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 Deumspired 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 onhisprie-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 fargone 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 meshall 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.
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 thebuona 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 hiscackling. 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 morselwent 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, beyonddoubt, 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 liquorcurved 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 atwhat 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 lovedyouthat 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 lightfrom 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.
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, neitherknowing 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 andcustode'sgoodwill 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 ownstockings 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, turnedsick 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 oldcustodefor 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 uphis 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 passionnot 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 ofpolicy 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.
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 isalways 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 Bœotia, 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 toFlorence 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.
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 comeamore, and of coursecuore, anddisiò, andanch' 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 aroaring 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 toask 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 wouldbe 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 hadsonnets andcanzoniaddressed 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.