Reeling, dancing, to himself it seemed, Carlo passed down the streets. White was on the ground; his brain was thick with whirling flakes; the roar of coming waters tingled in his veins. Sometimes he would pause and look stupidly at his right hand, as if in puzzle of its emptiness. There should have been something there—what was it?—a knife—a stone for two birds—Beatrice—and then Galeazzo. What had he omitted? He must go back and pick up the thread from the beginning.The waters came on as he stood, not close yet, but portentous, with a threatening roar. A crying shape, waving a bloody blade, sped towards and past him.'Arm, arm, for liberty!' it yelled as it ran. 'Tyranny is dead!'Carlo chuckled thickly to himself.'That was Olgiati. What does he with my dagger? I'll go and take it from him.'He turned, swaying, and in the act was swept upon, enveloped, and washed over by the torrent. It stranded him against a wall, where he stood blinking and giggling in the vortex of a multitudinous roar.'Murdered! the Duke! Murdered! Close the gates!'It thundered on and away. He looked at his hand once more; then turned for home.CHAPTER XXVIIMurdered? Ay; struck down in a moment on the threshold of God's house, lest his bloody footsteps entering should desecrate its pavement; snatched away to perdition from under the very shadows of stone saints, the gleam of the golden doors fading out of the horror of his fading eyes. He had had but time for one cry—'O Mother of God!'—a soul-clutch as wild as when a drowning man grasps at a flowering reed. In vain; he is under; the fair blossom whisks erect again, dashing the tears from her eyes; the white face far below is a stone among the stones.'So passeth the world's glory!'The choir sang, the organ thundered on; and still their blended fervour, while the dead body was relaxing and settling into the pool itself had made, rose poignant, sharper, more unearthly, piercing with tragic utterance its own burden, until at length, flood crashing upon flood, the roar of human passion below burst and overwhelmed it.What had happened?This.As the Duke entered the church by the west door, a full-bodied gentleman, dressed all in mail, with a jaque of crimson satin, had stepped from the crowd to make a way for him; which having affected to do, he had turned, and raising his velvet beret with his left hand, and dropping on one knee as if to crave some boon, had swiftly driven a dagger into Galeazzo's body, and again, as the Duke fell away from the stroke, freeing the blade, into his throat. Whereat, springing on the mortal cry that followed, flew other sparks of crimson from the body of the spectators, and pierced the doomed man with vicious stings, labouring out cries as they stabbed:—'For my sister!''For liberty!'—until the hilts slipping in their fingers sent their aims wavering.It was all the red act of a moment—the lancing of a ripened abscess—the gush, the scream, the silence.And then, the sudden stun and stupefaction yielding to mad tumult.None might know the gross body of this terror; only for the moment red coats and their partisans seemed paramount. But for the moment. The next, the scarlet clique seemed to break up and scatter, like a ball of red clay in a swirl of waters, and, flying on all sides, was caught and held in isolated particles among the throng. Whereat, for the first time, authority began to feel its paralysed wits, and to counter-shriek the desperate appeals of murder to rally and combine for liberty. A mighty equerry of the Duke, one da Ripa, fought, bellowing and struggling, to pull out his sword. Francione, a fellow of Visconti's, stabbed him under the armpit, and he wobbled and dropped amid the screaming crush, grinning horribly. Lampugnani, smiling and insinuative, slipped into a wailing group of women, and urged his soft passage through it, making for the door. He was almost out when, catching his foot in a skirt plucked sickly from his passing, he stumbled and rolled; and the spear of a giant Moor, who on the instant mounted the steps, passed through his throat.His body was first-fruits to the frenzied people without. They seized and bowled it through the streets, whacking it into shreds; then returned, breathed and blooded, for more. They were in high feather, ripe for prey and plunder. Galeazzo was dead! Viv' Anarchia!They pressed their way into the tumult; snatched gems and trinkets from the hair and bosoms of girls half mad with terror; took their brief toll of dainties, and only fell away, pushing and gabbling, before the onset of the ducal guard.Order followed presently; and then the tally and reckoning. The last fell swift enough to crown an orgy of perfection: screams in the squares; dismembered limbs; mangled scarecrows tossing in file from the battlements. Only two principals, Olgiati and Visconti, escaping for the moment, were reserved for later torments. A conspiracy, like near all blood conspiracies, abortive; founded on the common error that slaves abhor their bonds. They do not, in this world of unequal gifts and taxes. Moreover, it is inconsistent to suppose one can inaugurate an era of tolerance with murder.Olgiati, the last of that dark band to suffer, was also its only martyr. He had struck for a principle, straight in itself, oblique in its fanatic workings. Cursed by his father, abandoned by his friends and relatives, committed to unspeakable tortures, his courage never blenched or wavered. He gloried in his deed to the last; and, if a prayer escaped him, it was only that his executioners should vouchsafe him strength at the end to utter forth his soul in prayer. To Bona he sent a gentle message, deprecating his own instrumentality in the inevitable retributions of Providence. She answered, saintly vengeance, with a priest, urging him to save his soul by penitence. He retorted that, by God's mercy, his final deed should serve his sins for all atonement; and, so insisting, was carried to his mortal mangling. At the last moment a cry escaped him: 'Mors acerba: fama perpetua!' and, with that, and the shriek of 'Courage, Girolamo!' on his lips, he passed to his account.'The peace of Italy is dead!' cried Pope Sixtus on the day when news of the crime was brought to him. His prophecy found its first justification in a fervent appeal from the Duchess of Milan that he would posthumously absolve of his sins the man whom 'next to God she had loved above all else in the world.'And no doubt, being left to the present mercy of factions, she believed it.EPILOGUELong after the body of that tragedy had been committed to its eternal sleep, silently and by night, under the pavement of the vast cathedral; long after, in years so remote that the very bones of it, crumbling into ashes, might hardly be distinguished from the fibrous weeds of the golden shroud in which they had first been laid, fit moral to the deadly irony of human glory; long after, when the rise and fall of Ludovico Sforza, ripe achievement of his house and race, were already grown a tale for the wind to sob and whisper through lonely keyholes of a winter's night, there survived in Lombard legend the story of a marvellous boy, who, coming to earth and Milan once upon a time with some strange message of Christ in Arcady, had taken the winter in men's hearts with a brief St. Martin's summer of delight, and had so, in the bright morning of his promise, been snatched back to the heaven's nursery from which he had estrayed, leaving faint echoes of divinity in his wake. It whispered of a tomb, to which old tyranny had consigned this embodied angel, found emptied, like its sacred prototype's; and of the awe thereat which had fallen on its searchers. A fable, scared away at first in the strenuous roar of Time struggling for the mastery of great events; yet, in the later days of peace, still to be heard, very faint and far like a lark's song, dropping from the clouds.Sweet music, but a fable; and therefore more potent than reality to move men's hearts. Beatitudes are pronounced on things less tangible. Had Bernardo preached a creed more orthodox, he had been at this day a calendared saint on the strength of it. But he had only interpreted the human Christ to a people his prince and comrade had wrought to redeem.There had been those who—unless crushed under the fall of the tyranny which had sustained them—might have nipped the legend at its sprouting; telling how, on the night of that first dark and dire confusion, a cavalier, taking advantage of the brief anarchy that reigned, had appeared, with a force of his adherents, before the provost-marshal of that date, and had demanded of his hands the body of the martyred boy; how, kissing and wrapping the poor corpse in a costly cloak, this cavalier had lifted it with giant strength to his pommel, and, dismissing his silent followers, had ridden forth with his burden into the snowy darkness of the plains; how, in the ghostly dawn of a winter's morning, there had broken tears and wailing from a spectral throng gathered about the portal of an abbey in the distant hills; how, when presently the spring came with music of birds and gushing waters, there were no turves so green, no daisies so lush and fearless in all the monastic God's-acre, as those which the heart-stricken sorrow and tenderness of a newly received brother had brought to cover the grave of one, the youngest and most innocent of all the silent community gathered thereto.God rest thee, Carlo! Peace to thy faithful, passionate heart.An imperishable love, whose fruits, descended from that ancient stock, we eat to-day.But the body of the Fool, flung into a pit, was the carrion which first enriched its roots.Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majestyat the Edinburgh University Press*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOKA JAY OF ITALY***
Reeling, dancing, to himself it seemed, Carlo passed down the streets. White was on the ground; his brain was thick with whirling flakes; the roar of coming waters tingled in his veins. Sometimes he would pause and look stupidly at his right hand, as if in puzzle of its emptiness. There should have been something there—what was it?—a knife—a stone for two birds—Beatrice—and then Galeazzo. What had he omitted? He must go back and pick up the thread from the beginning.
The waters came on as he stood, not close yet, but portentous, with a threatening roar. A crying shape, waving a bloody blade, sped towards and past him.
'Arm, arm, for liberty!' it yelled as it ran. 'Tyranny is dead!'
Carlo chuckled thickly to himself.
'That was Olgiati. What does he with my dagger? I'll go and take it from him.'
He turned, swaying, and in the act was swept upon, enveloped, and washed over by the torrent. It stranded him against a wall, where he stood blinking and giggling in the vortex of a multitudinous roar.
'Murdered! the Duke! Murdered! Close the gates!'
It thundered on and away. He looked at his hand once more; then turned for home.
CHAPTER XXVII
Murdered? Ay; struck down in a moment on the threshold of God's house, lest his bloody footsteps entering should desecrate its pavement; snatched away to perdition from under the very shadows of stone saints, the gleam of the golden doors fading out of the horror of his fading eyes. He had had but time for one cry—'O Mother of God!'—a soul-clutch as wild as when a drowning man grasps at a flowering reed. In vain; he is under; the fair blossom whisks erect again, dashing the tears from her eyes; the white face far below is a stone among the stones.
'So passeth the world's glory!'
The choir sang, the organ thundered on; and still their blended fervour, while the dead body was relaxing and settling into the pool itself had made, rose poignant, sharper, more unearthly, piercing with tragic utterance its own burden, until at length, flood crashing upon flood, the roar of human passion below burst and overwhelmed it.
What had happened?
This.
As the Duke entered the church by the west door, a full-bodied gentleman, dressed all in mail, with a jaque of crimson satin, had stepped from the crowd to make a way for him; which having affected to do, he had turned, and raising his velvet beret with his left hand, and dropping on one knee as if to crave some boon, had swiftly driven a dagger into Galeazzo's body, and again, as the Duke fell away from the stroke, freeing the blade, into his throat. Whereat, springing on the mortal cry that followed, flew other sparks of crimson from the body of the spectators, and pierced the doomed man with vicious stings, labouring out cries as they stabbed:—
'For my sister!'
'For liberty!'—until the hilts slipping in their fingers sent their aims wavering.
It was all the red act of a moment—the lancing of a ripened abscess—the gush, the scream, the silence.
And then, the sudden stun and stupefaction yielding to mad tumult.
None might know the gross body of this terror; only for the moment red coats and their partisans seemed paramount. But for the moment. The next, the scarlet clique seemed to break up and scatter, like a ball of red clay in a swirl of waters, and, flying on all sides, was caught and held in isolated particles among the throng. Whereat, for the first time, authority began to feel its paralysed wits, and to counter-shriek the desperate appeals of murder to rally and combine for liberty. A mighty equerry of the Duke, one da Ripa, fought, bellowing and struggling, to pull out his sword. Francione, a fellow of Visconti's, stabbed him under the armpit, and he wobbled and dropped amid the screaming crush, grinning horribly. Lampugnani, smiling and insinuative, slipped into a wailing group of women, and urged his soft passage through it, making for the door. He was almost out when, catching his foot in a skirt plucked sickly from his passing, he stumbled and rolled; and the spear of a giant Moor, who on the instant mounted the steps, passed through his throat.
His body was first-fruits to the frenzied people without. They seized and bowled it through the streets, whacking it into shreds; then returned, breathed and blooded, for more. They were in high feather, ripe for prey and plunder. Galeazzo was dead! Viv' Anarchia!
They pressed their way into the tumult; snatched gems and trinkets from the hair and bosoms of girls half mad with terror; took their brief toll of dainties, and only fell away, pushing and gabbling, before the onset of the ducal guard.
Order followed presently; and then the tally and reckoning. The last fell swift enough to crown an orgy of perfection: screams in the squares; dismembered limbs; mangled scarecrows tossing in file from the battlements. Only two principals, Olgiati and Visconti, escaping for the moment, were reserved for later torments. A conspiracy, like near all blood conspiracies, abortive; founded on the common error that slaves abhor their bonds. They do not, in this world of unequal gifts and taxes. Moreover, it is inconsistent to suppose one can inaugurate an era of tolerance with murder.
Olgiati, the last of that dark band to suffer, was also its only martyr. He had struck for a principle, straight in itself, oblique in its fanatic workings. Cursed by his father, abandoned by his friends and relatives, committed to unspeakable tortures, his courage never blenched or wavered. He gloried in his deed to the last; and, if a prayer escaped him, it was only that his executioners should vouchsafe him strength at the end to utter forth his soul in prayer. To Bona he sent a gentle message, deprecating his own instrumentality in the inevitable retributions of Providence. She answered, saintly vengeance, with a priest, urging him to save his soul by penitence. He retorted that, by God's mercy, his final deed should serve his sins for all atonement; and, so insisting, was carried to his mortal mangling. At the last moment a cry escaped him: 'Mors acerba: fama perpetua!' and, with that, and the shriek of 'Courage, Girolamo!' on his lips, he passed to his account.
'The peace of Italy is dead!' cried Pope Sixtus on the day when news of the crime was brought to him. His prophecy found its first justification in a fervent appeal from the Duchess of Milan that he would posthumously absolve of his sins the man whom 'next to God she had loved above all else in the world.'
And no doubt, being left to the present mercy of factions, she believed it.
EPILOGUE
Long after the body of that tragedy had been committed to its eternal sleep, silently and by night, under the pavement of the vast cathedral; long after, in years so remote that the very bones of it, crumbling into ashes, might hardly be distinguished from the fibrous weeds of the golden shroud in which they had first been laid, fit moral to the deadly irony of human glory; long after, when the rise and fall of Ludovico Sforza, ripe achievement of his house and race, were already grown a tale for the wind to sob and whisper through lonely keyholes of a winter's night, there survived in Lombard legend the story of a marvellous boy, who, coming to earth and Milan once upon a time with some strange message of Christ in Arcady, had taken the winter in men's hearts with a brief St. Martin's summer of delight, and had so, in the bright morning of his promise, been snatched back to the heaven's nursery from which he had estrayed, leaving faint echoes of divinity in his wake. It whispered of a tomb, to which old tyranny had consigned this embodied angel, found emptied, like its sacred prototype's; and of the awe thereat which had fallen on its searchers. A fable, scared away at first in the strenuous roar of Time struggling for the mastery of great events; yet, in the later days of peace, still to be heard, very faint and far like a lark's song, dropping from the clouds.
Sweet music, but a fable; and therefore more potent than reality to move men's hearts. Beatitudes are pronounced on things less tangible. Had Bernardo preached a creed more orthodox, he had been at this day a calendared saint on the strength of it. But he had only interpreted the human Christ to a people his prince and comrade had wrought to redeem.
There had been those who—unless crushed under the fall of the tyranny which had sustained them—might have nipped the legend at its sprouting; telling how, on the night of that first dark and dire confusion, a cavalier, taking advantage of the brief anarchy that reigned, had appeared, with a force of his adherents, before the provost-marshal of that date, and had demanded of his hands the body of the martyred boy; how, kissing and wrapping the poor corpse in a costly cloak, this cavalier had lifted it with giant strength to his pommel, and, dismissing his silent followers, had ridden forth with his burden into the snowy darkness of the plains; how, in the ghostly dawn of a winter's morning, there had broken tears and wailing from a spectral throng gathered about the portal of an abbey in the distant hills; how, when presently the spring came with music of birds and gushing waters, there were no turves so green, no daisies so lush and fearless in all the monastic God's-acre, as those which the heart-stricken sorrow and tenderness of a newly received brother had brought to cover the grave of one, the youngest and most innocent of all the silent community gathered thereto.
God rest thee, Carlo! Peace to thy faithful, passionate heart.
An imperishable love, whose fruits, descended from that ancient stock, we eat to-day.
But the body of the Fool, flung into a pit, was the carrion which first enriched its roots.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majestyat the Edinburgh University Press
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOKA JAY OF ITALY***