither: she was beautiful, and when you came to know her face, lovely.
+They are brown, she was fair; they are little, she was very tall. They
+have eyes like a dove's, glossed brown; hers were deeply blue, the
+colour of the Adriatic when a fleeting cloud spreads a curtain of
+hyacinth over the sheeted turquoise bed. Beautifully hued in mingled red
+and white, delicately shaped, pliant, supple, and shy, such as she was
+(an honest, good girl, Heaven knows!) she might have lived and died in
+her alley--sweetheart of some half dozen decent fellows, wife of the
+most masterful, mother of a dozen brats, unnoticed save for her
+qualities of cheerful drudge and brood-mare; beautiful as a spring leaf
+till twenty, ripe as a peach on the wall till thirty, keen-faced and
+wise, mother and grandmother, at forty; and so on--such she might have
+lived and died, and been none the worse for her reclusion, had she not
+leaned more than half out of her window in the _Vicolo_ one bright April
+morning of her sixteenth year, to exchange lively banter with a friend
+below, and been seen by Messer Alessandro del Dardo, who within the
+cuirass of Sub-Prefect of Padua nourished the heart of an approved Poet;
+been seen of him for the miracle of young beauty she really was. Chance
+sparks kindle chance tinder; and so here. I am far from alleging the
+heart of Messer Alessandro to be dry tow; but I do repeat it, Padua was
+a freakish cityful, Ippolita lovely exceedingly, amorous poetry in the
+air.
+
+He, then, passing by, saw her stoop flushed and sparkling from above
+him; the sun caught her shining hair; a loose white smock revealed so
+much of her neck as to picture him the snowy rest. Snow and rosebuds--O
+ye little gods! As he stood in ecstasy she saw him at the end of the
+lane, and blushing drew back with a finger in her mouth, to thrill and
+giggle at ease. She saw a great gentleman stare; he saw a rosy goddess
+stoop and laugh, then blush and hide. _Vitas hinnuleo me similis,
+Chloe!_ Away he went, his heart leaping like a wood-fire, to report to
+Meleagro de' Martiri and Stazio Orsini, to Donna Euforbia, Donna
+Clarice, and Donna Simpatica--friends and poets alike--that he had had a
+most rare vision.
+
+"To me it seems," he said, "that that fair-haired daughter of the
+Greeks, Madonna Elena, the slim, the rosy-fingered disturber of the
+repose of cities, hath appeared to distract this our city of Padua. Me
+at least she hath distraught. Fair friends, sister and brother poets,
+you shall understand that henceforth I devote myself to this lady and
+her praise. More, I vow a vow, and call upon you to register it in the
+Golden Book of the Amorous Gests of Padua, that I will never cut my
+nails again until I have enthroned her sovereign lady of me, and of you
+all, and of this our humane Commonwealth. By golden Venus and her son,
+by Mars armipotent powerless in such toils, and by Vulcan in chains too
+cunning for his pincers; by Saints Ovid and Sappho, the Chian, the
+Mantuan, and the Veronese, I swear this oath."
+
+"It is well done, Alessandro," assented the listening company.
+
+That evening in his fellowship, Meleagro and Stazio, cloaked and lurking
+under the arcades, saw Ippolita walk down the Via Pozzo Depinto arm in
+arm with two shawled friends, transparently in the ranks of the _popol
+basso_, but as obviously not of them. Her golden head was bare; also by
+a head she sailed above them. They followed her by the Via Zitelle, over
+the Ponte della Morte, further yet, between garden walls topped with
+lilac, into the Prato della Valle. There the three unconscious girls
+mingled with the concourse of those who took the air under the still
+trees. Ippolita, that slim, tall marvel, seemed not to be remarked by
+any; Alessandro, swooning on his friend's arms, could scarcely believe
+it.
+
+"Edge up, Alessandro, edge up--accost, accost!" said Meleagro; but--
+
+"Do you think I would profane the _aura_ of her by my abhorred
+presence?" cried the lover. "Ah, God of Love, I would die sooner! I
+feel, indeed, my Daemon at work. Let me sit upon this bench--my tablets,
+ha!" He sat. Finely disordered verse, _rime sciolte_, resulted; but
+Ippolita was so far unperturbed.
+
+Gradually, however, it came to her notice that she was watched. There
+was singing under her windows at night; the day brought parties of noble
+youths into the _Vicolo_ scarlet-capped, feathered, slashed, and booted
+youths; ladies were with them as often as not; garlanded ladies with
+square-cut bodices showing half their bosoms; flowers came, verses,
+platters of Urbino, Gubbio, Faenza. She was saluted in the street,
+followed to the church door, waited for at the coming out from mass. It
+came, more or less, to this, that whenever she went abroad by ways where
+the honourable might pass, her going resembled that of the processional
+Host rather than of a respectable young woman. Her friends were no
+protection: the girls thought it fun, courted it, found stuff in it for
+giggling and peering with the eyes into dark corners; the lads of her
+station shrugged at it, then sulked, and at last fairly fought shy of
+such a conspicuous mate.
+
+Ippolita herself tried to laugh it off, but failed absurdly. She became
+plaintive.
+
+"What do these signori mean by their my-ladying?" she cried to Annina,
+her bosom friend. "Why do they send me these things? Platters! What use
+are platters to the likes of us, who as often as not have nothing to put
+on them?"
+
+Annina looked demurely. "It is easy to see what they want of thee,
+dearest. What does a gentleman always want of a poor girl that takes his
+fancy?"
+
+Ippolita tossed her high head.
+
+"Eh!" she snapped. "They may fill the house with crockery at that rate.
+I'm not rubbish!"
+
+She was not; but she wronged her adorers, who neither thought it nor
+hoped it of her. Messer Alessandro was not growing his nails for that
+sort of ware; nor could he have treated the Pope with more respect. He
+had never ventured to speak, though he had never failed to salute her.
+What he wrote was chiefly in verse, and as Ippolita could not read, it
+really did not much matter what his letters contained. Meleagro had
+opened his mouth to pay her a compliment: he won a frightened look out
+of her blue eyes, a fine blush, and lived upon them for a week. The
+ladies were bolder. Some of them had walked with her once in the Prato.
+There was very little to say, except that they loved her and thought her
+like a goddess. Ippolita was rather scared, laughed nervously, and said,
+"Chi lo sa?" Donna Euforbia then told her the story of the original
+Ippolita, the Scythian queen; of King Theseus, and the child born to
+them in sea-washed Acharnae. The Paduan Ippolita said "Gia!" several
+times, and asked if her namesake was a good Catholic. Finding she was
+not, she took no further interest in her fortunes than to suppose her
+deep in hell for her pains. The ladies asked her to come and be their
+queen; she said she couldn't leave her father. They offered her jewels
+for her hair, neck, fingers, wrists, ankles; she laughed, and said that
+they were not for the likes of her. They spoke of Alessandro, the Poet.
+She asked if he were any relation to the Signor Sotto-Prefetto. He was
+that same, said they.
+
+"Dio buono!" cried Ippolita. "Is he the gentleman who wants to undo me?"
+
+They were shocked. "He asks no more than to sit at your feet, Ippolita,
+and read the secrets of your beautiful eyes. It is your soul he loves;
+he asks nothing of your body." "They never do, Madonna," said Ippolita;
+"but I am a poor girl, so please you, who have to look every way at
+once, as the saying is. Domeneddio is the only Signore I ever heard tell
+of who could get on with people's souls. Men want more of us than that."
+
+Protests were wasted, and Alessandro, watchful of his nails, went mad in
+numbers. This it was to be tall out of common, this to lift up in
+dark-browed Padua a brave golden head; this to carry the bosom of an
+Oread beneath the smock of a girl in her teens; this, merciful Heaven,
+to be a vortex when poets are swirling down the stream of Time.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+MESSER ALESSANDRO THINKS TO CUT HIS NAILS
+
+
+Not to weary you, it is clear that Ippolita was the fashion. The poets,
+the courtiers, the painters, of whom in that age of peace Padua was
+full, were wild about this glowing girl, this sumptuous nymph of the Via
+Agnus Dei; they were melodiously, caperingly, symphonically wild,
+according to their bents. She saw herself on plates of faience, where
+the involutions of a ribbon revealed "Ippolita Bella" to the patient
+eye; she found herself (or they found her) an inordinate tri-syllable
+for a canzone, saw her colours of necessity reproduced on her lover's
+legs and shoulders as colours of election. One by one she could appraise
+her own possessions, and those they fabled of her. Her hair was
+Demeter's crown of ripe corn--she knew nothing of the lady, but hoped
+for the best. Her eyes were dark blue lakes in a field of snow--this she
+thought very fine. Her lips were the amorous petals of a rose that needs
+must kiss each other; kissing, they made a folded flower--ah!
+
+
+     "La virtu della bocca,
+     Che sana cio che tocca,"
+
+
+sighed the poets. But, bless her good innocence! that sweet mouth had
+touched nothing more mannish than her father's forehead or the feet of
+the Crucified. Her cheeks, said they, were apple-blossoms budded, her
+neck the stem of a chalice, her breast--but I spare your blushes, though
+they never spared hers. There is a book, "Gli Ornamenti delle Donne,"
+which will tell you what that bastion of a fair girl should be; and what
+it should be those Paduan lyrists will more than assure you Ippolita's
+was. Thus passionately they fingered every part, dwelling here, touching
+there, with no word that was not a caress. What she had not, too, they
+gave her--the attributes she sowed in them. She was "vagha," since they
+longed; "lontana," since she kept them at a distance; "nascosa," since
+they drove her to it; cold, since she dared not be warm.
+
+The painters, not to be behind, expressed what the others hinted. She
+saw herself, first, as _Daphne_ behind a laurel-bush--the artist,
+kneeling in the open, offered his heart smoking upon a dish; second, as
+_Luna_, standing in shrouded white on a crescent moon--the artist, as
+_Endymion_, asleep in a rocky landscape, waiting to be kissed; third, as
+_Leda_, naked in reeds beside her pair of eggs--the plumed artist near
+by, ruffling and flapping his wings. Luckily, their allusiveness escaped
+her; she knew nothing of the diversions of the ancient gods.
+
+But of all the vantage she gave them, none equalled that for which her
+gossips should have answered, her most commendable name of Ippolita. The
+verses she received on that theme would have made a _Theseid_, those she
+had to hear would have kept the rhapsodists for a twelve-month, those
+she saw the very Sala del Consiglio could not have contained. Ippolita
+at war with the Athenian, or leading her Amazons afield; Ippolita
+turning her unmaimed side to an adoring warrior (the painter) and you,
+or suckling Ippolita (with the artist's strongly marked features) in an
+ivied ruin with peacocks about it; Ippolita in a colonnade at Athens on
+the right hand of the king--thus she saw herself daily; thus the old
+palace walls of Padua, if they could yield up their tinged secrets
+through the coats of lime, would show her rosy limbs and crowned head.
+Mantegna has her armoured, with greaves to the knee and spiked cups on
+her breastplate. Gian Bellini carried her to Venice, to lead Scythians
+in trousers against Theseus in plate-armour and a blazoned shield.
+Giorgione set her burning in the shade, trying to cool her golden flank
+in deep mosses by a well.
+
+All this, and much more, Ippolita endured because she was a good as well
+as a beautiful girl. Sometimes she wept in a friend's arms, sometimes
+(really frightened) she sought her parish priest; mostly it was the
+wonder-working Virgin in Sant' Antonio or, at the greatest stress, the
+Saint's own black sarcophagus in the lighted chapel, to lay upon it a
+feverish palm or hot, indignant cheek. By some such aids as these she
+preserved entire her head, her heart, all her precious store, so that no
+flattery ever tarnished the clear glass of her mind, no assaults,
+however fierce, could bruise the root of modesty within her.
+
+Her father, vexed man, at first felt the glory of his daughter, shone
+by her reflected light, guessed (and had reasonable grounds for
+guessing) the profit it might be; but lastly, seeing the suitors sought
+not to marry her, and she would do no less, he grew disgusted with so
+windy a business, beat her for what was no fault of hers, and bade her
+be sold or begone. Ippolita, who began her day's processioning with
+music and flowers, ended it mostly in tears and stripes. There seemed no
+escape. If she went to draw water at the well the courtiers jostled for
+her first salutation; if she went to mass in the grey of the morning,
+so, blinking, did they. The priest who confessed her paid her
+compliments, the blind beggar at the church door looked at her out of
+one eye. She was incredibly the fashion; and the women, far from being
+jealous, were as wild about her as the men. She could have had a Court
+of Virgins, or gone like Artemis, buskined through the thickets, with a
+hundred high-girdled nymphs behind her, all for her sake locked in
+chastity. They also made her presents, which her father sold, until
+(learning to fear the Greeks, their brothers), she gently forbore them.
+Whereupon, the honest stone-mason had fresh cause for chastisement of so
+incalculably calculating a child.
+
+The hunted fair at last came to a point where she must stand or deliver.
+From three desperate lovers there seemed no sure road. All that was
+possible she did. She consulted her priest; he patted her cheek. A very
+old woman of her intimacy advised her to look in the glass; she did, and
+blushed at her own distressful face. A friar of the order of Saint
+Francis plumply told her to choose the most solid of her pursuers and
+make the most of him. "Such roses as yours, my daughter," said he,
+"should be early to market. You are sixteen now; but remember that by
+the mercy of Heaven you may live to be six and sixty. That's the time
+when the pot wants lining. If you have not the experience, pray how are
+you to direct the young in the way they should go? Yet that is the trade
+for an old lady whose life has been an easy one. For my part, I regret
+that the rules of our convent do not allow me to open the gate."
+
+She pouted, and went out into the sun again, to find her way to the
+Santo barred. The three poets, with three lutes, were singing a madrigal
+in her honour. They were understood to say that her going was over the
+tired bodies of lovers, that she went girdled with red hearts, that her
+breast was cold ivory, and her own heart carved in ice. _Nymph_ rhymed
+with _lymph_ and _Ippolita_ with _insolita_; the whole, ingenious as it
+was, was not _ad rem_; and as for the poor subject of it all, her heart
+(far from being ice) was hot with mutiny. She knew herself for a
+simpleton--just a poor girl; she knew herself made ridiculous by this
+parade; could see herself as she was. Her crisping hair was over her
+ears and knotted behind her neck, without garland or fillet or so much
+as a brass pin; her green dress, though it was low in the neck, was
+tightly drawn over her bust; for what were glorious to be shown in a
+great lady, in her had been an immodesty. When she lifted her skirt out
+of the gutter you could see some inches of bare leg. Her hands were
+brown with work, though her neck was like warm marble in the sun. Eh,
+she knew herself through and through just a low-born wench; and "O Gesu
+Re!" her heart cried within her, "why can they not leave me alone!"
+
+The three poets--Stazio Orsini in white and yellow, Alessandro del Dardo
+in white and green, and Meleagro de' Martiri in a plum-coloured
+cloak--accompanied her down the Via Pozzo Depinto to her poor house in
+the quarter of Santa Caterina; she lived in the Vicolo Agnus Dei. To
+their florid exercises in the language of courts she replied in
+monosyllables--"Sissignore," "Grazie, Signore," or "Servo suo"; the
+humble words were as much her daily use as _Padre nostro_ or _Ave
+Maria_. At the door she must have her hand kissed three times in face of
+the nudging neighbours; and to each salute her honesty prompted a fresh
+"Grazie, Signore," a curtsy, and a profound blush. Meleagro beat his
+forehead to see her so lovely and so unapproachable; Orsini bit his lip;
+but Alessandro, mindful of his nails, and not to be Sub-Prefect for
+nothing, went away to find the girl's father.
+
+This worthy bowed to the earth before his visitor. In what way could His
+Excellency be served? By the acceptance, on Matteo's part, of twenty
+ducats? Benissimo, e tante grazie!
+
+"Matteo," said the Sub-Prefect when this little transfer was
+accomplished, "your daughter is the most beautiful lady in all this city
+of Padua."
+
+"She is a choice thing, I own it," said the good Matteo; "and how dear
+to her old father your honour hath no notion."
+
+"I can very well imagine it," returned Messer Alessandro; "and, indeed,
+I remember that you are twenty ducats in hand."
+
+"Oh, va bene, va bene!" cried Matteo. "I am your Excellency's humble
+servant. You shall take her when you like and as you like."
+
+"All will be done scrupulously," Alessandro said with fervour. "We shall
+crown her Queen of our College of the Muses; she shall be priestess,
+sacred image, and oracle; and most honourably served."
+
+"Honour of course," said Matteo, "comes into the game. I have played it
+myself, and know what I am talking about. There was Beppina, that fat
+Venetian hussy--to see her eat! But she always had her whack. Eh, I have
+been a blade in my day!"
+
+To this testimony the Sub-Prefect had no comments ready. He returned to
+the object of his thought.
+
+"We shall in turn contemplate her excellence," he explained, "and derive
+inspirations in turn. A fine body of devotional rhyme should be the
+result of this."
+
+"The result," Matteo broke in, "will be a fine one, I warrant your
+Excellency, if such things as that are in your mind--and call it what
+you will, she's as healthy as ever her mother was. And _she_ had
+seventeen of 'em, one way with another, before I buried her."
+
+"She shall be crowned with stars, rest upon beds of roses, walk in
+flowery meadows, hide from the heat in thickets where water is--"
+Alessandro went lilting on. "We will sing to her all day, and of her all
+night. The saloon of the Villa Venusta shall depict the story of her
+glorious arising."
+
+"Pretty, pretty!" cried Matteo, "I see that your honour knows the rules
+of play. Now when shall the game begin?"
+
+"My honest friend, the litter will be at your door come daybreak," said
+Alessandro. "Three noble ladies will attend Madonna to bathe and dress
+her. After that, you shall leave her safely in our keeping."
+
+Matteo bowed. "Excellency, I am your servant. Everything shall be as you
+wish."
+
+He did not add, though he might well have added, that it was more than
+himself had dared to hope for.
+
+At time of sunset home he came, but not to beat his beautiful daughter.
+On the contrary, he made much of her. Fuddled he was, but not drunk. He
+took her incontinent upon his knee and began to deal in rather liberal
+innuendo. Divining him darkly, she went to work with such arts as she
+had to wheedle the worst out of him.
+
+"Carissimo padre,"--so she coaxed him, with hands interwoven about his
+scrubby face,--"tell me more of this gallantry of young blades."
+
+"Chuck, chuck, chuck," he babbled, oozing wine, "come and feed out of my
+hand. Bill me, sweeting, and I bill thee. Ho, ho! Two doves on a branch!
+What, turtle? Wilt thou mope for ever?"
+
+She trembled. "Nay, nay, I'll mope no more, father," says she. "But do
+thou tell me who my mate is to be."
+
+Slyly he looked at her burning face and slyly kissed it. Then he began
+to sing--
+
+
+     "Quell' drudo, Messer Amore,
+     Ha scelto un Dardo per cuore!
+     Dardo acerbo, ardente,
+     Che fa gridare le genti--
+     Ohime! Dolce dolore!"
+
+
+She had been a fool indeed to miss such a rebus. So the peril was worse
+than her dread! The lees of twenty ducats shabby in his fist told her
+how near the peril was.
+
+Going to bed, he folded her in his arms, making her prop while he
+mumbled comfort.
+
+"It is all for the best, my beauty-bright," he hiccoughed, "all clearly
+for the best. Messer Alessandro is a lover in ten thousand. I shall be
+as good as a father-in-law any day of the week. Why, it's 'My honest
+friend' that he hails me already! That is what a man may call climbing
+up, I hope, when a poetical roaring blade cuts out your 'servo suo' in
+that fashion. And he's Sotto-Prefetto, remember. That means all Padua
+yours for the asking. Sleep sound, my pretty bird, Ippolita bella! After
+this night you shall sleep by day." So he found, by good luck, his bed,
+and she a time for tears.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE JEW IN THE VIA DELLA GATTA
+
+
+If there is not much to be said for the Via della Gatta in these days,
+there was even less when Ippolita was the reigning toast. It was
+cloistered (as now), it was cobbled, shabby-white, secret, blind; it
+echoed silence, was a place for slippering crones, for furtive cats, and
+the smell of garlic and charcoal fires. Of nights, by the same token, it
+was not the place to choose for an after-supper walk. The watch used to
+go through it with swords before and daggers behind. Lanterns were
+little use save to reveal the cut-throat blackness all about.
+
+Now, on the very night when Matteo was fuddled, Ippolita in tears,
+Alessandro in a fever, and the more reputable Padovani turning down
+their beds, the watch came rattling at the Sub-Prefect's door to report
+a dead Jew in the Via della Gatta. Of all nights in the year, this, the
+eve of the Glorious Ippolita's home-bringing, to be vexed by a dead Jew!
+Messer Alessandro was exceedingly annoyed.
+
+"Take your accursed Jew," he said to the lieutenant, "and stuff him
+underground. I am busy, I am absorbed in work. When I have leisure I
+will attend to him. You can dig him up again. And I take this
+opportunity to tell you, Lieutenant, that your visit is most
+inopportune. For six months you have brought me nothing of the sort, and
+to-night, for example, you plump a Jew on my doorstep. Bury your beastly
+Jew and leave me in peace."
+
+"But, Excellency," stammered the Lieutenant, "your Excellency will see
+that I have no control over the assassins of Padua. This Jew has not
+died happily. There is a great hole under his ribs. He is scarcely cold
+yet."
+
+"That is soon remedied," said Alessandro; "put him in the ground."
+
+"But, Excellency, a murdered Jew, a Jew in holes--"
+
+"The Jews have been damned from the beginning of our dispensation,"
+cried the Sub-Prefect in a rage. "Well, I add my malediction. I say,
+Damn your Jew!" And he shut the door in the face of the watch.
+
+The Lieutenant was hungry. If his chief could damn the Jews, so could
+he.
+
+"Corporal," says he, "I am going to supper. Do what you like with the
+Jew, so long as you put him decently away when you have finished. Good
+night."
+
+The Corporal conferred with his men. Here was the Jew--what should they
+do with him? One of the archers suggested a source of profit. He might
+be shown in the wine-shops at a quattrino a head. Agreed. Off they set.
+
+They showed him at the Codalunga--there were some low-browed hovels
+there, as was usual about the gates: the Jew did well. Thence they
+skirted the walls by the Riviera Santa Sofia, tried him at the outer
+gate of the Carmine, worked their way from tavern to tavern, till they
+came to the Vicolo Agnus Dei. It was a thousand pities Matteo was drunk
+in his bed; he had quattrini enough and would not have missed the treat
+for the world. Ippolita, whimpering in hers, wondered what the buzzing
+and sliding of shoes in the street below could be about. She had
+troubles of her own, poor girl, but she could not stand this. Up she
+got: a single glance out of window was enough. She shuffled on a shift
+and a petticoat, snatched a shawl, and tiptoed out. Annina, her bosom
+friend, had no troubles. She was half undressed, but she too slipped a
+shawl over her head and went peering into the alley. There she met
+Ippolita, and joined hands. Flaring torches, a swarm of eager black
+heads, whispers, grunting, the archers' plumed helmets--"Madonna! What's
+all this?" cried the two girls together in a stew of curiosity. A dead
+Jew? A murdered Jew? O Gesu! They borrowed a quattrino apiece from a
+neighbour and were richly rewarded. Ah, the blood, the staring, his grey
+old fingers! There was a something, if you like, to talk about at the
+house door; and a something to dream of, per Bacco! I believe the Jew
+engulfed all her annoyances of the past and all her fret over the
+immediate future.
+
+When they had done with him, came the question of his interment. It was
+the small hours, very near the time to relieve guard. The Jew's hosts
+found themselves out by the Porta Santa Croce--an empty quarter of the
+town, abounding in gardens.
+
+"Over the wall with him," said the Corporal; "we'll plant him here." It
+was done. The Jew, who, by the look of him, had earned more money an
+hour after death than in all the years of his life, was put a foot and a
+half underground among the pumpkins in a garden of the Via di Vanzo.
+Padua went to sleep.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+IPPOLITA LIFTS UP HER EYES TO THE HILLS
+
+
+Waking from a late troubled sleep, Ippolita found her little room
+possessed by three noble ladies--Emilia Malaspina, Euforbia di
+Ponterotto, and Domenica di Campodarsego--dressed all in saffron and
+white (her sacred colours, they told her), who announced themselves,
+with much kneeling and folding of arms over breasts, as her handmaids.
+"Sagro cuor di Gesu!" thought poor Ippolita, "what a way to undo me!"
+But aloud she only murmured, "Tante grazie, gentildonne," and got out of
+bed.
+
+They had prepared for her a scented bath, into which, in her dazed
+condition, she entered without overmuch persuasion. True, she thought to
+find her death in so much water, and crossed herself vehemently when
+first it touched her back; but there might be worse deaths (she
+supposed) than drowning for a poor girl bought and sold, and not so very
+long ago a Jew had been baptized in Santa Giustina in water up to his
+neck. Nothing, however, would induce her to sit down. They dressed her
+then in silk, tied and garlanded her hair, put a gold chain round her
+neck, silken shoes on her feet--talking in quick whispers to each other
+all the time; and so announced with curtsies that she might enter the
+litter as soon as she would. She was at the disposition of these ladies,
+was her faltered reply. Emilia waved her hand out of the little window;
+chords of music sounded from the street; the voices of men and ladies
+rose upon a madrigal--
+
+"Fior' di Maggio--Soave, pio e saggio--Salve, Ippolita!"--the work of
+Alessandro's muse upon that night of discord from the Jew. So she went
+downstairs.
+
+The Vicolo Agnus Dei--a blind alley of low jutting houses over arcades,
+full of squalor, pink wash, children, and cats--was on this early
+morning ablaze with colour and music. From wall to wall (and eight feet
+will measure that) it seemed packed with the nobility. Tousled heads
+from above looked down curiously on heads elaborately frizzed, on
+scarlet caps, on plumes, on garlands, on jewelled necks. Poverty and
+riches touch at their extremes, like houses in the South. The shoulders
+of the ladies at play were no barer than those of the slatterns who
+gaped at them playing; but for Ippolita, who had always been a decent
+girl, let us hope her blushes were a cloak. She felt naked. And the
+bath, remember, had unnerved her.
+
+What these neighbours of hers may have thought is no concern of ours,
+since the actors in the play took no concern in it. Twenty pieces of
+silver had bought an incomparable peg for their conceits. They were
+rescuing, they said to each other, a lily from the gutter, taking a
+jewel from a dirty finger, glorifying the glories--a pious act which
+could not fail of returning honour to those who took honour in doing
+it. The people! Sacks to be filled with garlic and black wine, liver and
+blood-puddings--grunting hogs, let them keep their sty. Let them not
+dare (and in truth it never occurred to them to dare) interfere with the
+diversions of the great. Yet as the veiled sacrifice went to mount the
+litter, one brown-eyed rascal from an upper window, holding a towel over
+her neck, shrilled out in homely patois, "A vederti, 'Polita mia!" and
+Ippolita turned her lovely head and showed for a moment her shining wet
+eyes to those who watched. She smiled tenderly at the send-off, but
+"Addio, Annina, addio!" she said softly, and turned bowing to her bowing
+gaolers.
+
+As the swaying litter of gold and white went out into the Pozzo Depinto
+and turned up towards the Pontecorbo Gate; as the music and
+chanting--"Candida Ippolita, premio d'Amore! Grazia insolita del sommo
+Fattore!"--died away to a murmurous underflow of sound, perhaps a tongue
+or two was thrust into a cheek or two, perhaps a bare shoulder shrugged
+or one shock-head wagged to another. The air was sharp, beds still
+warm--whose business was it? The street was left to the rats and
+snuffing dogs again.
+
+But Annina had sparks of fire in her brown eyes, and panted as she
+tugged at her staylaces. It was not long before she clattered downstairs
+on her clacking heels, and went to mark the cage they had gilded for her
+dear Ippolita.
+
+Those hierophants, that Collegio d'Amore (as the new style ran), bearing
+in their midst the garlanded victim--Goddess at once and
+Sacrifice--awoke the echoes of the streets without comment. The city
+gates were open, it is true; in some churches the doors stood wide for
+the first mass; they passed a priest or so just up, a friar or so,
+furtive truants from their beds; then, at the edge of the Piazza del
+Santo, Ippolita peeping through her curtains saw a little company of
+goatherds, blanketted, brown-legged, shabby rogues, their feet white
+with country dust, new in from the hills with their flocks. They blinked
+to see the gay procession; but wistfully, longingly, she looked after
+them from her cage. They were not so much market-stuff, per Dio! They
+walked at large over bright hillsides, singing to the sky and the winds.
+They were not pestered with love or fine buzzing ladies or capering
+signori, who larded poor girls with compliments, and showed their teeth
+most when they meant least. Ah, if she could run away! If she could hide
+with them, lie on the hillsides while the goats cropped about her; lie
+on her back, her hands a pillow, and sing to the sky and the winds
+because she was so happy! The thought possessed her; she ached for
+freedom; felt the water of desire hot in her mouth. The sleepy shepherds
+huddled in their rags watched her go by; they little knew what a craving
+the sight of their dusty ease had stirred in a heart whose covering was
+fine silk and strung pearls. Her wrongs came back upon her like heaped
+waters of a flood. That shameful bath--ah, Soul of Christ, to strip one
+naked, and let souse in hot water, like a pig whose bristles must come
+off! More than songs which she did not understand, more than
+compliments which made her feel foolish and pictures which made her
+look so, was this refined indignity. Seethed in water like a dead
+pig--ah, Madonna! She arrived sulky--if so humble-minded a girl could be
+sulky; defiant, suspicious, at least.
+
+The place chosen for the new Collegio d'Amore was the Villa Venusta,
+whose shady garden can still be seen from the Riviera Businello. This
+garden is full of trees, myrtle, wisteria, lilac, acacia--flowering
+trees--with a complement of firs and shining laurel to give a setting to
+so much golden-green and white. It has a canal on two sides, is a deep,
+leafy place, where nightingales sing day and night; it abounds in grass
+lawns, flowers, weeping trees, and marble _hermae_. The villa itself is
+very stately, a three-storied house in the Venetian style, from whose
+upper windows you can command a fine stretch of country; below you on
+either hand the Piazza del Santo, the Prato della Valle, with their
+enormous churches, pink and grey; beyond these the city walls, the green
+plain; lastly, the ragged outline of the far distant hills. It has a
+courtyard with lemon trees, long, dim rooms empty of all but coolness,
+shuttered against the glare of noon; above, a great saloon coffered in
+the ceiling, frescoed on the walls, with a dais and a throne; an open
+loggia full of flowers; above all this again, raftered bedrooms smelling
+of lavender. A roomy, stately place for those whose lives move easily in
+such surroundings; for Ippolita, the girl of the people, happy in her
+dark tenement in the Vicolo, gossip of the upper windows, shy beckoner
+to the street, burnisher of doorposts at sundown--for Ippolita this
+windy great house was a prison, neither more nor less.
+
+It was a prison, at least, conducted according to the best rules of
+gallantry then obtaining. They bowed her up the staircase to the
+refectory: they sat her down and plied her on their knees with fruit and
+cups of wine. They led her to the throne room, where, high above them
+all, she was to sit, and (being crowned) hear them contend in verse and
+prose for the privilege of her love for the day. It was all arranged.
+She was to have a favourite every day, man or maid. Favour was to go by
+merit among her slaves. The theme was always to be her incomparable
+virtues--her beauty, discretion, wit (poor dumb fish!), her shining
+chastity, power of binding and loosing by one soft blue ray from her
+eyes, etc. They displayed her emblems on the walls--the peacock, because
+her beauty was her pride, her pride her beauty; doves, because they were
+Aphrodite's birds; rabbits, because the artist understood rabbits; the
+beaver, that glorious witness of virtue, who makes himself less
+certainly a beaver that he may be more safely a saint; the beaver, I
+say, in white on a green field. Other symbols--the lily of her candour,
+the rose of her glowing cheeks, the crocus of her hair, the pink
+anemones which were her toes, the almond for her fingers: she saw
+herself articulated; her fauna, her flora, her moral and physical
+attributes cried at her from the four walls.
+
+Ippolita sat very scared on her throne, and endured what she could by
+catching firmly to the knobs of it and blinking her eyes. One by one
+they came creeping, these silken ladies, these slashed and curled young
+lords, to kiss her hand. "Dio mio!" thought she. "What is all this
+about? And are maids courted this way among the great?" She knew very
+little about it, yet was quite sure they were not. She wondered when
+Alessandro's business was going to begin. As a matter of fact, it _had_
+begun. He was now removing several inches of superfluous finger-nail
+with a sword.
+
+For the first day that same Alessandro del Dardo won her to himself by
+his descant upon the theme, "How a gentleman may dismember himself
+without dishonour for a lady's love; and how not."
+
+"Now he has me," thought poor Ippolita, and set her teeth. But he lay at
+her feet most of the day, and though at night he led her into the
+garden, if you will believe me, he never even kissed her hand.
+
+"Who is mad?" thought she to herself, staring from her bed into the
+shadowy angles of the room. "Am I mad? Are these signori all mad? Is
+this a mad-house? Dio! it soon should be at this rate." She cried
+herself to sleep at last.
+
+Next day it was Meleagro who won her by a careful consideration of the
+question, "Whether or no, when a gentleman has served a lady for ten
+years, and she falls sick of the small-pox, he is _ipso facto_ absolved
+of his vow?" Meleagro decided that he was not, and was accepted by
+Ippolita, not because she admired his reasoning but because she thought
+it part of the game.
+
+Next came the turn of Donna Emilia, a very burning poetess, for a
+Sapphic ode; and so on and so on. After three days Ippolita found
+herself yawning her head off; the longing for freedom returned, for the
+open country, the hills, the goatherds. Not for her home in the Vicolo:
+this everlasting love-making with its aftertaste of stale sugar had
+turned her sick of Padua. The whole city, to her mind, reeked of
+bergamot; she guessed a fawning lover at every street corner, a pryer at
+every window--basta, basta, la citta!
+
+No: it was to the hills she lifted up her eyes, to the hills and the
+swart goatherds free of their mystery. That _riviera_ across the canal,
+where the budding planes made a mist of brown and rose, was a favourite
+haunt of theirs. There they assembled and milked their goats, thence set
+out homewards at night. Sitting in the pleached arbours, with two
+adoring ladies at her feet and a little cluster of youths behind and
+beside her, she used to peer long and earnestly through the branches to
+see them collect their flocks and start for the hills at dusk. Lithe,
+brown, sinewy lads they were! What long legs they had, with what bravery
+wore their ragged cloaks! One carried a great bulging skin under his
+arm--bagpipes! She was sure they made good music to each other in the
+green country places. Very early in the morning she heard them come in;
+they were known by their bells. She jumped out of her luxurious bed at
+the first tinkle, and was at the shutter watching for them before ever
+they rounded the angle of the Ponte della Morte. There they came! colour
+of dust, with the straggling goats following after in a cloud of it. Her
+impulse was to fling wide the casement, hold out both her arms, call to
+them with all her might, "Ha! help, in the name of the Trinity! Take me
+with you to the green hills. I am weary of life in this place!" Then,
+knowing she could not, she would hold herself back by main force, stare
+about her, run back, throw herself on the bed, lie there sobbing wildly,
+and so be found by her ladies who came to put her in that detestable
+bath. She was sure her skin was being rotted by so much water; she used
+to feel her arms and thighs secretly to see if they were palpably more
+flabby. It stood to reason that the water must soak in--where else could
+it go to! She thought that she walked like a bladder, supposing a
+bladder were to take itself legs. The whole affair was clean abominable;
+but she saw no way out.
+
+The way came.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+ANNINA AS DEMIURGE
+
+
+They held a tournament in the courtyard of the villa; quite a concourse
+thronged the painted lists. Ippolita, a miracle of rose and gold, in a
+white gauzy robe, her hair crowned with daisies, was Queen of Love and
+Beauty, fanned by ladies in red. Del Dardo tilted with Vittore
+Marzipane, Gottardo de' Brancacci with Giacomo Feo, a young lion from
+the Romagna. Messer Meleagro very nearly fell off his horse. They were
+all in gilt armour, their steeds blazoned with peacocks; but there was
+no dust, for the ground had been wetted with rosewater; no bones were
+broken and no blood drawn. The gallants of the Quattrocento could not
+abide what gave the salt to their grandfathers' feasts. They had other
+ways of deciding issues which appeared satisfactory; and when at the end
+the conquering champion went down on his two knees before the throne,
+when Ippolita, with deprecating hands and downcast eyes rose timidly to
+crown him, the silver trumpets pealed as shatteringly as ever over a
+blood-fray, and the company cried aloud to the witnessing sky, "Evviva
+Ippolita bella!" They could have done no more for a sheaf of broken
+necks.
+
+This was a great day; but at the close of it its glorious Occasion
+locked herself into her chamber with breathless care, and sat tearful by
+the window, with crisping hands and heaving bosom, watchful of the happy
+idlers she could see afar off in the broad green Prato. Under the
+shimmering trees there walked mothers, whose children dragged at their
+skirts to make them look; handfasted lovers were there; a lad teased a
+lass; a girl hunched her shoulder to provoke more teasing. An old priest
+paused with a finger in his breviary to smile upon a heap of ragged
+urchins tumbling in the dust. The air breathed benevolence, the peace of
+afternoon, the end of toil. Round about, so still and easeful after the
+day's labour, were the white houses, green-shuttered, half hidden in the
+trees, the minarets, the domes, the coursing swallows: over them the
+golden haze of afternoon, a sky yellowing at the edge, beams of dusty
+sunlight coming slantwise, broad pools of shadow; further still, the far
+purple shoulders of the hills. Ah, those velvet-sided, blue-bathing,
+bird-haunted, wind-kissed hills!
+
+But what was that? The jangle of little bells--the goatherds were going
+out of the city! This poor prisoner then, this watched and weary beauty,
+whispered to herself of her despair. "Oh, Madonna, Madonna, Madonna,"
+she fretted, "let me go!"
+
+As by miracle they announced a visitor: one Annina, a girl of the town.
+Would her Majesty see her?
+
+Ah, Heaven! but her Majesty would! In came, staring and breathing hard,
+a brown-eyed girl with a shawl over her head, below it a blue stuff
+gown, below all a pair of sturdy bare legs. "Corpaccio! that's a lady;
+that's never my 'Polita," she stammered when she saw the white silk
+wonder of the room, the jewels in her neck, the chains of gold, the
+bosom.
+
+"Oh, Annina! Annina! it is, it is your poor Ippolita," panted the
+beauty, and fell into the red arms of her friend.
+
+"Sakes! dear sakes! Thou'lt spoil thy glory, my lovely dear," cried the
+other; "but there then, but there then, there's nothing to wail about.
+Tell me the trouble, tell thy good Nannina!" So she petted her, like a
+mother her child.
+
+Donna Euforbia stood confused, but dutiful ever. "Has her Majesty any
+further commands?"
+
+"Grazie, grazie," said her kissing Majesty, "niente!" and so was left
+alone with all that she held true in Padua.
+
+"Oh, come, Nannina, come and sit with me; come to the window--let us
+have the air." She led her there. "O lasso!" said she then, and sighed;
+"how good it is to see thee, child!"
+
+Before the other could let out a "Madonna!" she began her plaint. "They
+give me no rest, Nannina, no rest at all. Day long, night long, they are
+at their postures. I am dressed, undressed, put to bed, taken out, fed,
+watered, like a pet dog. They put me in a bath, they do my hair out
+every day: to get me up in the morning according to their fancies is an
+hour and a half's work for three ladies. Figure it!"
+
+"Christian souls!" cried Nannina, "what's the meaning of this? A bath?
+What, water."
+
+"Full to the brim with water, on the faith of a Catholic. Of course, if
+this continues I must die."
+
+"Oh, sicuro, sicurissimo!" she agreed. "This is very serious, Ippolita.
+Eh, let me feel you. Are you ever dry, my poor child?"
+
+"Dry to the touch, Nannina, dry to the touch. But it is within my body I
+fear it. I must be sodden, dearest."
+
+"Send for a priest, Ippolita, that is the only chance. But, remember,
+when they have washed you, they put clothes upon you like these. Ah, but
+it is worth a girl's while to have silk upon her, and these chains, and
+these pearls. Corpaccio! there is no Madonna in Padua with such stones
+as these, nor any bishop either, upon my faith!"
+
+Ippolita shook her beautiful head. "They are not worth the price of all
+that smelling water," she complained. "Try it, Nannina, before you
+speak. Seriously, I am very unhappy. Let me tell you something."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"No--come nearer. I'll whisper."
+
+The two heads were very close together. Nannina's eyes became a
+study--attention, suspicion, justified prophecy, hopefulness; then
+saucerfuls of sheer surprise to smother every other emotion.
+
+"Ma! Impossibile! And they have never--?"
+
+"Never so much as a finger."
+
+"But what? Are they--? Don't they--?"
+
+Ippolita shrugged, pouting. "Chi lo sa? I tell you, Nannina, I shall go
+mad in this place."
+
+"And why not?" cried the other, with a snort. "You have examples enough
+about you, my conscience! What is all their singing and stuff about?"
+
+"I think it is about me, Nannina."
+
+"And their disputing?"
+
+"It is about me."
+
+"And the rhymes?"
+
+"They are about me."
+
+"And you have never--?"
+
+"Never, never, never!"
+
+"What, not in the garden even?"
+
+"No, never, I tell you. Only my hand."
+
+"Your hand--pouf! The nightingales sing there, I suppose."
+
+"All night."
+
+"And there is moonlight?"
+
+"Floods of moonlight."
+
+"Dio! Dio santissimo!" cried Nannina, striking her friend on the knee,
+"you must be out of this, Ippolita! This is unwholesome: I like not the
+smell of this. Faugh, fungus! Mawkish! I will see your father this very
+night."
+
+Ippolita shook her head again. "My father is paid by these signori."
+
+"Then the priest must do it. Father Corrado must do it."
+
+"He dare not."
+
+"A convent--?"
+
+"No, never! That is worse than this. But--oh, Nannina! if I dared I
+would do such a thing."
+
+"Well, let me hear. If it can be done it shall be done."
+
+"Ah," sighed Ippolita, with a hand on her heart, "ah, but it cannot be
+done!"
+
+"Then why speak of it?"
+
+"Because I want so much to do it. Listen."
+
+Then Ippolita, clinging to her friend's neck, whispered her darling
+thought. The goatherds on the hills! There was freedom--clean,
+untrammelled freedom! No philandering, for no one would know she was a
+girl; no ceremony, no grimacing, no stiff clothes; no hair-tiring--she
+must cut off her hair--no bathing, ah, Heaven! If she might go for a few
+months, a few weeks, until the hue and cry was over, until the signori
+had thought of a new game; then she would come back, and her father
+would be so glad of her that he would not beat her more than she could
+fairly stand. It was a great scheme; indeed it was the only way. But how
+to do? How to do?
+
+"I suppose it is a dream of mine," sighed she, knotting her fingers in
+and out of the gold chains.
+
+Annina said nothing, but frowned a good deal. "I see that you are not
+safe in Padua," she said in the end. "You are really too handsome, my
+child. You couldn't show your nose without being known and reported. You
+must go outside if you are to be in peace."
+
+"But I can't go, Nannina; you know it as well as I do."
+
+"I am not so sure. Do you mean what you say, Ippolita?"
+
+"Ah, Nannina!"
+
+"Then you shall go. It so happens that I know one of those goatherds--a
+rough lout of a fellow called Petruccio. I could tell him that a
+youngster had got into trouble in the city and wanted to lie quiet for a
+week or two. I can do it, Ippolita."
+
+"Oh! And will you, will you?"
+
+"Corpaccio! If you mean business."
+
+"I mean nothing else."
+
+"Then it is done."
+
+They clung together and kissed. Annina was to return the next evening at
+the same hour.
+
+That night it was remarked on all sides that Ippolita's beauty had never
+been so disastrous, her eyes so starry bright, her colour so
+fire-flushed. Messer Alessandro, who loved her like a maniac, went
+shivering out alone into the moonlit garden to expostulate with Nature.
+"Thou hast formed, most cruel Mother," cried he, "an image of thy fatal
+self, whose eyes are sharp swords, and her breath poison of ineffable
+sweetness; whose consummate shape killeth by mere splendour; to whose
+tint of bright fire every arm must stretch as moth to flame, and by it
+be blasted. All this thou hast done, and not yet content, hast set this
+glory so low that all may reach for it, and yet so remote that none can
+touch. Burning-pure is my Beloved, at whose approach I faint. What hard
+miracle is this of thine, Goddess, that all must love and none be found
+worthy?" Thus we may reflect, as Alessandro beat his resounding
+forehead, to what a pass poetry may bring a youth, who buys for twenty
+ducats what twenty thousand cannot give him the use of. Pygmalion made a
+woman one day, moulding all her gracious curves as his experience
+taught him. There went his twenty ducats. But not he could warm that
+image into glowing flesh, however much he sang to it and hymned. That
+was another's affair. So here.
+
+Annina came on the morrow full of secrecy and other things more
+equivocal still in appearance. Her burden proved, however, to be a
+bundle of rags which, she assured Ippolita, represented all that was
+necessary to the perfect goatherd.
+
+"We will do what we can here, child," said she, "in the way of staining
+your skin, cutting off your hair, and such like. Then you shall veil and
+come into the garden with me; but whereas you shall come in as the
+Madonna of these heathens, you shall leave, per Dio, as Silvestro, who
+murdered the Jew in the Via della Gatta and has to hide in the hills. Do
+you remember him, Ippolita?"
+
+"Of course I do," said Ippolita. "Have I killed that Jew, Annina?"
+
+"It is to be understood, my dear. Now come, there is everything to
+arrange."
+
+There was indeed. Del Dardo would have swooned to see how Annina handled
+his Unapproachable. Her burnished hair was off with a clip or two of the
+great shears; a mixture of soot and walnut-juice hid up her roses, and
+transformed her ivory limbs to the similitude of a tanner's. Ippolita
+did not know herself. Veiled up close, she crept into the garden with
+her confidante, and in a bower by the canal completed her
+transformation. Not Daphne suffered a ruder change. A pair of ragged
+breeches, swathes of cloth on her legs, an old shirt, a cloak of patched
+clouts, shapeless hat of felt, sandals for her feet, shod staff for her
+hand--behold the peerless Ippolita, idol of half Padua, turned into a
+sheepish overgrown boy in tatters, whose bathing could only have been in
+sweat, and the scent of his garments the rankness of goats. On the floor
+in a shining heap lay the silk robes, the chains and jewels, only
+witness with Annina of what had been done. That same Annina clasped in
+her arms the tall boy.
+
+"Oh, my dear, my dear!" she said, half sobbing, "if any ill should come
+of this I shall kill myself."
+
+"No ill will come, Nannina, believe me," replied Ippolita, quite calm.
+"You are sure they expect me?"
+
+"I see them on the riviera now. Slip into the boat. I will put you
+across."
+
+On the other bank, Ippolita was received by the herd-boys, all agog to
+see the champion who had killed the Jew.
+
+"Addio, Silvestro," said Annina, keeping up the play.
+
+"Addio, Nannina," said Silvestro, with a chuckle.
+
+"Are we ready, boys?" Petruccio called out, turning about him. "We must
+be careful what we're doing."
+
+"Hist, Silvestro," whispered one, with a nudge; "did he bleed much?"
+
+"Cosa terribile--a flood!" Silvestro spread out his hands.
+
+"Cristo! The glory of it!"
+
+"Valentino, I scrag you, my man, if you speak of the Jew till we are out
+of the Porta San Zuan," growled Petruccio, the leader: "Avanti!" And the
+drab-coloured crew moved off towards the sunset.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+SILVESTRO
+
+
+The guard at the Porta San Zuan let them go unheeded; one ragamuffin
+more or less made no odds. The heart of the new-born Silvestro gave a
+great bound as they cleared the gate, and she saw before her the
+straight white road with its border of silver stems and the spreading
+tent-roof of golden green. These stems were so obviously like the
+pillars of a church that Silvestro ventured to remark as much to her
+neighbour--a broad-faced, thick fellow, not quite her own height, but
+twice as big in the girth. His mouth was large, his eyes were small and
+rather hot. He blinked a good deal, was very sulky, and met her advances
+with a grunt. "Chi lo sa?" was as far as he would go along with her in
+the matter of tree-trunks.
+
+It was annoying. Every one had seemed friendly at first. But being free,
+she could not feel daunted long; and at the second bend of the road the
+hills sailed into full vision--the solemn hills in a long line of peak
+and hollow, velvety, dark, and brooding sleep, like a bank of cloud
+edging the pale sky. The frogs were singing vespers in the ditches, the
+sharp chorus of the cicalas shrilled on all sides. At the sight of this
+enormous calm Silvestro forgot rebuffs. For a murderer he was in a very
+cheerful humour; he began to sing; soon he had all the boys (except that
+blinker) rapt to attention. Andrea slewed round his bag and pipes and
+began upon a winding air; they all sang, going at a trot. The goats
+pricked up their ears; they too began to amble; it became a stampede.
+The sun went down behind Monte Venda, the bats came flickering out, the
+great droning cockchafers dropped on the road like splashes of rain. The
+night found them still far from Abano, but still talking and nearly all
+friends. Silvestro was hand in hand with Petruccio and another boy,
+called Mastino because he was heavy-jowled and underhung. Their tongues
+wagged against each other about nothing at all. Silvestro strengthened
+his position by hints and shrewd winks, but it was decided that the Jew
+should be kept for the night fire. That was too choice a morsel to be
+eaten on the road; that must be rolled on the palate, to get the
+flavours. It was a pity, certainly, about the pig-eyed boy, who snorted
+whenever the exploit was mentioned--but "Never mind him," thought
+Silvestro; "I have all the others."
+
+They passed through Abano; Monte Ortone was ahead, a spur of the great
+body of the hills.
+
+"There's the hermit's candle," said Petruccio. A twinkling light showed
+deep in the trees. "There was a most excellent miracle there--the
+Blessed Virgin in a tree. Two girls saw her and thought she was a kite
+entangled. But they fetched a priest from Abano, and he knew better. So
+then they built an oracle or some such place, and paid a hermit to pray
+there. And now, whoever has ague, or is with child, or hath bandy-legged
+children, or witch-crossed cows, always goes there; and the hermit cures
+them. That was money well laid out, I suppose."
+
+"Per Bacco!" cried Andrea, "I'll tell you some more. Did you ever hear
+of Monna Betta's short leg?"
+
+Petruccio cuffed him well. "A palsy on her leg, and a palsy strike
+thee," he thundered, "if with thy old women's tales we miss the path! Go
+drive the goats in, thick-chops, and stay that clapper of thine till
+they ask for a crow-keeper. Move now, be off!"
+
+"'Tis a hard thing, Petruccio," blubbered Andrea, "if one may not tell
+the honour of his own land to a stranger."
+
+But Petruccio sent him flying with grit in his ear.
+
+By a brambly path they climbed Monte Ortone--Petruccio first, the others
+after him, the newcomer as best might be, then musically the goats. That
+round-faced, blinking boy, whom they called Castracane, was behind
+Silvestro now, much diverted by her panting efforts to go up without
+panting what he could rise on with closed mouth and scarcely any sharper
+whistling at the nose.
+
+"Hey, comrade," said he, grinning, "one sees that the Jew's stair was
+easier going for thee than Ortone." And he prodded her with his staff.
+
+This was not friendly. Ippolita did her best to humour him. "I go up as
+well as I can, Castracane," she said. "But do you go first, if you
+will."
+
+"Nay, nay," he replied, with a chuckle; "I make very good practice in
+the rear." So saying he caught her ankle in the crook of his staff, and
+brought her down into the bushes like a running ram.
+
+Silvestro was hurt in his feelings; all the rest laughed; his late-won
+empire seemed slipping. And it was very strange treatment for the Queen
+of the Collegio d'Amore, if wholesome. She arrived wet and breathless at
+the top, feeling moreover that she must by all means make a friend of
+this ugly fellow.
+
+The fire was made, the pot put on, the pot boiled. Then for a time,
+though jaws worked like mill-clappers, it was to better purpose than
+words. But when the last shred of garlic or last gobbet of pork had been
+fished up, when the wine-skin was flabby, the last crust's memory faded
+from the toothpick, Petruccio slapped Silvestro on the knee.
+
+"Now, comrade," cried he, "we'll have the Jew for dessert."
+
+"The Jew, the Jew! Now for the Jew!" went the chorus.
+
+Silvestro coloured. "The Jew? Eh, well, I killed him--ecco!"
+
+The flaming logs lit up a ring of tense, pale faces--not one of which,
+Silvestro saw, would rest content with that. The interrogatories began,
+a dropping fire of them.
+
+"How did you do it?"
+
+"With my knife, of course."
+
+"Where did you strike?"
+
+"Under the ribs. I took him by his great goat's beard, the old dog, and
+jerked up his head--so. Then I drove in between his ribs--ping!"
+
+Surely that would do? Not at all.
+
+"The left ribs?"
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"Did he gurgle?"
+
+"Didn't he!"
+
+"Blood choked him--eh?"
+
+"Per Bacco!"
+
+"You stabbed him on the stair?"
+
+"Gia!"
+
+"Did he roll down?"
+
+"No, no; he just lay where he fell."
+
+"Why did you kill him?" said Castracane, suddenly--bolt upright.
+
+This was awkward. Silvestro fenced. "Eh, corpo di Bacco, why does one
+kill the Jews?"
+
+The others at first took the same side. Why, indeed? The question seemed
+absurd. Did they not crucify young children, and eat them afterwards?
+Did they not kill Gesu Cristo? Everybody knows that they did; and, as
+for proof, look at them with a dish of pork. Ugh!
+
+But Castracane blinked his small eyes, and held to it.
+
+"Did you kill him because of Gesu Cristo?" he asked.
+
+Silvestro shrugged. "It was partly that, of course."
+
+"What else?"
+
+Silvestro grew hot--desperate. Why, after all, would one kill a Jew?
+Something must be urged, something solid.
+
+"There was Annina, you know," said Silvestro, at his wit's end.
+
+"Annina--that girl you were with? What of her?" Castracane licked his
+lips.
+
+"Well, this Jew, you must understand, was a limber young fellow--"
+
+"Young!" shouted the other. "You told me he had a great grey beard like
+a goat."
+
+"It wasn't very grey--not so grey as a goat's. Well, he was always
+following Annina about, making her presents, cadging for favours.
+Accidente! I couldn't stand it, you must know. So, thinking of Annina,
+and of Gesu Cristo, and one thing and another, I decided to follow him
+back to the Via Gatta--and so I did."
+
+Andrea leaned forward, hoarsely whispering (blessed diversion!)--
+
+"Say, Silvestro, what colour was the Jew's blood?"
+
+Silvestro opened wide those blue eyes, which had wrought such havoc
+among the Paduan nobility.
+
+"Black, Andrea!" he whispered again; "black as pig's blood!"
+
+Andrea crossed himself. "Pio Cristo," he prayed, "let me kill a Jew some
+day!"
+
+Even then Castracane, the sceptic, was not satisfied. "All I know is,"
+said he, "that I saw a Jew cutting bread at the _Albero Verde_ last
+Martinmas, and he slipped into his own thumb, and came off as red as a
+dog's tongue. Bah!"
+
+"Damn the Jew," said Petruccio, yawning; "let's go to sleep, boys."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+CASTRACANE
+
+
+She woke early, with the full light of day in her eyes. She felt tired,
+but not inert, languid and luxurious, rather, and explored to the full
+the happiness of stretching. Round about her were huddled the drowsy
+boys; on the slopes of the steep place where she lay she could see the
+goats browsing on lentisk and juniper, acanthus, bramble, mountain-ash.
+Misty on the blue plain lay Padua, a sleeping city, white and
+violet--remote now and in every sense below her and her concerns. The
+sky was without cloud, very pale still, glowing white at the edge; the
+sun not yet out of the sea. The freshness of the air fanned her
+deliciously; larks were climbing the sky singing their prick-song,
+scores of finches crossed the slopes, dipping from bush to bush.
+Ippolita clasped her hands behind her head, and looked lazily at all
+this early glory. The freedom of her heart seemed explicit in that of
+her limbs. What she could do with her legs, for instance! How she could
+sprawl at ease! She was just like all the others--as ragged, as dirty,
+at least; and soon she would be as brown. Dio buono, the splendid life
+of a goatherd!
+
+Then she found that Castracane was watching her out of one wicked eye.
+He had rolled over on to his belly, his face lay sideways on his hands;
+one eye was shrewdly on her. She considered him, rather scared, out of
+the corner of hers. Decidedly he was a sulky boy--you might say an
+enemy. As unconcernedly as she could she got up, stretched herself with
+elaborate ease, and strolled off along the edge of the hill. Castracane
+followed her; she affected not to know it; but her heart began to
+quicken, and when he was close beside her she found that she had to look
+at him.
+
+"Good morning, Castracane," says Silvestro.
+
+He grunted. "Look here, Silvestro," he began, "about that Jew--"
+
+The accursed Jew, who, so far from denying the resurrection of the dead,
+seemed a standing proof of it! Was she never to have done with the Jew?
+
+"Well, what about him?"
+
+"Did you kill him or not? That's what about him."
+
+"I told you last night."
+
+"Yes, but I don't believe it."
+
+"What!"
+
+"I don't believe it. Now then?"
+
+Silvestro looked about for help: they were out of sight of the others,
+and there lay Padua, slumbrous in the plain. It seemed as if Castracane
+meant quarrelling. Well, what must be, must be.
+
+"I don't care whether you believe it or not. Now then?" The blue eyes
+were steady enough on the black by this time.
+
+"Look here," said Castracane after a pause, "I'll fight you if you
+like. That'll settle it."
+
+Silvestro laughed nervously. "Why should we fight, Castracane? Besides,
+we have no knives. How can we fight?"
+
+"Like this," said the other between his teeth. His left arm whipped out,
+like a lizard's tongue, and Silvestro lay flat on his back among the
+cistus flowers, seeing ink and scarlet clouds.
+
+"Stick a Jew indeed!" cried Castracane. "Stick a grandmother! Why,
+you're as soft as cheese!"
+
+Silvestro's shoulders told a tale. He had turned on his face, but his
+shoulders were enough. Lord, Lord, look at that! Scorn in his conqueror
+gave way to amazement, amazement to disgust, disgust to contempt. Last
+came pity. Who'd have thought such a leggy lad such a green one? He was
+crying like a girl. Castracane had no malice in him: he was sorry for
+those sobbing shoulders. He stooped over the wreck he had made, and
+tried to put it together again.
+
+"Come, Silvestro," he said gruffly, "I never meant to hurt you."
+
+The wet face was up in a moment--red and wet and angry.
+
+"It's not that! It's not that! I never killed the Jew--there! But I was
+a stranger, and I tried to be friendly, and you hated me. I hate being
+hated. Why should you hate me? What have I done?"
+
+This was too subtle for the youth. "The trouble was," he said, "that I
+hit you in the right place. That's the knock-out blow, that one. Morte
+di Ercole, and down you went! Well, I'm sorry; will that do?"
+
+"Yes, yes--I want no more. Let us be friends, Castracane."
+
+"Benissimo."
+
+He helped his late enemy up; they kissed each other, then sat together
+on the grass--admirable friends.
+
+"So you didn't kill the Jew?" Castracane began. "I knew it! But what did
+you do to run away?"
+
+"Ah, you mustn't ask. Indeed, I can't tell you. It was rather bad."
+
+Castracane looked keenly at his new friend. "Was it a girl?" he said.
+
+Silvestro blushed. "Yes, it was a girl."
+
+"Ah, ah! Then I say no more. I like girls myself. But they get you into
+trouble quicker than anything. You would rather not tell me any
+more--quite sure?"
+
+"No, I can't indeed. Let's talk of something else. How old are you?"
+
+"Seventeen."
+
+"I'm not sixteen yet. Is Castracane your real name?"
+
+Castracane looked pleased.
+
+"I'm glad you asked. No; they call me that among ourselves, because of a
+little knack I have; but my name is Pilade."
+
+"That's a very nice name," said Silvestro.
+
+"I believe you--it's a splendid name. There's no better. It's the name
+of a Roman--Emperor of Rome and Sultan of Padua he was--who killed a
+giant called Oreste, having first caused him to become a Christian."
+
+"But why did he kill him when he had made a Christian of him?" asked
+Silvestro, greatly interested; "or why did he make him a Christian, if
+he was going to kill him?"
+
+"Pouf! What questions!" cried Castracane. "He made him a Christian
+because he was a good Catholic himself, and killed him for being a
+giant, of course. Or take it this way. If he hadn't been a Christian,
+how could he have made a good death? He couldn't, naturally. So the
+Emperor christened him first and killed him afterwards--ecco! It's
+always done like that, they tell me."
+
+"I see it now," said Silvestro; "it was very fine. I like your name of
+Pilade best. I shall always call you that, if you will let me."
+
+"Call me what you like," says Pilade. "Let's go and wake the others. I'm
+as hungry as the devil with all this talking."
+
+The result of this was that Silvestro became Pilade's foot-boy, his
+slave. The lout was in clover; nothing could have suited him so well. No
+more goats to herd in the heat of the day--Silvestro would do it; no
+share of foraging for him; no more milk to carry into the valley; no
+more fires to make up; nor strays to follow; nor kids to carry to new
+pastures--Silvestro would do it. The luxurious rascal lay out the
+daylight stretched on his back with his hat over his eyes; he woke only
+for his meals. He would not be at the pains even to swathe his own legs
+or strap his own sandals. Silvestro, bathed in sweat, his fair skin
+burnt and blistered, his delicate hands and smooth legs scratched by
+brambles, his slender neck bowed beneath the weights he carried on
+shoulders stretched to cracking point--Silvestro worked from dawn to
+dusk, rejoicing in the thankless office. Thankless it was, since Master
+Pilade took no sort of notice; yet Silvestro gave thanks. Pilade allowed
+the other to stoop to his shoe-ties, to wind the swathes about his
+sturdy calves, to carry his very cloak and staff, while he slouched
+along with hands deep in breeches pockets, and his hat pulled down to
+his nose. Silvestro would proudly have carried him, too, had that been
+possible. Most unmanly of Silvestro, all this; but the rogue he petted
+was too snug to consider it. At the falling-in of night, having his
+belly full of meat and drink (which Silvestro had prepared and served
+him with), he might, if the mood took him, pull out his reed pipe.
+
+"Silvestro," he might say, "you have been useful to-day; perhaps I'll
+play you something."
+
+And the beautiful Silvestro (tanned counterpart of the Glorious
+Ippolita) would hang upon the melancholy noise, and observe with adoring
+interest every twitch and distension of the fat-cheeked hero; and at the
+end sigh his content, saying--
+
+"Ah, thank you, Pilade; you have been very kind to me."
+
+"The truth is," Pilade would allow, "I am a good-natured devil if you
+take me the right way. I'll tell you what, Silvestro; you have pleased
+me to-day. You may sleep at my feet if you like: it will keep them warm,
+to begin with, and you'll be near me, don't you see?"
+
+"Thank you, thank you, dear Pilade," cried the enraptured Silvestro.
+
+The world is a very odd one, and it is most true that the man who is
+for taming hearts should pursue, ostensibly, any other calling. Not that
+Pilade had that in view. He only sought to be comfortable, good lad.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+RESURRECTION OF THE JEW
+
+
+This idyllic state of things might have lasted no one knows how long,
+with Ippolita-Silvestro finding joy in unreasonable service, and Pilade
+both ease and reason. Where either partner was so admirably suited it
+might have been interesting to see what would have happened: whether
+Ippolita would have betrayed herself or Pilade found her out. She was
+over head and ears in love, but he was vastly well served; and there is
+nothing like content for drugging the wits.
+
+Things, however, fell out otherwise. The Jew, to begin with, fell out of
+the grave to which he had been hastily recommended, and most insecurely
+at that. He made himself felt in a variety of ways, was discovered by
+the gardener in the Via di Vanzo, and stuck into a gutter in the Via Man
+di Ferro. He was discovered again by some one who had either less to do
+among Christians or more among Jews than the generality in Padua; and
+this time he was carried to the Guard House. Being reported (reporting
+himself, indeed) to the watch, he was reported on to the Capitano, by
+him to the Prefect. The Prefect put the Sub-Prefect, who had met him
+before, upon the look-out.
+
+"The Most Serene Republic," said that authority, "cannot have unburied
+Jews adrift in the city without finding out why the cemetery does not
+hold them and why the gutter does. Inquire, Alessandro mio, inquire!
+There was a wound in the man's ribs big enough for a nest of rats."
+
+Alessandro bowed, but raised his fine eyebrows. He was at that hour most
+happily unhappy over the late disappearance of his Glorious Lady. The
+peerless beauty of Padua, the incomparable Ippolita, was gone. His
+business was to devise dirges, monodies, laments, _descortz_ in the
+Provencal manner; to cry "Heigho!" and "Well-a-day!" not "Ban!" or "Out,
+haro!" To have these high frenzies, these straining states of the soul,
+disturbed by the unclaimed remains of a resolving Jew, was a cruel test.
+Yet, he reflected within himself, if his piercing love survived this
+inquiry, it was founded on rock. And, indeed, Alessandro believed that
+his heart was slowly turning to stone. He felt a curious chill there
+when he got up in the morning, a dead weight, a mass to lift with every
+choked beat. Perhaps the Jew would end what Ippolita had begun. If so,
+well. But, ah, Ippolita, Ippolita bella, Ippolita crudel! Ah, ohime!
+
+Habit set him to work. He instructed his officers, he visited the gates,
+questioned, took notes, inspected the gutter in the Via Man di Ferro,
+even inspected the Jew. He went to the Via della Gatta, to the fatal
+staircase; he bullied two or three landlords of two or three low
+taverns; went to the stews, to the Ghetto; talked very loud, flourished
+his sword, drove his men this way and that--in fine, did everything
+that becomes a young official of spirit. The result of his labours was
+that the Jew got posthumous fame out of all proportion to his merits.
+The city fairly hummed with him; nobody talked of anything but the dead
+Jew.
+
+The goatherds, coming in by the Porta San Zuan a day later, were
+shrewdly scrutinised by the Guard. They were numbered off, their names
+taken; they were pulled about and flustered, asked questions,
+contradicted before they had time to answer, and then called
+prevaricators because they said nothing; they were, in fact, brought to
+that state of breathless hurry in which a boy will say anything you
+choose. This, as everybody knows, is the only way of getting at the
+truth.
+
+"There were more of you fellows the other night," said the Corporal of
+the Guard. "Where are the rest of you? Come now, out with it; no lies
+here!"
+
+Petruccio, who had some sense, shammed to have none; but Andrea, less
+happy, was a real fool. At this invitation he looked wise.
+
+"Castracane is not here--true, but it wasn't Castracane," he muttered,
+and found his neck in a vice.
+
+"Who was it then, son of a pig? Who was it?"
+
+"Mercy, mercy, my lord! I will tell the truth!" he whined as he twisted.
+
+"Gesu morto! Tell anything else and I cut thy liver out, hound!" swore
+the man who held him.
+
+"Ah, Dio! I will! I will! It was Silvestro who killed the Jew!"
+
+"You shall come with me to the Signor Sotto-Prefetto," said his holder.
+"There's a ducat for me in this affair." The poor little company were
+driven into the gatehouse and there pent; but Andrea went off between
+two archers to be examined at greater length by Messer Alessandro, and
+to give blubbering confirmation of the fact. All the unfortunate
+particulars wrung out of Silvestro on his first night of Monte
+Ortone--the stab under the ribs, the Jew's beard, his black blood, etc.,
+etc.--were now screwed out of Andrea and went to prove his story.
+
+"By the twenty-four ears of the Twelve Apostles," swore the Corporal,
+"we've got him at last, Messere."
+
+The Sub-Prefect felt that he must act upon this news. So much insistence
+had been laid upon the affair by his chief, he dared not send his
+lieutenant: he must go himself. This is what comes of neglecting
+new-killed Jews! he might have thought. He little knew what was to come
+of it.
+
+Two mounted men, Andrea with a rope round his neck, himself very
+splendidly booted and cuirassed, made up a sufficient cavalcade to fetch
+home one snivelling goatherd. It was four by the time they were off,
+seven before they were at Abano, eight when they reached the foot of
+Monte Ortone and faced the deep chestnut woods in which that precipice
+dips his flanks. But though it was getting dusk there were eyes sharp
+enough on the top of the mountain to watch for what sharp ears had
+heard--a most unaccustomed sound in those leafy solitudes--trotting
+horses and jingling steel. Castracane from the summit saw it all; and
+what is more, guessed at once what Andrea in a halter meant.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+PYLADES FINDS HIS ORESTES
+
+
+"Silvestro," he called softly, without moving from his ambush or turning
+his eyes from those he watched, "Silvestro, come here!"
+
+The obedient stripling came eagerly, and knelt as close to his master as
+he dared--just so as to touch him.
+
+"Eccomi, Pilade," says he.
+
+"Get back over the brow as fast as you can," said his friend, "and hide
+in the cave. Wait there till I come. Go now; do as I bid you."
+
+Silvestro went at once.
+
+Castracane squared his jaw and waited. Every now and then he muttered to
+himself, with lazy lifted eyebrows. It was too much trouble to shrug.
+"Poor little devil--it would be a shame! And I knocked him down for
+nothing. And he loves me, per Bacco! Certainly, I have never been loved
+before--by a man, I mean--except by my big old mother out yonder, and
+she is a woman. She'll be sorry--she's old--eh, she's horribly old!
+Accursed, most rotten ass, Andrea! The whole story out of him--and a lie
+at that. Cospetto! I can't let the poor lad swing. And I did knock him
+down--and he cried like a girl; but not because I grassed him. By my
+soul, I'll do it--there, then!" Then he mortised his chin in his brown
+hands and blinked while he waited.
+
+He had not so very long; but you might have given him an hour, it would
+have made no difference to Castracane then. The guard came reeking to
+the brow of the hill; Andrea, haltered, was with them. Alessandro,
+mopping his head and cursing the flies, came last.
+
+"Look yonder, Marco," said one. The other said "Ha!" and pounced upon
+his treasure. He had him by the ear and was pricking him with his sabre
+in the fleshy parts.
+
+"Easy, friend," said Castracane; "I'm not running away."
+
+He went like a sheep to the Sub-Prefect. Andrea watched him twittering.
+
+"What is your name, fellow?" said that heated officer.
+
+Andrea's eyes yearned for his mate's. Castracane gave him a terrible
+look.
+
+"Silvestro is my name, Signore," says he; and Andrea knew his game.
+
+"We have found our bird, I think," said Alessandro, turning to his men.
+
+"Yes, Excellency, this is the lad we want. There was another of
+them--Castracane they call him."
+
+"Ah, yes. Where is Castracane, fellow?"
+
+"He is over Venda. Gone to Noventa, to his mother," replied Castracane.
+
+"Well, we don't want him so far as I know. Now, attend to me. You are
+suspected of that business in the Via della Gatta."
+
+Castracane shrugged. "Chi lo sa?" says he.
+
+"We shall see about that. Meantime, what have you to urge?"
+
+Castracane scratched his head. "What would you have me say, Messere? I
+am a poor lad. You are many, and I am one."
+
+Alessandro turned to his archers. "Bring him down to the hermitage," he
+said. "I am going to eat something. Tie him up and wait for me there.
+You can let the other go. This is the lad, fast enough. Avanti!"
+
+So the shackles were taken off Andrea's raw wrists, and transferred to
+Castracane's; the neck halter was shifted; Castracane was bond, Andrea
+free. Then Messer Alessandro went down the hill to what supper the
+hermit could afford.
+
+In about half an hour Silvestro, who had been fidgeting in the cave,
+came out, restless to have stayed so long beyond sight or hearing of his
+Pilade. His reception by Andrea was shocking. The gaping boy sprang
+forward with his arms out.
+
+"Ha! Here is a terrible affair," he wailed.
+
+"Our Castracane is taken, and for your fault; he will be hanged, and for
+you! Make your supper of it, you Jew-jerker. What sacrifice, Dio mio!
+There has been nothing like it, I suppose, since Giulio Cesare kissed
+Brutus, or Judas Gesu Cristo. You kissed him this morning; you know you
+did! You always do, you blush-faced sneak! And for that kiss he has
+taken your sins upon him, and is to be hanged. Fie, Judas, fie! Oh,
+Madonna Maria, the terrible affair!"
+
+So ending as he began, he danced about the hill-top, wringing his hands.
+
+But Silvestro, very pale, came quickly up, and laid hold of him.
+
+"Tell me all, Andrea," says he; "for I know nothing except that I love
+Castracane and will save him. Who has taken him?"
+
+"It is a lord--the Sotto-Prefetto--the hook-nosed gentleman with thin
+eyebrows; him they call Messer Alessandro. Castracane is tied like a
+netted calf--his hands behind him, and them to his neck. What's the good
+of his strength? He is as strong as the town bull; but if he writhes his
+hands he strangles, and if he thrusts his neck he chokes. Ecco!"
+
+Silvestro was staring down into the valley. "Where is Messer Alessandro,
+Andrea? Tell me quickly, for I can save Castracane."
+
+"He is eating with the hermit in the wood. But what can you do?"
+
+"You stay here," said Silvestro with decision; "that's what you can do.
+I'll go down."
+
+The sound of breaking through undergrowth was followed by rapping at the
+hermit's door.
+
+"What do you want, boy?" said the pious man to the ragged figure in the
+dark.
+
+"Messer Alessandro, my reverend--Messer Alessandro at once."
+
+"Are you come about the Jew? He will bear no more. He is eating. He
+tells me he knows more about the Jew than he does about our holy
+religion--which is a dangerous state of things, except that he is sick
+to death of him."
+
+"It is not about the Jew, father," said Silvestro, out of breath. "Tell
+him it is about--Ippolita."
+
+"Va bene," said the hermit. "Stay where you are."
+
+Messer Alessandro dropped his tools with a clatter, wiped his mouth,
+beat his breast, and began to walk up and down the cell.
+
+"Send him in, hermit, send him in! Forty ducats if he has any news, ten
+ducats in any case for bringing my thoughts from Jews on earth to
+Ippolita in Paradise. Despatch, despatch, send me the goatherd."
+
+The pale apparition of a fair-haired boy, timid in rags, cloaked in
+rusty black, with bandaged legs, and his old felt hat crushed against
+his breast, stood in the doorway.
+
+"Oh, boy!" cried Alessandro, gesticulating with one hand, "may you be my
+Hermes, my swiftfoot messenger. Tell me what you know of the divine
+Ippolita."
+
+"I know where she is, Signor Sotto-Prefetto," says Silvestro huskily.
+
+"Tell me, by Venus and all her doves!"
+
+For answer the blushing boy looked appealingly at Alessandro, with eyes
+so deeply, limpidly, searchingly blue, with lips so tenderly parted,
+with a smile fluttering so timidly, and limbs so drooping under their
+disguise, yet so quickly transformed from frightened lad's to bashful
+beauty's, that--
+
+"Saints of the Heavenly Court--ah, God of Love!" cried Alessandro; and
+the Sub-Prefect fell upon his knees before the goatherd.
+
+Later you might have seen that same goatherd enthroned in the hermit's
+armchair, his hands locked in his lap, his legs modestly disposed, his
+head gracefully bowed, a blush on his burnt cheeks, his long lashes
+casting a shade, his breath coming and going with a pretty haste--and
+at his feet a splendid gentleman, booted and cuirassed, who poured out
+voluble assurances of eternal respect, of love undying, of the sovranty
+of Venus Urania, and the communion of beautiful minds.
+
+"I will see you again; yes, I will certainly see you again, since you so
+desire it," said Silvestro, after a good deal of this. "And I will give
+you what you ask, if it is in my power. But you must trust me so far:
+you must go away from here, and wait till I send word. I shall owe you
+every gratitude, every reward I can give you. Now, however, you must let
+me go; and I must take with me the goatherd, who is as innocent of the
+Jew's death as I am."
+
+"Ah, I will do all that you wish," sighed Alessandro. "Sacred lady, I
+will do it. But surely you will have pity upon a humble slave who has
+served you long and faithfully, and now is putting himself in peril for
+your pleasure. Pay me my poor fee, lady. Enrich me boundlessly with what
+costs you so little."
+
+So he urged, until--
+
+"Well," says Silvestro, "I will do it. Rise up, Messere; take what you
+will."
+
+Messer Alessandro shut his eyes, and slowly rose to his feet. Having
+kissed the goatherd's hand, he very delicately kissed the goatherd's
+proffered cheek. "I am paid immeasurably, most holy one," he said. "Lead
+now; I will do what you desire."
+
+Out sped Silvestro into the wood, the Sub-Prefect bareheaded behind him.
+In a glade not far from the hermitage sat the two archers. The horses
+were tethered to one tree, Castracane to another. Seeing their chief,
+the men sprang to attention; their astonishment at what followed was no
+greater than Castracane's. Silvestro (that timid slave), now as bold as
+brass, walked straight to him, the Sub-Prefect tiptoeing behind.
+
+"Loose him, Signore," says Silvestro.
+
+The Sub-Prefect with a knife cut his bonds. "Your will is done."
+
+"Thank you, Signor Alessandro: God be with you. Come, Pilade."
+
+Silvestro took Castracane by the hand, but not before the gentleman had
+kissed his own with profound respect. Then Silvestro led his friend away
+through the trees, and the Sub-Prefect was understood to say--
+
+"We have been on the wrong scent, men. Mount. To the city--Avanti!"
+
+"What's all this? Whither now?" stammered Castracane.
+
+Silvestro squeezed his hand. "Oh, dearest, let us go to the cave--let us
+go to the cave on the hill!"
+
+Castracane felt his friend trembling. Trembling is infectious; he began
+to tremble too.
+
+"Yes, yes, we will go to our cave," he agreed in a quick whisper.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+CYMON FINDS HIS IPHIGENIA
+
+
+They struggled upwards through the bushwood and starry flowers. It was a
+scented night, the air heavy with the burden of midsummer. The fireflies
+spread a jewelled web before their faces, great white moths flapped and
+droned about them. On they pushed, their hands locked through all
+hazards of brake or briar: neither would let go for a whole world, but
+Silvestro was always in front, leading Castracane for this once. One
+knew the way as well as another; but Silvestro led it. They rounded the
+hill-top.
+
+"Here we are at last," said Silvestro. "Let us sit here, and look at the
+splendour of the night. Oh, Pilade! Oh, dear friend! How couldst thou do
+so much for me?"
+
+"What else could I do?" said he gruffly. "You never killed the pig-Jew."
+
+"Nor did you, Pilade. Tell me why you gave yourself up."
+
+"Because you didn't do it, of course."
+
+"But you didn't do it either?"
+
+"Well, but I knocked you down."
+
+"Did you do it because of that; or because--because you like me?"
+
+Pilade grunted. "Suppose I did?"
+
+Silvestro sighed, and leaned his head on his friend's shoulder.
+
+"O wondrous night!" said he, whispering. "Look, the stars are like
+moons."
+
+It was certainly a wonderful night--a night of enormous silence, of
+great steady stars, of gold-dusted air, of a sky like a purple dome
+encrusted with jewelled lights. The two boys sat together, blinking at
+so much speechless glory. Castracane's arm was round his fellow's
+shoulder; that fellow's lips parted, and his breath came soft and
+eager--yet too quickly for ease. It was certainly a night of wonder.
+
+Castracane's arm slipped down to Silvestro's waist; Silvestro sighed,
+and snuggled into the haven it made.
+
+"O holy night!" said he. "Now might miracles happen, and we be by."
+
+"Ah," said Castracane, "the miracle of choice would be an angel with a
+basket of bread and cheese--or a beautiful maiden to come and lie in
+one's arms."
+
+Silvestro thrilled. Castracane gave a responsive squeeze, and went on.
+
+"I am not too sure, you must know, that one has not happened already. To
+see you lead that signore by the nose! You came swimming among the
+tree-stems like an angel. You might have knocked me down with a feather.
+And how he kissed your hand! Miracles! Why, if you had been the maiden I
+dream about, he couldn't have been more respectful. If you want
+miracles, for example!"
+
+"I do want them, Pilade. I want them very much." Silvestro sighed again,
+and leaned his cheek till it touched his friend's.
+
+A shock transfused Castracane; he was caught by the starry influences.
+Suddenly he turned his mouth towards that blushing flower, and kissed
+Silvestro. Silvestro thrilled but lay close.
+
+"Buon' Dio, ecco miracolo!" said Castracane hoarsely, and kissed again.
+
+Again his nestling companion gave no sign but a quiver.
+
+Castracane surveyed the stars. "A miracle has certainly happened," he
+said. "I feel very queer. My head swims, fingers and toes tingle; I seem
+to have hot lead in my legs. It may be that I am empty. I think it is a
+miracle; but as yet I see no angel."
+
+Some quicker thrill of what he held made him look at Silvestro. At the
+same moment Silvestro slowly turned his head, and looked at him. What
+each saw in the other's face beyond a white moon-shape, what shining of
+truth in the eye, what expectancy, what revelation in the lips, I know
+not. Two pair of lips, at least, met and stayed together.
+
+"O Dio!"
+
+"Oh, Pilade! Oh, carissimo!" She abandoned herself to joy.
+
+"_You_ are the angel, the miracle! You are--"
+
+"No, no, I am not an angel; but oh, I love you, dearly!"
+
+"Ah, la Madonna!"
+
+"I am Ippolita! I love you!"
+
+"You love me? You are mine then--come."
+
+"Andrea," said Castracane next morning, "I think the others will be back
+before noon. You must wait here till they come. I am going to take
+Silvestro over La Venda to see my mother, and confess to our curate. It
+is good for the soul."
+
+"Silvestro looks well this morning," said Andrea, with his mouth full of
+bread. "What a colour of dawn! What shining eyes! He would make a proper
+Madonna for a Mystery--eh?"
+
+"He would," said Castracane laconically; "a most proper Madonna. With a
+_Bambino_ on his lap--eh, Silvestro."
+
+Silvestro blushed; Castracane pinched his cheek, which made matters
+worse.
+
+They took the road together through the deep hedges of the valley. Monte
+Venda rose before them, dark with woods. Castracane's arm was round
+Silvestro's waist: every twenty yards they stopped.
+
+"To think of it!" cried Castracane, on one of these breathless halts.
+"You to be like any one of us--breeched, clouted, swathed--and a lovely
+lass within your shirt--Madonna!"
+
+"Do you think me lovely?" asked Ippolita devoutly. "I have heard that
+till I have been sick to death of it; but from you I shall never be
+tired of knowing it."
+
+"Blessed Angel!"
+
+"Oh, Pilade, my love!"
+
+They loitered on.
+
+"You see that I am not what you thought me," said Ippolita, with an arch
+look. "You thought I had killed a Jew."
+
+"Never, per Bacco!" cried Castracane. "That I'll swear to."
+
+"You thought I was a boy, even last night, dearest."
+
+But that he denied. "Santissimo! Did I treat you like a boy, I ask
+you?"
+
+"You knocked me down once, Pilade."
+
+"Every honest man knocks his wife down once," said Pilade gravely.
+
+"And then you kissed me."
+
+"I can kiss you again," said Pilade; and did.
+
+I repeat, Padua is a freakish city. The Sub-Prefect writes madrigals in
+vain. Castracane, the goatherd, sends Silvestro sprawling, and wins the
+golden Ippolita for a willing bride. What are we to make of it? _Deus
+nobis haec otia fecit._
+
+
+
+
+THE DUCHESS OF NONA
+
+     "L'Anima semplicetta, che sa nulla,
+     Salvo che, mossa da lieto fattore,
+     Volentier torna a cio che la trastulla."
+                             --_Purg._ xvi. 88.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+BOCCA BACIATA
+
+
+"Not unprosperous is your Erasmus in England," wrote that man of wiles
+to one Faustus, a poet; and then--"To touch upon one among many
+delights, there are girls in this land divinely fair--soft, easy, and
+more wooing than any of your Muses. Moreover, they have a custom which
+cannot be too much honoured. Wheresoever you go a-visiting, the girls
+all kiss you. With kisses you come in, with kisses depart; returning,
+they kiss you again. Cometh one to you, the kisses fly between; doth she
+go away, with kisses you are torn asunder; meeting in any place, kisses
+abound. Go where you will, it is all kisses. Indeed, my Faustus, had you
+but once tasted of lips so fragrant and so soft, not for a time only,
+but to your end of days, you would choose to be a pilgrim in this
+England." By no means the only stranger to be charmed by our welcoming
+girls was Erasmus. Amilcare Passavente, of a darker blood, found such
+kisses sweet: those of one at least he vowed to call his own. What he
+made of them, what they of him, what other diverting matter appertains
+to the kisser and the kissed, you shall understand who care to read.
+
+Mary was her name in our Lord, Lovel that of her father in the flesh, a
+respectable wharfinger of Bankside. Molly, Mawkin, Moll Lovel, "Long
+Moll Lovel," and other things similar she was to her kinsfolk and
+acquaintance, who had seen her handsome body outstrip her simple mind.
+Good girl that she was, she carried her looks as easily as a packet of
+groceries about the muddy ways of Wapping, went to church, went to
+market, gossiped out the dusk at the garden gate, or on the old wharf,
+after the 'prentices had gone, linked herself waist to waist with maiden
+friends. Up river or down, she trafficked in a wherry, and took the
+waterman's tender glances as part receipt for his hire. In a word, this
+winsome, rosy creature, grown hardy in a kind soil, adventured herself
+at ease among them that might have been her poets, adorers, or raveners,
+nor thought to be cheapened by the liberty she employed. She was rather
+shy with strangers, conscious of her height, awkward under observation,
+blushing to know she blushed; but simple as the day, pleased with
+flattery, pleased with other trifles,--trinkets, snatched kisses, notes
+slipped into the prayer-book, etc. She told her mother everything before
+she went to bed, sat on her father's knee when she was too old and much
+too tall for it, dreamed of lovers, hid trembling when they came, had
+palpitations, never told a fib or refused a sweetmeat; she was, in fact,
+just the honest, red-cheeked, pretty, shy simpleton of a lass you will
+meet by the round dozen in our country, who grows into the plump wife of
+Master Church-warden-in-broadcloth, bears a half-score children, gets
+flushed after midday dinner, and would sooner miss church than the
+postman any day in the year. Such was Molly Lovel at nineteen, honestly
+handsome and honestly a fool, whom in Bankside they knew as Long-legged
+Moll.
+
+To Amilcare Passavente, the young merchant-adventurer from Leghorn,
+ravished as he was by the spell of her cool lips, she became at once "La
+divina Maria," or shorter, "La Diva"; and in a very light space of time,
+when his acquaintance with her and hers with his tongue had ripened, she
+had quite a nosegay of names: Madonna Collebianca (my Lady Whitethroat),
+Donna Fiordispina, La Bella Rosseggiante, were three among three dozen
+flowers of speech, picked from a highly scented garden of such for her
+adorning. Amilcare translated them in his hoarse, eager voice, helped on
+by his hands (which were rapid) and his beseeching eyes (which had the
+flattery of deference), not only to Molly apart, but to all or any of
+her acquaintance who could listen without giggling. Molly pressed her
+bosom; her friends, as they loitered home, said in each other's ears,
+"Blessed Lord, what will become of Gregory Drax?" Gregory Drax was the
+broad-girthed young master of a trading-smack which coasted between
+London and Berwick, and was even at that hour in Kirkley Roads, standing
+off Yarmouth.
+
+All a summer this endured, but went no further while Amilcare, new to
+the blunt ways of the English, was unable to stomach their cropped
+speech any better than their sour beer. Those who heard his florid
+paraphrase took it gravely, yet held by their "Moll Lovel." They wished
+that Gregory Drax might have a fair wind home; they wondered what Master
+Lovel was about; trusted that the black-eyed rascal (whose speech was
+too glib, surely, to be honest) would not make a fool of the girl. He
+very soon showed them that, whatever else he did, he intended to make a
+woman of her. Let them hold, said he (for once expressing his contempt),
+to their "Molly Lovel"--the name was the Shadow. He would hold, as at
+that moment he was very devoutly holding, Molly herself--aha! the
+blessed Substance. And when the young Molly let herself go whither her
+soft desires had long since fled; when she felt the heart of Amilcare
+jumping against hers, his cheek, his lips, his soft syllabling, her own
+breathless replies--then at last Amilcare, quite enraptured, finding
+everything about her wonder and delight, made shift to catch up some
+waft of her very tongue, closer savour of her very home, and called her
+on high his adorable, his unending, his altogether soul-devastating,
+destroying mistress, "Madonna Mollavella." Good Master Lovel the
+wharfinger neither knew his daughter nor his father's name in this
+long-drawn compound of liquids; he was troubled, very doubtful, anxious
+for Gregory Drax; but all Lombardy and the Emilian March came to know it
+in time. Amilcare rode down opposition. Eloquence! Were ever such cries
+to great Heaven, such invitations to Olympus, slappings of the
+forehead, punchings of ribs, in Wapping before? Molly in tears on her
+mother's breast, Amilcare on his knees, the neighbours at the door:
+Master Lovel, good man, abominated such scenes. Father Pounce married
+them at St. Saviour's in Southwark; money abounded, the dowry passed
+from hand to hand. On a gusty November morning there sailed out of the
+London river the barque _Santa Fina_ of Leghorn, having on board
+Amilcare Passavente and Donna Maria his wife, bound (as all believed)
+for that port, and thence by long roads to their country of
+adoption--not Pisa, nor Lucca, nor any place Tuscan; but Nona in the
+March of Emilia. No; Erasmus was not the only traveller whirled about by
+English kisses, nor Molly Lovel the only simple witch in turn bewitched.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+AMILCARE: COMMERCE AND THE AFFECTIONS
+
+
+Molly was a handsome fool: let there be no doubt about that. There was
+no romance in her, though sentiment enough. She lacked the historic
+sense; and if she thought of Rome at all, supposed it a collocation of
+warehouses, jetties, and a church or two--an unfamiliar Wapping upon a
+river with a long name. Her sensations on the voyage were those of
+sea-sickness, on the golden-hazy Campagna those of home-sickness
+unaffected. Affectation of any sort was far from her. If she was happy
+she showed her white teeth, if wretched she either pouted or cried; if
+she liked you there were kisses, if she distrusted you she grew red. But
+she distrusted no one. Why should she? Since every act of hers was, in
+seeming, a caress of personal intention, every one loved her. As for her
+husband, when he was not sacramentally engaged, he mutely raved to the
+stars, protesting by his dimmed eyes, moving lips, and strained-out arms
+how every breath she took was to him also an inspiration. Her frankness,
+the truth lucent in her eyes, her abounding receptivity,--for she
+believed everything she was told and objected to nothing,--her sweet
+long body, the tired grace with which she carried her lovely head, her
+tender, stroking ways, the evenness of her temper (which only that of
+her teeth could surpass),--all this threatened to make of Amilcare a
+poet or a saint, something totally disparate to his immediate proposals.
+His nature saved him for the game which his nature had taught him.
+
+In that great game he had to play Molly (though he loved her dearly)
+must be, he saw, his prime counter. Coming to England to negotiate bills
+of exchange, he had Molly thrown in. She would do more for him than
+rose-nobles. He ecstatised over his adorable capture; but saw no reason
+in that why he should not lay it out to advantage. It would not cheapen
+in the chaffer; on the contrary, give him the usufruct for a few years,
+and he would be not only the happiest but the most considerable of men.
+Triumphant Bacchus! (so he mused to himself) what had he not gained? A
+year's pay for his men, the confidence of the "Signori" of Nona, the
+acclamations of the Piazza and the Council Chamber at once--and Molly
+Lovel. Hey! that was best of all. For her sake, and by her means, he
+would be Capitano del Popolo. What else? That would do for a beginning.
+If Molly could turn his head, she could turn other heads, he supposed. A
+turned head meant a disponable body, a bending back, an obsequious knee,
+even a carcase at a quick hand's discretion; votes in Council, delirium
+in the Piazza, _Te Deum_ in the Church. Amilcare knew his countrymen: he
+that knows them half as well will have no trouble in conceiving how
+these trade-calculations can consist with a great deal of true love.
+And what was Amilcare's trade? His trade was politics, the stock whereof
+was the people of Nona, the shifty, chattering, light-weight spawn of
+one of those little burnt-brick and white cities of the Lombard
+Plain--set deep in trees, domed, belfried, full of gardens and fountains
+and public places--which owed their independence to being too near a
+pair of rival states to be worth either's conquering. There were some
+score of these strewn over Southern Emilia and Romagna in those days,
+and the time was almost at hand, and with it the man, to sweep them all
+into one common net of wretchedness. But Amilcare had no clear thought
+of that. For the moment Nona was as peaceful as Forli, or Rimini, or
+Pesaro, or Faenza, thanks to him and his "Centaurs"--that famous band of
+free riders he had levied from the Tuscan hills. Very much at his mercy,
+safe under the eye of his trusted Secretary, awaiting his return, he
+fully intended that peace to continue when she fell huddling to him. It
+would, indeed, be his care; for it was a maxim of Italian politics that
+no man willingly stirs after dinner.
+
+The situation was still pretty delicate; he had done little more than
+win foothold. In the late struggles with Parma he had intrigued with
+great address; sold himself and his Centaurs to Farnese, brought that
+thick-necked hero up to the very walls of Nona, then (in the nick of
+time) resold himself at double the price to the city he was besieging,
+and routed his yesterday's master by an attack in flank just as the
+Nonesi were carrying the trenches in front. In the excitement of that
+wonderful hour--Farnese in full flight, himself borne on men's shoulders
+round the Piazza, thanksgiving in the cathedral, clouds of incense,
+clashing bells, wine running in the Fontana delle Grazie--he had for a
+moment been tempted to believe the times ripe for a proclamation:
+"Amilcar, Dei Gratia, Nonarum Dux," etc. He had his treble wages in his
+pocket, the hearts of the whole city throbbing at his feet. He was a
+young man: tempted he certainly was. But Grifone (the Secretary) touched
+his elbow and showed a straightened lip. He would not risk it. He
+contented himself with a footing, the Palazzo Bagnacavallo rent-free,
+and the title of "Gonfalonerius Populorum Libertatis," which looked
+passably well about a broad seal. "Pater Patriae," "Nonarum Dux," the
+control of the bread-tax,--all should be added to him in time, if only
+the Borgia could be fed elsewhere. At the thought of that hearty eater
+stalled in the Vatican, he felt that he might indeed thank God for his
+lovely Molly. With her for decoy even that game-bird might be lured.
+Lying on the poop of the _Santa Fina_, his dark eyes questing over her
+face, her hands among his curls, he seemed to Molly the wonder of the
+world. So of her world he was; but he meant to be that of his own--a
+very different world.
+
+He was a lithe, various creature, this Amilcare Passavente, his own
+paradox. Quick as a bird of prey he was, and at times as inert; dark as
+night, eagle-faced, flat-browed, stiff and small in the head,
+clean-featured, with decisive lips. A very fluent speaker, hoarse in
+voice, but cunning in the vibrations he could lend it, he was in action
+as light and fierce as a flame; at rest as massive as a block of stone,
+impervious to threats or prayers or tears. Women loved him easily, men
+followed him blindly, and both for the same reason--that they believed
+him ruthless to all but themselves. Ruthless, indeed, he had been, and
+was to all and sundry. Molly was the one apparent exception, and in her
+eyes he was perfect. For her immediate comfort this may have been true
+of him. He was a brave lover.
+
+He taught her to falter endearments in his own tongue: he was _carino,
+caro amico, anima mia, sovrano del mio cuor_, and many other things yet
+more intimate. In return he gave her a homage which was not without a
+certain depth because it was done with foresight. He taught her to be
+his slave by professing himself hers, and so touching her generosity as
+well as her humility. At all this she was very apt. There was a fund of
+deep affection in the girl, the makings of an excellent wife, a devoted
+mother--far more stuff than should go to serve as toy for a man's idle
+hours. Also she was very demonstrative, by no means averse (quite the
+contrary, indeed) to demonstrations on his part. She loved to walk
+belted by his arm, loved to put her head on his shoulder, or have her
+chin lifted that eyes or lips might be kissed. These favours, which his
+nation was accustomed to keep at home, she wore without
+self-consciousness abroad. It enchanted Amilcare, not only as a thing
+beautiful in itself, but as a clear source of profit in his schemes. He
+pictured the havoc she would work in a hall full of the signori--keen
+men all--when she sailed through the rooms offering her lips to whoso
+would greet them "English fashion." Why, the whole city would be her
+slave--eh, and more than the city! Bentivoglio of Bologna, Il Moro of
+Milan, Ordelaffi, Manfredi, Farnese, the Borgia, the Gonzaga, D'Este of
+Ferrara, Riario, Montefeltro, Orsini--by the Saint of Padua, he would
+face them each with his beautiful wife; charm them, turn their heads,
+and then--_ping_! Let the neatest wrist win the odd trick. Very pleasant
+schemes of witchery and silent murder did he make as the _Santa Fina_
+drove him through the dark blue waters on his honeymoon, and at last
+brought him up to point out to his adoring instrument a low golden
+shore, a darker line of purple shadow beyond, and in the midst a white
+tower which gleamed like snow. "Civitavecchia, my queen among ladies!
+Rome beyond it; beyond that Nona--Nona and glorious life for thee and
+me!" he cried, as he waved her towards these splendid things.
+
+But Molly snuggled closer to him and sighed.
+
+He, very sensitive to alien moods, was conscious of the jar. "You are
+sad, beloved?" he asked her softly. "You are thinking of your own land?"
+
+"No, no, dearest; not that now. I was thinking only--but it is
+foolishness of a fool," said Molly, hiding her face.
+
+"You cannot be a fool, blessed one, since you are not so much as human
+as I see you now," he whispered, holding her close. "You are a rosy god
+at this moment, my treasure. You are all colour of dawn, auroral, colour
+of tender fires. Tell me your thought, my holy one."
+
+She whispered it back. "It was--that you will be full of business at
+Nona, Amilcare. You will have no time to love your poor Molly."
+
+The rogue was fishing for protestations, and got them.
+
+"Love you!" he cried. "Ah, tell me how long I have to live, and I will
+tell you the hours of my love, O my soul!"
+
+"But you will be abroad, a-horseback, with your captains, in the
+tents--"
+
+"Why, yes, that must be so," he owned. "But I shall love you the more
+for that, Molletta."
+
+She pretended to pout, fidgeted in his arm, arched her neck.
+
+"But how shall I know it, Amilcare, if I am not there?"
+
+"By what I do to you when I return, dearest love," cried he; and
+thereafter, speaking by signs, was better understood.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+MARKET COVERT
+
+
+They made Rome a day or two after that little tender and exchange of
+vows, having disembarked amid a crowd of clamorous Amilcares in
+rags--she could see some dear trait of him in each; trailed across the
+bleached marches (with the Sabine Hills like a blue hem beyond); caught
+the sun at Cervetri, and entered the dusty town by the Porta
+Cavalleggieri on one of those beaten white noons when the shadows look
+to be cut out of ebony, and the wicked old walls forbidden to keep
+still. The very dust seems alive, quivering and restless under heat. St.
+Peter's church, smothered in rush mats, was a-building, the marble
+blocks had the vivid force of lightning; two or three heretic friars
+were being hailed by the Ponte Sant' Angelo to a burning in the Vatican;
+Molly was almost blind, had a headache, a back-ache, and a heart-ache.
+Amilcare, who had fallen in with a party of lancers by the way, had
+ridden for a league or two in vehement converse with their lieutenant.
+To him there seemed more to say than ever to her. She felt hurt and
+wanted to cry.
+
+At their inn they learned the news--that is, Amilcare learned it, for
+Molly was languishing upon a bed, forgotten and mercifully forgetting.
+Pretty news it was. Don Cesare, it appeared, had stabbed the Duke of
+Gandia, his brother, three nights ago, and thrown him into the Tiber.
+The body had only been fished out yesterday; it had nine wounds in it,
+including one in the throat big enough to put your fist in. It was a
+sieve, not a body: perforated! His Holiness? Ah, he could be heard even
+here, howling in the Vatican, like a bitch in an empty house. Don Cesare
+was in hiding, reported at Foligno. To-morrow there was to be a Holy
+Conclave--all the Cardinals. God knew what Alexander had or had not in
+his mind, the conscience-stricken old dog. It was known what he had not
+in his house, at least. Vannozza had been thrice refused admission; so
+also La Bella Lucrezia. Think of it!
+
+This was very grave news to Amilcare's private ear. Cesare was his
+deadly enemy, the one man he honestly feared; the one man, consequently,
+he wanted to meet. He was still brooding over it when the broad-backed
+butcher they call Il Drudo slammed him on the back.
+
+"Fortune is with you, Passavente--the slut! She gives you time to
+breathe. The Borgia had a sinking of the stomach; he hankered after a
+filling of Lombard sausage a little while since. Gandia cut in, and
+Cesare cut in, _per Bacco_! But mark my words, Amilcare, the appetite
+will return. You will have the Duke in your March before many days.
+Therefore my advice to you is--Avoid Foligno; fortify Nona."
+
+Amilcare looked his man in the face. "And my advice to myself, Galeotto,
+is--Seek Foligno, and so fortify Nona. _Addio._" He went out like a man
+who has found his way.
+
+"Now, what the devil did the fellow mean by that?" cried Il Drudo, with
+his thick fingers out.
+
+"Devilry expresses it," said a sly secretary in black.
+
+Molly in dreams, soft as a child and glossy with sleep, looked too
+beautiful for a disturbing hand to dare anything that night. It would
+have been the act of a brute, not Amilcare's act. In small things he was
+all gentleness. He crept into bed like a cat, fearful of waking her, and
+next morning contrived, by a fit of coughing, to waken her no more than
+half. The rest he did by methods equally adroit, until by imperceptible
+degrees she learned that Rome might give no ease to her feet. He had her
+in the saddle and all the baggage-mules away an hour after the sun.
+
+Arrived at Foligno, he found that his great enemy was at sanctuary in
+the Convent of Olivet, biting his nails in a red fume there. Hidden
+behind spires of cypress, Olivet stood outside the walls, a sun-dyed
+white building deep under brown eaves. Cesare, it was reported, was
+quite alone with his moods, now consumed by fidgety remorse for what he
+might have lost in his brother's blood, now confident and inclined to
+blusterous hilarity, now shuddering under an obsession of nerves. In any
+guise he was dangerous, but worst of all when the black fit of suspicion
+was upon him. So he now seemed; for being told who waited upon him, he
+refused point-blank to see anybody. Amilcare, at the door, heard his
+"Vattene, vattene! Non seccami!" ("Out, out! Don't pester me!") rocking
+down the dim passages of the house; and Molly, whom this sudden new
+expedition had bereft of what wit she had, turned pale to hear the
+roaring beast.
+
+"Ah, love, love, love, let us run away! I like not this empty place,"
+whimpered the girl, holding her husband's arm; but he gently removed her
+hand, kissed it, and held it.
+
+"Courage, dear one; I shall be by thy side. Much depends upon this
+adventure," he urged in fervent whispers, knowing how much to a tittle.
+
+To the monk who came out, distended with Cesare's explosives, he
+addressed himself in a vernacular too fluid for Molly to catch up.
+
+"I pray you, reverend brother, recommend me yet once more to the feet of
+his Resplendency, saying that not I alone supplicate his favours. Add
+that I have with me, to present, my most beautiful wife, that she may
+assure him with her own lips how very much she is his slave."
+
+The pantomime of piteous beseeching hands, of eyebrows exquisitely
+arched, told more than his words. They showed to a hair's breadth how
+far he expected, how far was prepared, to tempt his customer. No pedlar
+before a doorful of girls' sidelong heads could more deftly have
+marketed his wares. The monk, too, sidled his head; he pursed his mouth,
+furrowed with a finger in his dewlap, tried to appraise the wares. But
+to allow this would have been to forestall the market.
+
+"Ah, for love of the saints, go, my brother!" he was entreated, with
+gentle persistence; and so worked upon, he waddled away.
+
+Amilcare let fall a hearty sigh, and considered Molly with anxiety. He
+had not dared to say a word to her of what her entertainer was, or what
+her part should be. Premeditation might throw her out of balance,
+conscious art might exhibit her a scheming courtesan; just in her
+artlessness lay all her magic. No, no; he trusted her. She was still
+adorably English--witness her on the ship! He could see how she would
+do, how the sight would ravish him, lover as he was; for the rest, he
+must trust to his early calculations. Yes! he was ready to stake
+everything upon this move. The Borgia would be at her feet: so at his
+feet also. Oh, wise, wise Amilcare!
+
+"His Eminence the Duke will receive your Lordship," said the returning
+monk, and turned once more to lead the way.
+
+"My saint, my lamb, my meek burnished dove!" breathed Amilcare in a
+glow, and pressed her to his heart behind the frate's broad back.
+
+Cesare, magnificently tawny in black velvet, was in a window, raking
+with a white hand at his beard, a prey evidently to cross-tides of
+fever. When his visitors were announced he looked sharply round; but
+Molly was hooded, her face deep in the shade. Of Passavente he had not
+the slightest concern. That hero was prostrate, bowing and chattering,
+and explaining with his hands.
+
+Molly stayed twittering by the door, wonderful because she saw her King
+of Men cringing like a footboy before a shorter than himself. True, it
+was case of a duke; but she had not known such dealings in Wapping.
+There men doffed caps to my Lord or his Grace; they gave and took their
+due, but did not writhe on the floor. And then this particular duke's
+blockish inattention to what her lord was saying filled her with
+concern. There he leaned, and there he looked out of window at the
+twinkling acacias, and there he picked his beard. Amilcare's tact must
+have deserted him, since he could let this simple slave turn critic. But
+the part, in any case, was difficult. Presently the Duke threw him a
+hasty phrase, a sort of _pish, man_! which cut him off in the midst of a
+period, and walked towards Molly in the doorway. Amilcare flew before on
+tenterhooks. Cesare came graciously on--it was curious to see how his
+face had cleared. Molly dropped a curtsy, covering herself closer with a
+hand at the hood's tie. Cesare showed his teeth, held out both his
+hands. Passavente, with a displaying air full of alacrity and deference,
+unveiled his wife, and she went forward to greet his Grace.
+
+She had been uncovered as by a dealer, but even so thrilled to feel his
+touch upon her shoulders, and showed herself blushing with the emotion,
+lovelier for love. Cesare was really startled to see how vividly
+beautiful she was; but, with more command of himself than the other
+trafficker, was careful not to show it. He smiled yet more sunnily; his
+words were some pleasant, friendly compliment. Molly, guessing it so,
+came nearer, took his open hands, and put up her face for his kiss.
+Caesar Borgia took a deep breath before he accepted of the rest. Then he
+did kiss her, twice. He was ridiculously pleased, very much in
+confusion for a little while. Since he could say nothing and she had
+nothing to say, the pair of them stood hand-clasped, smiling, dim-eyed
+and red in the face, like two glad children--Amilcare, anxious mothering
+hen, clucking about them. The Duke, having recovered himself, murmured
+some courtesy, and led his captive to a seat in the window. His
+half-dozen English words and her six Italian, his readiness, her
+simplicity, put matters on a friendly footing: very soon Molly was
+chattering like a school-girl. Cesare was enchanted; he recovered his
+gaiety, forgot his bloody hands, his anxieties, schemes, fret at
+inaction. He ordered a meal to be served at once, kept Molly close to
+his side, heaped her plate, pledged her in wine. He went so far as to
+forget all common precautions and eat whatsoever was put before him.
+
+Be sure Amilcare missed nothing. He saw all, perhaps more than all: he
+was used to deal with men. Thought he to himself, "Hey! If this was my
+house of Nona, _amico_, and the time six months hence, you would sleep
+where you supped." But Cesare had no thought of Amilcare until the end.
+Then he clapped him on the shoulder.
+
+"My Passavente," he cried, "you have gone far on your pearl-fishing and
+dived deeper than most of us, but by our hope of salvation you have
+found a jewel of price! And ah, Madonna," he said, with his burning eyes
+on the girl, "you have brought the sun into Italy. You shall be called
+_Principessa della Pace_, who heal all sorrow and strife by the light of
+your face."
+
+"I humbly thank your Grace," said Molly, very grateful; but Amilcare
+dropped upon one knee.
+
+"Splendour," says he, "deign to visit our poor house in Nona, if you
+would learn what willing service is."
+
+"My friend, be sure of me," said the Borgia, and meant it. "Do you bid
+me come, Princess?" His looks ate her up.
+
+Molly hung her head. "I shall in all things serve your Grace," said she,
+with a curtsy. She kissed him again, and then Amilcare took her away.
+
+The Borgia wrote sonnets that night.
+
+"Mollavella, pearl of ladies," whispered her ardent husband, when they
+were on the North Road and in the thick of the violet Roman night,
+"never have I felt such joy in you as this day." He looked up at the
+massed company of the stars. "Fiery in all that galaxy, yonder I see my
+own star!" he cried in a transport. "Behold, it points us dead to the
+North. O Star, lit by a star! 'Tis you have set it burning clear, my
+glorious Princess."
+
+"Dearest heart, I shall die of love," sighed swooning Molly, out of
+herself at such praise. "But indeed I have done little enough for you as
+yet."
+
+"More than you think, or can dream," he answered, and spoke truly; for
+the girl saw nothing in their late visit but a civility done to a great
+lord.
+
+"If the Duke comes to Nona, Amilcare, I will try to put him at his
+ease," she said after a little.
+
+"Try, try, dear soul; it is all that I wish."
+
+"He seemed not so to me when first we went to him, Amilcare."
+
+Amilcare shrugged. "Eh, per la Madonna--!" he began, as who should say,
+"Being known for his brother's butcher, how should he be?" But he stayed
+in time. "He has many enemies," he added quietly.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+MARKET OVERT
+
+
+Nona, little city of domes and belfries and square loggias, all in a
+cluster behind brown walls; with gates of Roman masonry, stolid Lombard
+church, a piazza of colonnades and restless poplar trees; of a splayed
+fountain where the Three Graces, back to back, spurt water from their
+breasts of bronze--Nona, in our time, is not to be discerned from the
+railway, although you may see its ranked mulberry-trees and fields of
+maize, and guess its pleasant seat in the plain well enough. It is about
+the size of Parma, a cheerful, leisurely place, abounding in shade and
+deep doorways and _cafes_, having some thirty churches (mostly baroque),
+a fine Palazzo della Ragione in the principal square, and the remains of
+a cathedral of the ninth century glooming behind a monstrous facade of
+the seventeenth, all whitewash, cornucopias, and sprawling Apostles.
+Thus it seems now to the strayed traveller who, breaking his journey at
+Castel Bolognese, simmers for four hours in an omnibus along with
+priests, flies, fleas, and old women. The _cortege_ from Papal territory
+saw a vastly different city of it when it approached the gates in the
+early spring of 1494. The young leafage shimmered like a veil of golden
+gauze, the poplar buds were pink and brown, the chestnuts had all their
+candles afire; larks by dozens were abroad in the clear sky. Below the
+old Rocca del Capitan Vecchio--a grizzled and blind block of masonry on
+a spur of limestone, which held not a few of Ezzelin's secrets--two
+miles from Nona, stood a company of boys and girls in white garments,
+their laps full of flowers. Their shrill song of welcome hailed the
+riders, and to the same hopeful music they went on. The towers were all
+standing in those days, the battlements intact; at every gate stood a
+guard. The Cathedral of the Santi Apostoli had no Apostles; its great
+front was a cube of unfinished brick; but colonnades ran in all the
+streets, row after row of beautifully ordered arches; over them were
+jutting cornices enriched with dancing children, sea monsters, tritons,
+dolphins, nymphs blowing conches, Nereus, Thetis, and all their sleek
+familiars, moulded in red clay. The fountain shone, the displayed Graces
+jetted their crystal store; from every window hung carpets, on every
+tower a gonfalon, from every church belfry came the riot of bells. The
+people were massed at the gates, at the windows, on roofs and loggias
+and balconies--a motley of orange and blue, crimson and green. Soldiers
+lined the ways, priests with banners were on the steps of their
+churches. "Evviva, Amilcare! Evviva, Madonna Inglese!" ran like a river
+of sound from the gates about the streets, until, in the Piazza Grande,
+where the Signoria waited in the solemn estate of brocade and ermine,
+the volume of it had the throbbing roll of breakers on a cliff. Thud
+upon thud came "Evviva!" each with a shock which made pale Molly catch
+her breath; more than once or twice her eyes swam, and she felt herself
+wag helpless in the saddle. But Amilcare, snuffing wine, was in his
+glory, idol of a crowd he despised and meant to rule. Proud he looked
+and very greatly a ruler, firm-lipped, with a high head, and a flush on
+his dark cheeks.
+
+At the steps of the Palazzo della Ragione he halted, cap in hand. The
+trumpeters shrilled for silence, the Secretary of the Republic read a
+Latin speech; everybody applauded what nobody understood. Amilcare, at
+the end of it, swung off his horse and ran up the steps. He embraced the
+orator, embraced the signori one after another; greetings flashed about,
+tears, laughter, clappings on the back. But he kept his head throughout:
+it was seen that he wished to present his wife. Present her! Enthusiasm
+grew frenzied; he had to battle his way down the steps to regain her
+side. He lifted her lightly down; hand in hand they went up the steps
+again. Molly excelled herself, was the wonder of the whole city. How she
+curtsied to their lordships--what a figure she had for that grace--how
+tall, how supple, and how slim! When she gave her rosy cheek to each in
+turn, there was a kind of caught sob audible in the crowd. The
+simplicity of the act brought tears to tender eyes: men laughed or
+looked haggard, according as the trouble took them; women, more at home
+with tears, clung to each other as they cried. A marvel all believed
+her--an angel clean from heaven; the kiss of peace, _la bocca della
+Carita_! A young Dominican became inspired; he showed the whites of his
+eyes, he spumed at the lips, began to mutter, with gurglings in the
+throat. At last his words broke strangling from him--"O mouth of
+singular favour! O lips of heavenly dew!" he stuttered, with a finger on
+high seesawing to the rhythm: "O starry eyes conversant with the aspect
+of angels!" He dropped down plump in a fit, barely heard at the palace
+door; but all the square surged with his cry--"O mouth of singular
+favour! O starry eyes! Evviva Madonna!"
+
+Men and women all told, Molly must have been forty times kissed. Twice
+forty times would not have sufficed for the candidates who jostled,
+strained, and prayed between the soldiers' pikes below the steps. It
+would be difficult to say which sex her pretty artlessness pleased the
+more: she made the women cry, the old men prophesy, the young men dream
+dreams. Certainly, there was nobody who thought ill of her for a
+performance so glaringly counter to Italian ways, whose men kiss each
+other while they keep their women at home. The thing was so transparent,
+done in such pure good faith, there was no room for judgment in it. She
+went among that people as, in these days, a child still might go. To
+those bullet-headed captains, grim and shaven close; to those painted
+great ladies, whose bare necks looked the more naked for their jewels;
+to those cruddled, be-robed old men; to the dapper sons of them; to
+their stiff-laced daughters--Molly went blushing, smiling, shy, and
+glad, and to each she gave her fresh cheek and the balm of her English
+lips. O mouth of singular favour! O starry eyes! She bereft them of
+compliments by her speechless welcome, overcame policy by having none,
+led captivity captive. Amilcare might hover behind her with plots, a
+delighted and forgotten shade: Molly Lovel of Bankside was Duchess of
+Nona, and might have been Queen of Italy, if all Italy had stood in the
+Piazza Grande. She was throned at a banquet, escorted home by the
+Signoria bareheaded; she was serenaded all night by relays of citizens,
+by straining poets, by all kinds of music. She had not a wink of sleep
+till morning, nor the faintest idea what it was all about.
+
+There was no withstanding the popular voice; the Nonesi went mad to be a
+Duchy, with Molly for Duchess. Amilcare might be thrown in. They
+besieged the Bagnacavallo _Cortile_; they wrote sonnets and madrigals,
+and sang them day in, day out. Amilcare, acting with admirable
+discretion, kept very much to himself; he sent his beautiful wife on to
+the balcony twice a day to be saluted, and (more sparingly) let her work
+for him among the higher sort with her lips, her blushes, and her
+friendly grey eyes. He was humble in the Council, sober beneath the
+heaped-up honours of the popular voice, stern only with his mercenaries.
+A fortnight of this swept him to the top of his hopes. A deputation,
+with a laurel crown and the title of _Dux_ in a casket, waited upon him.
+He had expected it for a week, and carefully dragooned his Molly.
+
+"I must refuse the thing," he told her, "for your dear sake, my angel.
+The fatigues, the affairs of a Ruler of State are incredible. I will
+never let you bear them. The signori may pluck their beards out by the
+roots. I am resolved." Molly wept to hear him.
+
+When the great morning came--a luminous April day of showers and warm
+wind--he was as good as his word. Molly, shining with pride in him
+(herself wearing the day's "uncertain glory"), saw him fold his arms in
+face of the pompous line of men his seniors, compress his mouth, shake
+his cropped head. The deputation was much taken aback, the crowd drove
+hither and thither; she saw head turned to head, guessed at wounds which
+certainly any one there was incapable of feeling. She, however, felt
+them, rose up from her chair, laid a hand upon her lord's arm: they saw
+her plead with him. Oh, lovely sight! with her they too began to plead:
+"Pieta di Nona, Signore! Pieta di noi, Madonna!" She was their graceful
+choragus; or rather, she, like some slim daughter of the
+Greeks--Iphigenia or another--voiced the protagonist's part; and they
+wailed after her, a chorus of elders. Finally, she knelt to him, wound
+her arms about his hips, put up her entreating face. The comedy was
+played out. Amilcare showed himself shaken; he stooped to her, lifted
+her in his arms, embraced her. "O mouth of singular favour!" etc. The
+convocation broke up in sobs, psalmody, and kisses on the cheek.
+Amilcare and his wife were led to the broad window and out on to the
+loggia. There stood Molly in all the glow of her happy toil,
+quick-breathing, enraptured, laughing and afire. The crown was on her
+head, by her side her sceptred lord; and below the people cheered and
+howled. "Udite, citt adini, il vostro Capitano!" cried the heralds.
+"Duca! duca! Evviva Amilcare, Duca!" cried the throng. Then Amilcare
+pointed to the crowned girl. "Evviva la Madonna di Nona!" he brayed like
+a tube of brass. So as Madonna di Nona they knew her to the end.
+Amilcare was crowned with his laurel wreath in the Santi Apostoli; _Te
+Deum_ was sung. Nona started on her new career--benevolent despotism
+tempered by a girl's kisses.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+GRIFONE--AMATEUR OF SENSE
+
+
+Grifone must now be lifted into the piece, Grifone the grey-eyed,
+self-contained little Secretary, whose brain seemed quicksilver, whose
+acts those of a deliberate cat, whose inches were few, whose years only
+tender. One of Amilcare's rare acts of unpremeditated humanity had been
+to snatch him, a naked urchin of nine, from Barga, when (after a night
+surprise) he was raining fire and sword and the pains of hell upon that
+serried stronghold of the hills.
+
+"Eh, Signore, Signore!" had whined the half-famished imp, padding by the
+condottiere's stirrup.
+
+"Va via, vattene al diavolo!" a musketeer growled at him, and tried to
+club him down.
+
+Amilcare looked, as one might idly glance at a shrew-mouse in the path.
+He saw a brown body pitifully lean, a shock black head, a pair of
+piercing grey eyes. Further, he saw that the child had not on a stitch
+of clothing, and that he was splashed to the knees with drying blood.
+
+"What now, Baby?" he asked.
+
+"Lift me into the saddle, Signore," said the boy, with a propitiating
+grin; "I am getting my feet wet."
+
+The little dog had a humorous twist to his eyebrow, and it was true
+enough that the kennels were running red.
+
+"Whose blood is that on your legs, my lad?" Passavente stayed his
+charger.
+
+Grifone shrugged. "Misericordia! Who knows? My father's perhaps; my
+mother's more certainly, since my father ran away. My mother would have
+run too, but she had no time. Eh, take me up, Signore! I cannot swim."
+
+Amilcare swung him up by the hand, so saved his life. Next day Grifone
+saved his.
+
+They burnt a monastery in the plain and ransacked a chestful of
+correspondence.
+
+"Death of Christ!" swore Passavente, "I can't read this Latin. Go and
+fetch me a monk and a rope."
+
+The monk, a plausible rogue, began to read: little Grifone stood by the
+table. At a certain point he broke into the recital with an emphatic
+word: "Liar!"
+
+"What the deuce does this mean?" fumed Amilcare in a rage.
+
+"The monk is deceiving your Lordship," said Grifone; "the sense is the
+opposite of what he reports."
+
+It seemed that the boy knew Latin--at any rate enough to hang a few
+monks. Hanged the poor devils were, and after that very much was made of
+Grifone. Amilcare took him through all his campaigns, had him well
+taught, gave confidence for confidence, and found by the time he was at
+Nona, making his "Gran Tradimento" of Farnese, that he could not get on
+without him. The accepted remedy for such a state of the case was to
+kill the youth at once. Amilcare did not do that, and at first was able
+to bless himself for his second forbearance. Grifone was privy to all
+his master's hopes and safeguards; Grifone wrought upon the Signoria,
+cajoled the clergy, bamboozled the _popolani_, descended even to the
+ragamuffins in the gutters, and taught them how to shout "Duca! Duca!"
+when his master went proudly a-horseback, or to scribble his effigy in
+great chalk circles on the city walls. Though it may be true that
+Molly's graces brought Amilcare the crown of Nona, it must be added that
+neither Molly nor her Duke could have got in at all if Grifone had not
+been there to oil the hinges of the gates.
+
+He had the soft purring ways of a cat, the tact of a Jesuit, the
+penetration of a money-lender, the sensibility of a musical amateur, and
+the morals of a maid-of-honour. He had extraordinary command over
+himself; he seemed able to do everything, and wishful to win nothing.
+There never was a young man (as a matter of fact) who wanted so much or
+asked so little. It was the very boundlessness of his desires which
+reined him in. The appetite of the Caesars would not have represented
+his, all the gratification they could have commanded would have been for
+him but a whet. If he had a weak side it was his own astuteness: he
+could not always see how unutterably foolish a man might be if he were
+let alone. Another foible he had--intellectual appreciation of beauty
+pushed to fainting-point. His senses were so straitly tied to his brains
+that to pluck at one was to thrill the other. Made on a small scale, he
+was pretty rather than handsome, had quiet watchful eyes, a smiling
+mouth, very little hands and feet. He seldom dressed out of black
+velvet, and if he wanted a man assassinated had the thing done at so
+many removes that it was always entered "private quarrel" or "love
+affair" in the reports of the City Watch. He generally chose friars for
+business of the sort, because they could be about at night without
+suspicion, and their hanging sleeves gave them such a pull. For cup or
+fruit work he found ladies the only possible agents. No one in Nona
+would dream of taking wine from a man; and as for presents of figs,
+Grifone was maturely of opinion that the last and present Pontiffs had
+exhausted that pretty artifice. Finally, you can easily understand how
+useful Duke Amilcare found a demure lad of this kind in the matter of
+moulding his new State.
+
+When his master brought him a mistress he gave her great attention. Like
+all clever fellows, he was at first disposed to set down her simplicity
+to her credit; but after watching her for some time, he decided that
+here was actually a soul clear as glass--thing of inestimable value in a
+country where lying was an axiom of politics--and his respect for her
+quickened into something more. If she had been only beautiful she would
+never have attracted him as she did. There were plenty of women in Italy
+handsome enough for his needs (the flower of whose amours were mostly
+for the mind); but simpletons were rarer. This tall wistful girl told
+the truth--but told it incredibly! Think of this. Shortly after the
+coronation, Bentivoglio, the chalk-faced tyrant of Bologna, came with an
+army on his way to Forli. He had an old grudge against Nona. Finding
+himself within a league of its walls, his men lusty and well-fed, his
+artillery in great train, Nona (as he judged it) in ferment--he
+blockaded the place, and in due time summoned it to surrender. Amilcare
+laughed at him, told his wife (in secret) that he would attack on the
+morrow, and went to the Council. While he was there came a new summons
+from Bentivoglio, a messenger with a white flag. Word was sent to the
+Duke; the Duke could not be found. "Oh," said one, "seek Madonna for
+answer." This was done.
+
+"Tell the Lord of Bologna," says Molly, "that we attack to-morrow."
+
+The man bowed himself away. You should have seen Amilcare's face when
+this was reported to him; he rated his lovely Molly like a fish-fag.
+Then he had an interview with Grifone; told him the whole story.
+
+Grifone stared. "Ebbene, Monsignore," said he, "your Grace will do well
+to attack."
+
+"Attack, man? when the fellow knows we are coming! Are you mad?"
+
+"Not so, my lord," replied the Secretary. "Bentivoglio does not know you
+are coming. What he knows is that you have _said_ you are coming."
+
+Well, at last Amilcare saw what Grifone had seen from the first, the mad
+results which might be won by a truth-telling Duchess. The Nonesi did
+attack. Bentivoglio, of course, not expecting them, was scattered over
+the maize fields, and never collected his force again until his own
+territory was reached. That was why he could not help the Lady of Forli.
+"Per Bacco," said Grifone to himself, "truth in Italy is soused in the
+mud at the well's bottom; in England it seems to lie in a pan. This
+pretty creature is as shallow as a crystal cup, where you may study
+Truth, like a blue jewel, in an inch of water." He went about
+thoughtfully the rest of that day. This new-discovered quality of
+Molly's was a thing very beautiful in his eyes. The conclusion he came
+to was that he was about to fall in love with the lady. "And that, after
+all," was his comment, "might not be a bad thing, if (as is probable) it
+become necessary to make her my consort." Then he went happily to sleep.
+
+Grifone's proposals to himself were still very simple. Shortly, they
+were to get a throne for his master in order that he might the more
+easily acquire one for himself. "My legs," he said frankly, "are too
+short to get up without a footstool." Amilcare was to have been the
+footstool. But then Molly came into play. At first she seemed to make
+the simple thing simpler. Amilcare was a strong man, but stiff. Grifone
+was sure he would bungle in his handling of Molly; this truth-telling
+beauty, this flawless jewel in a cup, would baffle him; he would neither
+see it the fine nor the delicate tool it was. He worked best with a
+bludgeon which, as it did brute's work, might be brutishly handled. So
+far well--he might trust Amilcare to wreck himself. Unfortunately, it
+seemed only too likely he might involve Molly in the mess. That danger
+was looming; already he set her to decoy-work which the girl herself
+(Grifone could see) did not relish. The ladies of Nona were gay and
+free--too free. Molly recoiled visibly, more than once. The men were
+worse. Incredible as it seemed to Grifone, they actually ravaged this
+tender honeysuckle spray to drench themselves with the scent. Molly,
+beautifully patient, courteous, meek as she was, cast a scared, paling
+face about the assembly now and again: some of the talk, too, cut her
+very deep. Grifone was already too much interested in her to stomach
+this. He decided to make discreet love to his Duchess by a way of his
+own. The Nonesi (gluttons!) abused her favours; he would refuse them. He
+would fast where Nona feasted, and be the only unkissed guest at her
+receptions.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+GRIFONE ENTERS THE MARKET
+
+
+The first opportunity he had he took. The Palazzo Bagnacavallo was
+thrown open to all worthy citizens, the rooms (since no one in those
+courting days was held unworthy) were crowded. Ladies, soldiers,
+churchmen, humanists in brocade, poets in velvet, a Cardinal, a
+cross-eyed Greek who had forsaken usury at Trebizond for moral
+philosophy at Nona; Madonna Diamante, too receptive wife of the Count of
+Cornuto; Madonna Smeralda, her discreet friend; Madonna Saphira; Madonna
+Rubina; frizzed young nobles in parti-coloured hose; humble abbates,
+uncured and incurable; a monk crowned with laurel for a sonnet; and a
+Knight of the Holy Ghost in retirement;--these were some of the company
+among whom Duchess Molly was paraded by her discerning lord, to carry
+her smiles of welcome and her pretty ways. Grifone, grave, attentive, in
+black, was there, be sure, waiting his turn. It came, and with it Molly,
+blushing and overwrought, new from the very kindly salutations of the
+Greek. To Grifone she proffered a greeting which was no less kind
+because her heart was troubled. Her well of trust in mankind was not yet
+dry. Grifone took her hand and bent over it; it was as much as he did to
+brush it with his lips. Molly wondered at him.
+
+"You should be Messer Grifone, my Lord's secretary," she said,
+faltering.
+
+"Alas, I have that misfortune," replied the youth, with averted eyes.
+
+"Why, I know you very well," said Molly, "but see now that I have
+offended you. What is my injury, Signore? What have I done?"
+
+"Madonna," said Grifone (but so low that no other could hear him),
+"believe me that the offence is none of your wilful making. It is,
+however, irremediable. Nothing but misfortune could overcome such
+misfortune as mine; and that I pray Heaven to keep far from you."
+
+"Alack! good Grifone, what sayings are these for a day that should be
+happy?" urged the warm-hearted girl, with eyes ready to fill.
+
+"Madonna, let me endure the thought of them alone, I entreat your
+Grace."
+
+"Never, while I live, Grifone. You make me most unhappy. Will you not
+kiss me?"
+
+"Never, while I live, Madonna, if I am to live honest."
+
+Molly went white and red, and stood hesitating, uncertain whether to cry
+or be angry. Either might have been a vent for her distress, which was
+real. Commanding herself with pains--
+
+"I will require you to speak with me after supper," she said, after a
+pause for the struggle.
+
+Grifone bowed his head and backed away from her. She, being boundless in
+capacity for the affections of her kind, spent the interval with an
+aching heart.
+
+Directly supper was done she hunted for the Secretary. The affair had
+by now throbbed itself into a question of her physical ease. Her
+heartstrings were at a dangerous stretch, she quivering at the point of
+tears. Master Grifone, for his part, had taken very good care that the
+Duke of Nona should be occupied, and himself not hard to find. Molly
+came upon him in a gallery of arras; caught him crouching there with his
+face hidden in his hands. She went to him at once, full of the trouble
+he showed her, sat by him, put her arm round his neck, and tried to draw
+his head up. Grifone turned her a white, miserable face.
+
+"Ah!" he said, husky with reproach, "ah! you have come with the ardours
+of an angel leaping in you; yet no cruelty could in truth be sharper."
+
+"Cruel? Cruel? Oh, Grifone, nobody has ever said this of me before!"
+whimpered poor Molly. She was swirling in wilder water than she knew.
+
+"The cruelty is unconscious, yet none the less bitter for that," he
+complained; and then, all at once, he turned fiercely to rend her.
+"What! When I throb for your footfall, or when I lean swooning to the
+wall for the scent of your hair as you pass; when I urge against your
+chamber door that I may feed upon the sound of your breath, or hunt for
+broken bread under your table that I may grow drunk on what your fingers
+have touched! When I go raving at night, weeping by day, with a knife in
+my heart, tears that scald my eyes! When with these pains to endure,
+these perils to skirt, heights to fly, you will speak, touch me, breathe
+upon me, tempt me to greet you with kissing of the lips--ah, heaven and
+hell! it is over-much. I would be an honest man, look you. I have a
+master to serve, I bid you remember. It is true enough that I love you
+out of all measure; there is no sin in that which I cannot help; but
+misery there is, by our Saviour. The sin is gaping all about me, itching
+here, aching there, gnawing and groping without cease, or stint, or
+allay. Yes, yes, I know this is true--God help me! I love you
+deplorably; but I will not touch you. You are the ever-blessed thing to
+me; but I will make you the ever-abhorred thing, _anathema maranatha_. I
+love you, I worship you, I adore you; you are my saint, my church, my
+altar, my soul's peculiar food; you shall be my devil, his hell, his
+cauldron, my venomous offence. And all this you shall be that I may love
+you yet more, yet incomprehensibly more, and (withal) live honest. I
+will hate you because I adore you. Ah! and I will prove whether by
+hating you most of all I cannot drown myself in love." He threw himself
+out of her reach, and rocked with hidden face.
+
+Here was pretty hearing for a pretty bride. Molly, with heaving bosom,
+stood abashed and dumb, and troubled profoundly. Not only had she never
+tried to stem so fierce a torrent of love, nor ever shuddered under such
+dry heat in men's words--she had never yet dreamed of so much passion in
+men created. And glorious passion, too, it seemed, so stern and
+repressed--a passion which hugged a fetter, a splendid misery of denial.
+Of course she had nothing to say; she never had anything to say; yet she
+longed to say or do something. Her interest in all these fine things
+was painful, if delicious; and it never occurred to her for a moment
+that it could be a sin to listen where it was evidently such a virtue to
+declare. She was conscious of no disloyalty to Amilcare in so listening,
+in being so troubled, in displaying her trouble so unaffectedly. Poor,
+poor, good Grifone! So very noble, so white and miserable; Heaven knows
+she would have satisfied him if she could. With her, to feel was to
+touch (if I may so put it); quite instinctively she stretched out her
+arms to draw him home; the good fool would have kissed his tears away if
+he had had any, giving him for comfort what he had screamed upon as a
+torment. But that was a talent denied to Grifone: he could not cry. All
+the same, she was at the point to kiss him, when he once more prevented
+her--this time without violence.
+
+"Ah, my lady, my lady," he said, with a smile whimsically sad, "have a
+little pity on a torturing wretch!"
+
+Molly now covered her face and freely sobbed. The scene was
+heartrending, and Grifone judged that he might give the finishing
+stroke. He stood over her where she was flung (the poor humble soul),
+and laid his fingers lightly on her silken shoulder.
+
+"Love makes a good reader of a man," he said slowly, drawling his words.
+"Long ago I discerned the clear stream of truth which is the issue of
+your love. Henceforward there is a secret pact between us two, a secret
+wholly honourable, since I have only told it that you might be won over
+not to dare me too far. Being honourable, you (who are the fountain of
+honour) will keep it. We go our two ways, we look not on each other, we
+greet not, neither speak what either knows. Chance will throw us much
+together; yet this law we will punctually observe. To me the hour will
+say--'Guard thee, Grifone, thy sweet enemy draws near.' To you--'Now
+goodness be thy guide, Molly, lest thou art a cause of stumbling to thy
+brother.' So let it always be."
+
+He left her then, knowing very well that he had sworn the good girl to
+faith inviolable, and given her the subject of perennial thought.
+
+And so he had. Molly kept his secret, honoured it, honoured him. She
+came by tortuous ways of her hoodblind heart to glory and exult in both;
+nor had she the wit to discern how or by what stealthy degrees the pain
+and longing she pitied in him grew to be more pitiable in herself. She
+watched him wonderfully in those crowded days of court life which
+followed, and when she was blinded by her tears, held him as a martyr
+who, for her sake, lay quivering under the knife. It shows the length of
+her road, that she was never aware how much more in her sight he was
+than Amilcare, the man of her election. Amilcare, it is true, was
+greatly occupied: one cannot be a duke for nothing. Not home affairs
+only (though discontent was never far off) called him from home: the
+times were full of the shock of alarms; thrones toppled; there were
+rumours of moving hosts beyond the Alps. Cesare, the flame-coloured
+Borgia, was still meditating his kingdom in Romagna; already the Lady of
+Forli was flogging her sulky lieges into some sort of action for her
+defence. Now, Nona lay dead in the Borgia's way, and unless the Borgia
+could be hoodwinked again as he had been hoodwinked before, Nona need
+not cease to be a Duchy, but Amilcare would cease to be a Duke. No
+wonder the man was a lacklove just now. He intended to play Molly for
+his great stake; meantime he must be more of a duke than he was,
+recognised as such by other powers, by dukes firmly rooted, by grudging
+republics, or tyrants in thin veils.
+
+And while he was consolidating his throne--ruffling here, fawning
+there--Grifone was always before Molly's eye; always plucking at her
+poor heartstrings; always holding up his grave patience, his bleeding,
+his most eloquent refusals, for her wonder. Wonder, indeed, she did, and
+much more than that. The thought sat upon her like a brooding evil
+spirit, frayed her nerves to waste. He used to move her so much by this
+policy of negation that she found herself panting as she sat among her
+women; or when from her throned seat at table she saw his pale profile
+burn like a silver coin in the dusk, the pain of her heart's beating
+well-nigh made her suffocate. Her troubles came to be day-long; he
+haunted her by night. When she began to ask the Virgin Mary how long she
+could endure, it was the signal to herself that she could endure no
+more. She sent for him then, and implored him brokenly--sobbing,
+kneeling before him--that he would leave her. Grifone bowed his head.
+
+Next day Amilcare (or some other) told her that the Secretary was to be
+absent for some months arranging alliances abroad. He went without
+seeing her or bidding any farewells. She was prostrate for three or four
+days, could hardly drag herself to church, or away from it when she had
+once gained its cool sanctuary aisles. After that she got better and
+more her old self. The relief was as delicious as the grief had been;
+she was really happy. Then she found that she was beginning to dread his
+return. This was exactly what he had desired: he was a most astute young
+man.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A PEDLAR'S ROUND
+
+
+Grifone's tour of negotiation lasted very nearly six months--months of
+comparative ease for Molly, neglected by husband and shadowing lover
+alike. During this time the latter visited every important court in
+Italy, except Naples, whither he cared not, and Parma, whither he dared
+not venture--the object of his journey being, of course, to secure his
+master's acknowledgment by a better title than the throats of a marketed
+crowd. It would be as interesting as it was surprising to see the little
+craftsman at work, the ingenuity with which he plied his handful of
+tools, the proud patience with which he endured snub after snub, his
+bland passivity and extraordinary rebound. First of all, he went to
+Rome, ever the pivot of danger to an Italian diplomat. Molly's portrait,
+done in his best manner by Dosso of Ferrara, was presented to Duke Caesar
+of Valentinois.
+
+In this, the lady with loose hair and a still looser robe (spangled with
+stars it was, and slipped off one white shoulder) was sitting in a green
+wilderness feeding lions with _confetti_. On a cedar near by, were
+several parrots and a pale owl, and from a low-swinging branch a great
+speckled snake stooped downward to embrace Molly's waist in a dry fold,
+and with his head writhed forward to lick her chin. It was a pleasing
+piece; Don Cesare was ravished. The seed planted in him at Foligno
+germinated, produced a bud, before long a triumphant flower. Not only
+would he come to Nona, and that soon, but the Holy Father sent the
+Golden Rose to "his dearest daughter in Jesus Christ, Maria, by the same
+grace Duchess of Nona." O mouth of singular favour!
+
+With the scent of this rare blossom, Grifone went off to tickle the
+nostrils of the North. But he must not delay us. Bologna he dared to
+visit: thither the ducal pair must needs go anon. Milan received him to
+some purpose; Venice received him to none at all. Barbarigo was not Doge
+for nothing. Ferrara was busy with thoughts of piety, the whole court
+barefoot, howling "Fac me plagis" between the garden walls. In other
+places he cried his wares, and reached Nona again in the heats of July.
+
+He found his lovely mistress in a shaking fever, languid under the
+breathless heat of the plain, yet never at rest. He found her large-eyed
+and bodeful, horribly nervous of him. She had been longing to see him,
+yet every day made vehement prayer that she might never look on him
+again. When she knew that he was indeed in the palace, she shut herself
+into her chamber with a crucifix, and spent the whole day at the window
+peeping from behind a curtain. Grifone saw the shape of her in it, saw
+her hand at the selvage.
+
+"Courage, Grifone, mio caro," he assured himself; "she is afraid of
+thee." He resumed his state of armed respect, Molly her tossing nights
+and pacing days. Affairs were something awry within the Duchy, yet
+Grifone assured his Lord they were likely to be much more awry out of
+it. Madonna Duchessa must certainly be shown about--otherwise, an
+avalanche. Preparations were pushed on. By October the Duke and Duchess,
+with a great train set out--actually for Bologna, but nominally for
+Milanese territory. Lodovico, of that great principality, would have
+been mortally affronted if he believed Bentivoglio to have been
+considered first. Therefore the visit to Bologna was to be a dead
+secret, performed by the principals almost unattended. Meantime Grifone
+(who loved mystification) prepared litters with a dummy Duke and Duchess
+to go under escort to Borgo San Donnino. He and his wagging escort duly
+entered that city: excuses to the Podesta secured him a covered passage
+to the palace. Once there, unfortunately, the populace clamoured for a
+view, insisted upon their Graces' appearance. Grifone had to set his
+dolls at a window. There they stared, embraced, while three Ciceronian
+orations were delivered from the piazza, and all the merchant-guilds
+marched round it with banners and torches. Next morning he got them off
+safely by some stroke of good luck; but his joke got wind in time, came
+round to Cesare Borgia's ears, and at last was repeated against Nona.
+For no other reason could this absurd incident claim your ears.
+
+At Bologna, also, all had gone well with the real adventurers--up to a
+certain point Bentivoglio the tyrant (whose name is surely the grimmest
+of his pleasantries) having seen the lovely Molly, was disposed to
+forgive her that disastrous veracity which (you remember) had prevented
+him before. He was so favourably impressed that Amilcare (who never
+missed a chance) left him alone with her for two hours in the garden
+after supper. At the end of that time Molly came to him, stumbling over
+her dress in her haste, flushed and in tears. They must leave Bologna at
+once, she declared; she would die else, or never look her husband in the
+face. The man had insulted her, was horrible, most wicked. Amilcare, her
+dear lord, must go and avenge her, etc., etc.
+
+Here was a pother. What could be done? Grifone, of course, had he been
+there, would have drawn his master's sword for him, dragged him out of
+the room, and sent him back in half an hour's time with a bloody
+testimony of nothing on the blade. Molly would have been pacified,
+Bentivoglio snug abed, the sword none the worse for a little pig's
+blood. But Grifone was at Borgo jigging his dolls and listening to
+Cicero, and Amilcare lost his head. He pooh-poohed the whole affair;
+Molly grew pale, stopped crying. Amilcare began to feel himself--come,
+come, she was reasonable after all. He condescended to explain the fine
+uses of Italian statecraft, the wife's part, the husband's part. He was
+most explicit; Molly grew white, ended by fainting. Amilcare carried her
+to bed; she refused to sleep with him. He raged; she cared nothing. She
+was wild with terror, shame, discovery of her lover's worth, and of her
+love's. He had to beg her pardon on his knees, made an enemy of
+Bentivoglio, a fool of himself, and left next morning in a tearing
+passion.
+
+Grifone, who met his master at Cremona, lost no time in seeing that
+something had gone counter, and very little in finding out what it was.
+
+"Leave it to me, my good lord," he said comfortably; "I will explain it
+to Madonna in another way."
+
+Before they went to bed he had a little guarded talk with his Duchess,
+half excusation of his absence which might have aggravated her alarms,
+half condemnation of Amilcare; the whole, consequently, a veiled eulogy
+of himself.
+
+Molly was very quiet at first, subdued and miserable, but sincerely
+grateful. To express this, she fell into her natural way, a way of
+little timid tendernesses, little touchings of the arm, urgings of the
+cheek. Grifone received them rigidly; she was reduced to tears.
+Thereupon he kissed her ardently, twice, and fled. She remained a long
+while in the dark, breathless, limp, awed, and absurdly happy. Next
+morning he was as distant as the Alps and quite as frosty. At dusk they
+reached Milan.
+
+Whatever Duke Ludovic (titular of Bari, actual of Milan) may have
+intended to ensue, he gave them a proper reception. Cardinal Ascanio
+himself came to the city gate with clergy and the Council; cavalry, a
+parti-coloured array, pennoned and feathered, escorted them to the
+castle. There, on the steps within the great courtyard, the Moor
+himself, sumptuous in silver brocade, and Donna Beatrice his wife; there
+his tired sister, Duchess Bona, and her by no means tired daughter,
+Bianca Maria of the green eyes, stood panoplied to await them. Trumpets
+announced the greetings that passed; yet another fanfare the greetings
+that were to come when within the hall, at the foot of the broad
+staircase, they found and kissed the hands of the anxious little Duke
+Galeazzo Gian and his pretty wife--pair of doomed children, even then in
+the cold shadow of their fate.
+
+Half-hearted, fainting Molly went through her little part with the
+accustomed success. Her pretty English-Italian, her English lips, again
+her eager hands, so anxious to search friends out, found their sure way
+to one at least. Bianca Maria, affianced of the Roman King, delighted to
+kiss and be kissed, announced herself the shy girl's lover. Pleasure
+broke over her face, broke the glaze of her bottomless eyes with a gleam
+like the sun's when in still water it betrays deep green paths of light.
+
+She was an enigmatic rogue, so clever that to most she seemed of
+unplumbed stupidity. Those blank green eyes of hers, that waxen face,
+that scarlet impenetrable mouth, her even gait and look of ruminating,
+look of a dolt--who knew Bianca Maria? Not Maximilian the mild-mannered
+King; not Duke Ludovic (that creased traitor) who schemed her marriage;
+not altogether Lionardo, who painted half her portrait and taught her
+much of his wisdom; certainly not poor Molly of Nona. All Milanese were
+her lovers, and here was another heart, Molly's, to wit, laid open and
+soothed by the little witch's quick hand-stroke. Bianca Maria had all
+her secrets with all her love in the first hour of their embracery.
+
+The two girls sat clasped in one chair in that pretty time of dressing
+when half is undone and half's to do. Molly, feeling a fool but loving
+to have it so, sat in the lap of the younger, who mothered her.
+
+After many days Lionardo, who forgot nothing and never her whom he thus
+happened on, glorified her as the Virgin Mary on the knees of Saint
+Anne. The indefinite smile, the innocent consciousness, the tender
+maiden ways! Wife, mother, handmaid of high God, he thought of her as of
+Molly in _apotheosis_; dutiful for love's sake, yet incurably a child,
+made for the petting place.
+
+"Grifone the Secretary is your lover, my Molly," said Bianca Maria the
+wise.
+
+Molly admitted the sobering truth, and the other pinched her lip.
+
+"Take care of him, my dear. He is more perilous than that stiff husband
+you now have. The husband is a trading fool. He uses you as a carrot to
+induce donkeys. The other is more curious, and has no use for donkeys.
+He will use you otherwise."
+
+"Why, how will he use me then?" said open-eyed Molly. She was vaguely
+ill at ease; but the other shammed stupid. All she could be brought to
+add was--
+
+"I will take care of you if I can. You will never do here, nor should
+ever have come--a lamb among our Lombard wolves. Had you no English
+lover, to kill Amilcare and prevent it?"
+
+Molly thought of Gregory Drax, who had been upon the North seas at the
+time. Gregory Drax used to lean over the garden gate chewing straws.
+This he did by the hour together, to the perfect satisfaction of himself
+and understanding of the neighbours. Molly could not think that it would
+have led to the slaying of Amilcare.
+
+"What was he like, this Gregorio?" asked Bianca Maria, suddenly alert
+when she had got his name smoothly.
+
+Molly did her best--ruddy, blue-eyed, always blushing and laughing,
+fair-haired, very long arms. He was a _marinajo_.
+
+"He sounds to be so," said Bianca Maria. Then she clapped her hands and
+summoned Lionardo.
+
+The great man had no sooner appeared (noiselessly in the doorway, the
+inscrutable grey-beard) than she kissed her friend and bade her go with
+her women to the appointed quarters of the Nonesi. Lionardo gravely
+saluted her as she went rosy out. He had seen the Virgin in the lap of
+Saint Anne and cared no more for the poor original.
+
+"Dear Lionardo," said the girl in the chair to the most learned man of
+her day, "you shall do me the favour to write a letter in Latin to a
+certain English lord, Messer Gregorio Dras, _Marinajo_, Londra."
+
+"Principessa," said the great man, "I am ready. Recite your letter."
+
+"To her very singular good lord," the letter began--the only one, so
+far as I know, written by the Empress Bianca Maria to England; certainly
+the only one she ever wrote to Wapping. The conceit of it was as
+follows: That the lovely Lady Molly was at Nona on the confines of
+Emilia and Romagna, wife of a man who would shortly be murdered in order
+that she might become the mate of the assassin; that a very great lord,
+son of the Holy Father, was intending for those parts, and would
+probably take the same means to secure himself the position of her third
+husband. The writer proposed that the Lord Gregorius, whose virtue and
+celerity of judgment were well known throughout Italy, should journey
+out to Nona with all reasonable despatch and repossess himself of the
+lady. "Thus your lordship," it concluded, "may happily become fourth
+husband of a lady, whose charms are of a sort so noble and perdurable
+that they are unlikely to suffer from the arduous duties their
+excellence involves. Yet such haste as is compatible with your
+worshipful degree in the realm of England may be recommended. From
+Milan, etc., in the year of our thankful Redemption 1494."
+
+"How shall we send our letter speediest, my Merlin?" His enchantress
+laid her emerald spell over him--O incomparable witch! Such sorcery
+exalted him always. He lifted her question upon one of his towering
+flights.
+
+"The wings of birds, if we could use them, were admirable for the
+purpose, Princess," he replied. "But, for the moment, the difficulty of
+instructing such messengers is insuperable. And not only so, but it is
+probable that the Lord Gregorio, seeing such an envoy to his hand, might
+put a bolt into it, and itself into the pot, without interrogatories
+delivered or answers made. So messenger and message would alike be
+boiled. Another way occurs to me, which arises out of this
+consideration. We stand, each bather of us, in a lake of air. A lake?
+Rather, an illimitable ocean of it spread over land and sea, in which
+the very mountain-tops do blink. Should not, then, the pulsing of our
+thought, as it rings outward from us, be discernible in the ripples
+about the Lord Gregorio's ears? Obviously it should. But the reading of
+such ripples would be a nice matter; and again we lack means, and again
+the time, to instruct his lordship. Once more--"
+
+"Ah, you dream your subtleties, and my letter gets cold," said Bianca
+Maria, pouting. "You are now just as you sit watchfully when you should
+be painting my picture."
+
+"It is then that I am painting my hardest, Princess Saint Anne," he
+returned. "But leave with me your letter. It shall go in a man's bosom
+to-morrow morning."
+
+High affairs of State are not settled in a week, nor dukes so apt at
+billing as a pair of girls. Duke Ludovic would not declare himself to
+every adventurer; Duke Amilcare was too patently adventurous to disclose
+all his hand. Then came Grifone, with a game of his own. Blind each of
+one eye, they set to dealing their cards for beggar-my-neighbour.
+
+Now Ludovic feared one man in all Italy, and so did Amilcare. That was
+the one man in all Italy whom Grifone respected, on whom he thought he
+could honestly rely. Thought he to himself, "Can their Serenities be
+leagued against this man in my service? Can they not, by our risen
+Lord?" He fancied that they might.
+
+To this end he proposed to his master, very shortly, the assassination
+of Borgia by means of the lovely Molly. Let her, at a private banquet,
+inveigle him to drink a cup.
+
+"Suggest this to the Duke of Bari," he said. "I think your lordship will
+not be disappointed. Substantial pledges must be exacted, of course; he
+must tread in deep enough to leave a footmark or two visible 'twixt
+Milan and Nona."
+
+Amilcare thought well of this advice and followed it. Ludovic,
+incredulous at first and breathless, took a fortnight to ponder. He
+consulted Cardinal Ascanio, consulted his astrologers, took the test of
+the opening Virgil. His eye lighted upon the portentous words: "Tantae
+molis erat Romanam condere gentem." Who would have twittered after
+those? He sought his guest and told him roundly that if the thing went
+well he would send an envoy to the court at Nona, and support the new
+Duchy with moral force.
+
+Amilcare did not believe him, naturally, nor did he greatly care for
+moral forces. He stipulated for an envoy at once, an invitation for
+himself and his wife to Bianca Maria's wedding, and for a loan of twenty
+thousand ducats in specie.
+
+Ludovic boggled horribly at this; but they accorded at last. The envoy
+was to go then and there, the invitation should be sent when the Borgia
+had agreed to visit Nona, and the money when he was within a day's ride
+of that city. Reduced to cipher-writing, this treaty was placed below
+the visible Host on the high altar of Sant' Eustorgio; the allies
+received the Communion, and after another week's festivities the Duke
+and Duchess of Nona went home.
+
+At parting, the two girls clung together.
+
+"We shall never meet again, child," cried the chosen Empress. "I am sure
+of it."
+
+Molly kissed her. "Are we not to come to your marriage, dear Bianca?"
+
+"My marriage?" cried the other. "You will as likely see me there as that
+shadow of a name which will be my bridegroom. You will see my
+simulacrum, a plastered effigy of me. I shall be stiff with gold-dust
+and diamonds; a doll marrying a doll's bed-gown. Why should I be there
+if his ever-august Majesty is represented by a puff of silly breath?
+Pray, never look for Bianca Maria in the Queen of the Romans. The Queen
+of the Romans is a doll, windy ruler of the name of a people; Bianca
+Maria Sforza, daughter of thieves, has been your friend, as you will
+see. She has provided for your third husband an honest man. Now kiss me
+for the last time and, by Heaven, go quickly, or I shall keep you here
+for my soul's health."
+
+The fierce little hungry creature threw her arms round Molly's neck and
+kissed her like a lover.
+
+Molly was melted into tears. "Oh, Bianca, you bewilder, you terrify me!
+What is this of husbands and your soul?"
+
+"Ah, my soul!" cried she. "Do you think so highly of it as to suppose
+it will survive this marriage, or so lightly as not to care? My soul,
+poor child, is in the case with your lovely body. It is the tied bird of
+all these fowlers."
+
+"Alas, alas! But I cannot understand," Molly wailed; but the other
+caught her the closer.
+
+"That you do not understand, Carina, is your salvation. It proves you
+immortal. Now go. No! kiss me, kiss me!"
+
+They were parted at last; and though they did meet again, they kissed no
+more.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+PRIVATE TREATY
+
+
+To a most elaborately penned invitation the Borgia responded by half a
+dozen words scrawled by his secretary. He would be in the March at such
+and such a time, and would spend such and such a day in Nona.
+
+He had heard from Amilcare; he replied to Molly. The insult was glaring,
+even to her.
+
+"Is this tolerable, my lord?" said the meek beauty, incensed at last.
+
+Amilcare shrugged. "It may not have to be borne very long," said he.
+"For my part I am accustomed to reckon a gift by its use to me, not by
+the sacking round about it." He was now beyond his wife's depth: she
+neither followed nor tried to follow him.
+
+In these days she saw but little of her lord, and could have wished it
+less. He, who in action was as cheerful a soul as you could wish to
+serve, was harassed by the long expectances of diplomacy, and in the
+routine work of governing most grim. The Nonesi had come to hate him a
+good deal, but to fear him more. Expenses were incalculable, the taxes
+grew; there were riots. Savage snaps of speech in the Council did harm;
+imprisonments followed, then some unaccountable sudden deaths. High and
+low alike, none knew where the blow might fall, but all flinched at it.
+
+In these distresses Molly served him well, for she at least was
+universally loved. If the Duke had a man stabbed, the Duchess took such
+sweet consolation to the widow that none could murmur long. To watch her
+warm tears flow was in itself a solace; to feel her arms, to win her
+kissing mouth, quickened those doubtful poor souls.
+
+Furtively also, Grifone was on her side; a neat phrase here and there
+made her position plain to the most infidel in the city. It is true that
+while he helped her there he tortured her otherwhere inexpressibly. He
+hardly ever left her now, and her heart bled to see him go in fear of
+her; she prayed night and day that he might have strength to shake off
+this biting, cruel love. It never entered her head that she could
+console him by perfidy to a perfidious husband; it had entered Grifone's
+head a hundred times, but he always put it out. He could afford to wait
+for what, after all, he only valued as a concession to vulgar opinion.
+In thought she had been his for a year; and in the mind he lived most
+deliciously. It was, no doubt, his full intent to make her his in all
+the grossness of the fact, but not until he had got rid of Amilcare, or
+induced Amilcare to get rid of himself. This was what the stiffnecked
+Condottiere was now doing as fast as his best enemies could have wished.
+His people hated him so bitterly that he would certainly have worn
+mail--had not Molly been his mail. They spared him because they loved
+her, and believed that he still had her heart. "Amilcar, uxoris gratia,
+Dux," was now the fact. Grifone could have destroyed belief and him
+together by a lift of the eyebrow; but he wanted more than that, so
+waited on.
+
+The little fellow was really extraordinary. Luxurious as he was to the
+root, and effeminate; hating as he did cold water, cold food, the cold
+shoulder; one and all of these shuddering things he had schooled himself
+to bear without a blink. He grew even to take a stern pleasure in the
+bitterness they cost him, as he turned them to his uses and reckoned up
+his balance at the bank. Amilcare snarled at him, cut his words out of
+his mouth, struck him, kicked him once like a yard-dog. Grifone added it
+all to his store.
+
+But as the day for Duke Cesare's visit drew near, Molly began to be much
+again in her husband's thoughts--how far she would go in this maturer
+time. She had charmed the man once before, at Foligno; she had charmed
+everybody. But then she had been charmed herself. Subsequently she had
+charmed Bentivoglio, not so happily but that she endangered her own
+spell. That was the present trouble, for hitherto her charm had lain
+precisely in herself, in the little everyday acts which were her own
+nature. Bentivoglio had reasonably wanted more: so would Borgia want
+very much more. Could Molly be brought, not to surrender all he wanted,
+but to make him want? Amilcare, growing tense between his difficulties,
+felt that explanations must be given and received, felt also that they
+must come from himself--in fact, Grifone had declined them--and felt
+that he was not strong in such work. Direction he could give, but not
+explanation. However, he must try.
+
+On a vivid morning of early summer, when the lemon-trees in the
+_cortile_ looked as if they had been cut out of metal, and the planes
+and very poplars were unwinking in the thick blue air, Amilcare came
+into his wife's room. She had not expected him; he found her lying
+dishevelled and unbusked, with all her glossy hair tumbled loose. Very
+much a maiden still, notwithstanding her year and a half of troublous
+marriage, she jumped up directly she saw him, and, blushful, covered her
+neck. Amilcare, finding her and the act adorable together, took her in
+his arms and kissed her; then he led her back by the hand to the
+window-cushions and made her sit upon his knee. He began to play with
+her hair.
+
+"What a silken mesh, my Molly! What a snare for a man in this lovely
+cloud! How fragrant of roses! Ah, most beautiful wife, you could lead
+all Italy by a strand of this miraculous hair."
+
+She was pleased with his praises, touched and grateful; she kissed him
+for them. So they grew more friendly than they had been ever since the
+Bentivoglio had shocked her modesty and faith in him at once. Amilcare
+rattled on; love-talk comes easily to the Italian tongue, whose very
+vocables are caresses.
+
+Gradually he drew in and in to the Borgia, centre of all his spinning
+thought.
+
+"There is a lover of yours, for instance!" he said, comically aghast;
+and Molly laughed.
+
+"Why, Amilcare, you make all the world to be my lover, all the world to
+look at me through your eyes. Believe it, they see me truer than you do.
+I am a very simple person."
+
+Amilcare began to count upon his fingers, one hand meeting the other
+round Molly's caught waist.
+
+"The Borgia, the Count of Cavalcalupo, Oreste Colonna, Negroponte, three
+Bishops at Sesto, Bianca Maria, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, Ordelaffi,
+Benti----"
+
+She stopped him there with a hand on his mouth. "Pah, the horrible man!"
+
+Amilcare gaily struggled for vent, and--"voglio!" he concluded the word.
+"You may not relish the trophy, my wife; but him you undoubtedly
+charmed. And now Don Cesare is coming. Him also it will be as needful as
+easy to please."
+
+Molly turned in her husband's arms to consider him. Something in his
+tone (rather than the words he had used) struck bodefully upon her.
+Amilcare was kissing her hair and would not give over: she cast down her
+eyes unsatisfied.
+
+"I hope I may always please my lord's friends," she said in a low voice.
+
+Amilcare settled himself yet more luxuriously in his cushions, and
+looked at the ceiling.
+
+"You must charm him, my soul," he said intensely; "you must charm him. I
+am in his hands, in his way; he has sought my ruin and I believe still
+seeks it. Twice he has tried to poison me, once to have me stabbed; if
+he tries again he will succeed. Nothing can turn Don Cesare from his
+path but a woman. Therefore, you must charm him, ravish his eyes. You
+know very well how to do that."
+
+Molly stared, grew red, began to stammer. "But how can I--? Oh,
+Amilcare, what do you ask of me?"
+
+Then he looked at her, severely but without malice. She noticed for the
+first time the cold-steel hue in his eyes, the complete absence of
+friendliness--a tinge which his men knew very well, and other men's men
+even better.
+
+"I ask of you, my Molly, that the man be put at his ease," he said
+deliberately (happy in ordering at last); "more, that his direction be
+turned. He must be made high-hearted, full of glorious hope, not
+counting cost, keen in pursuit. He must blow off the cobwebs of his
+doubt; rather, these must shred from him as he flies in chase. I cannot
+afford his distrust. I can do nothing without you. Light of Heaven! am I
+asking too much? Or do you suppose that my safety with the Borgia is not
+yours also?" He shrugged his intolerable indignation and threw back his
+head. Thus he avoided to look at his wife.
+
+She still sat upon his knee, but like an alien, bolt upright, reasoning
+out her misery with wide tearless eyes, and a hand to press her bosom
+down. Shocks were no more for her--she had learned too much; but these
+things seemed like hard fingers on a familiar wound, which opened the
+old sore and set it aching. The part he now put to her had only to be
+named to be shown for horrible; was yet too horrible to be named; yet
+had to be named.
+
+"You ask of me to charm your enemy," she said in a still, fascinated
+voice (as if she were forced by a spell to speak obscenity): "to beguile
+your enemy--to make him--make him--seek me? Him, the man who tried to
+murder you? Charm him? Charm him? Lead him to pursue?"
+
+She could hardly drag the words out of her, but Lord! what a fool she
+was. At least, Amilcare thought so. The plainest duty, the easiest; this
+childish woman's game! He jumped up, quivering with nerves on edge, and
+the sympathy between the pair lacked even touch. Molly found her feet,
+stood brooding before him, all her hair about her lowered face.
+
+To see her thus, a mute, a block, maddened Amilcare. He clenched his
+fists. "Yes, Madam"--his words bit the air--"you shall charm this enemy
+of mine, if you please; this assassin, this ravener of other men's
+goods. You shall charm him in the way you best know--you and your
+nation. Bentivoglio I excused you: he was not worth your pains. Borgia I
+shall not excuse you. I showed you to him with this only view; I asked
+him here, I speak to you now, with this only view. You are adorable in
+every part, if you choose to be. Italy has no woman like you, so
+winning, so much the sumptuous child: such tall buds shoot only in the
+North. To it, then! Charm him as you charmed me. Teach him--_Santo
+Dio_!--teach him to die for a smile. At least afford him the smile or
+the provocation of it: the rest shall be my affair. Soul of Christ! am I
+to miss this astounding opportunity? Never in the world. I bid you by
+all you hold sacred to do your duty. Am I plain enough?"
+
+He was. She had grown as grey as a cloth, could say nothing, only motion
+with her dry lips. But she bent her head to him, and stretched out her
+hands in token of obedience to law.
+
+"Good," said Amilcare; "my wife understands me." And he went out then
+and there to his Council. His conviction of her submissiveness (and of
+other things about her to modify it) may be gauged by the fact that he
+never saw her again (except ceremonially) until a certain moment after
+the dinner with Borgia.
+
+Grifone saw her all the more for that. What he saw satisfied him that
+she was in terrible trouble. She slunk about, to his view, as if beaten
+down by shame. He had seen young girls in that strait very often, when
+the first step had been taken, the first flush faded from the venture,
+the first after-knowledge come. They always went as though they were
+watched. More than that, he discerned that she was nearly broken for
+want of a counsellor: he caught her long gaze fixed upon him sometimes.
+She seemed to be peering through him, spoke to herself (he thought) as
+she sat vacantly upon her throne, or at table among the quick wits, with
+all her spying ladies to fence her in. If any one addressed the word to
+her she flushed suddenly and began to catch after her breath. He could
+see how shortly that breath came, and how it seemed to hurt her. If she
+answered at all, it was stupidly and beside the purpose; then she would
+look conscious of her dulness, grow uncomfortably red, be at the point
+to cry. All this, while it could not but gratify him, made him a little
+sorry too.
+
+One night, at a very brilliant assembly given by the notorious Donna
+Smeralda Buonaccorso, he saw her standing forlorn on the terrace, like a
+lonely rock in the sea--the most beautiful woman in Nona and the most
+splendidly attired, absolutely alone in all that chattering, grimacing
+crowd. The Duchess of Nona! This consideration alone moved him to real
+pity--for to be great and unfortunate has a freakish way of touching
+your heart--it moved him quietly towards her, to whisper in her ear--
+
+"Madonna"--(and Heaven! how she started), "Madonna, what you need now is
+the courage of your race. But courage, I well know, comes only by
+confidence, and confidence is what I can give you. Trust for trust; will
+you hear me?"
+
+But she looked piteously at him, as if she had been found out, and put
+her hands to her ears.
+
+"I dare not hear you! I dare not! How can you speak to me when I have
+never asked--never thought? Ah, leave me, Grifone. I have not heard you
+yet: ask me not--but go!"
+
+It was she that went, that hurried from him, stumbling in her haste,
+like a hunted thing. He could see no more of her that night, so with a
+shrug turned to his quiet amusement. There were women there pleasant
+enough. It was true that he wanted but one woman superlatively; but it
+was eminently Grifone's maxim that, failing that which you need, you
+should take that which you can get.
+
+The last stage in the education of Molly, Amilcare found must positively
+be left to the Secretary.
+
+On the night before Duke Cesare's arrival, when every other preparation
+had been made, Grifone came into his master's room, late. He said
+nothing, nor got any greeting; but he placed a little phial on the
+table, and waited. Amilcare looked at it, did not touch it. It was a
+very small phial, half full of a clear liquid.
+
+"You prepared it yourself, Grifone?"
+
+Grifone nodded pleasantly.
+
+"Then I may rest assured--?"
+
+"You may, my lord."
+
+"I will ask you to make all arrangements, Grifone. When the time comes
+you will take the cup to Madonna Duchessa, with a hint of so much as may
+be necessary to provide against mischances. Will this be done?"
+
+"Punctually and surely, Excellence." The Secretary retired with his
+bottle.
+
+Amilcare sat on with a tight smile which neither waxed nor waned, but
+seemed frozen on his face. He may thus have sat for two or three hours,
+his eyes fixed on a point at the table's edge. That point, whatever it
+was, a speck of dust, may be, seemed to grow and grow till it was
+monstrous and a burden intolerable to endure. Amilcare, with an effort,
+stretched out his hand and cuffed at it. He knocked a book off the table
+by this means, then started, then swore at himself. Twice after this he
+spoke, smiling all the while. "Is it now indeed?" he asked, raising one
+eyebrow; "is it now indeed?" Then he got up, stretched himself noisily,
+and lay down as he was on the sofa, to sleep in a moment.
+
+Molly lay with a young maid of hers that night and never had a wink.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE LAST BIDDING
+
+
+That golden Duke of Valentinois had a pompous reception from his august
+ally at Nona. Amilcare, riding like Castor, at one with his horse, went
+out at the head of his court to meet him. The Centaurs lined the way
+with a hedge of steel. Hat in hand, the Duke of Nona rode back with his
+guest to the garlanded gates. There, a fluttered choir, all virgins and
+all white, strewed flowers; from that point to the Piazza Grande one
+song came leaping on the heels of another. On the steps of the Duomo
+were the clergy in brocade, a mitred bishop half smothered under his
+cope in their midst. The two Dukes dismounted, and hand in hand entered
+the church; the organ pealed; the choir burst out with the chant, _Ecce,
+Rex tuus venit_; and then (seeing Cesare had once been a Cardinal),
+_Ecce Sacerdos magnus_. The smoke of incense went rolling to the roof,
+_Te Deum_ spired between the rifts; an Archbishop intoned the Mass of
+the Holy Ghost. Cesare, in white satin, golden-headed, red-gold in the
+beard, cloaked and collared with the Golden Fleece, knelt in the middle
+of the dome; beside him the hawk-faced Amilcare, splendid in silver
+armour, knelt also--but stiffly; whereas the Borgia (graceful in all
+that he did) drooped easily forward on his _prie-dieu,_ like the
+Archangel Gabriel who brought the great tidings to Madonna Maria.
+Amilcare, at that rate, was like Michael, his more trenchant colleague,
+that "bird of God."
+
+The Bishop, who knew perfectly well why the Duke had come to Nona, and
+why Nona's Duke wanted him there, preached a sermon which the saving
+Italian virtue of urbanity prevented from being either monstrous or
+ridiculous. Before the altar the two lords kissed each other. One of
+them had tried and the other was about to try murder as a political
+expedient; but that was no reason why good manners should not prevail.
+Decent ceremony was always a virtue of the race.
+
+Half an hour before dinner Grifone (who had not been to church) stood
+before his mistress, who had not been suffered to go. He had a flagon in
+his hands, of silver gilt, like the calyx of a great flower whose stem
+was sheathed in the clustered wings of angels, whose base was their
+feet. He held it in both hands as if it were a chalice.
+
+Molly, beaten out and white, looked at it dully, but did not seem to see
+it.
+
+"Madonna mia," said the youth, "this is the loving-cup which I am to
+hand to you after dinner, and which you are to hand to Duke Cesare."
+
+He hardly heard her answer, but judged by the shaping of her lips that
+it was, "Well, Grifone?"
+
+"Duke Cesare will ask you to sip of it first, Madonna."
+
+His looks were piercing; yet she was too far gone to be disturbed by
+such as those. She even smiled faintly at his emphasis.
+
+"Well, Grifone?" she asked again, in that same dry whisper. "How shall
+that be harm to him if I do it?"
+
+Grifone blew out his lips. "Harm, _per Dio_! None at all, but common
+prudence on his part. No harm to him, lady; but to you obeying him,
+destruction, death!"
+
+Molly stared. Her breath came hollow from her mouth.
+
+"Death, Grifone?" she faltered, and then pored over his face again.
+
+He nodded his words into her.
+
+"Death, Madonnina."
+
+The girl tottered to her feet--had to balance like a rope-dancer to keep
+upon them.
+
+"But then--but then--O Saviour!"
+
+She threw her arms up. He thought she would fall, so put one of his
+round her waist. He felt her heart knocking like a drum, pressed her
+closer, drew her in and kissed her, with a coaxing word or two. She
+tried to collect herself--alas! her wits were scattered wide. Her head
+drooped to his shoulder.
+
+After that there began the most pitiful business. She was pleading with
+him in a whining, wheedling, silly voice, which would have broken down
+an Englishman. Grifone himself was pricked. It was like a child,
+frightened into slyness, coaxing its mother.
+
+"Dear Grifone, dear Grifone! You will not hand me the cup. Oh, please,
+please, please!"
+
+Grifone kissed her. "Why, what can I do?" he said. "My lord has ordered
+it so, dear one."
+
+She took no notice of his familiarities; indeed, the tone they lent his
+voice may have soothed the poor affectionate wretch. But she only wrung
+her hands at his news.
+
+"No, no, no! 'Tis impossible! No, no, he could never do it!"
+
+"I can repeat his words," said the inexorable Grifone; "he said--"
+
+Then she sprang away from him as if he had whipped her, and crouched in
+a corner, at bay. She began to rave, seemingly in a high delirium,
+pointed at him, wagged her arm at him, mowing the air.
+
+"Never repeat them, never repeat them. I shall die if you do!"
+
+Grifone set down his cup, ran forward and embraced her. "My lovely lady,
+my adorable Molly!" he murmured, in a passion of admiration for her
+transformed, unearthly beauty.
+
+She noticed nothing of him or his doings, lay lax in his arms. She
+stared, gulping down horror; she looked like some shocked Addolorata
+come upon the body of her dead Son. And so, perhaps (since all good
+women mother their lovers or lords), she was face to face with her dead.
+Tears came to blot out her misery; she could not stay their fall. They
+anointed also the burning cheeks of young Grifone, and drove him outside
+himself with love. He kissed her softly again, with reverence, and
+whispered--
+
+"Courage, sweet lady; I shall be with you. I have it all in hand. The
+end for you and me shall be happiness undreamed of yet. The Duke comes
+in a quarter of an hour." Then he left her alone.
+
+"The affair will go by clockwork," he assured himself. "Neither fast nor
+slow, but by clockwork." He had an ingenious mind, and loved mechanics.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+WITH ALL FAULTS
+
+
+At the coming out from church the two Dukes (mentally at least)
+separated; their paths coincided, but not their thoughts, nor their
+behaviour. By common consent, as it appeared, Amilcare at once resumed
+the obsequious, Cesare the overbearing part. Amilcare talked
+profusively, smirked, grimaced, pranced by the other's side, writhed his
+hands, in copious explanation of nothing at all. Cesare shrugged. The
+amount of disdain an Italian can throw into a pair of dull eyes or an
+irritable shoulder, the amount of it another will take without
+swallowing, can still be studied whenever a young lieutenant of the line
+sits down to breakfast in a tavern, and the waiter slaves for his penny
+fee. Yet, depend upon it, the cringer has balanced to a nicety the
+sweets and sours of boot-blacking against the _buona mano_; the rest is
+pure commerce. So now, the deliberate insolence of the flushed Borgia
+towards his host was a thing to be dumb at; yet Passavente redoubled his
+volubility.
+
+Going up the steps of the Palazzo Bagnacavallo, the guest plumply told
+his entertainer to bring out the woman and go to the devil with his
+cackling. Amilcare laughed all over his face at the best joke in the
+world, and bowed to the earth. Thus humoured they went in to dinner.
+
+Molly, in fold over fold of silk gauze which let every lovely limb be
+seen as glorified in a rosy mist, met them in the ante-room, and
+thenceforth the Borgia had eyes for nothing but the beauty of her. The
+moment he saw her, he drew, as once before, a sharp breath; she greeted
+him in her fashion; he was moved to a fit of trembling.
+
+From that time forth Amilcare was as though he were not. The Roman
+waited for no invitation and disregarded those he got. Would his Grace
+be pleased to dine? His Grace went on pouring out his talk to the
+wonderful rose-coloured lady. Amilcare, patient to excess, watched.
+Presently Cesare said, "Madama, shall we go to dinner?" and to dinner
+they went, Amilcare rubbing his hands behind them.
+
+They found the table prepared--a very low one; divans to sit upon; none
+but Grifone, pale and respectful, in the little painted chamber.
+
+All this had been carefully provided. The Duke's suite dined in another
+wing of the palace; the choir of minstrels, who held the passage between
+them, had mail under their cassocks, and two-edged swords made for
+thrusting. They were fifty strong. Every page-in-waiting in the hall and
+long cool passages was a "Centaur" armed to the teeth. Don Cesare, it
+seems, had walked into a steel trap at last. Do you wonder that Amilcare
+could afford a supple back?
+
+But as the delicate meats succeeded each other--each duly tasted by
+Grifone before a morsel went to plate--there was one, in the surge of
+her terrors, struck dumb with what was, rather, wonder. The magnificent
+Cesare went his road over the feelings of his host; the host bowed and
+waved his hands. Why should he not? Never one word of answer, never a
+gleam of attention did he win from the Roman. Why should he care? His
+wife was doing her duty, his enemy was webbed: what else could matter?
+The Italian shrug goes deeper than the shoulders; sometimes it strokes
+the heart of a man. The very indignities heaped upon the adventurer made
+his revenge the sweeter nursling.
+
+But Molly, the tall English girl, burning in her shameful robe, saw it
+vastly otherwise. That a man could bend so low! That she should ever
+have loved a man with such a stooping back! To think of that made (for
+the moment) every other degradation light. Her part as yet was one of
+sufferance: to look handsome, languid with the excess of her burden of
+beauty; to smile slowly, to keep her eyes on her lap. Pure passivity all
+this, under which the miserable soul could torture in secret. As she
+often had a back-ache, it was easy to wilt among her cushions; as she
+was always mute before flattery, to smile was as simple as to frown and
+meant no more; as she was ashamed of herself and her husband, she could
+hardly hope to lift her honest eyes, or temper her furious blushing.
+
+It would be untrue to say that the Borgia's eager under-current of
+love-language stirred her not at all. Even to her the man's fame made
+his homage a tribute; something it was, beyond doubt, to be courted by
+the greatest prince in Italy. And he had not touched her yet. Amilcare,
+whose desperate grinning made his jaws ache, noticed so much as he
+watched her, fidgeting in his place. His nails were for ever at his
+teeth: when the fruit should come in he was to slip out, and Grifone to
+crown the work. Meanwhile, the flagrant unconcern for his whereabouts
+shown by the victim might have stung a blind worm to bite, or excused
+any treachery. Amilcare had no rage at all and felt the need of no
+excuse. All his anxiety was that Cesare should enmesh himself deep
+enough; and then--! The thought of what should happen then set his head
+singing a song as mad as Judith's.
+
+The still Grifone stood behind his mistress and saw Cesare's golden head
+sink near and yet nearer to her shoulder. He watched his arm over the
+back of her seat, and how his other hand crept towards the lady's idle
+pair. The room held those four, and them not long. In his time Amilcare
+muttered some excuse and tiptoed out.
+
+Cesare was saying, "Ah, give me love--love only--else I must die!"
+
+Molly answered nothing with her lips, but in her bosom prayed
+ceaselessly for pity.
+
+"Love me, pledge me with your lips, let me drink of you, O my soul!"
+sighed the Duke.
+
+"Ecco, Madonna," said Grifone, and handed her the cup.
+
+"The chalice of love!" cried Cesare, straining towards the white girl.
+"Drink to me, my heart, and I will drink from thee!"
+
+Molly still held the cup, though the liquor curved brimming at the lip.
+Her eyes were sightless, her head shaking with palsy.
+
+"Drink, drink, my soul!"
+
+"Yes, my lord, yes, yes; I must drink very deep," she said, and raised
+the cup.
+
+"Pshutt!" said Grifone.
+
+She turned like a caught beast, wild and blanched with horror. She rose
+suddenly, swaying on her feet, entangled one of them in her long robe
+and stumbled forward to stay herself by the table. She looked like some
+spurred Bacchante, lurching over the board with the great flagon a-nod
+in her hand. Cesare made to catch her in his arms, and reached for the
+cup; but then she screamed with all her might and threw the accursed
+thing crash upon the pavement.
+
+"Treachery! Treachery!" Molly shrieked; and again, "Treachery! O God, he
+has made me a devil!" She threw her head up, herself tumbled back upon
+the cushions; knew nothing of Grifone's "Go, go, go, my lord; the house
+is quick with murder!" and when she opened her eyes at last saw Amilcare
+standing grim and grey before her.
+
+Who can say what shall best reveal a man, whether love or hate or fear?
+Or how to know which of these three passions stripped her this Amilcare
+naked? Naked he was now, and she found that she had never known him. The
+colour of his face was that of old white wax; his mouth seemed stretched
+to cracking point, neither turned up at the corners nor down, but a
+bleak slit jagged across his face. He fastened her with his hard eyes,
+which seemed smaller than usual, and had a scared look, as if he was
+positively disconcerted at what he read as they glimmered over his
+wife. In one of his hands (never still) he had a long knife, very lean
+in the blade.
+
+"Ah, what do you want of me more, Amilcare?" It was Molly spoke first,
+in a whisper.
+
+He croaked his reply. "I am going to kill you."
+
+"Oh! oh! You are going to kill me, my lord?"
+
+"You have sold me to my enemy. He is your lover."
+
+"No, no! I have no lover, Amilcare; I have never had a lover."
+
+"Liar!" he thundered. "If he had not been your lover you would not have
+spared his life. There can be no other reason. I am not a fool."
+
+To Grifone that was just what he appeared. To her some ray of her own
+soul's honest logic showed at the last.
+
+"Amilcare!" she cried out, on her knees, "Amilcare, listen, I pray you.
+I have done you no wrong; I implore you not to hurt me; I have done you
+honour. It was because I loved _you_ that I saved his life. I speak the
+truth, my lord, I speak the truth."
+
+"I have never thought you to speak otherwise; but I have been wrong, it
+appears. The excuse is monstrous. I am going to kill you."
+
+The miserable girl turned him a pinched face. She searched for any shred
+of what she had known in him, but all the deadly mask of him she saw
+told her nothing. She began to be witless again, to wring her hands, to
+whimper and whine.
+
+Amilcare looked fixedly at her, every muscle in his face rigid as stone.
+So, as he ruminated, some whisp of his racing thought caught light from
+his inner rage, flared blood-bright before him, and convulsing him drove
+him to his work.
+
+"Gross trull!" He sprang at her with his knife in the air. Molly
+shrieked for mercy; and before he could be on her Grifone whipped out
+his dagger and stabbed his master under the stabbing arm.
+
+Amilcare jerked in mid-career, constricted and turned half. But the blow
+had gone too deep and too true. He fell horribly, and Molly knew no
+more.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+FROM AN AMATEUR'S CABINET
+
+
+Grifone received his swooning lady into his arms and held her there to
+his great content, triumphing in her beauty and successful capture.
+Truly the adventure had gone by clockwork: he might say (he thought)
+that there was not one step in it but had been schemed to an eighth of
+an inch; and when you have to bring temperamental differences into
+account, the chances of Italian politics, the influence of climate, the
+panic alarms of a ridden mob--and still succeed, why, then you may
+lawfully be happy. Happy he was, but Molly was tall and he a
+light-weight. Moreover, he wanted to wipe his blade and be off. He
+judged it prudent, therefore, to bring her to herself again, and so did
+by sousing her liberally with cold water.
+
+Molly, as soon as she could see, was aware of him kneeling by her side
+and of his arms about her. Before she had done gasping he began to kiss
+her.
+
+"My heart of hearts, my lovely soul, my lady Moll! Mine altogether by
+the act of my arm!" were some of his fiery words.
+
+There were others yet more explicit, which left no doubt of his passion,
+nor any ray of doubt of his intentions. Grifone took everything for
+granted, as he had from the beginning.
+
+"My charmer," he said, "I have saved you from ignominious death; but I
+have saved myself also from a death by no means agreeable to me. It was
+impossible that our love could have held us much longer at a distance
+from each other, impossible that we could have still suffered a third
+person to usurp our privileges. If that stabbed stabber under the table
+had not misunderstood you so grotesquely--the gross-witted hog!--he
+would have lived, and I died of jealousy. A far from pleasant death, you
+will allow; worse in that it would have involved your own. For I should
+have had to kill you too, my dearest joy: so much would have been owing
+to my self-respect. Things, you see, could not have turned out more
+fortunately; the fellow trapped himself. We may be happy--we will be
+wildly happy--you shall see!"
+
+It may be doubted whether Molly heard anything of this exposition; she
+may well have missed one or two steps in a carefully reasoned argument.
+Hers was that state of absorbent lassitude when the words and acts put
+to you sink into the floating mass of your weakness. The late shocking
+grief hovers felt about you: a buzz of talk, a rain of caresses, hold
+the spectre off, and so are serviceable--but no more. The cold cheek,
+the clay-cold lips, the long, lax limbs of the poor doll were at his
+service. She saw nothing through her dim eyes, made no motion with her
+lips, sobbed rather than breathed, endured tearlessly rather than lived
+awake her misery. Misery is not the word: she had been sent down to hell
+and had come back dumb to earth, neither knowing why such torment was
+hers, nor thinking how to fly a second questioning. Had she been capable
+of a wish, a prayer, or of begging a favour, who can doubt what it would
+have been? Death, oh, death!
+
+Grifone's face was so near to hers, that not to kiss her would have been
+an affectation; but when he began to make plans, he released her, sat
+up, and spoke as though he were discussing theory.
+
+"There is very much to do, my love," said he, "but I think I see my way
+clear. It is instant flight, to begin with, for one of the household may
+be here any moment, or Don Cesare return. Such an one would have but to
+open the window and cry, 'Treason, ho!' to secure our being torn to
+pieces--not for any love the Nonesi bear that carrion; but because not
+one of them could resist the chance of kicking his benefactors. It is
+reasonable, after all. Instant flight, my dear, if you please. But
+whither? you will ask. Luckily I can take you to a pretty safe place, of
+which I have the key and _custode's_ goodwill in my pocket. You know the
+Rocca del Capitan Vecchio outside the Latin Gate? We go there for our
+terrestrial paradise. Shawl your lovely head, therefore, stoop your
+glorious shoulders, and obey me exactly."
+
+He got up as he made an end of speech, drew her gently to her feet, and
+showed her how to muffle herself in the hood of a man's cloak. He bound
+the rest of the garment about her waist with his belt, pinned up her
+skirt and petticoat as high as her knees, and gave her his own
+stockings and shoes. Then he helped himself to his dead master's pair,
+to his sword and velvet gown; and--
+
+"Now," he said, "we may start by the privy garden."
+
+He led the way. It was a golden afternoon of late summer; the shadows
+were lengthening as the air grew tired and cool, all the place was full
+of that vast peace in which a day of strenuous heat sinks to rest. The
+faint breeze in the myrtles was like a sleeper's sigh:--
+
+"Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae--" murmured Grifone to
+himself, as he slipped among the cypresses over the grass. Molly
+followed him with faltering knees, nearly spent. As always, she was at
+the mercy of a clear head, never masterless when a man was near her.
+Morally, nervously, she seemed to be dead; so she followed her new lord
+as meekly as she had followed her old--that one to Nona across the seas,
+this one by gloomy, pent ways through the stale-smelling streets of the
+city to the Rocca del Capitan Vecchio.
+
+Meekly enough she went, yet not so far nor so meekly but that she gave
+Grifone a genuine surprise. It seems that the air, the exercise,
+precautions, what-not, had cried back her escaped wits: certain it is
+that, once in the storm-bitten old fortress, she thanked her leader and
+rescuer with a tremulous sweetness all her own, and then--by Heaven and
+Earth!--urged him gently to go back, "lest her honour should be breathed
+upon."
+
+Her honour! Grifone, the romancer, turned sick with amazement. He was
+dumbfounded, could not believe his ears, nor yet his eyes; that there
+before him should stand that drooping, flagged, pitiful beauty, always
+at his discretion, now wholly at his mercy within nine-foot walls, and
+talk to him with wet eyes and pleading lips of the Cardinal Virtues.
+
+As soon as he could collect himself he put this before her in a whirl of
+words.
+
+_Santo Dio!_ Timidity, prejudice, after what had passed! In what
+possible way or by what possible quibble of a priest could anything stay
+them now from the harvest of a sown love--two years' sowing, by the
+Redeemer, two years' torture; and now--a solid square fortress on a
+naked rock, deemed impregnable by anything but black treachery! Let him
+make assurance incredibly secure: say the word, and he would go and
+silence the old _custode_ for ever. It was done in a moment--what more
+could he do?
+
+So he prayed; but Molly was a rock at last. She ignored everything but
+the fact that she could never survive the night if he stayed in the
+fortress-tower. Such, she assured him, was the fixed habit of her
+extraordinary race. She made no pretence of mourning her dead husband;
+indeed, her horror of him set her shuddering at his mere name; nor did
+she affect to deny that she loved Grifone. It made no difference. She
+was luminously mild, used her hands like a Madonna in a picture, was
+more lovely and winning in the motions of her little head, the wistful
+deeps and darks of her eyes, the pathetic curve of her mouth, than any
+Madonna short of Leonardo's. Grifone threw up his arms; such a pass
+confounded him; he had no tools to pick this sort of lock. Oh, but the
+thing was impossible! Two years' longing, the husband dead--why, they
+might marry, even, if she would. Perhaps that was what she needed? If
+so, he would risk his life in the city again to find a priest. But,
+think of it, formalities at this hour!
+
+Molly smiled and blushed; she was sorry for her friend and would have
+consoled him if she could; but the thing was so obvious. Did not Grifone
+see?
+
+Grifone did not see; he tore his hair, he threatened, prayed, raved,
+commanded, coaxed, swore by God and the Devil, clung to her
+knees--useless!
+
+"Dear friend," she said, and stroked his hot hair, "you have served me
+well. Never serve me now so ill."
+
+She beat him. From that moment, when love was dead, he began to hate
+her. She was safe from what she feared. Everything he might have waived
+but that, a clean blow at his own conceit. The end was near.
+
+Their colloquy, so frenzied on his part, so staid and generous at once
+on hers, was barely over before the hum of many voices crept upon them,
+a slow, murmurous advance, out of which, as the hordes drew near, one or
+two sharp cries--"Seek, seek!" "Death to the traitor!"--threw up like
+the hastier wave-crests in a racing tide. Again they heard (and now more
+clearly), "Evviva Madonna! La Madonna di Nona!" and then (more ominous
+than all) a cry for Cesare Borgia: "Chiesa! Chiesa!"
+
+At this last Grifone, who had been biting his fingers shrewdly, wrung a
+nail apart till the blood came. His was the desperate caught face of a
+stoat in a trap.
+
+"What is this crying without?" said Molly in a hush.
+
+"Pest! I must find out," said Grifone.
+
+He climbed to a high window and looked down into the moonlight. "The
+Nonesi in force. Cesare Borgia and the troops. Hist! He is going to
+speak to them; they are holding him up." He strained to listen--and it
+seems that he heard.
+
+"Citizens," said the Borgia, in fact, "I pledge you my sacred word that
+the Duchess shall be delivered to you whole and in honour. She shall be
+in the Palace within an hour. The Secretary who has her there, who
+stabbed his master and (as I learn from Milan) hatched all the plot,
+must be left to me. Madonna Maria saved my life at the peril of her own.
+She has no more devoted servant than I am. Trust me to prove it."
+
+"Chiesa! Chiesa! Madonna! Heed the Duke!" cried the mob. And then, "Let
+the Duke go up and win us our lady."
+
+"That he shall never do," said Grifone, and came down from the window.
+
+Molly, seeing the cunning in his eyes, backed to the wall.
+
+Time does not serve, and pity forbids, that I should dwell upon this
+misery. What she may have wailed, what he withstood who loved her once,
+I have no care to set down at large. He strangled her with cruel,
+vivacious hands, and then (since time had pressed, and all his passion
+not been pent in one wicked place) fell to kissing the flouted clay.
+Getting up from this tribute, he was faced by Cesare Borgia and his men;
+by Cesare who, used to such stratagems as this of late, had had the
+whole story out of Ludovic at Milan, and forestalled Nona by buying up
+the troop of "Centaurs" before ever he entered the city. Thus had
+Amilcare been sold by his own purchase, and thus Grifone griped in his
+own springe. Cesare found him, I say, and Grifone knew in the first
+crossing of their eyes that his hour had come.
+
+He bore it without a wink, and lucky he might think it that for Cesare
+also the time was short. He was sooner dead than he dared to hope, and
+died cursing the name of Borgia. But that was a seasoned name.
+
+"The populace is on fire, Highness," reported a breathed captain. "It
+clamours for the Duchess of Nona. We can hardly hold them much longer,
+strong as we are. We must show her, though I perceive that her
+Excellency has fainted."
+
+"She is dead, man," said Cesare shortly, wiping his pair of daggers.
+
+"It is a pity, Highness. _Ma----!_" He shrugged the end to his period.
+
+Cesare looked at the girl and shrugged in his turn.
+
+"Luckily it is dark. We must play them that trick they played on Borgo
+San Domino. She must be put in a litter, and at the palace see to it
+that the lights are behind her before ever you set her up in the window.
+Do what you can for us, Ercole."
+
+They worked their best to compose that pitiful dead. She had suffered
+much, and showed it. Her wide eyes were horrible. And there was little
+time for more than to order her dress and neck-jewels, and to smooth out
+her brown hair.
+
+"H'm," said Cesare, "you have made little of it; but at a distance it
+may serve our turn until the troops arrive. Is the litter below? Good.
+_Avanti!_"
+
+The church bells rang all night, and all night the Piazza Grande was
+alive, a flickering field of torches and passing and repassing throngs.
+"Evviva Madonna! Hail, Duchess of Nona!" were the cries they gave. And
+above, at an arched window, haloed by candle-light, the staring lady of
+the land, stiffened and relaxed, played out the last functions of her
+generous body, in return for the people's acclamation.
+
+Bianca Maria, Queen of the Romans by virtue of proxy and the Sacrament,
+spurred into the city of Nona next noon at the head of a plumed escort.
+There, at the fatal window, she saw the whole truth in a flash.
+
+"_O lasso!_ Her third husband was her last, I see," she said, and bit
+her lip to sting the tears back.
+
+"Majesty," said Cesare, hat in hand at her stirrup, "it is not quite so.
+Grifone was not quick enough for the other fellow. Messer Death is
+actually her second husband."
+
+"Now I have something for which to thank our Lord God," said Bianca
+Maria. "Let her be decently buried, but not here."
+
+It was, however, explained that for reasons of policy the Duchess of
+Nona must share tombs with the Duke. Serviceable in death as in life,
+there where she was marketed lies her fragrant dust; fragrant now, I
+hope, since all the passion is out.
+
+I almost despair of winning your applause for poor Molly Lovel, yet will
+add this finally in her justification. Women are most loved when they
+are lovely, most lovely when they are meek. This is not to say that they
+will be worthily loved or loyally: there are two sides to a bargain. Yet
+this one thing more: they are neither meek nor lovely unless they love.
+And since Molly Lovel, on my showing, was both in a superlative degree,
+it follows that she must have loved much. She was ill repaid while she
+lived; let now that measure be meted her which was accorded another
+Molly whose surname was Magdalene.
+
+
+
+
+MESSER CINO AND THE LIVE COAL
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+It is not generally known that the learned Aristotle once spent the
+night in a basket dangled midway betwixt attic and basement of a castle;
+nor that, having suffered himself to be saddled for the business, he
+went on all-fours, ambling round the terrace-walk with a lady on his
+back, a lady who, it is said, plied the whip with more heartiness than
+humanity. But there seems no doubt of the fact. The name of the lady
+(she was Countess of Cyprus), the time of the escapade, which was upon
+the sage's return from India in the train of the triumphant
+Alexander--these and many other particulars are at hand. The story does
+not lack of detail, though it is noteworthy that Petrarch, in his
+"Trionfo d'Amore," decently veils the victim in a periphrasis. "Quell'
+el gran Greco"--there is the great Grecian, says he, and leaves you to
+choose between the Stagyrite, Philip of Macedon, and Theseus. The
+painters, however, have had no mercy upon him. I remember him in a
+pageant at Siena, in a straw hat, with his mouth full of grass; the lady
+rides him in the mannish way. In pictures he is always doting, humbled
+to the dust or cradled in his basket, when he is not showing his paces
+on the lawn. By all accounts it was a bad case of green-sickness, as
+such late cases are. You are to understand that he refused all
+nourishment, took delight in no manner of books, could not be stayed by
+the nicest problems of Physical Science--such as whether the beaver does
+indeed catch fish with his tail, the truth concerning the eyesight of
+the lynxes of Boeotia, or what gave the partridge such a reputation
+for heedless gallantry. But it would be unprofitable to inquire into all
+this; Aristotle was not the first enamoured sage in history, nor was he
+the last. And where he bowed his laborious front it was to be hoped that
+Messer Cino of Pistoja might do the like. It is of him that I am to
+speak. The story is of Selvaggia Vergiolesi, the beautiful romp, and of
+Messer Guittoncino de' Sigibuldi, that most eminent jurist, familiarly
+known as Cino da Pistoja in the affectionate phrasing of his native
+town.
+
+Love-making was the mode in his day (which was also Dante's), but Master
+Cino had been all for the Civil Law. The Digest, the Pandects, the
+Institutes of Gaius and what not, had given him a bent back before his
+time, so that he walked among the Pistolese beauties with his eyes on
+the ground and his hands knotted behind his decent robe. Love might have
+made him fatter, yet he throve upon his arid food; he sat in an
+important chair in his University; he had lectured at Bologna (hive of
+sucking Archdeacons), at Siena, at Perugia. Should he prosper, he looked
+to Florence for his next jump. As little as he could contrive was he
+for Pope or Emperor, Black or White, Farinata or Cerchi; banishment came
+that road. His friend Dante was footsore with exile, halfway over
+Apennine by this time; Cino knew that for him also the treading was very
+delicate. Constitutionally he was Ghibelline with his friend Dante, and
+such politics went well in Pistoja for the moment. But who could tell?
+The next turn of the wheel might bring the Pope round; Pistoja might go
+Black (as indeed she did in more senses than one), and pray where would
+be his Assessorship of Civil Causes, where his solemn chair, where his
+title to doffing of caps and a chief seat at feasts? Cino, meditating
+these things over his morning sop and wine, rubbed his chin sore and
+determined to take a wife. His family was respectable, but Ghibelline;
+his means were happy; his abilities known to others as well as to
+himself. Good! He would marry a sober Guelphish virgin, and establish a
+position to face both the windy quarters. It was when his negotiations
+to this end had reached maturity, when the contract for his espousals
+with the honourable lady, Monna Margherita degli Ughi, had actually been
+signed, that Messer Cino of Pistoja was late for his class, got cold
+feet, and turned poet.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+It was a strange hour when Love leaped the heart of Cino, that staid
+jurisconsult, to send him reeling up the sunny side of the piazza
+heedless of his friends or his enemies. To his dying day he could not
+have told you how it came upon him. Being a man of slow utterance and of
+a mind necessarily bent towards the concrete, all he could confess to
+himself throughout the terrible business was, that there had been a
+cataclysm. He remembered the coldness of his feet; cold feet in mid
+April--something like a cataclysm! As he turned it over and over in his
+mind a lady recurred with the persistence of a refrain in a ballad; and
+words, quite unaccustomed words, tripped over his tongue to meet her.
+What a lovely vision she had made!--"Una donzella non con uman' volto (a
+gentle lady not of human look)." Well, what next? Ah, something about
+"Amor, che ha la mia virtu tolto (Love that has reft me of my manly
+will)." Then should come _amore_, and of course _cuore_, and _disio_,
+and _anch' io_! This was very new; it was also very strange what a
+fascination he found in his phrenetic exercises. Rhyme, now: he had
+called it often enough a jingle of endings; it were more true to say
+that it was a jingle of mendings, for it certainly soothed him. He was
+making a goddess in his own image; poetry--Santa Cecilia! he was a
+poet, like his friend Dante, like that supercilious young tomb-walker
+Guido Cavalcanti. A poet he undoubtedly became; and if his feet were
+cold his heart was on fire.
+
+What happened was this, so far as I am informed. At the north angle of
+the church of San Giovanni fuori Civitas there is a narrow lane, so dark
+that at very noon no sunlight comes in but upon blue bars of dust
+slant-wise overhead. This lay upon Cino's daily beat from his lodgings
+to the Podesta;[1] and here it was that he met Selvaggia Vergiolesi.
+
+She was one of three young girls walking hand in hand up the alley on
+their way from early mass, the tallest where all were tall, and, as it
+seemed to him when he dreamed of it, astonishingly beautiful. Though
+they were very young, they were ladies of rank; their heads were high
+and crowned, their gowns of figured brocade; they had chains round their
+necks, and each a jewel on her forehead; by chains also swung their
+little mass-books in silver covers. Cino knew them well enough by sight.
+Their names were Selvaggia di Filippo Vergiolesi, Guglielmotta
+Aspramonte, Nicoletta della Torre. So at least he had always believed;
+but now, but now! A beam of gold dust shot down upon the central head.
+This was Aglaia, fairest of the three Graces; and the other two were
+Euphrosyne and Thaleia, her handmaids. Thus it struck Cino, heart and
+head, at this sublime moment of his drab-coloured life.
+
+Selvaggia's hair was brown, gold-shot of its own virtue. In and out of
+it was threaded a fine gold chain; behind, it was of course plaited in a
+long twist, plaited and bound up in cloth of gold till it looked as hard
+as a bull's tail. Her dress was all of formal brocade, green and white,
+to her feet. It was cut square at the neck; and from that square her
+throat, dazzlingly white, shot up as stiff as a stalk which should find
+in her face its delicate flower. She was not very rosy, save about the
+lips; her eyes were grey, inclined to be green, the lashes black. As for
+her shape, sumptuous as her dress was, stiff and straight and severe, I
+ask you to believe that she had grace to fill it with life, to move at
+ease in it, to press it into soft and rounded lines. Her linked
+companions also were beauties of their day--that sleek and sleepy
+Nicoletta, that ruddy Guglielmotta; but they seemed to cower in their
+rigid clothes, and they were as nothing to Cino.
+
+The lane was so narrow that only three could pass abreast; it was
+abreast these three were coming, as Cino saw. On a sudden his heart
+began to knock at his ribs; that was when the light fell aslant upon the
+maid. He could no more have taken his eyes off Selvaggia than he could
+have climbed up the dusty wall to avoid her. Lo, here is one stronger
+than I! At the next moment the three young rogues were about him, their
+knitted hands a fence,--but the eyes of Selvaggia! Terrible twin-fires,
+he thought, such as men light in the desert to scare the beasts away
+while they sleep, or (as he afterwards improved it for his need) like
+the flaming sword of the Archangel, which declared and yet forbade Eden
+to Adam and his wife.
+
+Selvaggia, in truth, though she had fourteen years behind her, was a
+romp when no one was looking. There were three brothers at home, but no
+mother; she was half a boy for all her straight gown. To embarrass this
+demure professor, to presume upon her sex while discarding it, was a
+great joke after a tediously droned mass at San Jacopo. Nicoletta would
+have made room, even the hardier Guglielmotta drew back; but the wicked
+Selvaggia pinched their fingers so that they could not escape. All this
+time Messer Cino had his eyes rooted in Selvaggia's, reading her as if
+she were a portent. She endured very well what she took to be the
+vacancy of confusion in a shy recluse.
+
+"Well, Messer Cino, what will you do?" said she, bubbling with mischief.
+
+"Oh, Madonna, can you ask?" he replied, and clasped his hands.
+
+"But you see that I do ask."
+
+"I would stop here all the day if I might," said Messer Cino, with a
+look by no means vacant. Whereupon she let him through that minute and
+ran away blushing. More than once or twice she encountered him there,
+but she never tried to pen him back again.
+
+Little Monna Selvaggia learned that you cannot always put out the fire
+which you have kindled. The fire set blazing by those lit green swords
+of hers was in the heart of an Assessor of Civil Causes, a brazier with
+only too good a draught. For love in love-learned Tuscany was then a
+roaring wind; it came rhythmically and set the glowing mass beating like
+the sestett of a sonnet. One lived in numbers in those days; numbers
+always came. You sonnetteered upon the battlefield, in the pulpit, on
+the Bench, at the Bar. Throughout the moil of his day's work at the
+Podesta those clinging long words, in themselves inspiration, _disio,
+piacere, vaghezza, gentilezza, diletto, affetto,_ beautiful twins that
+go ever embraced, wailed in poor Cino's ears, and insensibly shaped
+themselves coherent. He thought they were like mirrors, so placed that
+each gave a look of Selvaggia. Before the end of the day he had the
+whole of her in a sonnet which, if it were as good as it was
+comfortable, should needs (he thought) be excellent. The thrill which
+marked achievement sent the blood to his head; this time he gloried in
+cold feet. He wrote his sonnet out fair upon vellum in a hand no scribe
+at the Papal Court could have bettered, rolled it, tied it with green
+and white silk (her colours, colours of the hawthorn hedge!), and went
+out into the streets at the falling-in of the day to deliver it.
+
+The Palazzo Vergiolesi lay over by the church of San Francesco al Prato,
+just where the Via San Prospero debouches into that green place. Like
+all Tuscan palaces it was more fortress than house, a dark square box of
+masonry with a machicollated lid; and separate from it, but appurtenant,
+had a most grim tower with a slit or two halfway up for all its windows.
+Here, under the great escutcheon of the Vergiolesi, Cino delivered his
+missive. The porter took it with a bow so gracious that the poet was
+bold to ask whether the Lady Selvaggia was actually within.
+
+"Yes, surely, Messere," said the man, "and moreover in the kitchen with
+the cookmaids. For there is a cake-making on hand, and she is never far
+away from that business."
+
+Cino was ravished by this instance of divine humiliation; so might
+Apollo have bowed in the house of Admetus, so Israel have kept sheep for
+Rachel's sake. He walked away in most exalted mood, his feet no longer
+cold. This was a great day for him, when he could see a new heaven and a
+new earth.
+
+"Now I too have been in Arcady!" he thought to himself, with tears in
+his eyes. "I will send a copy of my sonnet to Dante Alighieri by a sure
+hand. He should be at Bologna by this." And he did.
+
+Madonna Selvaggia, her sleeves rolled up, a great bib all about her
+pretty person, and her mouth in a fine mess of sugar and crumbs,
+received her tribute sitting on the long kitchen-table. It should have
+touched, it might have tickled, but it simply confused her. The maids
+peeped over her shoulder as she read, in ecstasy that Madonna should
+have a lover and a poet of her own. Selvaggia filched another handful of
+sugar and crumbs, and twiddled her sonnet while she wondered what on
+earth she should do with it. Her fine brows met each other over the
+puzzle, so clearly case for a confidence. Gianbattista, her youngest
+brother, was her bosom friend; but he was away, she knew, riding to Pisa
+with their father. Next to him ranked Nicoletta; she would be at mass
+to-morrow--that would do. Meantime the cook produced a most triumphal
+cake hot and hot, and the transports of poor Messer Cino were forgotten.
+
+Dante's reply to his copy was so characteristic that I must anticipate a
+little to speak of it. He confined himself almost entirely to
+technicalities, strongly objecting to the sestett with its three rhymes
+in the middle, upon which Cino had prided himself in no small degree.
+The only thing he seemed to care for was the tenth line, "A dolce morte
+sotto dolce inganno," which you may render, if you like, "To a sweet
+death under so sweet deceit"; but he said there were too many "o's" in
+it. "As to the subject of your poem," he wrote in a postscript, "love is
+a thing of so terrible a nature that not lightly is it to be entered,
+since it cannot be lightly left; and, seeing the latter affair is much
+out of a man's power, he should be wary with the former, wherein at
+present he would appear to have some discretion, though not very much."
+This was chilly comfort; but by the time it reached him Cino was beyond
+the assault of chills.
+
+Equally interesting should it be to record the conversation of Monna
+Selvaggia with her discreet friend Nicoletta; yet I cannot record
+everything. Nicoletta had a lover of her own, a most proper poet, who
+had got far beyond the mere accidence of the science where Cino was
+fumbling now; you might say that he was at theory. Nicoletta, moreover,
+was sixteen years old, a marriageable age, an age indeed at which not to
+have a lover would have been a disgrace. She had had sonnets and
+_canzoni_ addressed to her since she was twelve; but then she had two
+elder sisters and only one brother--a monk! This made a vast difference.
+The upshot was that when Cino met the two ladies at the charmed spot of
+yesterday's encounter he uncovered before them and stood with folded
+hands, as if at his prayers. Consequently he missed the very pretty air
+of consciousness with which Selvaggia passed him by, the heightened
+colour of her, the lowered eyes and restless fingers, Also he missed
+Nicoletta's demure shot askance, demure but critical, as became an
+expert. A sonnet and a bunch of red anemones went to the Palazzo
+Vergiolesi that evening; thenceforth it rained sonnets till poor little
+Selvaggia ran near losing her five wits. It rained sonnets, I say, until
+the Cancellieri brought out the black Guelphs in a swarm. Then it rained
+blood, and the Vergiolesi fled one cloudy night to Pitecchio, their
+stronghold in the Apennine. For Messer Cino, it behoved him also to
+advise seriously about his position. To sonnetteer is very well, but a
+lover, to say nothing of a jurisconsult, must live; he cannot have his
+throat cut if there is a way out.
+
+There was a very simple way out, which he took. He went down to Lucca in
+the plain and married his Margherita degli Ughi. With her Guelph
+connections he felt himself safer. He bestowed his wife in the keeping
+of her people for the time, bought himself a horse, and rode up to
+Pitecchio among the green maize, the olive-yards, and sprouting vines to
+claim asylum from Filippo, and to see once more the beautiful young
+Selvaggia.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] So the Pistolesi described at once their government and the seat of
+it.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+There is hardly a sonnet, there are certainly neither _ballate_,
+_canzoni_, nor _capitoli_ which do not contain some reference to Monna
+Selvaggia's fine eyes, and always to the same tune. They scorch him,
+they beacon him, they flash out upon him in the dark, so that he falls
+prone as Saul (who got up with a new name and an honourable addition);
+they are lodestones, swords, lamps, torches, fires, fixed and ambulatory
+stars, the sun, the moon, candles. They hold lurking a thief to prey
+upon the vitals of Cino; they are traitors, cruel lances; they kill him
+by stabbing day after day. You can picture the high-spirited young lady
+from his book--her noble bearing, her proud head, her unflinching
+regard, again the sparks in her grey-green eyes, and so on. He plays
+upon her _forte nome_, her dreadful name of Selvaggia; so she comes to
+be Ferezza itself. "Tanto e altiera," he says, so haughtily she goes
+that love sets him shaking; but, kind or cruel, it is all one to the
+enamoured Master Cino; for even if she "un pochettin sorride (light him
+a little smile)," it melts him as sun melts snow. In any case,
+therefore, he must go, like Dante's cranes, trailing his woes. It
+appears that she had very little mercy upon him; for all that in one
+place he records that she was "of all sweet sport and solace amorous,"
+in many more than one he complains of her bringing him to "death and
+derision," of her being in a royal rage with her poet. At last he cries
+out for Pity to become incarnate and vest his lady in her own robe. It
+may be that he loved his misery; he is always on the point of dying,
+but, like the swan, he was careful to set it to music first. Selvaggia,
+in fact, laughed at him (he turned once to call her a Jew for that)
+egged on as she was by her brother and her own vivacious habit. She had
+no Nicoletta at Pitecchio, no mother anywhere, and a scheming father too
+busy to be anything but shrugging towards poets. She accepted his rhymes
+(she would probably have been scared if they ceased), his services, his
+lowered looks, his bent knee; and then she tripped away with an arm
+round Gianbattista's neck to laugh at all these praiseworthy attentions.
+As for Cino, Selvaggia was become his religion, and his rhyming her
+reasonable service. His goddess may have been as thirsty as the Scythian
+Artemis; may be that she asked blood and stripes of her devotees. All
+this may well be; for, by the Lord, did she not have them?
+
+Ridolfo and Ugolino Vergiolesi, the two elder brothers of Selvaggia, had
+stayed behind in Pistoja to share the fighting in the streets. They had
+plenty of it, given and received. Ridolfo had his head cut open, Ugolino
+went near to losing his sword arm; but in spite of these heroic
+sufferances the detested Cancellieri became masters of the city, and the
+chequer-board flag floated over the Podesta. Pistoja was now no place
+for a Ghibelline. So the two young men rode up to the hill-fortress,
+battered, but in high spirits. Selvaggia flew down the cypress-walk to
+meet them; they were brought in like wounded heroes. That was a bad
+day's work for Messer Cino the amorist; Apollo and the Muses limped in
+rags, and Mars was the only God worth thinking about, except on Sundays.
+
+Ridolfo, with his broken head-piece, was a bluff youth,
+broad-shouldered, square-jawed, a great eater, grimly silent for the
+most part. Ugolino had a trenchant humour of the Italian sort. What this
+may be is best exampled by our harlequinades, in which very much of
+Boccaccio's bent still survives. You must have a man drubbed if you want
+to laugh, and do your rogueries with a pleasant grin if you are inclined
+to heroism. Ridolfo, reading Selvaggia's sheaf of rhymes that night, was
+for running Master Cino through the body, jurist or no jurist; but
+Ugolino saw his way to a jest of the most excellent quality, and
+prevailed. He was much struck by the poet's preoccupation with his
+sister's eyes.
+
+"Candles, are they," he chuckled, "torches, fires, suns, moons, and
+stars? You seem to have scorched this rhymester, Vaggia."
+
+"He has frequently told me so, indeed," said Selvaggia.
+
+"It reminds me of Messer San Giovanni Vangelista," Ugolino continued,
+"who was made to sing rarely by the touching of a hot cinder."
+
+Selvaggia snatched the scrolls out of her brother's hand. "Nay, nay, but
+wait," she cried, with a gulp of laughter; "I have done that to Messer
+Cino, or can if I choose." She turned over the delicate pen-work in a
+hurry. "Here," she said eagerly, "read this!"
+
+Ugolino scampered through a couple of quatrains. "There's nothing out of
+common here," said he.
+
+"Go on, go on," said the girl, and nudged him to attend.
+
+Ugolino read the sestett:--
+
+
+     "'His book is but the vesture of her spirit;
+     So too thy poet, that feels the living coal
+     Flame on his lips and leap to song, shall know,
+     To whom the glory, whose the unending merit;
+     Nor faltering shall his utterance be, nor slow
+     The mute confession of his inmost soul.'"
+
+
+Reading, he became absorbed in this fantastic, but not unhandsome piece;
+even Selvaggia pondered it with wide eyes and lips half parted. It was
+certainly very wonderful that a man could say such things, she thought.
+Were they true? Could they be true of any one in the world--even of
+Beatrice Portinari, that wonderful dead lady? She had never, she
+remembered, shown this particular sonnet to Nicoletta. What would
+Nicoletta have said? Pooh, what nonsense it was, what arrant nonsense in
+a man who could carry a sword, if he chose, and kill his enemies, or,
+better still, with his head outwit them--that he should turn to pens and
+ink and to fogging a poor girl! So Selvaggia, not so Ugolino. He got up
+and whispered to the scowling Ridolfo; Ridolfo nodded, and the pair of
+them went off presently together.
+
+Oblique looks on Cino were the immediate outcome. He knew the young men
+disliked him, but cared little for that so long as they left him free
+to his devotions. A brisk little passage, a rally of words, with a bite
+in some of them, should have warned him; but no, the stage he had
+reached was out of range of the longest shots.
+
+Said Ugolino at supper: "Messer Giurisconsulto, will you have a red
+pepper?"
+
+"Thank you, Messere," replied Cino, "it is over hot for my tongue."
+
+The huge Ridolfo threw his head back to laugh. "Does a burnt man dread
+the fire, or is he only to be fired one way? Why, man alive, my sister
+has set a flaming coal to your lips, and I am told you burst out singing
+instead of singeing."
+
+Cino coloured at this lunge; yet his respect for the lady of his mind
+was such that he could not evade it.
+
+"You take the language of metaphor, Messere," said he, rather stiffly,
+"to serve your occasions. You are of course within your rights. However,
+I will beg leave to be excused the red pepper of Messer Ugolino."
+
+"You prefer coals?" cried Ugolino, starting up. "Good! you shall have
+them."
+
+That was all; but the malign smile upon the dark youth's face gave a
+ring to the words, and an omen.
+
+Late that night Cino was in his chamber writing a _ballata_. His little
+oil-lamp was by his side; the words flowed freely from his pen; tears
+hot and honest were in his eyes as he felt rather than thought his
+exquisite griefs. Despised and rejected of men was he--and why? For the
+love of a beautiful lady. Eh, Mother of God, but that was worth the
+pain! She had barely lifted her eyes upon him all that day, and while
+her brothers gibed had been at no concern to keep straight her scornful
+lip. Patience, he was learning his craft! The words flowed like blood
+from a vein.
+
+
+     "Love struck me in the side,
+     And from the wound my soul took wing and flew
+     To Heaven, and all my pride
+     Fell, and I knew
+     There was no balm could stay that wound so wide."
+
+
+At this moment came a rapping at his door. He went to open it, dreaming
+no harm. There stood Ridolfo and Ugolino with swords in their right
+hands; in his left Ugolino carried a brazier.
+
+"Gentlemen," said Cino, "what is the meaning of this? Will you break in
+upon the repose of your father's guest? And do you come armed against an
+unarmed man?"
+
+The pair of them, however, came into the room, and Ridolfo locked the
+door behind him. "Look you, Cino," said he, "our father's guests are not
+our guests, for our way is to choose our own. There is a vast difference
+between us, and it lies in this, that you and the like of you are
+word-mongers, phrasers, heart-strokers; whereas we, Master Cino, are, in
+Scripture language, doers of the word, rounding our phrases with iron,
+and putting in full-stops with the point when they are needed. And we do
+not stroke girls' hearts, Cino, but as often as not break men's heads."
+
+Cino, for all his dismay, could not forbear a glance at the speaker's
+own damaged pate. "And, after all, Messer Ridolfo, in that you do but
+as you are done by, and who will blame you?"
+
+"Hark'ee, Master Giurista," broke in Ugolino, "we have come to prove
+some of these fine words of yours. It will be well for you to answer
+questions instead of bandying them. Now did you, or did you not report
+that my sister Selvaggia touched your lips with a coal and set you off
+singing?"
+
+Cino, with folded arms, bent his head in assent: "I have said it,
+Messere."
+
+"Good! Now, such singing, though it is not to her taste, might be very
+much to ours. In fact we have come to hear it, and that you might be
+robbed of all excuse, we have brought the key with us. Brother, pray
+blow up the brazier."
+
+Ridolfo, with his great cheeks like bladders, blew the coals to a white
+heat. "Now then," he said, grinning to Ugolino, "now then, the concert
+may begin."
+
+Cino, who by this time had seen what was in the wind, saw also what his
+course must be. Whatever happened he could not allow a poet to be made
+ridiculous. It was ridiculous to struggle with two armed men, and
+unseemly; but suffering was never ridiculous. Patience, therefore! He
+anticipated the burly Ridolfo, who, having done his bellows-work, was
+now about to pin his victim from behind.
+
+"Pray do not give yourself the pain to hold me, Messere," said he; "I am
+not the man to deny you your amusement. Do what you will, I shall not
+budge from here."
+
+He stood where he was with his arms crossed, and he kept his word. The
+red cinder hissed upon his lips; he shut his eyes, he ground his teeth
+together, the sweat beaded his forehead and glistened in his hair. Once
+he reeled over, and would have fallen if Ridolfo had not been there to
+catch him; but he did not sing the tune they had expected, and presently
+they let him alone. So much for Italian humour, which, you will see,
+does not lack flavour. It was only the insensate obtuseness of the gull
+which prevented Ugolino dying of laughter. Ridolfo was annoyed.
+
+"Give me cold iron to play with another time," he growled; "I am sick of
+your monkey-tricks." This hurt Ugolino a good deal, for it made him feel
+a fool.
+
+Will it be believed that the infatuate Master Cino spent the rest of the
+night in a rapture of poetry? It was not voiced poetry, could never have
+been written down; rather, it was a torrent of feeling upon which he
+floated out to heaven, in which he bathed. It thrilled through every
+fibre of his body till he felt the wings of his soul fluttering madly to
+be free. This was the very ecstasy of love, to suffer the extreme
+torment for the beloved! Ah, he was smitten deep enough at last; if
+poetry were to be won through bloody sweat, the pains of the rack, the
+crawling anguish of the fire, was not poetry his own? Yes, indeed; what
+Dante had gained through exile and the death of Monna Beatrice was his
+for another price, the price of his own blood. He forgot the physical
+agony of his scorched mouth, forgot the insult, forgot everything but
+this ineffable achievement, this desperate essay, this triumph, this
+anointing. Cino, Cino, martyr for Love! Hail, Cino, crowned with thy
+pain! He could have held up his bleeding heart and worshipped it. Surely
+this was the greatest hour of his life.
+
+Before he left Pitecchio, and that was before the dawn came upon it, he
+wrote this letter to his mistress.
+
+
+     "To his unending Lady, the image of all lovely delight, the Lady
+     Selvaggia, Cino the poet, martyr for love, wisheth health and
+     honour with kissing of feet. Madonna, if sin it be to lift over
+     high the eyes, I have sinned very grievously; and if to have great
+     joy be assurance of forgiveness, then am I twice absolved. Such
+     bliss as I have had in the contemplation of your excellence cometh
+     not to many men, yet that which hath befallen me this night
+     (concerning which your honourable brothers shall inform you if you
+     ask them)--this indeed is to be blessed of love so high, so rarely,
+     that it were hard to believe myself the recipient, but for certain
+     bodily testimony which, I doubt not, I shall carry about me to my
+     last hour. I leave this house within a little while and go to the
+     hermitage of Santa Marcella Pistoiese, there to pray Almighty God
+     to make me worthy of my dignities and to contemplate the divine
+     image of you wherewith my heart is sealed. So fare you well!--The
+     most abject of your slaves,
+                                                           "CINO."
+
+
+His reason for giving the name of his new refuge was an honourable one,
+and would appeal to a duellist. His flight, though necessary, should be
+robbed of all appearance of flight; if they wanted him they could find
+him. Other results it had--results which he could never have
+anticipated, and which to have foreseen would have made him choose any
+other form of disgrace. But this was out of the question; nothing known
+to Cino or his philosophy could have told him the future of his conduct.
+He placed his letter in an infallible place and left Pitecchio just as
+the western sky was throbbing with warm light.
+
+For the present I leave him on his way.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The third act of the comedy should open on Selvaggia in her bed reading
+the letter. Beautiful as she may have looked, flushed and loose-haired
+at that time, it is better to leave her alone with her puzzle, and
+choose rather the hour of her enlightenment. Ridolfo and Ugolino were
+booted and spurred, their hooded hawks were on their wrists when she got
+speech of them. They were not very willing witnesses in a cause which
+now seemed to tell against themselves. Selvaggia's cheeks burned as with
+poor Cino's live coal when she could piece together all the shameful
+truth; tears brimmed at her eyes, and these too were scalding hot.
+Selvaggia, you must understand, was a very good girl, her only sin being
+none of her accomplishment; she was a child who looked like a young
+woman. Certainly she could not help that, though all the practice of her
+race were against her. She had never sought love, never felt to need it,
+nor cared to harbour it when it came. Love knocked at her heart, asking
+an entry; her heart was not an inn, she thought, let the wayfarer go on.
+But the knocking had continued till her ears had grown to be soothed by
+the gentle sound; and now it had stopped for ever, and, Pitiful Mother,
+for what good reason? Oh, the thing was horrible, shameful,
+unutterable! She was crying with rage; but as that spent itself a great
+warm flood of genuine sorrow tided over her, floated her away: she cried
+as though her heart was breaking; and now she cried for pity, and at
+last she cried for very love. A pale ethereal Cino, finger on lip, rose
+before her; a halo burned about his head; he seemed a saint, he should
+be hers! Ugolino and Ridolfo, helpless and ashamed before her outburst,
+went out bickering to their sport; and Selvaggia, wild as her name,
+untaught, with none to tutor her, dared her utmost--dared, poor girl,
+beyond her strength.
+
+Late in the afternoon of that day Cino, in the oratory of his hermitage,
+getting what comfort he could out of an angular Madonna frescoed there,
+heard a light step brush the threshold. The sun, already far gone in the
+west, cast on the white wall a shadow whose sight set his head spinning.
+He turned hastily round. There at the door stood Selvaggia in a crimson
+cloak; for the rest, a picture of the Tragic Muse, so woebegone, so
+white, so ringed with dark she was.
+
+Cino, on his feet, muttered a prayer to himself. He covered his scarred
+mouth, but not before the girl had caught sight of it. She set to
+wringing her hands, and began a low wailing cry.
+
+"Ah, terrible--ah, terrible! That I should have done it to one who was
+always so gentle with me and so patient! Oh, Cino"--and she held out her
+hands towards him--"oh, Cino, will you not forgive me? Will you not? I,
+only, did it; it was through me that they knew what you had said.
+Shameful girl that I am!" She covered her face and stood sobbing before
+him. But confronted with this toppled Madonna, Cino was speechless,
+wholly unprepared by jurisprudence or the less exact science of love for
+such a pass. As he knew himself, he could have written eloquently and
+done justice to the piercing theme; but love, as he and his fellows
+understood it, had no spoken language. I do not see, however, that
+Selvaggia is to be blamed for being ignorant of this.
+
+Yet he had to say something, since there stood the weeping girl, all
+abandoned to her trouble. "I beseech you, Madonna," he was beginning,
+when she suddenly bared her face, her woe, and her beauty to his
+astonished eyes, looking passionately at him in a way which even he
+could not misinterpret.
+
+"Cino," she said brokenly, "I am a wilful girl, but not wicked, ah, no!
+not hard-hearted. I think I did not understand you; I heard, but would
+not hear; it was wantonness, not evil in me, Cino. You have never
+wearied of telling me your devotion; is it too late to be thankful? Now
+I am come to tell you what I should have said long before, that I am
+grateful, proud of such love, that I receive it if still I may,
+that--that"--her voice fell to a thrilled whisper--"that I love you,
+Cino." Ah, but she had no more courage; she hid her blushes in her hands
+and felt that now she should by rights sink into the earth.
+
+Judge you, who know the theory of the matter, if this were terrible
+hearing for Messer Cino. Terrible? It was unprecedented hearing; it was
+a thing which, so far as he knew, had never happened to a lover before.
+That love should go smooth, the lady smile, the lady love, the lady woo?
+Monstrous! The lady was never kind. Where was anguish? Where martyrdom?
+Where poetry and sore eyes? Yet stay, was not such a thing in itself a
+torment, to be cut off your martyrdom?
+
+Cino gasped for breath. "You love me, Madonna?" he said. "You love me?"
+
+Selvaggia nodded her head in her hands; she felt that she was blushing
+all over her body.
+
+Cino, at this new stab, struck his forehead a resounding smack. "This is
+terrible indeed!" he cried out in his distress; whereupon Selvaggia
+forgot to be ashamed any more, she was so taken by surprise.
+
+"What do you mean, Cino?" she began to falter. "I don't understand you."
+
+Cino plunged into the icy pool of explanation, and splashed there at
+large. "I mean, I mean"--he waved his hands in the air--"it is most
+difficult to explain. We must apprehend Love aright--if we can. He is a
+grim and dreadful lord, it appears, working out the salvation of the
+souls of poets, and other men, by great sufferings. There is no other
+way, as the books teach us. Such love is always towards ladies; the
+suffering is from them, the love for them. They deal the darts, and
+receive the more devotion. It is not to be otherwise--could not
+be--there can be no poetry without pain; and how can there be pain if
+the lady loves the poet? Ah, no, it is impossible! Anciently, very long
+ago, in the times of Troy, maybe, it was different. I know not what to
+say; I had never expected, never looked, nor even asked--ah, Madonna,"
+he suddenly cried, and found himself upon his knees, "what am I to say
+to you for this speech of yours?"
+
+Selvaggia, white enough now, froze hard. "Do you mean," she said slowly,
+in words that fell one by one, like cuts from a deliberate whip, "do you
+mean that you do not love me, Messer Cino, after all?"
+
+"You are a light to my eyes and a lantern to my feet," Cino murmured:
+but she did not seem to hear.
+
+"Do you mean," she went on, "that you are not prepared to be--to be
+my--my betrothed?"
+
+It was done: now let the heavens fall! She could not ask the man to
+marry her, but it came to the same thing; she had practically committed
+that unpardonable sin; she had approached love to wedlock, a mystery to
+a bargain, the rapt converse of souls in heaven to a wrangle over the
+heeltaps in a tavern parlour. She was a heretic whom any Court of Love
+must excommunicate. The thing was so serious that it brought Cino to his
+feet, severe, formal, an Assessor of Civil Causes. He spread out his
+hands as if to wave aside words he should never have heard. He had found
+his tongue, for he was now contemplating the Abstract.
+
+"Be very sure, most sacred Lady," said he, "that no bodily torment could
+drive me to such sacrilege as your noble humility leads you to
+contemplate. No indeed! Wretchedly unworthy as I am to live in the light
+of your eyes, I am not yet fallen so far. There are yet seeds of grace
+within me--of your planting, Madonna, of your planting!" She paid no
+heed to his compliments; her eyes were fixed. On he hurried. "So far,
+indeed, as those worldly concerns go, whereof you hint, I am provided
+for. My wife is at Lucca in her father's house--but of such things it is
+not fitting we should speak. Rather we should reason together of the
+high philosophy of love, which--"
+
+But Selvaggia was gone before he could invite her on such a lofty
+flight; the wife at Lucca sent her fleeting down the mossy slopes like a
+hare. It was too dark for men to see her face when she tiptoed into
+Pitecchio and slipped up to her chamber. Safe at last there, she
+shivered and drowsed the night away; but waking or sleeping she did not
+cease her dreary moan.
+
+Cino, after a night of consternation, could endure the hermitage no
+more; the problem, he was free to confess, beat him. Next day,
+therefore, he took horse and rode over the mountains to Bologna, intent
+upon finding Dante there; but Dante had gone to Verona with half of his
+"Inferno" in his saddlebag. Thither Cino pursued and there found him in
+the church of St. Helen, disputing with the doctors upon the Question of
+the Land and the Water. What passed between the great poet and the less
+I cannot certainly report, nor is it material. I think that the tinge of
+philosophy set here and there in Cino's verses, to say nothing of a
+couplet or two which give more than a hint of the "Vita Nova," may
+safely be ascribed to that time. I know at least that he did not cease
+to love his beautiful and wild Selvaggia, so far as he understood that
+delicate state of the soul which she, perverse child, had so signally
+misapprehended. The truth may well be that he was tolerably happy at
+Verona, able to contemplate at his ease the divine image of his lady
+without any interference from the disturbing original. He was, it is
+said, meditating an ambitious work, the history of the Roman Polity from
+Numa to Justinian, an epic in five and twenty books, wherein Selvaggia
+would have played a fine part, that of the Genius of Natural Law. The
+scheme might have ripened but for one small circumstance; this was the
+death of Selvaggia.
+
+That healthy, laughing girl, Genius of Nature or not, paid the penalty
+of her incurable childishness by catching a malaria, whereof she died,
+as it is said, in a high delirium of some eight hours. So it seems that
+she was really unteachable, for first she had spoiled Cino's martyrdom,
+and next, by the same token, robbed the world of an epic in twenty-five
+books. Cino heard of it some time afterwards, and in due season was
+shown her tomb at Monte della Sambuca high on the Apennine, a grey stone
+solitary in a grey waste of shale. There he pondered the science of
+which, while she was so strangely ignorant, he had now become an adept;
+there, or thereabouts, he composed the most beautiful of all his rhymes,
+the _canzone_ which may stand for an elegy of the Lady Selvaggia.
+
+
+     "Ay me, alas! the beautiful bright hair,--"
+
+
+Ay me, indeed! And thus he ends:
+
+
+     "Ay me, sharp Death! till what I ask is done
+     And my whole life is ended utterly,--
+     Answer,--must I weep on
+     Even thus, and never cease to moan _ay me_?"[2]
+
+
+He might well ask. It should be accorded him that he was worthy of the
+occasion: the poem is very fine. But I think the good man did well
+enough after this; I know that if he was sad he was most melodiously
+sad. He throve; he became a professor; his wife bore him five children.
+His native city has done him what honour she could, ousted his surname
+in favour of her own, set up a pompous monument in the Cathedral Church
+(where little Selvaggia heard her dull mass), and dubbed him once and
+for all, _L'amoroso Messer Cino da Pistoja_. That should suffice him. As
+for the young Selvaggia, I suppose her bones are dust of the Apennine.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[2] The translation is Rossetti's.
+
+
+
+
+THE JUDGMENT OF BORSO
+
+     "Unde proverbii loco etiamnunc usurpatur, praeteriisse Borsii
+     tempora."--_Este Chronicle_.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE ADVENTURERS
+
+
+It is happily as unnecessary as it would be unwise to inquire into the
+ancestry of Bellaroba, a meek-eyed girl of Venice, with whom I have here
+some concern. Her mother was La Fragiletta, of the Old Ghetto, and her
+father may have been of the Council of Ten, or possibly a Doge. No one
+could deny it, for no one knew his name. It is certain that his daughter
+was not christened as she was called, equally certain that the nickname
+fitted her. _Bella roba_, a pretty thing, she always had been for her
+mother's many friends; _bella roba_ in truth she looked, as La
+Fragiletta fastened her dark red dress, stuck a bunch of carnations in
+the bosom of it, and pulled up the laces round her slim neck, on a
+certain May morning in or about the year 1469. "The shape you are,
+child," said that industrious woman, "I can do nothing for you in
+Venice. It is as timid as a nun's. Ferrara is the place of all the
+world for you. I look forward to your speedy establishment in a city
+where a girl may be like a flagstaff and yet not thought amiss."
+
+Bellaroba looked humbly at herself in the glass; though she could see
+that she was pretty, it was not to be denied that she was thin. Ah, no;
+she did not take after her mother. Here she sighed to remember that her
+bosom friend, Olimpia Castaneve, took after hers only too well, and was
+to accompany her fortune-hunting in Ferrara for precisely opposite
+reasons. Was this fair? she wondered. She, Bellaroba, was to go because
+she was of a piece with the Ferrarese; Olimpia, because she could
+furnish a provoking contrast. She was an affectionate, docile creature,
+this shrinking Bellaroba, absurdly young, absurdly your servant; but
+tears smarted in her eyes as she stood adorned for sacrifice--in her
+tight crimson dress, lace at her neck and wrists, a jewel on her
+forehead, a chain in her hair, and a cold block of lead dragging at her
+heart. She had never denied any one anything, and certainly not her
+mother. Her tears glistened as she blinked, her lip was shaky; she was
+kissed a good-bye none the less, and went down the steps to join Olimpia
+huddled in the gondola.
+
+"Good-bye, my child," cried Madam Fragiletta from the doorway. "Be wise;
+remember what I have told you. Never see a priest the wrong side of the
+grille, and obey Monna Nanna in everything. I shall have a mass for you
+at San Zan to-morrow, and another on your birthday, which I shall never
+forget."
+
+The morning was misty and sharp, Madam Fragiletta was very much
+undressed, and loved her bed. She waved her hand gallantly to Bellaroba,
+who still stood up wistful in the gondola; she did not wait for it to
+shoot the bridge or round the square corner of the _rio_, but turned
+shrugging to the house. There was no reasonable probability that these
+two would ever meet again. Short outlooks govern La Fragiletta's trade,
+and Providence, it seems, has little to do with it.
+
+Olimpia Castaneve, the muffled brooder in the poop, was cold, cross, and
+still. Bellaroba snivelled, but she was scornful under her cloak, and no
+word passed between the pair until they were in the great blunt-nosed
+barge, heading against a crisping tide for Chioggia. Then, as the sun
+shot through the mist and revealed the lagoon, one broad sheet of silver
+and blue, the shawls were opened, limbs went luxuriously at the stretch;
+you could see and hear chatter the couple of adventurers if you cared.
+Bellaroba you have seen already--very gentle, very simple, very unformed
+without and within. She had pretty ways, coaxing and appealing ways.
+When she asked a question it was with lifted eyebrows and a head on one
+side. She would take your hand without art, and let you hold it without
+afterthought. It was the easiest thing in the world to kiss her, for she
+suffered it gladly and quite innocently; it came as naturally as to a
+cat to rub his cheek on your chair or swinging foot. Yet the girl was as
+modest as a Clare. If you had presumed on your licence to make love to
+her, it would not have been her scorn (for she had none), but her
+distress that would have set you back in your place. God knows what La
+Fragiletta might have taught her. It is certain she was all unlettered
+in love up to that hour. Bellaroba was not only modest by instinct, but
+that better thing, innocent by preoccupation.
+
+In all this she was a dead contrast to her handsome friend Olimpia
+Castaneve, who was really a beauty of the true Venetian mould. As sleek
+and sumptuous as a cat, as splendidly coloured as a sunburnt nectarine,
+crowned with a mass of red-gold hair, as stupid as she was sly, and as
+rich as she was spendthrift, the lovely Olimpia had been sent
+adventuring to the bees of Ferrara, not as lacking honey for Venice, but
+as being too great a treasure for her mother's house. Her mother was La
+Farfalla--a swollen butterfly in these days--and frankly said that she
+could not afford such a daughter. Olimpia had no instructions; in fact,
+needed none. She went cheerfully out to what Monna Nanna and the Blessed
+Virgin should prepare for her, without kisses (which she garnered
+against the lean years) and without reserves. She neither condemned her
+mother nor approved. Perhaps she had not the wit; assuredly she lacked
+the energy. She was remarkably handsome in her hot Venetian way, richly
+coloured, brown-eyed, crimson-lipped, bosomed like a goddess and shaped
+like a Caryatid. She half closed her eyes, half opened her lips, smiled
+and drowsed and waited. You would have thought her melting with love;
+she was ciphering a price, but being slow at figures, she hid herself
+(spiderwise) in a golden mesh. Olimpia was nearly always complaisant,
+had no reticences, no conscience, few brains. She was luxury itself,
+fond of the fire, fond of her bed, fond of her dinner. Admittedly
+self-absorbed, she was accustomed to say that she knew far too much
+about love to fall into it. It was a reflection as serious as she could
+make it; but Love is very apt to take such sayings amiss. Olimpia out of
+love might make men miserable; in it, what might she not do? I am about
+to tell you.
+
+At Chioggia they were to await a shipload of merchants and pack-mules
+expected from Ancona; but the wind proved counter when their barge had
+weathered Malamocco, and that which dis-served them befriended the
+northering freight. They found the train of beasts awaiting them,
+saddled and loaded, restless to be off. Chioggia to Ferrara, by the road
+they would go, is a handsome fifty miles.
+
+In that company, as they neared, they observed a calm-eyed youth with a
+delicate, girlish face, and wonderful shock of light gold hair all about
+it. He stood alone on the mole, one knee bent, a hand to his hip, and
+soberly surveyed the group on the barge. He made a charming little
+picture there--seemed indeed posed for some such thing; he was
+charmingly pretty himself, but for all that, he had a tragic touch upon
+him, a droop of the lip, or the eyelid, perhaps. One could hardly say,
+yet never miss it. Even Olimpia noticed the shadow across him. As they
+touched--"Look, look, Bellaroba," she whispered, and nudged her
+friend--"that boy! Did you ever see such a lovely child?"
+
+Bellaroba drew a long breath. "I think he is as lovely as an angel," she
+replied, her eyes fascinated. And her saying was equally true. He was
+such a demure boy-angel, bright-haired, long and shapely in the limb, as
+the painters and carvers loved to set in Madonna's court, careful about
+her throne, or below the dais fiddling, or strumming lutes to charm away
+her listlessness. Moreover, Angioletto was the name he went by, though
+he had been christened Dominick. And he came from Borgo San
+Sepolcro--far cry from windy Chioggia--a place among the brown Tuscan
+hills, just where they melt into Umbria; and he was by trade a minstrel,
+and going to Ferrara. Of so much, with many bows, he informed the two
+girls, being questioned by Olimpia. But he looked at Bellaroba as he
+spoke, and she listened the harder and looked the longer of the two.
+
+Everything about him seemed to her altogether gracious, from the silky
+floss of his gold hair to his proper legs, sheathed in scarlet to the
+thighs. He was as soft and daintily coloured as a girl, had long curved
+lashes to his grey eyes, a pathetic droop to his lip, the bloom as of a
+peach on his cheeks. But you could never mistake him for a girl. His
+eyes had a critical blink, he looked to have the discretion of a man. A
+fop he might be; he had a wiry mind. A fop, in fact, he was. He had a
+little scarlet cap on his head, scarlet stockings, peaked scarlet shoes:
+for the rest he was in green cloth with a blue leather belt about his
+waist. He had fine lace ruffles at his wrists, a fine line of white at
+his throat, and in his ears (if you could have seen them) gold rings.
+Just the pampered young minion of any Tuscan court, a precocious
+wrappage of wit, good manners, and sensibility, he looked what he spoke,
+the exquisite Florentine, to these broad-vowelled Venetian lasses; did
+not smile, but seemed never out of temper; and was certainly not timid.
+Self-possessed, reticent he was; but not timid. That was proved.
+
+When the cavalcade was on the point to start, Angioletto stepped forward
+and took Bellaroba by the hand.
+
+"Little lady," says he to his blushing captive, "I have a mule for the
+road which I am assured is a steady pacer. Will you be my pillion?"
+
+"Oh, yes, Messere," said Bellaroba in a twitter, and dropped him a
+curtsy of her best.
+
+"Excellent!" he cried gaily. "I can see that we are to be friends." So
+she was led away.
+
+He helped her on to the mule in no time, showed her how she must hold
+him round the middle, how closely and how constantly; he explained how
+little there was to fear, for all that such a manner of going was as
+venturesome to her as a steamer would have seemed to Ulysses, that great
+captain. It was then that Olimpia (watching all this) proved Angioletto
+not timid, for she saw him conclude his precepts to her friend by
+kissing her cheek in the easiest manner. "H'm," thought the wise
+Olimpia, "I pray that Bellaroba may be careful."
+
+She herself accepted the services and part of the horse of a lean
+Ravennese, a Captain of Lances--two yards of sinew and brown
+leather--who told her that his name was Mosca, and his heart bleeding at
+her feet. Olimpia smiled beautifully upon him, but was careful; took a
+share of the courser, but gave in return nothing more than a hand on its
+master's belt. He wanted much more, and showed it. Olimpia, far from
+coy, hinted an exchange. She needed her bearings; did this apparent hero
+know Ferrara? The Mosca snorted, threw back his head at the word.
+Ferrara? cried he, did he know it! Saints and Angels, who could know it
+better? "Ferrara?" he went on to shout, appealing to gods and men, "the
+gayest court in all Italy--the cleanest air, the most laughing women,
+the--pest! It is a place of holy days and feasts--all music, loving, and
+delight! But you will see, my dear; I will see that you see." Olimpia
+must know more exactly than this, and so she told the Mosca. He could
+deny her nothing; so as they rode between the grey swamps of the lagoon,
+he poured out his understanding in his own fashion. His oaths made her
+gasp, but the facts atoned for that. By the bones of God, but he served
+a great lord of that city--Guarino Guarini by name, whose blade was the
+longest, the oftenest out, and the cleanest cutter, as himself was the
+lightest heart, and most trenchant carver of men in Borso's fief. The
+good captain carried his loyalty to the edge of his simplicity, and left
+it there for Olimpia to handle. "By the cheeks of the Virgin, my dear, I
+know what I know. My young master has an eye which, whether it say
+'Come' or 'Go,' needs not say it twice. He is as fine and limber as a
+leopard on the King of England's shield, of a nature so frank and loving
+that I suppose there is hardly a lady in Ferrara could not testify to
+it--unless she were bound to the service of his Magnificence the Duke.
+Why! Yourself might make a shift to be my little friend, and never
+repent it, mind you--no, no, I may be battered, my dear, but I am
+seasoned; I have great experience: you would not repent, and shall not,
+by the Face on the Handkerchief! But happen you see my master, happen he
+wear his brocade of white and gold--it is all peacocks' eyes, my
+seraphic heart, in gold and blue upon snowy white--happen again he look,
+'Come' at you--why, off you trot as a hound to the platter, and I speed
+you thither with open heart. Thus walks his world, Guarino Guarini, my
+noble master."
+
+Olimpia had a colour, and flew it now most becomingly in her cheeks. It
+was a wholesome, healthy, happy colour, born of her growing excitement;
+the Captain highly approved of it. She thus earned more information.
+Guarino Guarini, it appeared, though not of the reigning family, was
+very near the throne. He had married one of the d'Este ladies, Madama
+Lionella, legitimised daughter of Duke Borso, and was now ignoring the
+fact to his own and her entire satisfaction. Upon the Countess's score,
+Captain Mosca had not very much to say. "A great-hearted lady, amorous,
+generous, a great lover," he allowed; "a pretty taste for music and
+singing she has, is a friend of poets and such like. The antechamber is
+full of them; and there they are--on promotion, you understand. But
+though she has a wonderful free spirit, she is no beauty, you must know.
+Her mouth is too big, and her eyes are too small. It is a kissing mouth,
+as we say, my dear, and a speaking eye--and there you have Madama
+Lionella, who loves minstrels."
+
+"Tell me," said Olimpia here, "who is that pretty gentleman with my
+friend? Is he not a minstrel?"
+
+The Captain turned in his saddle and, when he had observed, snorted his
+disdain.
+
+"That sprout, my deary?" said he. "Some such dapper little
+chamber-fellow, I'll warrant you. A lap-dog, a lady's toy, with a piping
+voice and an eye for mischief. Yes, he'll be for climbing by Madama
+Lionella's back-stair. He has the make of it--just the doll she loves to
+dandle." Which was all the Captain had to say for Angioletto.
+
+Little as it was, it was more than Angioletto had to say for Mosca. He
+was, indeed, serenely indifferent to the lean brown man. From the moment
+of their setting out, he and Bellaroba had wagged tongues in concert,
+and before they had made a dozen miles each knew the other's story to
+the roots. Angioletto's was no great matter. The Capuchins at Borgo had
+taught him his rudiments, his voice had taken him into the choir, his
+manners into the sacristy. He had been Boy-Bishop twice, had become a
+favourite of the Warden's, learnt Latin, smelt at Greek, scribbled
+verses. Then, one Corpus Christi, he got his chance. There was to be a
+Pageant--"Triumph," he called it--a Triumph of Love and a Triumph of
+Chastity, wherein by the good offices of his friend the Warden he was
+chosen for the part of Love. It was to be assumed that he pleased, for
+Chastity (who was a great lady of the place) took him into her service;
+and there he stayed until, as he explained, she married again. She had
+been a widow, it seems, when she took part in the Triumphs.
+
+Bellaroba was much interested.
+
+"Was the lady kind to you, Angioletto?"
+
+"Oh, very kind."
+
+"But you had to go, you say?"
+
+"Yes. It was judged better."
+
+"But I don't quite see. If she was kind I wonder why you judged it
+better to go, or why she did."
+
+"It did not rest wholly with us," said Angioletto.
+
+Bellaroba did not pursue the subject. But after a short pause--
+
+"And are you now from her house?" she asked.
+
+Angioletto shook his head. "That was a very long time ago," said he;
+"two years at least. I am eighteen, you must know. When I left the
+Marchioness she gave me a handsome present. It sufficed to take me to
+Perugia--to the University there; it afforded me two years' study in the
+liberal arts, and my outfit for this present venture into the bargain."
+
+"And do you know what you will do at Ferrara, Angioletto?"
+
+"Yes, quite well."
+
+"What will you do?"
+
+"I will marry you, Bellaroba," the boy replied, as he turned suddenly,
+put his arms about her and took a long kiss.
+
+Bellaroba, in a bath of love, made him free of her lips. For a while the
+mule had to do his pacing alone.
+
+"Oh, Angioletto, Angioletto," whispered the girl, with a hidden face, "I
+have never been happy like this before."
+
+"You will never be unhappy again, dearest, for I shall be with you."
+
+For the time there was no more talk, since the broken murmurs of their
+joy and wonder cannot be so described. The billing of two doves on an
+elm was not more artless than their converse on the mule's back.
+
+The girl brought prose in again, as became a daughter of Venice. What
+had led Angioletto to Ferrara?
+
+"The Blessed Virgin," he promptly replied, and she sighed a happy
+acquiescence in so pious a retort.
+
+"But what else?"
+
+For answer Angioletto drew a silk-bound letter from his breast. "This
+epistle," he said, "promises me employment and fame almost as certainly
+as you promise me bliss. It is from a Cardinal of my acquaintance to a
+noble lady of Ferrara, by name Lionella, daughter of Duke Borso himself,
+and wife to one Messer Guarino Guarini, a very great lord. The lady is
+patroness of all poets and minstrels. Consider our fortunes made, my
+joy."
+
+"They must be made since you believe it, Angioletto," said Bellaroba
+with faith. "I have never seen any one like you, so beautiful and so
+wise at once."
+
+The compliment provoked kisses. Angioletto embraced her again; again
+conversation became ejaculatory, and again the mule tripped over the
+reins. He learned before the day was out to allow for this new hindrance
+to his way; he tripped no more. The lovers continued their rapt
+intercourse all that May-day journey through the rice-fields, until at
+Rovigo (half hidden in a mist of green) they halted for the night.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+ARMS AND THE MANNIKIN
+
+
+The hubbub of the inn-yard, where shouting merchants wrestled for
+porters, and donkeys brayed them down, the narrowed eyes of Olimpia, the
+sardonic grin of the gaunt Mosca, brought our lovers back into the real
+world. They faced their foes together with insensible meeting and
+holding of young hands. Angioletto did his best not to feel a detected
+schoolboy, and did succeed in meeting the Captain's terrific looks.
+Bellaroba made no attempt at heroism. Her blush was a thing to be seen.
+
+"Bellaroba, come with me, my child," said Olimpia severely; but
+Angioletto kept her hand.
+
+Captain Mosca fiddled at his sword-hilt.
+
+"Would you like spitted lark for supper, Madonna?" he asked with
+meaning.
+
+Olimpia burst into a shrill laugh, and Angioletto, who had the pluck of
+a little gamecock, turned to his partner in guilt.
+
+"And you, Madonnetta," he said sweetly, "what do you say to _boars head_
+larded?"
+
+Bellaroba giggled in spite of herself--for she was terribly
+frightened--but again Olimpia, the grand indifferent, pealed her
+delight. The Captain glared round about him over a tossing sea of bales
+and asses' ears; getting small joy of that, he scowled portentously at
+the little minstrel and took a stride forward.
+
+"Look you, sprigling," said he, "you have to do with a man of deeds; a
+man, by Saint Hercules, of steel."
+
+Angioletto was fired, cheek and eye. He never faltered.
+
+"I wish I had to do with a man of sense," he said.
+
+"If you do not drop that lady's hand, my lad--" growled the Mosca.
+
+"What then, sir?"
+
+"Then," the Captain roared, "by the ante-chambers of Paradise, she shall
+cling to carrion!"
+
+Bellaroba with a little cry fell to her knees; Olimpia bit her finger;
+Angioletto shrugged.
+
+"You have better lungs than manners, Captain," he said quietly. "These
+ladies of ours are fatigued with travel and tired of fasting. Moreover,
+I apprehend a bale of carpets on my back at every moment. We will, so
+please you, sup. If you and the lady whom you escort will do me the
+honour of sharing my table we can arrange other matters at our leisure.
+I have always understood that encounters before ladies are make-believe;
+but your experience should inform you how far that is true. By leave,
+Signor Capitano."
+
+Whereupon he lifts up the praying Bellaroba, kisses her forehead, and
+hands her into the inn as bold as a Viscount. One or two tongues were in
+one or two cheeks; one hand at least clapped him on the shoulder for a
+"little assassin"--a compliment: the honours were his to that present.
+Olimpia followed after him, very much impressed with the thought that
+the sooner she could exchange Mosca for Mosca's master the better for
+her. In the rear of the procession stalked that gaping hero swearing
+rapidly under his breath to keep himself in some sort of countenance.
+
+Angioletto's assurance, and with it his luck, held out the evening. Not
+otherwise could he have cleared himself of the mess. He fairly froze
+Mosca by the coolness of his assumptions.
+
+"I will fight you as soon as you choose, and with your own weapons,
+after supper," said he, "but it is only fair to warn you that you will
+be killed."
+
+"How so, by the King of Glory!" cried the Captain.
+
+"The wagging finger of Fate, sir," replied Angioletto readily, "and the
+conjunctions of the stars. My horoscope was taken at Foligno with the
+utmost exactitude. Mars himself, for reasons of his own, seems to have
+presided over my begetting. More than that, though I have not the least
+desire to take your life--should not, indeed, know what to do with
+it--it will be impossible for me to avoid it. I am really very sorry.
+Your case is just on a parallel with that of the younger Altopasso who,
+on this very day a year ago, insisted upon fighting with me. It is true
+that I do not pretend to love or even to approve of you, Captain; I
+consider that your legs have outgrown your brains. But for all that, I
+should be sorry to think that for want of a little ordinary politeness,
+or for shanks out of due measure, an honest man had lost his life.
+However, I fear the affair has gone too far."
+
+The Captain grew purple and green by turns. The room of full tables was
+all agog. He let out an oath which I omit.
+
+"The affair has not gone so far as this blade shall go, turkey-poult,"
+he thundered.
+
+"Make yourself quite easy on that point, my good sir," said Angioletto,
+cracking a walnut; "your sword shall fly the length of the room. I have
+a pass that is irresistible. You cannot fight planets, Captain."
+
+"I have never tried yet, by our Lord," the Captain admitted, "but no one
+has dared to doubt my valour, and, planet or no planet, I'll run you
+through."
+
+Angioletto smiled at another walnut. "I find the conceit admirable,"
+said he, "yet you will perish so sure as this city is Rovigo and a
+titular fief of my mistress's master."
+
+"A straw for your mistress, little egg," cried the suffocating Captain.
+
+"I will give it to Countess Lionella as your dying gift, Signor
+Capitano."
+
+The name smacked him in the face; he shook his head like a worried bull,
+or as a dog shakes water from his pelt. Olimpia, too, was interested,
+and for the first time. With face fixed between her hands, she leaned
+both elbows on the table, watching.
+
+"Is the Countess Lionella your mistress?" she asked. Angioletto made her
+a bow; the company applauded a popular name. Olimpia turned a glance
+upon her Captain, which said as plainly as she could have spoken,
+"Finish him for your master's sake." But it had no meaning for the
+champion, who possibly knew more about his master than he had been
+minded to declare.
+
+Angioletto tapped the ground with his toe. "Come, Master Captain," he
+said, "before your blood cools."
+
+"Have no fear, bantam," said a jolly Dominican in his ear, "that toad's
+blood was never hot." It certainly looked like it. The Captain scratched
+his head.
+
+"Look ye now, youngster," he said at last, "I serve his worship Count
+Guarino Guarini, who is the husband of Madama Lionella; and lucky for
+you that service is. Otherwise, by the truly splintered Cross, it had
+gone hard with you this night."
+
+"Oh, brava, brava!" cheered the dining-room, and then hooted the Captain
+to his bench.
+
+Angioletto put up his little hanger with a curt nod in his enemy's
+direction. "For the Countess's sake I spare you to the Count, Captain
+Mosca; though what precisely your value may be to his Excellency I do
+not at present understand."
+
+Thereupon he turned to his poor Bellaroba, took her in his arms before
+them all, kissed her eyes dry of tears, and ended by drawing a rueful
+smile from her lips. The dining-room found him admirable throughout; but
+Olimpia got up, yawning.
+
+"Come, child, it is time for bed," she declared, "I suppose even this
+entertainment must have a term." There was no gainsaying it. The lovers
+were torn apart by the moral force of Olimpia's attendance; but not
+until it was demonstrated that, though good-night is a word of two
+syllables, it needs four lips, and is therefore capable of infinite
+extension.
+
+"Well, my child, I hope you are satisfied with this little day's work,"
+said Olimpia, half undressed.
+
+For answer, Bellaroba, upon her friend's neck, dissolved in a flood of
+happy tears.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+HOW THEY CAME TO FERRARA
+
+
+That was a fair sight which greeted the travellers at the close of the
+next day--the towers of Ferrara rising stately out of a green thicket.
+The lovers trilled their happiness to each other: surely nothing but
+pleasure and a smooth life could come out of so treeful a place!
+
+"In our Venice, you must know," said Bellaroba, "we set great store by
+green boughs, having so few of them. We think that harshness and clamour
+may hunt the canals, but that birds can sing in gardens of a world
+really joyful. What a cloud of green trees--look, look how near the sky
+comes to them! Oh, my Angioletto, we are going to be so happy!" And the
+young girl laid her hot cheek on her lover's shoulder.
+
+He, though her premises were undeniable, had his doubts. Her words set
+him wondering what was to be the end of this light-hearted adventure.
+
+"My dear," said he, "if trees get in a man's way of villainy or
+incommode his pleasures he will cut them down, depend upon it."
+
+"Well, silly boy," she cried, and gave him a peck of a kiss, "and does
+not that prove what I say, that there are no villainies in Ferrara? For,
+see, the trees are as thick as a forest." She made him laugh again
+before many paces. His ringing tones caught the ears of Captain Mosca,
+and set that great man scowling.
+
+"If I don't get a crumb down that yapping gullet, call me not Mosca," he
+grumbled.
+
+"Speak a little louder, Signor Capitano," said his pillion.
+
+"Your pardon, Madonna Olimpia," he answered, "but I believe I was
+breathing a prayer on account of the little love-boy yonder."
+
+Olimpia laughed. "I love him as much as you do, I dare swear," said she;
+"but he may be very useful. Remember that I am but a poor gentlewoman
+with my fortune to make."
+
+"Give me the making of it, my angel," cried the Captain, crushing his
+heart with his fist. "You shall have the most crowded _cortile_ in
+Ferrara. May I give you a humble bit of advice?"
+
+"Certainly you may."
+
+"It will be this, then, that you hold off from Monna Nanna and keep
+yourself very much to yourself. Between us we can arrange a pretty
+future. I know Monna Nanna better than becomes me. Believe me, the
+acquaintance would become you still less. But with such talents as I
+have--and they are all yours--I can arrange for you a most proper
+dwelling-place which shall cost little and bring much in."
+
+"But we cannot live there alone, Captain."
+
+"Hey! I am beforehand. I parry with the head, my duchess," cried the
+delighted Mosca. "I have thought of all that. There is an old lady of my
+friendship in the city, by name Donna Matura. She is something decayed
+in estate o' these days, has fewer crusts than teeth, poor soul, but
+has mingled with the highest. She will be all that you could wish, and
+you more than she could hope for. Think of it, lady, think of it."
+
+"I will," said Olimpia, who had already done so. There is no doubt that
+she and the Mosca understood each other.
+
+They were now riding up the long lime-tree avenue which leads to the
+Sea-Gate of Ferrara; soon they entered Ferrara itself, that city of warm
+red brick, of broad eaves, of laughter, and, as it were, a fairy-tale,
+bowered in rustling green. The streets ran wide between garden walls and
+the massy fronts of great square houses; they were full of a traffic
+which seemed that of a prosperous people bent upon pleasure. Happy
+ladies rode by with hawks or leashed dogs, or crowns of flowers.
+Cavaliers, in white and yellow, ribboned, slashed, curled, and
+feathered, went in and out of the throng to keep an assignation, or to
+break one. The priests joked with the women, the very urchins coaxed for
+kisses. Every street corner had its lovers' tryst, never a garden walk
+without its loitering pair, never a lady came out of a church door but
+there stood a devout adorer to beg a touch of holy water from her
+finger-tip.
+
+"How happy this people is," cried Bellaroba, flushed and sparkling, to
+her little lord. "Everybody loves everybody else."
+
+"My dear, we have nothing to do with their loves; we are going to be
+married," replied Angioletto, looking straight before him.
+
+"Yes, Angioletto," said she, as meek as a mouse.
+
+Olimpia, who was not thinking of marriage, was highly entertained.
+There was a press of grooms and led horses, richly caparisoned, outside
+the open doors of a new and very spacious palace. Round about them
+crowded people of a meaner sort, and beggars not a few; but a lane was
+kept to the gateway by soldiers in red and yellow, who bore upon their
+breasts a quartered coat of eagles and lilies.
+
+"Hist!" said Mosca, pulling up his horse. "This is the fine new palace
+of the Duke, which he calls his Schifanoia. He is evidently expected in
+from his hawking. The greatest falconer you ever knew, my life! I do
+assure you."
+
+"That may very well be," said Olimpia, "for I have never known one at
+all."
+
+"You shall know this one before I die, and another who is my most noble
+master," cried Mosca, "or I am your kennel-dog for nothing."
+
+"Let us wait a little and see this hawking Duke of yours," Olimpia said,
+with a gentle pressure of her arms about the Captain's middle.
+
+"Blood of blood," sighed the Mosca, "I am as wax in the candle of you,
+my soul."
+
+Olimpia pulled down her hood. Her patience was rewarded in no long time
+by the sound of an approaching cavalcade; presently she saw the nodding
+plumes of riders and their beasts at the end of the street. Knights,
+squires, and ladies rode with their reigning prince: he himself with two
+young men, magnificently dressed, came in advance of the troop, and at a
+great pace.
+
+Olimpia judged her time well. At the moment Duke Borso drew rein to turn
+into his gates she threw back her hood and looked him full in the face,
+as if to dower him with all the splendour of her beauty. The sly,
+humorous face of the old fox twitched as his eyes caught the girl's. He
+looked a prude with a touch of freakishness in him; his pursed mouth
+seemed always to be strangling a smile, the issue of the strife always
+in doubt. Now, for instance, though Olimpia said to herself that she was
+satisfied, she could never have denied that he disapproved of her, while
+nobody could have maintained it. Borso had shot upon her a piercing
+glance the minute in which he had turned his horse; Mosca had had the
+benefit of another; then he had acknowledged in military fashion the
+waving caps and kerchiefs at the gates and had passed into the
+courtyard.
+
+"Oh, you may be satisfied, my soul," said the Mosca. "Borso will never
+forget us now: it is not his way. But look, look!" Another pair of eyes
+was at work, belonging to a very handsome, ruddy youth who had been at
+the Duke's left hand. Olimpia needed no nudge from the Captain to tell
+her who this noble rider might be. Guarino Guarini for a florin! And so
+it was.
+
+"Yes," said Mosca, "that is my most intrepid master. The flaxen lad in
+silver brocade, who was on the other side, is Teofilo Calcagnini, of
+whom I know little more than that he is Duke Borso's shadow. You shall
+hardly see them apart. The other, my charmer, the other is our man.
+Leave me to deal with him. Come now to the inn. To-morrow you shall have
+your hired house, and the next day company for it more to your taste
+than lean old Mosca."
+
+"I shall never forget you, my Captain," said the really grateful
+Olimpia; and said truer than she knew. "Come," she added, "we should
+seek out Bellaroba and her little sweetheart. There must be an end of
+that pretty gentleman, my friend."
+
+"By the majesty of King Solomon, there shall be an end," Mosca swore,
+and pricked his horse.
+
+Angioletto and his lady-love had been better exercised than to think of
+dukes. They had thought of religion.
+
+They passed by the Schifanoia at a sober walk, regardless of the crowd.
+
+"My heart," Angioletto said, "there is here what I suppose to be the
+most famous shrine in Romagna. I mean that of the Madonna degli Greci, a
+pompous image from Byzantium, which proceeded undoubtedly from the
+_bottega_ of Saint Luke. If that Signore had been as indifferent a
+painter as he was great Saint (which is surely impossible), we should do
+well to visit his Madonna. Her holiness is past dispute; there are very
+few miracles which she could not perform if she chose. As well as
+burning a candle apiece before her face, we could lay our prayers and
+new love at her feet. Beyond question she will hear and bring us good
+luck. What do you think?"
+
+"I think as you think, Angioletto," said Bellaroba, and held him closer.
+
+"Let us go then. I know the way very well."
+
+So they went to the tune which the young lad sang under his breath, and
+before long came to a piazza, not very broad, but flagged all over and
+set about with stately brick buildings, having on the left the stone
+front of a great church, tier upon tier of arches interlaced. The door
+of it was guarded by two stone lions, and above the porch was the figure
+of a buxom lady with a smile half saucy, half benevolent, to whom
+Angioletto doffed his cap.
+
+"They call her Donna Ferrara," he explained. "This is the Duomo. Let us
+go in."
+
+They dismounted; a lame boy held the mule; they entered the church.
+
+It was very large, very dark, and nearly empty. Angioletto put his arm
+round Bellaroba's waist, and they began to pace the aisle in
+confidential talk.
+
+"Where are you going to live in this place, Bellaroba?" he asked her.
+
+"I don't know. Olimpia knows. There was a Monna Nanna we were to live
+with, I think. But Olimpia will decide. I must do as she wishes."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"She is older than I am--two years. Besides I always have. And my mother
+commanded it."
+
+"Your last appears to me the only reason worth a thought. Do you not
+want to know what I think of it, Bellaroba?" He bent his head towards
+her. Her answer, the flutter of a quick little kiss, pleased him. "Well,
+I will tell you," said he. "I think we should be married at once--this
+very minute. I do indeed."
+
+"Oh!" said Bellaroba, blushing beautifully.
+
+"I can see that you are pleased at this, my dear," Angioletto said,
+looking at her. They were head for head level, these children. "But
+what would Olimpia say?"
+
+Bellaroba paused for strength to tell the painful truth.
+
+"She would say 'Fiddlesticks,' Angioletto."
+
+Angioletto frowned. "Ah! what is to be done?" he asked.
+
+Bellaroba looked down, plucked at her skirt, saw Angioletto's hand
+peeping round her waist. It seemed difficult to say, and yet what she
+did say was very simple: "We have not asked Olimpia, you know."
+
+"No," Angioletto answered; "we have had no time yet. But we will, of
+course."
+
+"Oh, of course," said she, who kept her eyes hidden, and spoke very low.
+"Oh, of course. But--"
+
+"Well, dearest?"
+
+"Could we not--would it not be wiser--of course you know best,
+Angioletto!--might we not ask her--afterwards?"
+
+Angioletto kissed her.
+
+"You are as wise as you are lovely, my little wife. Come, let us find
+the Madonna degli Greci." And he led her away by the hand.
+
+They found her in the north transept, in a little fenced chapel all
+starry with tapers and gleaming gold and silver hearts. As it was the
+eve of Pentecost she was uncovered; they could see her dark outline with
+its wrought metal ring about the head. Half-way down was another metal
+ring; Bambino's head should be in there.
+
+Both the hand-fasted pilgrims fell to their knees: Bellaroba crossed
+herself, and then hid her face with her left hand, Angioletto with his
+right. After a silence, about the space of two Hail Mary's, the youth
+looked resolutely up at Madonna, and began to speak to her.
+
+"Holy and most glorious Virgin, Mother of God," said he, "we, thy
+children, have sought thee first in this famous city of Ferrara, because
+we are sure that thou wilt love us even more than we love each other,
+and wilt be glad to share our secret. We are going to marry each other
+at this moment, Madonna, and thou shalt be the priest. There can be none
+better, since thou hadst in thy womb for many months the great Priest of
+all Christians, our sublime Redeemer. Now, behold, Madonna, how I wed
+this my wife, Bellaroba. With this ring, which was given me by a very
+great lady," and he took a ring from his breast, "I wed my wife, placing
+it upon her finger in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
+Holy Ghost. I do not endow her with my worldly goods, for thou knowest I
+have none. I do not worship her with my body at this moment, but in the
+meantime I worship her unfeignedly with my mind, just as I worship thee
+with my soul. It appears, therefore, that I have wedded her enough. It
+is useless, most sacred Lady, to ask her whether she will honour and
+obey me, because of course she will, seeing that she loves me with all
+her good heart. Such as we are--very young, quite poor, but much thy
+servants--thou knowest whether thou canst be happy in this mating. I
+believe that thou canst. Now, therefore, since she is mine, she shall
+say with me three _Aves_ and a _Paternoster_, likewise the _Credo_, or
+so much of it as she can remember. And, O Madonna, trust me to cherish
+her, and do thou intercede for us. _Per Christum Dominum
+nostrum_--AMEN."
+
+"Bellaroba, my wife, look at me," he said, and the girl looked up
+wondering. He took her happy face between his hands, and kissed her two
+eyes, her forehead, and her mouth. Then they said the appointed prayers,
+and rose to their feet to return; nor did they forget the candles, but
+purchased them at the door of an old lady, who had a basketful to sell.
+
+Coming out of the church into the sun again, they encountered the
+scrutiny of Olimpia. Captain Mosca, slapping his booted leg, was holding
+the horse.
+
+"Where have you two children been?" said Olimpia. "Mischief in a corner,
+eh? You have missed the sight of Duke Borso and a gilded company."
+
+"We have been saying our prayers to Madonna of the Greeks," said
+Bellaroba meekly.
+
+"There are red flames in your cheeks, child, and a ring on your finger.
+Did you find those in the church?"
+
+"Madonna gave them to me, Olimpia."
+
+"So, so, so! Do you begin by robbing a shrine, pray?"
+
+"Ah, Madama Olimpia," said Angioletto, "we have only taken from the
+shrine what is our due."
+
+Not the least of the minstrel's parts was that of speaking as though he
+had something weighty in reserve. Olimpia, though by nature dull, was
+also sly. She had a suspicion about Angioletto now; but a
+quick-shifting glance from one to the other of the pair before her
+revealed nothing but serenity in the boy, and little but soft happiness
+in the girl. She opened her lips to speak, snapped them to again, and
+turned to the Captain and affairs more urgent than the love-making of
+babies. It was the hour of supper; the question was of a lodging.
+Captain Mosca knew an inn--the "Golden Sword"--where decent
+entertainment could be had for the night. As no one could deny what
+nobody knew anything about, it was decided. They sought and found the
+"Golden Sword," and put up with it, and in it. The supper party was, at
+least, merry, for Angioletto led it. He sang, he joked, made love, spent
+money, was wise, unwise, heedless, heedful. He charmed a grin at last
+into the very Captain's long face. That warrior, indeed, went so far as
+to drink his health in wine of Verona. He and his
+Olimpia--unhesitatingly his in the gaiety of the moment--drank it out of
+the same glass. "Love and Ferrara!" cried Captain Mosca, with a foot on
+the table. "Love in Ferrara," said Angioletto, and stroked Bellaroba's
+hair. So everything was very friendly and full of hope. At a late hour,
+and for excellent reasons, Olimpia kissed Bellaroba good-night, was
+herself kissed by Angioletto, and withdrew. Captain Mosca prayed
+vehemently for further and better acquaintance with his friend "the
+divine poet," and his pretty mistress. So went Bellaroba's marriage
+supper.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+"WHY COME YE NAT TO COURTE?"
+
+     "Le donne e i cavalier, gli affanni e gli agi,
+     Che ne invogliava araore e cortesia."
+
+
+The little house--discreet affair of eaves modest as drooped eyelids, of
+latticed windows, of wistaria before and a bower of willows behind--was
+found and furnished out of the girls' store and the Captain's credit.
+Donna Matura, a brown old woman, hideous, toothless, and inclined to
+swooning, was installed as duenna. She was, indeed, owner of the house
+and furniture, for which Olimpia paid and the Captain promised to pay;
+but that did not appear until much later. There was a great charm, not
+without a certain deal of luxury, in the place. Of course there was a
+garden--a bright green nest of flowering trees and shrubs; in the middle
+was a grass-plat; in that, again, a bronze fountain, which had the form
+of three naked boys back to back, and an inscription to the effect that
+it had been set up by a certain Galeotto Moro, in the days of Marquess
+Lionel, "in honour of Saints Peter and Paul and of the Virgin Deipara,"
+upon some special occasion of family thanksgiving. The weeping
+willows--themselves fountains of green--sprayed over a stone seat. The
+place bore signs of an honourable past; it was falling now gently to a
+comely decay; but it answered every purpose. All promised well. So much
+Captain Mosca was given to understand; yet it was hinted that his
+promises were not complete. "My life and soul," cried he on his knees in
+the garden, "the little affair is a matter of three minutes." It proved
+to be a matter of more than three months and was then accomplished in
+another way and with other results than had been looked for. Thus it
+was.
+
+When Angioletto had been assured of the nesting of his mate, he dressed
+himself point-device and went to Court to deliver his credentials. He
+found the lady upon whom so much depended, at the Schifanoia. Madama
+Lionella d'Este, wife of the Count Guarino Guarini, was a
+fresh-coloured, lusty young woman of three and twenty, not at all in
+love with her husband, but very much in love with love. The Captain of
+Lances had said truly when he shrugged her off as no beauty.
+Large-limbed she was, the shape of a boy, with a long mouth and small
+eyes, full-lipped, big in foot and hand. Yet she was a very merry soul,
+frank if not free in her speech and gesture, and though liable to bursts
+of angry temper, for the most part as innocent of malice as a tiger cub.
+If you remember her an Este, you will forgive her much, excuse her
+everything, and rather like her.
+
+Angioletto, who found her sitting on the grass among her ladies,
+advanced with great ceremony and many bows. Madama did not get up; no
+one did; so Angioletto had to step gingerly into a ring of roguish
+women to deliver his letter. Lionella scampered through it, reddening
+with pleasure; she beckoned him with smiles to sit beside her.
+
+"We are making rose-garlands to adorn our pretty heads," she said,
+laughing. "Come and sit by me, Angioletto, and sing to us. Who knows but
+what, if you are good, we shall not crown you with one of them?"
+
+It was a great merit of Angioletto's that he always took things and men
+(especially women) as he found them. Such as they were he could be for
+the time. He was by no means waxen; elastic rather. Down he plumped,
+accordingly, cross-legged by his new mistress, and warbled a canzone to
+the viola which enchanted the lady.
+
+"More, more, more!" she cried, clapping her hands. "Oh, boy, I could
+have you a prince for less than that! What a throstle-pipe you have!"
+
+It was, as he afterwards found out, of her habit to be for ever at
+extremes; but just now, not knowing how to take her, he sang on all the
+better for her praise; and he had her next wriggling in an ecstasy over
+a trifle he made up on the spur of the moment--a snatch wherein roses
+and a girl's face (Bellaroba's, be sure) took turns to be dominant. At
+the end of this pretty piece the Countess Lionella fairly took his own
+face between her hands, crumpled his lips into a bud and kissed them
+full. Angioletto coloured, though no one else did. It was evidently
+quite harmless, and afterwards he was ashamed of his shame.
+
+As it was, a diversion of a different order broke in upon the next song
+which, so soon as he had picked up his nerve, he adventured. One of the
+Maids of Honour looked quickly over her shoulder, and "Hist, Madama! The
+Duke!" she said, with wide eyes and a blush.
+
+The song ceased, the whole company, Lionella included, scrambled to
+their feet. Duke Borso, his portly body swaying like a carriage on
+springs, his hands behind him, and attended by a tall young man, very
+splendid and very blonde, came across the grass towards them. Angioletto
+could not decide whether to think him rogue or prude. His puckered face
+twitched, his eyes twitched, his pursed-up lips worked together; it was
+again as if he were struggling with a laugh. He wore his tall square cap
+well off his forehead, and looked what he really was--a strong man
+tired, but not yet tired out, of kindness. The benevolence seemed
+inborn, seemed fighting through every seam of the pompous face.
+"Madonna! his generous motions work him into creases, as if he were
+volcanic soil," thought Angioletto. Watching him narrowly as he came, he
+decided that this was a master to be loved if not admired, respected but
+not feared. "I should get the worst of a bout with him," thought he;
+"but I had rather it were with him than with Apollo." That title was
+just, as the reflection shrewd. Teofilo Calcagnini would have made a
+terrible tutor to Master Phaeton.
+
+Duke Borso bowed shortly to the standing maids, and favoured Angioletto
+with a keen eye before he set a hand on his daughter's shoulder. She
+looked a pleased welcome as he began to stroke her hair. "Ah, they love
+the man," thought Angioletto; "good!"
+
+"Why, chick," said Duke Borso, "you are like a cage of singing-birds
+scared by the cat."
+
+"Your Grace shall judge whether we are too scared to sing," replied his
+laughing daughter. "Come," she added, turning to Angioletto, "tune your
+viol and pipe to it again, my little poet."
+
+The Duke made a wry mouth. "Hey, I have no ear for music, my dear," said
+he.
+
+Angioletto was ready for him. "If your Magnificence will permit," he
+said, "I will take care not to offend his honourable ear. I will say my
+piece, with no more music than will serve to tie word to word. May it be
+so, Magnificence? Have I liberty, Madam?" He bowed, smiling, from one to
+the other of the great people.
+
+He was a very courtly and charming little person, this Tuscan youth.
+Above all he had a ready address. So bright and strong, and yet so
+deferential did he look, pleading his cause among them, Lionella could
+have kissed him again for nothing more than his dexterity.
+
+"Ah, you shall do whatever you like, Angioletto!" she cried.
+
+Borso's eyes twinkled, and he primmed his lips. "I do not go so far as
+Madama, Master Angioletto, but I shall be pleased to hear what you are
+pleased to give me." He fell into an attitude of profound attention.
+
+Angioletto, having bowed once more, began.
+
+It so happened that Lorenzo de' Medici, that monster of genius, had not
+long printed his _Caccia col falcone_. Angioletto had it by heart
+against his need; using it now he could never have made a better
+choice--as, indeed, he guessed. It was as good as a play to watch
+Borso's wary eyes at the commencement of this piece, and to see them
+drop their fence as the declamation went on. Lorenzo begins with a
+pretty description of the dawn on Tuscan hilltops--
+
+
+     "Era gia rosso tutto l'oriente,
+     E le cime de' monti parien d'oro," etc.
+
+
+Borso, neither approving nor disapproving, kept his head disposed for
+more. At
+
+
+     "Quando fui desto da certi rumori
+     Di buon sonagli ed allettar di cani"
+
+
+he began to blink; with the quick direction to the huntsman--
+
+
+     "Deh, vanne innanzi, presto Capellaio,"
+
+
+he stifled a smile. But the calling of the hounds by their names broke
+down his guard. Angioletto shrilled them out in a high, boyish voice--
+
+
+     "Chiama Tamburo, Pezuolo e Martello,
+     La Foglia, la Castagna e la Guerrina,
+     Fagiano, Fagianin, Rocca e Capello,
+     E Friza, e Biondo, Bamboccio e Rossina,
+     Ghiotto, la Torta, Viola e Pestello,
+     E Serchio e Fuse e'l mio Buontempo vecchio,
+     Zambraco, Buratel, Scaccio e Pennecchio...."
+
+
+Every muscle of the keen old hunter was now quivering; his eyes were
+bright, his smile open and that of a child. To the last word of the
+poem--and it has length--he followed without breath the checks, the
+false casts, the bickering of the huntsmen, the petty incidents of a
+breezy morning in the marshes, nodding at every point, missing nothing,
+cracking his fingers, cheering under his breath, with delight
+undisguised and interest unalloyed. The moment it was ended he seemed
+prime for a burst of heedless comment; but he stopped, shut his lips
+with a snap, and became the inscrutable ruler of a fief of the Empire
+once more. But Angioletto knew that he had pleased him, for all that he
+walked off as he had come, without word or sign.
+
+He had pleased every one. Homing to his nest in the Borgo, he caught his
+little Bellaroba in his arms with a rapture none the less because it had
+been earned at a stretch. It was long before he could find time and
+breath to lead her into the garden and have the story out. Olimpia,
+coming down to look for them in the dusk, found that a seat for two
+would easily hold one more. It should be added of Angioletto that he
+suppressed the incident of the Countess Lionella's salute.
+
+At supper there were evidences that, whatever had been Angioletto's
+fate, all had not gone so well with the Captain of Lances. Not that
+appetite failed him; indeed, he ate the more for his taciturnity. Yet
+not repletion made him sigh, for he sighed consumedly before he began
+and rather less when he had finished, as though the kindlier juices of
+our nature had got to work to disperse the melancholic. Angioletto
+rallied him upon his gloom, but to no purpose. The meal was a silent
+one; almost the only conversation was that of the minstrel's foot with
+Bellaroba's under the table.
+
+The truth was, that of conversation the Captain had had enough before
+supper--a very short colloquy with his Olimpia. In it he was brought to
+confess that he had seen his patron that morning. "Well?" had been
+Olimpia's commentary--a shot which raked the Captain fore and aft. Well,
+he desperately admitted, there was nothing actually arranged:
+_patienza_! His most noble master had been greatly harassed with
+affairs--the Duke's approaching visit to Rome, the precise forms which
+must be observed, the punctilios, the hundred niceties of etiquette;
+"Ah, _patienza_!" urged the sweating Mosca.
+
+Patience, she saw, was the only wear; but, per Bacco, he should learn it
+too! She was in a high rage. The Captain was given to know that Ferrara
+was a great city, with more houses in it than one; in fine, he was shown
+the door. Supper first was an extreme and contemptuous condescension of
+Olimpia's, urged by the thought that a fed Mosca might be a more
+desperate Mosca, while a lean one would be desperate only for a meal.
+
+A true relation of what passed in the Palazzo Guarini may serve to show
+how just she had been. The Count had received news of his henchman's
+attendance with a nod, had kept him waiting two hours in the _cortile_,
+then remembered him and bid him upstairs.
+
+"Well, dog," said the young lord, from his dressing-table, "and why the
+devil are you so late to report yourself?"
+
+"Ah, Excellence, believe me--" began to stutter the Captain.
+
+"That is exactly what I will not do, my man. Who was that wench at your
+back yesterday?"
+
+The Captain rubbed his hands. "Excellence, a wench indeed! A golden
+Venetian--glorious! Dove-eyed, honey-tongued, and very much your
+lordship's servant, I do assure you."
+
+"You are so completely and at such length a fool, Mosca," said Count
+Guarini, with a yawn, "and strive so desperately to be rascal in spite
+of it, that I am almost sorry for you. Tie me these points, my good
+fellow, get me my sword, and go to the devil with your golden Venetian."
+
+That, believe me, had been all. Therefore Captain Mosca, as he slunk out
+into the dark after supper in obedience to his inexorable Olimpia, felt
+that he must be more ingenious than he had supposed. At the same time it
+is only fair to say that when he had spoken so hopefully of his affair
+to the lady on the pillion he had believed every word of his own story.
+A man puts on spectacles to suit his complexion: the Captain's was
+sanguine.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+FORTUNE WITH THE DOUBLE BLADE
+
+     "Similemente agli splendor mondani
+     Ordino general ministra e duca,
+     Che permutasse a tempo li ben vani,
+     Di gente in gente, e d'uno in altro sangue."--_Inf._ vii. 77.
+
+
+Angioletto had cause to believe in that star of his, for it never
+wavered in the course it held. Borso's court found him much to its
+taste. The men, however tall, of looks however terrible, bent their
+height and unbent their scowls to him; he was the pet of all the women;
+the very Fool, saturnine as he was (with a bite in every jest), had no
+gibe to put him to the blush withal. He made money, or money's worth, as
+fast as friends. A gold chain with a peregrine in enamel and jewels came
+to him by the hands of the Chamberlain; nothing was said, but he knew it
+was from the Duke. Countess Lionella could not reward him enough--now a
+jewel, now a gold cup, at one time a purse, at another a crystal phial
+filled with Jordan water. And so it went, the star waxing ever. He could
+have maintained the discreet house by Porta Angeli out of his earnings,
+and he did; but you have to pay for your luck somehow, and it very soon
+happened that he could not maintain himself in it. He was only too
+popular. The Count Guarino wanted him at the Palazzo Guarini; the
+Countess insisted that he should remain in bond at the Schifanoia; the
+august couple wrangled publicly over his little body.
+
+"What, Madam," cried the Count, "is it not enough that you absent
+yourself from my house? Must you keep my friends out of it also?"
+
+"He was accredited to me, my lord," said the lady, "to me, therefore, he
+shall come."
+
+"Good madam," returned Guarini, "I admire your taste as a man, but
+deplore it as a husband. I think the little poet will do better with
+me."
+
+"Stuff!" cried the Countess, "I might be his mother."
+
+Said the Count: "Madam, I need not deny it; yet it is very evident that
+you are not his mother." He spoke with some heat.
+
+Lionella was mightily amused. "Jealousy, my lord?" She arched her fine
+brows.
+
+"I don't know the word, Madam," he answered her, touched on a raw.
+Jealousy appeared to him as the most vulgar of the vices.
+
+"Prove that to me!" the Countess pursued him. Guarini made her a bow.
+
+"Perfectly, Contessa," said he. "You shall have your poet, and he shall
+be my friend." Wherein the Count showed that to be a gentleman it may
+sometimes be necessary to appear a fool.
+
+The matter was thus settled, and Angioletto ravished from his nest.
+
+His last night at home--_a casa_, as he loved to call it--need not be
+dwelt upon. Bitter-sweet it was, yet his courage made it more sweet
+than bitter. Bellaroba was tearful, clung to him, kissed and murmured
+incoherently because of sobbing. He loved her more than ever for that,
+but as became a prudent husband, thought to say a word in season.
+
+"My dear," he said in her ear, as he held her close, "you are very young
+to be a wife, and too young to be properly left alone with such
+companions as your Olimpia, whom I distrust, and Monna Matura, whom I
+abhor. But what can I do? I must make our fortunes, and pray to God that
+your beauty do not mar them. Follow my advice, my injunctions even, and
+it will not. Keep much at home, go not abroad unattended or uncovered.
+Your hooded head makes you surpassingly beautiful; you need not fear to
+be a figure of fun. At the same time it shields most of your sacred
+person from profane eyes. The great shield of all, however, is to have
+business before you when you are from house. Go briskly about
+this--whether it be market, mass, or mischief--and no one will look at
+you twice. At home it should be the same. There may be visitors; if
+Monna Olimpia can contrive it, there will be a good many. You may judge
+of their quality by her anxiety to receive them. Be guarded then, my
+dear, and go by contraries. They will not find the pattern of the carpet
+so interesting as you should do. Give them prose for their poetry,
+vinegar for their sweet wine, bitter herbs when they look to you for
+cane of sugar. Keep your honeycomb for him who is trying to earn it.
+Think where I am going, my Bellaroba! To what temptations, blessed
+Lord! to what askings, to what suggestion of wanton dealing! Remember
+that in all this I shall have your honour to keep, as you have mine. Say
+a great many prayers, my little heart, for the welfare of my soul and of
+yours; lock your door at night; let Monna Matura go with you to mass and
+confession; and--and--oh! my wife, my little wife, but I love not the
+leaving of you!" And so these poor children cried on each other's
+breasts, and so fell to the unspoken tongue of Love's elect. Next
+morning he went early, leaving her kissed in bed.
+
+He saw her once again, spent a most blissful two hours in her company,
+before the Countess Lionella took it into her head to shelter from the
+summer heats in a villa she had above Monselice. Thither Angioletto was
+forced to go in her train. He found it intolerable, went with a heart of
+lead; for so cheerful a soul he was what he looked, parched and wan.
+This lasted a week. Then came a paper, scrawled with brown ink marks,
+which, after much study, he took to imply--
+
+
+     "MY LOVE ANGILETO, I love you more every day. I cry a good deal for
+     lack of you. I kiss you two hundred times, and will be good and
+     happy,
+                                       "Your dutiful      BELAROBA."
+
+
+This revived him amazingly: he went singing about the gardens which hung
+upon the side of the grey hill, and composed a pastoral comedy to be
+acted by the Countess's ladies in the Temple grove.
+
+Lionella very openly and without afterthought made love to him. He was a
+charming little lad, it is true; but quite apart from that, he was the
+only male creature above servant rank in the household. I describe him
+so because I cannot bring myself to call him a man; but he was quite man
+enough for the lady's intent. It is a surprising instance of the tact
+there was innate in the youth that he checked every undue liberty on the
+part of his mistress without endangering her self-respect or his own
+high favour. Perhaps he allowed matters to go a little too far. His were
+times of artless Art and of franchise--immoral, yet mainly innocent.
+Children call each other pet names, hold hands, kiss, and no one is
+hurt. So it was in Ferrara when Borso ruled it. _Praeteriere Borsii
+tempora!_ True enough. There were those who saw that tuneful time in the
+shaping; we, alas! look down on the splintered shards. But we know that
+if Assyrian balm was ever for the world's chaffer it was in the days of
+Borso, the good Duke.
+
+Angioletto loved his Bellaroba with all his heart: no debonair Lionella
+could decoy him to be untrue. But he was debonair himself, of high
+courage, and mettlesome; and he may have gone a little too far. He was
+now become her confidant, secretary, bosom friend. Whence came the shock
+of crisis.
+
+One morning Lionella called for him in a hurry. He found her, an amused
+frown on her broad brows, pacing the terrace walk, holding an open
+letter in her hand. The moment he came in sight the Countess ran towards
+him, drew his arm in hers, and began to speak very fast.
+
+"My dear boy," she said, "I am in a fix. You shall advise me how to act,
+the more willingly I hope, as you are in a sense the contriver of all
+the mischief. You know the Count my husband well enough to agree with
+me that he is a man of gallantry. He has proved it, for it is plain that
+he would never have left me (to my great content) to go my own gait
+unless it had been worth his while. I do him perfect justice, I believe.
+He has never thwarted me, nor frowned, nor raised an eyebrow at an act
+or motion of mine. Never but once, and that was when I proposed to take
+you into my service. Don't blush, Angioletto, it is quite true. He then
+raised, not his eyebrows--at least I think not--but some little
+objections. I said that I was old enough to be your mother--no, no, that
+also is true, my dear! He answered, 'No doubt; but it is very evident
+that you are not his mother.' That again may be true, I suppose?
+However, the affair ended in great good-humour on both sides, and here
+you are, as you see! But now the Count sends me this letter, in which he
+says--let me see--ah! 'Your ladyship will remember my not ungenerous
+conduct in the matter of the little poet, Angioletto, on whose account
+you had certain benevolent dispositions to gratify'--neatly turned, is
+it not? 'I have now to propose to you, turn for turn, a like favour to
+myself, which is that you shall take into your service a young
+gentlewoman of Venice, who is but newly come to Ferrara'--What is the
+matter, Angioletto? You put me out. Where was I? Oh, yes--'She is
+respectably bred, very modest, very diligent, very pious, moderately
+handsome.'--My dear boy, if you want to sit down, by all means say so.
+We will sit together here.--'The name she goes by with those who know
+her is Bellaroba.'--Bellaroba, indeed! Well--'I am very sure that you
+will have no reason to regret my excellent choice on your behalf; and it
+is the more timely because I learn from Fazio that one of your women has
+fallen sick of the small-pox'--and so on. The Count is occasionally
+sublime. I like particularly the list of the young lady's qualifications
+and the reference to his own kindness to myself. Now, what am I to say?
+I see you are puzzled. Well, I will give you time."
+
+What Angioletto himself was to say is more to the purpose. I think it
+much to his credit that his first ascertainable emotion after the buffet
+of assault was one of wildest exultation at the prospect. It shows that
+he had never for a moment distrusted the meek little partner of his
+fortunes. Whisps of such doubt did afterwards float across his pretty
+morning picture, but he put them away at once. Next came worldly wisdom.
+True Tuscan that he was, his instinct was to decline perilous rapture if
+waiting might bring it on easy terms. For a long time he weighed instant
+joy against policy. Finally, as he was more Italian than Tuscan, and
+more boy than either, he decided to jump the danger. The vision of
+Bellaroba shy in the rose-garden, of himself crowning her soft hair,
+bending over her, kissing her upturned face; of the Countess behind one
+thicket looking for him, and the Count behind another looking for
+Bellaroba--it was too much to resist!
+
+"Madama," he said, "it is hardly for me to advise in such delicate
+matters. I should not, by right, dare say what I am about to say upon
+your invitation. Yet if I were his nobility, Count Guarino Guarini, not
+the least of my pleasant moments would be that in which I could say, 'I
+have a noble lady to wife, for she honours me as I have honoured her.'"
+
+That was a very dextrous remark, vastly pleasing to the Countess. She
+kissed the speaker then and there, wrote her letter hot-head, talked
+about it all that day, and worked herself into such a fever of curiosity
+that she cut short her villeggiatura by six weeks, so as the sooner to
+see the girl who could inspire her with such admirable ideas of her own
+magnanimity. She even grew quite enthusiastic upon her husband's
+account, almost sentimental about him. This much the wily Angioletto
+(who did not study character for nothing) had allowed for in his
+calculations.
+
+It is by no means certain that the Countess was as wise as her guide.
+The facts which induced the letter were these. Guarini had chanced upon
+an early mass at San Cristoforo and Bellaroba kneeling at her prayers.
+She, all unconscious of any presence but her own and her Saviour's, was
+looking up to the Mother who had made Him so, dim-eyed, and smiling
+rather tenderly. Her lips framed petitions for the coming home of
+Angioletto. She had hooded her head as he commanded, and it became her
+as he had foreseen. With her added cares of wifely duty this gave a
+sober look to her untameable childish bloom; she was almost a
+business-like beauty now. To Guarino the pathetic appealed more nearly;
+to him she seemed a pretty nun, a wood-bird caged. He never took his
+eyes off her--she caught him in a soft mood and ravished him. A little
+saint in bud, he swore; a wholesome, domestic little household goddess,
+meek and very pure, who would carry home her beauties unaware and oil
+the tousled heads of half a dozen brothers and sisters. Homeliness is
+neither Italian word nor virtue; but just as it describes Bellaroba, so
+an inkling of its charm thrilled the young lord who saw her. Could one
+cage such a gossamer thing? Fate had done it, why not he? At least he
+could not lose sight of her. He tracked her to the house under the wall,
+saw the door scrupulously shut upon her, wandered up and down the street
+for half an hour, returned a laggard to his palace--and yet had her full
+in vision. She possessed him until mass-time following: the same things
+happened. Guarino was hit hard; he took certain steps and got
+information which tallied with his better instincts. It guided also his
+subsequent efforts, for obviously the more direct remedies would not
+meet his case. Therefore, he wrote to the Countess, as you have seen.
+Her reply delighted him, and the rest was very easy. Borso signed the
+order of appointment, boggling only at her name. "Buonaroba I know,"
+said he. "What am I to think of Bellaroba, Guarino?"
+
+"Your Grace shall be pleased to think that his daughter has chosen her
+for her own person," said the Count.
+
+"Hum," said Borso, and signed the parchment.
+
+Then came another scrawl for "my love Angilotto," in which the
+miraculous news was told.
+
+
+     "Olimpia took it very ill," she wrote, "but the Signor Capitano
+     talked her happier--at least, he stayed a long time. I hope you
+     will think it all for the best. I am very good, and kiss you many
+     times,
+                                          "Your        BELAROBBA."
+
+
+Olimpia had indeed been very cross, as Captain Mosca would have
+testified. She had not, at any rate, talked _him_ any happier: that he
+would have upheld with an oath. The experienced man knew the whip of
+sleet on his bare skin; but this was worse than any winter campaign; it
+left him dumb and without the little ease which shivering gives you. It
+had not been a question so much of talking as of keeping his feet.
+Olimpia, when the news came, had raged like a shrieking wind about the
+narrow house. "My dearest life! Soul of my soul!" was all the Captain
+had to fend the blast. It was no time for endearments--Olimpia raved
+herself still. Tears, floods of them, followed, whereat the Captain
+melted also and wept. He did foolishly. Demoniac gusts of laughing
+caught and flung him to the rafters, chill rages froze him where he
+fell. He lost his little store of wit, sagged like a broken sunflower,
+and was finally pelted from the door by a storm of Venetian curses, in
+which all his ancestors, himself, and any descendants he might dare to
+have, were heavily involved. Bellaroba, trembling in her bed, heard him
+go with a sinking heart. "Olimpia will come and murder me now," she said
+to herself.
+
+But Olimpia slept long where she fell, and next morning decided to
+garner her rage.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+ENDS AND MEANS
+
+     "Amor che a null' amato amar perdona."
+
+
+Bellaroba, who pleased the Countess, for the same reasons, no doubt, did
+not please the Count. It is possible to be too demure, and very little
+good to have domestic charm if you shut the door upon the amateur.
+Lionella had never had so much of her lord's society as during the month
+that followed her return to Ferrara. She did not complain of this; on
+the contrary, the more the maid held off and the man pursued, the more
+Lionella was entertained. Angioletto, invited to share her sport, proved
+dull. She confessed to more than one of her women (including Bellaroba)
+that if she had not been very much in love with the poet she would have
+thought him a fool. You see that she made no secret of her weakness. The
+fact is, she did not consider it a weakness; whereby you have this
+remarkable position of affairs at the Schifanoia, that Bellaroba was
+invited to be a student of her husband's amours, and he of hers.
+Considering the state of their secret hearts this might have led to
+matter of tragic concern; if they had loved less it would have done so.
+As it was, they were quite indifferent. Their hours were a series of
+breathless escapades--romance at fever heat. Stolen meetings before
+dawn among the dewy rose-bushes, chance touchings, chance kisses,
+embraces half tasted, and looks often crossed--of such were their days
+at the Schifanoia. Meantime a coiled ladder watched out the sun from a
+myrtle thicket, of which and its works came their happy nights. Then, as
+she lay in his arms, the Maid of Honour vanished in the child who was so
+lovely because she so loved; she could prattle, in the soft Venetian
+brogue, of boundless faith in her little lord, of her simple admiration
+of him and all he did, of her wonder and delight to be loved. She could
+tell him of what she could do, and of how much she could never do, to
+please him and pay him honour. And Angioletto would nod gravely at each
+point that she made, and kiss her now and then very softly to show her
+that he was perfectly satisfied. So soon as the first swallow twittered
+in the eaves, or the first pale line of light trembled at the casement,
+he had to fly. But he waited in the rosery till she came tiptoe out; and
+then the day's alarms and the day's delight began. Eh! It was a royal
+month, a honeymoon indeed!
+
+But it could not last--barely saw its round of eight and twenty days.
+Lionella was a lady born, as it were, in the purple. Command sat lightly
+on her; she had never been disobeyed. She now grew querulous, exacting,
+suspicious, moody, sometimes petulant, sometimes beseeching. It gave
+Angioletto the deuce's own time now and then; but he might yet have
+weathered the rocks--for his tact was only equalled by his good
+temper--if the Countess had not precipitated matters. There came a day,
+and an hour of a day, when she spoke to him. She had spoken before; her
+ambitions had always been verbal--but now they were literal, all the
+"t's" were crossed. That was a moment for Angioletto to take with quick
+breath.
+
+He took it so. Instead of hinting at his duty, or hers, he blundered out
+the fact that he did not love her.
+
+"Dog," cried the Countess, "do you dare to tell me that?"
+
+"Madama, I do indeed," he answered sadly, for he saw his house about his
+ears.
+
+Lionella checked herself; she bit her lip, put her hands ostentatiously
+behind her back.
+
+"You had better leave the house, Master Angioletto," said she drily,
+"before I go further and see to it."
+
+He bowed himself out. Then he sought his poor Bellaroba, found her in
+the garden, drew her aside without trouble of a pretext, and told her
+the whole story.
+
+"My lovely dear," he said, "I am a broken man. There has been a terrible
+scene with Madama, in which she got so much the worst of it that I was
+very triumphantly ruined. You behold me decked with the ashes of my
+scorched prosperity. What is to be done with you? For I must go."
+
+"Oh, Angioletto," cried Bellaroba, trembling and catching at his breast,
+"won't you--can't you--ruin me too? Then we shall be happy again."
+
+He pressed her to his heart. "Dearest dear," he said, half laughing,
+half sobbing, "you are quite ruined enough. Stay as you are. I will see
+you every night What! By the Mass, are you not my wife?"
+
+"Of course I am, Angioletto. But nobody thinks so--not even any priest."
+
+"Eh!" he cried, "but that is all the better. Only you and I and Madonna
+the Virgin of the Greeks know it. She never blabs secrets, and you dare
+not, and I can't. So you see it is well arranged."
+
+She loved him most of all in this gay humour, and provoked him to new
+flights.
+
+"But, you wild boy, how can you see me when you are ruined?" she asked,
+all her roses in flower at the fun of the thing. "How can you be in the
+Schifanoia if you are thrust out of it?"
+
+Angioletto, with a mysterious air, kissed her for answer. "Leave that to
+me, my dear," he said. "Never have another of the maids to sleep with
+you, and lock your chamber door. Now I must go, because I am kicked out.
+Good-bye, my bride; I shall see you long before another dawn."
+
+She let him go at last, and turned to her duties with less sighing than
+you would have supposed, and no tears at all. Her belief in the wisdom,
+audacity, and decision of her Angioletto was absolute. She had never
+known him to fail. Yet if she chanced to think of the towering Count
+Guarini plying her with flowers and sweatmeats, she shivered to remember
+her citadel naked of all defences. This made her feel homesick for her
+lover's arms. Like a sensible girl, therefore, she thought of the Count
+as little as possible; still less of another sinister apparition, that
+of the obsequious Captain Mosca, craning his lean neck round the corners
+of her vision, grinning from ear to ear.
+
+Free of the Schifanoia (whose dust he was yet careful to keep upon his
+shoes for the sake of her it harboured), Angioletto walked briskly down
+the street, shaping his course for the Borgo. He had been rounding a
+plan even while he was announcing to Bellaroba that he had it cut and
+dried; and now he was to execute it. True, it was a little extravagant,
+depended too much, perhaps, upon other people's estimations of him
+tallying with his own; but you will have found out by this time that the
+youth was a realist. Ideas stood for things with him; and, as he said,
+if he could not make them stand so to his auditory he was no poet. This
+was a heresy he could not allow even supposititiously. The idea was
+excellent; the thing, therefore, no less. Therefore he concluded that he
+should not fail of his plan.
+
+Beyond the Porta Angeli, in Borso's day, was to be found a huddle of
+tenements--fungus-growth upon the city wall--single-storied,
+single-roomed affairs, mostly the lodging of artificers in the lesser
+crafts. Among them all there was but one of two floors, a substantial
+red-brick little house with a most grandiloquent chimney-stack. And very
+rightly it was so, for it belonged to the Court chimney-sweep.
+
+On this eventful noon Sor Beppo, the sweep, was sitting on his doorstep
+in the sun, eating an onion, one of many which reposed in a vinegar
+bath on his knees. He was quite black, save where a three-days beard
+lent a gleam of snow to chaps and chin; being toothless, he was an
+indifferent performer upon the onion. But his hearing was as keen as his
+eyesight. He caught Angioletto's vivacious heeltaps upon the flags, and
+peered from burly brows at the smart little gentleman, cloaked,
+feathered, and gaudy, who looked as suitable to his dusty surroundings
+as a red poppy to a rubbish heap.
+
+Angioletto, stopping before him, took off his scarlet cap with a
+flourish.
+
+"Well, young stabbing blade," said Beppo, "and who may you be?"
+
+"Sir," replied the youth, "I am a poet." Beppo rubbed his shooting chin
+with a noise like the scraping of nutmegs.
+
+"Well," said he, "I'll not deny that it's a trade, and a lawful trade;
+but for my part I sweep noblemen's chimneys and am proud of it. Shake
+hands, poet."
+
+They shook hands, with great cordiality on the poet's part.
+
+"Sit down, poet," said Beppo.
+
+Angioletto sat on the doorstep beside him without a word.
+
+"Will you have an onion, my friend?" the old fellow went on to ask.
+
+"Thank you, Sor Beppo, but I have already dined. Let me rather talk to
+you while you finish your meal."
+
+"It is not so much a meal as a relish," said the sweep. "But talk
+away--we'll never quarrel over terms."
+
+"I hope not," Angioletto took him up; "because I have done with
+poetising and have a mind to try your trade."
+
+Beppo, his mouth full of onion, paused in his bite to gape at this
+dapper page, who, all scarlet and white as he was, talked after such a
+fashion.
+
+"How'll that be now?" he said. "You've never come all this way to crack
+a joke?"
+
+"Ah, never in the world, my friend," cried Angioletto. "I am in
+earnest."
+
+"You may be as earnest as a friar in the pulpit, and yet pretty bad at
+chimney-work, young master. What do you know of it, pray?"
+
+"Nothing at all," replied Angioletto, as if that helped him.
+
+"Look at that now," cried the triumphant Sor Beppo.
+
+"Pardon me, Master Beppo," said the youth, "you cannot look at it yet,
+but you very soon shall. Have you a chimney to hand?"
+
+"Ah, I might have that," the old man agreed, with a chuckle which ended
+as a snort. "There might be a chimney in my house that's not been swept
+for thirty year, having little time and less inclination to sweep 'em
+for nothing but glory. But, happen there were such a piece of work, what
+then?"
+
+Angioletto pointed into the house. "Is that the chimney, Beppo?"
+
+Beppo nodded. "That might be the chimney in question, my gentleman."
+
+With a "By your leave, Sor Beppo," Angioletto stepped delicately into
+the room. He threw down cloak and cap, unstrapped girdle and hanger,
+stripped off his doublet, and stood up in shirt and breeches. Beppo
+watched him, all agape, too breathless to chew. Before he could
+interfere--
+
+"By the Saints, but he's in!" he cried with arms thrown up. "Eh, master,
+come you back, come you back!"
+
+"What do you want?" a muffled voice came from the chimney. Beppo sawed
+the air.
+
+"Don't you play the fool up there, my boy, don't you do it! That's as
+foul as the grave, that chimney is. I'll have ye on my soul as long as I
+live, and I can ill afford it, for I've a queasy conscience in my black
+shell." He seemed to be treading on pins.
+
+He was answered, "We will talk of your conscience and its shell when I
+come back. Take off my shoes, will you?"
+
+A neat leg was pushed into the fireplace; then another. Beppo did the
+office, meek as an acolyte. Then he sighed, for the legs drew up the
+chimney and vanished in dust.
+
+"There goes a lad of spirit to his gloomy end," murmured brokenly the
+sweep, as he looked at the little red shoes in his hand. "I would not
+have had that come to pass for twenty gold ducats. But, Lord! who'd 'a
+thought it of a Court spark, that he should be as good as his word? Not
+I, used to Courts as a man may be." He fell to scratching his head.
+
+"Hey, hey!" he cried, as there was a prodigious scuffling up the
+chimney. "Now he strangles, now he strangles!" A shower of soot came
+down. Beppo flacked about the room; then two heavy objects fell. Beppo
+crept up. "Mary Virgin, he's killing birds," he said, in an awed
+whisper, and picked up two owls with wagging heads. The recesses of the
+chimney were still very lively. "Eh, there he is again," said the old
+sweep. "What now?" Down came a rat, squeaking for its life, then three
+in succession, very silent because their necks were wrung. "This is
+better than a cat any day of the seven," said Sor Beppo. "What a diamond
+of a poet! He should be crowned with laurel-twigs if I were Duke Borso
+in all his glory. Being but Beppo the sweep, he shall be free of my
+mystery the moment he's free of my chimney-stack."
+
+He could await Angioletto's coming now with equal mind. The lad had
+approved himself. I leave you to judge of the welcome he got when,
+breathless, scratched, and sable as the night, he showed his white teeth
+at the door. Beppo, in fact, fell weeping on his neck. By this simple
+device Angioletto was enabled to keep his word, and Bellaroba to find
+him black but comely.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE CAPTAIN'S TREADINGS
+
+
+While Angioletto and his Bellaroba dwelt in a paradise, none the less
+glorious for being as sooty as the darkness which veiled it, the estate
+of Captain Mosca, that hungry swordsman, was most unhappy. Divorced from
+bed and board, cast off by his mistress, and not yet adopted by his
+master, the poor man felt dimly about for supports, conscious that his
+treadings had well-nigh slipped. At such a time the gentle eyes of
+Bellaroba--nobody's enemy--courted him, like a beam of firelight on a
+rain-scoured street, with a smiling invitation to share the peace within
+doors. He hung uneasily about the gateways in these days, cold-elbowed
+by the lackeys, ignored by the higher sort, unseen by the quality; he
+burnished the lintels with his shoulder-blades, chewed many straws,
+counted the flagstones, knew the hours by the signals of his stomach.
+Then, if by hazard Bellaroba should come dancing by with a "Good
+morning, Signor Capitano," a "_Come sta?_" or, prettier still, a bright
+"_Sta bene?_" what wonder if the man of rage humbled himself before the
+little Maid of Honour? What wonder, again, if she, out of the
+overflowings of her happiness, should give him an alms?
+
+No wonder at all, but pity there should be; for the Captain played an
+unworthy part. I suppose his standard was not very high. I know he was
+hungry; I know that nothing degrades a man so low as degradation--since
+what he believes himself, that he is; but I find it hard to excuse him
+for draining Bellaroba of her little secrets. Judas that he was, he took
+her sop, and then sold her for thirty pieces of silver.
+
+The draining of a well so limpid was the easiest thing in the world. She
+was too absurdly happy, too triumphant altogether in the successful
+craft of her brilliant little lord, to be continent. She dealt in
+semi-transparent mystery with her manipulator from the moment he had won
+her compassion. Her secret was none from the first, or it was like the
+secret which a child will tell you, all the louder for being said in
+your ear.
+
+"My dear little friend," said the smirking Captain, when he had it,
+"what you tell me there is as wine in my blood. I declare it sets me
+singing tunes."
+
+"Ah, but he is wonderful, my Angioletto," said she, and her eyes grew
+larger for the thought of him.
+
+"For a stripling of his inches he beats any cock that ever fought a
+main," Mosca declared; "blood of Blood, but he does! What and if he did
+square up to me--do I bear a grudge? Never, upon my body."
+
+"You will not--you would not--ah, tell Olimpia of this, Signor
+Capitano?" she hazarded. The Captain stroked one eye with the back of
+his finger. He looked pityingly upon her with the other.
+
+"Ah, my dear soul," he said, sighing, "could you think it of old
+Mosca?"
+
+Bellaroba hastened to disclaim. "No, no, no, I did not think it, Signor
+Capitano. But for a minute I had a little fear. Olimpia never loved
+Angioletto at all, and I don't think she loves me very much--now."
+
+"To be plain with you, my lamb," said the Mosca, "she has no such vasty
+love for me. I have not set foot within her door since a certain day you
+may remember."
+
+The girl shivered. "If I remember it! Ah, Madonna delle Grazie, she had
+a devil that day!"
+
+"She had seven, I'm sure of it," cried the Captain. "So I leave you to
+judge how much of your story she may worm out of me."
+
+He so beamed upon her, kissed her hands with such a lofty stoop, that
+she felt ashamed of herself, and begged his pardon.
+
+This brought the Captain to his knees. "By the God who made the Jews,"
+he swore, "I leave not this raw flagstone till you have unsaid those
+words!"
+
+In the end, after a prodigious fuss, he drifted away down the corridor
+and left her to go about her business.
+
+But he drifted not very far. He felt himself full of affairs which were
+as meat and drink to his spirit starved by neglect. It was so great a
+thing to have a pretext for approaching Count Guarini. That young lord
+had a way like a keen-edged knife. You might weave a whole vestment
+about your errand, fold upon fold of ingenious surmise, argument _pro_,
+argument _con_; Guarino Guarini would dart eyes upon you--slash! he had
+rent your fabric and discovered you naked underneath, a liar ready for
+the whip. Nor, to do him justice, did he ever fail to apply it. Truth
+was, indeed, the only key to Guarino's chamber.
+
+Truth, and timely truth, was what the Captain felt he had at last. With
+it he braved the supercilious doorkeeper; with it he forced the fellow
+to lift his intolerable eyelids.
+
+"By the powers of darkness, my friend," he said, "it will be a bad day's
+work for you if you deny me this time." So he won his admission and
+faced his master.
+
+"Now, Mosca, your lie," said the Count, with his cold-steel delivery.
+Mosca did not stumble.
+
+"Master," he said, "I can do you service."
+
+"Do it then," whipped in the Count.
+
+"I can tell your Excellence why he succeeds no better with La
+Bellaroba."
+
+"Ah!" The Count was suspicious, but interested.
+
+"The little lady has a lover."
+
+"Body of a dog!"
+
+"Body of Angioletto, Excellence."
+
+"Angioletto? That spaniel? How many more laps will he cradle in? Cut his
+tongue out, my good fellow, and then come to me again."
+
+"Excellence, may I speak?"
+
+"I suppose so. Speak."
+
+The Captain waited no further invitation, but told the whole story from
+the beginning. Guarino thought upon it for a moment.
+
+"He will come to-night?" he asked.
+
+"Certain, Excellence."
+
+"Then we have him. You have done well, Mosca--it was time, my friend,
+for you are an expensive hack to keep at grass. Now listen. Take
+Bellaroba away--command of the Contessa, of course. Take her to the
+little house in the Borgo. Make all fast, and return here in time for
+the steeple-jack. When you have him in the trap, run him through the
+body, raise the devil's uproar, and denounce him to the patrol. Do you
+understand me?"
+
+"Perfectly, Excellence."
+
+"Take my purse from the table and off with you then."
+
+Captain Mosca bowed to the ground and backed out.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+FIRST MIDNIGHT CONVERSATION
+
+
+The Borgo of Borso's day was, as you might say, a sucker of the city of
+the Po, a flowery crop of villas and gardens about the city's root.
+There was the discreet house which Captain Mosca had once chosen for his
+Olimpia; there also was that which Guarino Guarini maintained for his
+(or any) Bellaroba. It is probable that there were many such houses in
+the Borgo; it was a very pleasant place, heavy scented with lilac and
+hawthorn in the spring, drowsy all the summer through with rustling
+leaves and the murmur of innumerable bees. The place was quiet; there
+was no traffic, no hint of the city bustle; on the other hand there was
+the notoriety which must always attach to any act done where no others
+are doing. Time, day-time especially, hangs heavy in the Borgo. One
+machinates in the face of many green shutters, which are not necessarily
+dead because they are shut.
+
+This reasoning does not attack the sagacity of Count Guarini, for the
+only circumstance which could give it force was entirely unknown to him.
+He did not know that the Borgo held Bellaroba's friend, Olimpia, or that
+it sheltered under the same roof Olimpia, the Captain's enemy. He knew
+nothing of Bellaroba's friends and cared nothing for the Captain's
+enemies. But, as a matter of history, the proceedings of Mosca upon that
+eventful day were of the greatest possible interest to Signorina
+Castaneve. Donna Matura, trust her, had not failed to report his first
+appearance, stork-like, in the Borgo. No subsequent voyage of his into
+those parts (and he made many) was lost upon Olimpia. Captain Mosca,
+honest man, made a preposterous accomplice. His rusty cloak, the white
+of his observant eye, the craning of his neck, the very angle of his
+sword--cocked up for frolic like a wren's tail--spoke the profuse
+conspirator. He spent money liberally, seemed to have plenty more, had
+his finger to his nose with every other word. He brought a troop of
+underlings; a bevy of young women under his orders turned the little
+shuttered house out of doors--at every window carpets, curtains,
+hangings of all sorts, fluttered as if for a triumphal procession.
+Flowers came in stacks: "H'm!" said Olimpia, "there's a woman in this."
+A couple of asses brought skins of wine. "That will be wash for the lean
+hog himself," she added. From that time forth she never left her
+shutter. To make herself the more sure she gave orders to Donna Matura
+to close all the shutters alike. Captain Mosca, on one of his returns to
+the Borgo, looked up at the blind green eyes of his former haven and,
+chuckling, rubbed his hands. This artless outlet to his feelings was
+interpreted for what it was worth behind the shutter.
+
+By six of the evening Mosca, seeing Olimpia's house still keep a dead
+face, threw off the last remnant of his cares and bade himself be
+merry. "My handsome friend is either asleep or on a journey, it
+appears," said he to himself. "That, on the whole, is well. I cannot
+think she would be pleased at the advent of little Bellaroba riding
+pillion to me. Still less would the honour about to be paid the young
+lady afford her any gratification. Least of all would her observations
+on the subject tend to clear the air. No, no. Everything is for the
+best, it seems, and the world still a tolerable place. Now for my little
+wood-bird." He paid and dismissed his work-people, then rode off himself
+to fetch Bellaroba. And Olimpia, from her shutter, watched him go.
+
+There was no trouble on the child's score. The Countess was away; a
+feigned message from her was enough. Had she been at home and in a good
+humour, she would have accorded a real one, no doubt; so the deceit was
+quite harmless. Bellaroba demurred a little that she could not in person
+warn Angioletto, but the Captain begged her to have no fears. Time
+pressed; it was evident the Countess's service was urgent. Yet the
+Captain swore by all that he held sacred--to be sure no great things,
+but Bellaroba could not know that--to deliver her message to the lad
+with his own hand. "For," said he, and confirmed it with an oath, "if I
+don't see him this very night it will be a pity:" words which were
+afterwards thought to have been prophetic by the curious in such
+matters. So Bellaroba entrusted him with her scrawl to "My love
+Angilotto," and the Captain chewed and swallowed it when she was not
+looking. Then he lifted her to his horse and rode with her into the
+green-sheltered Borgo, just as it was settling into twilight. And
+Olimpia, from her shutter, saw them come.
+
+I spare you the picture of her fury: it was not seemly, for all it was
+very white and still. The sight of a handsome girl shuddering in a cold
+stare under the grip of an evil spirit can never be pleasant; and where
+the experienced Donna Matura shrank from what she saw and heard, it
+becomes not me to tread. Donna Matura was of her country, that cheerful,
+laughing Midland of the Po, and neither felt the Venetian throb of
+pleasure nor conceived the excesses of Venetian pain. Extremes touch on
+the Lagoon. Donna Matura saw her gold-haired mistress white and drawn,
+saw her witless shaking, saw her tear and rend herself, heard her jerked
+words of loathing, blasphemy, and obscene defiance--and fairly fled the
+house. "For," as she said, "if words of man or woman could bring the
+rafters about our ears, or open a pit to send us lightly whither we all
+must go who have heard them, those words which Madam Olimpia spat about
+her must surely do it." So much she confessed to afterwards, but no
+more; for she stayed nothing more.
+
+Olimpia may have leaned twisting against her wall for about an hour,
+mouthing insane babble from her blued lips. It was at least quite dark
+when she came to herself, lit the lamp, wiped the cold beads from her
+forehead, smoothed and bound her hair. She was not herself, nor looked
+to be so; she had a face completely colourless, lips like grey mould,
+and burning black eyes. But her hand was steady; she hardly winked; her
+breath, which came through her nose, was even, though it whistled rather
+sharply. Whatever she was about--and she seemed to be acting a part--she
+did with extraordinary care, down to the changing of her crimson dress
+for a dark green one. The former had been loose and clinging, made of
+velvet; the dark green was of cloth, fitted her close, and, as she
+ascertained by a few gestures, gave free play to her arms. She knocked
+off her heeled Venetian shoes, whose clatter was familiar to the house,
+and bound on flat-soled sandals instead. Over her head she had a black
+lace scarf, on her hands leather gauntlets. Lastly, she took from a
+press a long, double-edged knife, felt its temper, and stuck it inside
+her stocking, under the garter. She made a final hasty sweep of the room
+with her unquiet eyes as she went out of it.
+
+The door of the house she knocked upon was opened by a page, who asked
+her business.
+
+"Mosca, Captain Mosca, is my business," said she in a whisper.
+
+"The Signor Capitano is occupied, Madonna," replied the boy.
+
+"I know it, I know it," she answered. "But my business is the lady's
+business also. I must see them both--and at once. Let me pass."
+
+The page vowed and swore by all the company of Heaven that those were
+her actual words. He was put to the torture and cried in the most
+heartrending manner; but he held to it, so long as he could hold to
+anything, that the visitor had said "her business was the other lady's
+business." What a further application of the question might have
+brought we cannot tell, since he fainted before it could be tried. "The
+boy Gasparo appeared to take no further interest in the elucidation of
+the truth," reported the judges, "and we recommend that he be chastised
+for contumacy." He was, at any rate, no witness of the scene which
+followed Olimpia's entry. There was that about her, a subdued haste, a
+deliberation, a kind of intensity got by rote, which fascinated the
+youngster and left him staring in the hall.
+
+Olimpia walked across it alone, went straight to a door at the bottom on
+the right-hand side, turned the handle, and entered. There was a table
+spread with supper; there was Captain Mosca seated at it eating a peach
+from his wine-glass; there was Bellaroba, flushed and marred with tears,
+leaning against the further wall. She gave a little gasp of fear when
+she saw what the doorway framed; after that she followed Olimpia about
+the room with the same incurable fascination which the page-boy had
+felt. Olimpia shut the door as softly as she had opened it, and as
+softly shot the bolt.
+
+Then it seemed that Mosca felt her presence, for he turned, saw, and
+jumped up with a cry mingled of fear and rage. It was found out
+afterwards that he was unarmed. This will explain his alarm. Disastrous
+honesty! his sword was upstairs in the bed.
+
+There followed a most curious scene. The Captain stood up by the table
+and dogged Olimpia with his narrow eyes. When she advanced, he backed;
+when she stopped, he stopped. In this manner, eyeing each other without
+a blink, they made the round of the table. Bellaroba cowered by the
+wall; pursued and pursuer brushed against her in turn. She shivered and
+moaned a little at every touch; but they were too intent upon their game
+to know that she was there. In the second round, Mosca, who was again
+close to her, reached out his hand for a knife from the table. Quick as
+thought Olimpia was at him, reached across and drove her knife through
+his hand into the wood. Mosca howled, but his fear by now was such that
+he must be free to run as before, though he maimed himself. He tore his
+hand away and left Olimpia holding a fixed blade. She wrenched it out
+and made a pounce. The miserable Mosca turned to Bellaroba. He laid what
+he had left of hands upon her shoulders; he pulled her from the wall; he
+set her before him and hugged her close to his breast. Thus he made her
+back a shield against the long knife, and with her he fenced and held
+off his enemy for minutes more. Olimpia, horribly busy, scorched the
+girl's neck with her breath--but she never made to hurt her.
+
+Then came the end. Olimpia made a lunge at his right side. The Captain
+hugged Bellaroba there. At the next moment the long knife was below his
+left arm, buried to the hilt, and defender and defence rolled heavily to
+the floor. Olimpia walked to the table and helped herself to the
+Captain's Val Pulicella.
+
+The watch (whom the page had roused after Mosca's first cry) broke in by
+the window, disentangled Bellaroba, bound the hands of both prisoners
+behind their backs, and marched them and the boy off to the Castle.
+Count Guarini, coming in an hour later, found his murdered lieutenant
+for his only guest.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+SECOND MIDNIGHT CONVERSATION
+
+
+In that same night of mine and countermine Duke Borso, who had broken up
+the circle early by reason of his toothache, went wandering the long
+corridors of the Schifanoia under the sting of his scourge. He found his
+spacious pleasure-house valueless against that particular annoy, but (as
+always) he was the more whimsical for his affliction. Nothing works your
+genuine man of humour so nearly as himself. The sight of his own image,
+puffed and blinking in nightcap, bed-gown, and slippers, when he came
+upon it in a long mirror, set him chuckling. He paused before the absurd
+epitome to apostrophise, wagged a finger at it, and got wag for wag. "We
+might be two drolls in a pantomime!" said he to his double. "Your arm,
+gossip:" he crooked an elbow. "It seems," he continued, "that we are
+both sufferers, my poor fellow! Magnificence goes drooping; a swollen
+estate does not forbid a jowl of the same proportions; and give me leave
+to tell you, brother, that we have each of us been better dressed in our
+day. Fie, what a pair of quills below your gown; and what a sorry diadem
+to stand for two duchies and a marquisate of uncertain age! Duke and my
+brother, if we were to be spied upon by any of our Court just now, what
+sort of a reverence should we get, think you? Eh, you rogue, as much as
+we deserve! I will tell you, good Borso, my own poor opinion of these
+things. A Duke who cannot be dukely in his shirt, a Pope who is but an
+afflicted biped between the blankets, is no Duke at all, is a Pope by
+toleration. There should be some such test at every crowning of our
+sort. Souse a Bishop in his bath before you let him warm his chair; cry
+'Fire!' on the stairs of the Vatican and watch your Pontiff-elect
+scudding over the Piazza in his sark, before the Conclave sing _Veni
+Creator_. Judge of your Emperor with a swollen nose, blacken your Dukes
+in the eye: if they remain Dukes and Emperors you may safely obey them.
+They are men, Borso, they are men! Yes, you spindle-shanked rascal, you
+may well wince. Do you ponder how you would stand assay? So do I ponder
+it, brother, and doubt horribly." He clapped his hand to his face.
+"Steady now, steady, here comes another bout. Ah, Madonna of the
+Este--but this is a shrewd twinge! Fare you well, brother Fat-chops. I
+must walk this devil out of me." He waved a hand to his brother of the
+looking-glass and slippered away, groaning and sniggering to himself. So
+he walked and was philosophical till two of the morning. At that hour he
+was ready to drop with fatigue; but his pains had left him. "I will
+sleep, by the grace of Heaven," he said. He plumped down in the
+embrasure of a door, prepared to follow his humour: the door yielded and
+he with it. "Who am I to outrage a lady's chamber?" he muttered, half
+asleep. "To be sure she seems to invite me. Let us look at this
+complaisant sleeper." He went into the room. A glimmering lamp burned
+before a shrine, enough to show him to a decent four-post bed, empty.
+"By the great god Pan!" cried Borso, "my luck holds. Courage! I am not a
+Duke for nothing, then." He shut and bolted the door, slipped into the
+bed and was asleep in three minutes. It was twenty minutes after two.
+
+At the stroke of three, with a scarcely perceptible rustling, Angioletto
+slid down the chimney and stepped into the room. He carefully brushed
+himself with a brush which hung by the hearth. The chimney was by now
+thoroughly clean, however. He next washed his face and hands, undressed,
+and crept softly to the bed. Very quietly he inserted himself between
+the sheets, very softly kissed the shoulder of the sleeper; very soon he
+was as sound as his bedfellow.
+
+The Duke awoke, as his habit was, with the first light, and saw the
+curly head on the pillow beside him. He whistled softly to himself.
+
+"Now, by the tears of the Virgin," said he, "how did this lady come in?
+It would be as well to know it, since plainly I must go out." He sat up
+in bed, clasped his knees, and frowned a little. "It is clean against
+the traditions of my house," he ruminated, "but I think I will go. And
+the sooner the better."
+
+Suiting action to word, he had one foot on the floor when Angioletto,
+with a long sigh, opened his eyes, turned over, and saw him.
+
+"The devil!" said Duke Borso.
+
+"Madonna," was his second venture, when he had recognised the
+impropriety of his first, "Madonna, I am this moment about to retire--"
+
+Angioletto, whose eyes had attained their fullest stretch of wonder,
+opened his mouth--but not to speak. He gaped at the lord of the land.
+
+"Madonna--" Borso began once more. Then the other found his voice--
+
+"Alas, my lord Duke, it is Madonna I thought to find. Where is my wife?"
+
+That was Borso's cue to stare.
+
+"Your wife?" he cried, "your wife! Heaven above us, man, why the devil
+should your wife be in my bed?"
+
+Angioletto, with the deepest respect always, suffered a smile to play
+askew about his lips.
+
+"Alas, Magnificence," he said, "if I dared I would ask him, why the
+devil he should be in my wife's bed?"
+
+It was the youth's way to preface his audacities by the assurance that
+he dared not utter them. But the retort pleased Borso. His eyes began to
+twinkle.
+
+"Look ye, young gentleman," said he, suppressing his wish to chuckle,
+"if this is your wife's bed, I am sorry for you, for I give you my word
+she has not been in it to-night. But I confess I should like to know why
+your wife has a bed in my house."
+
+Angioletto nodded gravely.
+
+"I should be the last person to deny your Grace's right to all
+information. Bellaroba is my dear wife's name, her country is Venice,
+her duties are to be about Madama Lionella's person. My own duties are
+to be about hers, so far as I may."
+
+"Fair and softly, my friend," said the Duke, "not so fast, if you
+please. Do you know that Maids of Honour may not marry without
+permission, and, in any case, may not be visited by their husbands
+during their service?"
+
+"Magnificence, she was not married without permission. Or rather, she
+was married before permission was needed."
+
+"Eh, how may that be now?" said Borso, tucking in his chin. "Did she
+come here as Signora Qualcosa?"
+
+"She came here as Bellaroba, Magnificence. No one knows of our marriage
+but your Grace and the Holy Virgin."
+
+"Then you are not married, but should be. That is your meaning--eh?"
+
+"Ah, by Heaven, Magnificence," cried Angioletto, "we are the most
+married couple in the world!"
+
+"H'm," was all Borso had to say to that. "And who made her of Madama's
+Court?"
+
+"It was your Grace."
+
+"Oh, of course, of course, man! But why the deuce did I do it?"
+
+"It was at the request of Count Guarino Guarini, Magnificence?"
+
+"Eh, eh! now I recollect. Ah, to be sure! That must be a very agreeable
+reflection for you at this moment, my friend," he said, with a sly look.
+
+Angioletto took the equivoque with dignity, "I have perfect confidence
+in my wife, my lord Duke."
+
+Borso shrugged. "Well, it is your affair--not mine," he said. Then he
+changed his tone. "I think, however, we will come back to what is my
+affair as well as yours. Be so good as to tell me how you came here."
+
+"I came down the chimney," said Angioletto calmly. "I am by calling a
+chimney-sweep."
+
+"Upon my word," Borso said, "this is a fine story I am piecing together!
+How long have you been of that trade, pray?"
+
+Angioletto received this shot with firmness, even dignity. "I was
+formerly a poet attached to the Court, Magnificence. But when Madama
+turned me away it became necessary that I should see my young wife; so I
+became a chimney-sweep for the purpose."
+
+The Duke's mouth twitched too much for his own dignity. He pulled the
+bedclothes up to his nose, therefore, before he asked--
+
+"Why did Madama turn you away, sir?"
+
+Angioletto, for the first time, was confused. He hung his head.
+
+"I hope your Grace will not insist upon an answer," he replied in a
+troubled voice.
+
+Borso looked keenly at him for a time. "No, I think I will not," said
+he. "Are you the lad who sang me the _Caccia col falcone_?"
+
+"The same, my lord Duke."
+
+"I thought so. Now, sir, to come back to this performance of yours,
+which I suppose is not the first by any means--eh?"
+
+"It appears to be the last, my lord," said Angioletto ruefully.
+
+"I think it is the last," replied the Duke; "for I hope you understand
+that I can have you clapped into gaol for it."
+
+"Pardon, Magnificence--he can do more. He can have me hanged for it."
+
+"I don't agree with you," said Borso. "If my name were Ferdinand of
+Arragon, or Sforza, or della Rovere, yes; but being Borso d'Este, no."
+
+"Your Grace puts me to shame," said Angioletto, with feeling. "I am to
+take it then--"
+
+"You shall take it as you please, my friend," Borso rejoined, with his
+chin once more upon his clasped knees. "For my part I propose to take
+_you_ and keep you under lock and key for a season--as at present
+advised."
+
+Angioletto bowed, as well as one may who is sitting up in a very soft
+bed. His voice was quite meek.
+
+"I shall in all duty obey your Grace's directions, and will leave behind
+me but one small request, which I am persuaded Borso d'Este will not
+refuse his prisoner."
+
+"And what is that, my good friend?"
+
+"It is the care for the person and honour of my wife, my lord Duke,"
+answered Angioletto.
+
+This set Borso rubbing his nose. He thought before he spoke again.
+
+"As for your wife's person, my man," said he, "it will be as safe in my
+dominions as all persons, whatever their ages or conditions. Her honour
+is another affair. That is neither for me nor my laws, but for herself.
+And perhaps you will let me add that if to-night is a sample of her
+course of living, you are putting upon me a rather onerous charge."
+
+"My Lord, my Lord," cried Angioletto here, "I will answer for my wife's
+honour with my last drop of blood. It is her person I cannot answer for
+if I am in prison."
+
+"I have told you that I will answer for her person, master poet. I would
+much rather leave her honour to you and your drops of blood. So you may
+go to the Castle with a clear mind. To the Castle, moreover, you shall
+undoubtedly go, if it is only to teach you that the possession of a wife
+is no passport to other men's chimneys. First, however, I will ask you
+to do me a small service, which is to go to my bedchamber and send me my
+gentlemen, my dresser, and my clothes. I am, you perceive, entirely at
+your mercy. You will follow these persons back to me here, and will then
+give yourself up as I shall direct."
+
+Angioletto, out of bed by this time, knelt to the Duke's hand.
+
+"I am your Grace's servant," said he. He hastily dressed himself and
+went about the business he was bidden on.
+
+"Madam the Virgin," said Borso, with a half-laugh, "that is a fine young
+man! If he had not made so free with my chimneys I would advance him.
+Advanced he shall be!" he cried out after a while. "Zounds! has not
+Guarino made free with his wife? Eh, but I fear it." He shook his
+nightcap at the thought. "A couple of days' reflection in a half light
+will do the lad no harm. He'll dream of his wife, or compose me some
+songs. Bellaroba, he called her. I remember the jade--a demure,
+rosy-cheeked little cat, for ever twiddling her fingers or her
+apron-ends. Those sleek ones are the worst. Poor boy! I'll advance him.
+He shall be librarian, go secretary to Rome or Florence. I'll have him
+about my own person. By the Sons of Heaven, but he's as good as gold!
+Ah, I hear him."
+
+The Duke's gentlemen bowed themselves into the room, followed by the
+dresser.
+
+"Good morning, my friends," said Borso. "But where is my messenger?"
+
+"Magnificence, he is at the door," said the usher.
+
+"Bring him in, Foppa, bring him in," cried the Duke; "we know each other
+by now."
+
+Angioletto was introduced.
+
+"Master Angioletto," the twinkling old tyrant said, "get you downstairs
+to the Captain of the Archers. Say to him as follows: 'Captain, my lord
+the Duke begs you to conduct me surely to the Castle, and keep me
+prisoner there during his Grace's pleasure.' Will you oblige me so far?"
+
+"I shall obey you exactly, my lord Duke," said Angioletto, making a
+reverence.
+
+He went at once and gave himself up. In some quarter of an hour's time
+he was lodged in the Castle, in a cell upon the level of the moat. Next
+door to him on either side (though he knew nothing of it) were two women
+who had been brought in with a page-boy over night upon a charge of
+murder. Their case, indeed, was one of the first matters which engaged
+the attention of Duke Borso after mass.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+ORDEAL BY ROPE
+
+
+The prison chills made Olimpia shiver, the prison silences made her
+afraid. The wavering moan of the page-boy, who had been tumbled on to a
+straw bed after his first bout of the question, drove home the reality
+of her situation, and made her sick. Olimpia was one of your snug pretty
+women; she loved to be warmed, coaxed, petted; liked her bed, her fire;
+liked sweetmeats, and to see people about her go smiling. Mostly, too,
+she had had her way in these matters, for she was a beautiful creature,
+smooth and handsome as a Persian cat. Jealousy, on this account, was a
+new experience; she had never suffered it before, did not realise it
+now. Besides, it was over; she had killed her faithless lover. But the
+dark, the cold, the silence, the calm enmity of the dim walls--these
+were but an intensification of familiar discomforts. She had always been
+afraid of the dark, often cold, often quelled by quiet, made sullen by
+indifference. She hated all this, and felt it all, in spite of the glory
+of the Captain's killing. It seemed more awful now, more unendurable
+than ever, because--she knew there was no good disguising it--because it
+stood for something else. Ah, ah! she was in danger. So sure as she
+thought of this, Olimpia's heart stood still, and then suddenly throbbed
+as if it must break. It surged up into her throat. Her tongue clove to
+her palate, she felt the bristling of her flesh, could hear her heart
+quite loud making double knocks at her side. The page-boy moaned to
+himself through it all; a rat hidden somewhere bore him company by
+scratching most diligently at the brickwork. She could not hear anything
+of Bellaroba--the only familiar thing in this vast black horror. The
+panic gained upon her till her head swam in it. She could not die! Ah,
+never, never, never, by Christ on His throne!
+
+The sickening futility of that final word, Never, in the face of the
+dead certainty announced by the inexorable walls, served to make the
+wretch's case the more desperate. Panic, chalk-white, staring
+panic-fear, swallowed her up: the next few hours flew by as minutes,
+while she was cowering and gibbering in a corner. Before the inevitable
+you either resign or rave yourself mad--there is no middle course.
+Bellaroba took the first. Sitting in her cell with her cheek pressed
+against the wall which (though she knew it not) penned also her
+Angioletto, she never opened her eyes, nor cried, nor moaned; but where
+she settled herself at her entry there she was found when they came to
+hale her to the judgment. She gave no trouble, made no sign; but she let
+down her hair to cover her bare neck, and if she blushed it was that
+folks should see her blood-smirched evening finery by the light of day.
+She was a very decent girl always, and this seemed to her horrible even
+in a pit of horrors. Olimpia, clinging to life, was driven upon the
+second course. It took two halberdiers to hold her up.
+
+Borso had before him the deposition of the page-boy and the report of
+the watch. From the words of the first he suspected that both women were
+concerned--until he had heard the second. This was to the effect that
+the Captain's head had been cut off.
+
+"No, no," said Borso to himself, "I am heartily sorry for my young
+friend the chimney-sweeping poet, but I can't think him a fool. He would
+never have married a woman who could cut off a man's head. Yet stay! It
+may be that she floored the Captain and that the other rounded off the
+job with that gratuitous touch. She--that other--was eating walnuts when
+the watch came, I gather. She could have cut a dead man's head off,
+never doubt it. Well, let us see, let us see."
+
+Then it was that he gave the order: "Bring the two women before me."
+
+He did justice ever in the open. A broad green field outside one of the
+gates served him for court. Two gibbets and an open pit stood for the
+terror of the law; he himself, on a gilt chair under a canopy, for the
+majesty of it. The day was bright, breezy, and white-clouded. The
+poplars twinkled innumerably, the long Este gonfalon flacked and
+strained in the wind. Spectators with soldiery to hedge them kept a wide
+square about the plain. From their side the figures in the midst--the
+red, gold, and white about the pavilion, the steel of the soldiers, the
+drooping women between them--were about as real as a handful of
+marionettes. It seemed impossible such puppets could decide issues of
+life and death. But the red hangman and his machines were grim touches
+for a puppet-show.
+
+Olimpia Castaneve was brought forward first. She was more composed by
+now--the air, the sun, the cheerful colours of the court, had warmed
+her. She stood alone facing Borso. He, at first glance, remembered every
+shred of her; but he betrayed nothing. There was no one more blankly
+cool in this world than Borso on the judgment-seat.
+
+"What is your name, mistress?"
+
+"Magnificence, I am well known in Ferrara."
+
+"Your name," thundered the Duke, "by the face of the sky!"
+
+"Olimpia Castaneve."
+
+"Did you cut off the head of the Captain of Lances, who was called Il
+Mosca?"
+
+Olimpia was looking very handsome, and knew it.
+
+"Magnificence," she said, "my hand is on my heart." It was.
+
+"What the devil has that got to do with it?" asked Borso, looking about
+him for a reason.
+
+"Serenity, if my heart were guilty, it would burn my hand. If my hand
+were red, it would soil my heart."
+
+"Pouf!" said Borso, and puckered his face. "Stand back, Castaneve. Now
+for the little one. How are you called, baggage?"
+
+Bellaroba shivered a very little, and looked solemn.
+
+"Bellaroba, my lord."
+
+"Very pretty; but I must have more."
+
+"There is no more, my lord. I am wife of Angioletto."
+
+"Well, well. I know Master Angioletto, and he me. We'll have him here, I
+think. Hi, you!" said he, turning to an officer of his guards. "Go and
+fetch the chimney-sweep."
+
+Ten minutes passed; then Angioletto came up between a detachment of men,
+unbound. He was not observed to falter throughout his course over the
+broad field; but his eyes were fever bright and colour noticeably high.
+Bellaroba did not look up at him; her eyelids fluttered, but she kept
+her head hung, and as for her blushes they were curtained by her long
+hair. He, on the contrary, directly he had bent his knee to the Duke,
+turned to where she stood, and, in face of the whole city, put his arms
+about her, and found a way to kiss her cheek. The broad ring of
+onlookers wavered; the twitches played like summer lightning over
+Borso's face.
+
+"Come here, Angioletto," he said. Angioletto drew near the throne.
+
+"You see now, my friend," the Duke continued in a low voice, "what may
+happen to one's wife if she keeps not her bed o' nights. A certain
+Captain Mosca has been stabbed. More than that, his head was attacked
+when he had ceased to take any interest in it, and cut off. I ask no
+words from you, no comments, no adjurations, for you are a prejudiced
+party. Your wife and this other woman between them have done the
+Captain's business. Mine is to find out how. Stand aside now and
+listen."
+
+Angioletto started, opened his mouth to speak--but the Duke put up his
+hand. "Young man," said he sternly, "I am Duke of Ferrara, and you are
+my prisoner. Be good enough to remember that."
+
+Angioletto hung his head. Borso turned again to Bellaroba, but kept the
+other in his eye.
+
+"Now, missy, what had you to do with Captain Mosca's headpiece?"
+
+"Nothing, my lord."
+
+"What!" he roared. "Did you not cut it off?"
+
+"No, my lord."
+
+"Why not, girl? He was your enemy, I suppose?"
+
+"I think he was, my lord."
+
+"Think! Do you not know it? What did he want of you?"
+
+"He wanted to make me bad, my lord."
+
+"Ah! So you stabbed him, eh?"
+
+"No, my lord."
+
+"Come now, come now, girl. Look at your frock."
+
+She did look and was silent.
+
+"Well!" Borso continued, after a sharp glance at Angioletto. "Did your
+husband cut it off?"
+
+"No, my lord, he wasn't there--but--"
+
+"Well--but what?"
+
+"He would have killed him, my lord."
+
+"Oh, the devil he would! Why?"
+
+"Because he loves me, my lord."
+
+"H'm. Well, Miss Bellaroba, where's your hand?"
+
+She held it out. "Here, sir."
+
+"What a little one! Well, put it on your heart. Now, how does it feel?"
+
+"It jumps, my lord."
+
+"Does it burn you, child?"
+
+"No, my lord; it's quite cold."
+
+"Stand down, Bellaroba. Castaneve, come forward."
+
+His face just now was a sight to be seen--crumpled, infinitely prim,
+crow-footed like an ivied wall; but extraordinarily wise; with that
+tempered resolve which says, "I know Evil and I know Good, and dare be
+just to either." He was thinking profoundly; every one could see it.
+Best of the company before him Angioletto, the little Tuscan, read his
+thought. His own was, "Unless I fear Justice I need not fear Borso.
+Dante saw the death of his lady to be just. Courage then!"
+
+"Mistress Castaneve," said Duke Borso, "you declare yourself innocent?"
+
+"Excellency, I do, I do! Ah, Mother of God!" The panic was creeping up
+Olimpia's legs, to loosen the joints of her knees.
+
+The Judge turned half. "Mistress Bellaroba, you also declare yourself
+innocent?"
+
+"Yes, my lord," she said.
+
+"Diavolo!" muttered Angioletto, "he is not 'my lord'; he is
+'Magnificence.' I must scold her for this afterwards."
+
+"The position of affairs is this," said the Duke, aloud. "One of these
+prisoners is guilty of the deed, and the guilty one is the liar. Now, I
+will not put an innocent person to death if I can avoid it; and I will
+not put these women to the question, because I should wring a confession
+of guilt from each, and be no more certain than I was before. I may
+have my own opinion, and may have proved it on various grounds. That
+again, I do not care to obtrude. I do not see that I can better the
+precedent set me by a very wise man and patriarch, King Solomon of Zion.
+Let the women judge each other. My judgment is that the innocent of
+these two shall hang the guilty."
+
+The bystanders were silent, till one man shivered. The shiver swept
+lightly through the company like a wind in the reeds, and ran wider and
+wider till it stirred the farthest edge of the field. All eyes were upon
+the prisoners. Borso's blinked from below his shaggy brows, young
+Teofilo Calcagnini's were misty, Angioletto's hard and bright. Bellaroba
+had been motionless throughout, except when her lips moved to speak; she
+was motionless now. But Olimpia was panting. The unearthly quiet was
+only broken by that short sound for ten minutes.
+
+"Bellaroba," then said the Duke, "what say you? You declare that you are
+innocent. Will you hang the guilty and go free?"
+
+For the first time she looked up, but not at her judge. It was at
+Angioletto she looked, Angioletto at her.
+
+"No, my lord, I cannot," said Bellaroba in the hush. The wind shivered
+the reeds again, then fainted down.
+
+"Castaneve," said the dry voice, "what say you? You declare that you are
+innocent. Will you hang the guilty and go free?"
+
+The drowning Olimpia threw up her hands to clutch at this plank in the
+sea-swirl. Free! O God! The word turned her.
+
+"Magnificence, I must, I must, I must!" She wailed, and fell a heap to
+the ground. Bellaroba covered her eyes. Teofilo Calcagnini shook the
+tears from his. Borso sat on immovably, working his jaws.
+
+It is at this point that the conduct of Angioletto touches the
+sublime--a position never accorded by posterity to his verse. It proves
+him, nevertheless, the greater artist to this extent, that he was
+equally the slave of the Idea, though working in more intractable stuff:
+himself, namely; his own little heart throbbing in his own young body.
+Therefore he deserves well of posterity, which finds his verses thin.
+Said Angioletto: "Yes, Bellaroba is my adorable wife, loved beyond all
+women, deserving beyond all price. Yet if she killed the Captain she is
+guilty of death, and the sentence is just whoever perform it. And if,
+being guiltless, she is hanged by the guilty, the action will glorify
+her; for it is the price she pays for clean hands."
+
+Then, in the midst of that waiting assembly, he called the girl to him
+by her name, took her face in both his hands and kissed it very
+tenderly, smiling all the time through his quick tears.
+
+"My dear little heart," said he, "your husband is proud of you. All that
+you have done is admirable in this black business. In a very short time
+I shall see you again. Though it is a higher flight than the Schifanoia
+chimney, it is quicker done. Trust me, Bellaroba; you know I have never
+failed you yet."
+
+He could say no more, but took her in his arms and held her there,
+speechless as he was with inspiration. She, seeming to burn in the fire
+that consumed him, lay quite still, neither sobbing any more, nor
+shivering. So they clung together for a little. Then Angioletto lifted
+up his face from her cheek, and put her gently away from him.
+
+"Let justice be done, Excellency," he called out in his shrill boy's
+voice, "we have said our say to each other."
+
+Borso spoke.
+
+"Justice shall be done. The innocent has condemned the guilty: let that
+woman be hanged. We have learned the value of clean hands this day.
+Mistress Bellaroba, you have a man in ten thousand; Angioletto, my
+friend, you have what you deserve, a woman in ten million. It is not
+fair that the worth of you two should be known only to me and the
+Blessed Virgin; you shall tell it now to a priest. Come along, and let
+me have the whole story with my breakfast."
+
+Thus Duke Borso did judgment for his good town of Ferrara in times very
+remote from our own. The Ferrarese used to say that it needs a sound
+lawyer to know how to break the laws.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Little Novels of Italy, by Maurice Henry Hewlett
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