A Jay of Italy Read online

  *CHAPTER IV*

  Galeazzo Maria Sforza, third Duke of Milan of his line, was verycharacteristically engaged in a very characteristic room of hisresplendent castello of the Porta Giovia, which dominated the whole cityfrom the north-east. This room, buried like a captivating lust in theheart of the Rocca, or inner citadel of the castello, swarmed with thosedeft procurers to the great, panders between Art and emotion, who aresatisfied, by contributing, each his share, to the glorification of asensual despotism, to partake a rediffused flavour of its sum. Theywere poets, painters, and musicians, sculptors and learned doctors, andevery one, despite his independent calling, a sycophant. Before thepower, central and paramount, which alone in their particular orbitcould amass within itself the total of their lesser lights, theyprostrated themselves as before a God. It is so in all ages of man. Hewill contribute, of choice, to the prosperous charity; he will lay hisgifts at the opulent shrine. The worldling, says Shakespeare, makes histestament of more to much. '_Ah! c'est le plus grand roi du monde!_'once cried Madame de Sevigne of Louis XIV., who had danced with her.'He is the finest gentleman I have ever seen!' cried Johnsonenthusiastically at a later date, after an interview with Farmer George;and though--perhaps because--the stout old Colossus was as independentas reason itself, he spoke the general moral. Professors were here,too, who did not blush to proclaim the exalted scion of Condottieri, theblood-lusting monster, the infernal atavism of Caligula, for the firstgentleman in Italy, or to prostitute their erudition in his service.

  It was Madonna Beatrice who had drawn that analogy, and there was plentyof justification for it; as also, it must be said, plenty of moreimmediate precedent for the abominations of this Galeazzo. If, like thegrand-matricidal Roman, he had poisoned his mother, the Visconti, hispredecessors, with their atrocious blood-profanations and exaltations ofbastardy, were responsible for the conditions which had made so dreadfulan act conceivable. If, emulating Caligula's treatment of frailvestals, he had buried alive some too-accommodating virgin of thecloister, whom he had first debauched, he could quote the Viscontiprecedent of carnality indulged till it became a very ecstasy offiend-possession. Between old Rome and modern Milan, indeed, there waslittle to prefer. Caligula used to throw spectators in the theatres tothe beasts, having first torn out the tongues of his victims, lest hisears should be offended by their articulate appeals. Bernabo Viscontiand his brother, with whom he shared the duchy, agreed upon an edictsubjecting State criminals to a scale of tortures which was calculatedto culminate in death in not less than forty days. Giovanni Maria andFilippo Maria, last of the accursed race, organised man-hunts in thestreets of their capitals, and fed their hounds on human flesh.

  To starve his victims to death, and, when they complained (it was an ageof practical jokes), to stuff their mouths with filth, was a pet sportwith Galeazzo. Once, for a wretch who had killed a hare, a crimeunpardonable, he procured a death of laughable, unspeakable torment byforcing him to devour the animal, bones and fur and all.

  It is enough. They were all madmen, in fact, moral abortions of that'breeding-in' of demi-gods which sows the world with chimeras. It isnot good for any man to be subject to no government but his own, andleast of all when a vicious heredity has imposed a sickness on hisreason. Blood affinities on the near side of incest, powerunquestioned, unbridled self-indulgences--these are no progenitors oftemperance and liberality. Amongst savages, generations ofinter-marryings will but refine exquisitely on savagery; and the despotsof this era were little more than the last expressions of a decadentbarbarism. Galeazzo, and such as Galeazzo, were, it is true, to projectthe long shadows of their lusts and cruelties over the timesforthcoming; yet it is as certain that with him the limits of the worstwere reached, and hereafter peoples and rulers were to grow to somecommon accord of participation in the enlightenments of their ages.

  One might have fancied in him, in his apparent reachings to foreclose onsuch a state, to appropriate to himself not its moral but its materialaccessories, some uneasy premonition of the truth. He stood on the lineof partition, his sympathies with the past, his greed for the opulentfuture, and, hesitating, was presently to drop between. That paradox ofthe lusts of savagery and the lusts of intellect hobnobbing in theindividual, which characterised so many of his contemporaries, criedaloud in him. He was superstitious and a sceptic. Like Malatesta ofRimini--who could enshrine beneath the shadow of one glorious church thebones of a favourite mistress and those of an admired heathenphilosopher which he had brought expressly from Greece for thepurpose--he would make a compromise between Paganism and Christianity.He worshipped God and the devil, as if his arrogance halted at nothingshort of reconciling two equal but antagonistic powers. He surroundedhimself with monks and infidels; acclaimed impartially an illuminatedpsalter or a painting for a bagnio, a Roman canticle or a hymn to thePaphian Venus; sobbed in the soft throbbings of a lute, and went sobbingto witness a captive's torturing; conceived himself an enlightenedpatron of the arts, and, in a mad caprice, ordered his craftsmen, underpenalty of instant death, to paint and hang with portraits of the ducalfamily in a single night a hall of the castello. He groped andgrovelled in bestiality; founded a library and peopled a university witherudition; encouraged profligacy and printing; was covetous and lavish,and splendid as the clusters of diamonds on a Jewess's unclean fingers.His palaces swarmed with cutthroats and physicians, philosophers andempirics, pimps and theologians, heaven-commissioned artists andpope-commissioned agents for indulgences, who would sell one absolutionbeforehand for the foulest excesses in lust or violence. His crowdedhalls were the very stage of the ante-renaissance, where the priest, thepoisoner, the romantic hero and the sordid villain, the flaunting doxyand the white dove of innocence, rubbed shoulders with the scene-painterand conductor in a disordered rehearsal of the melodrama to come. And sowe alight on him in this Rocca, sinister and lonely, the protagonist ofthe piece to which he was in a little to supply the most tragicdenouement.

  He lay sunk back in pillows on a couch set in an alcove high and apart.One long, jewelled hand caressed the head of a boarhound. Judged by theswift code of his times, he was already mature, a sage of thirty-one.His eyes were small and deep-seated under gloomy thatches, his foreheadnarrow and receding, his cheeks ravenous, his nose was hooked. But incontrast with this pinched hunger of feature were the bagging chin andsensual neck, as well as the grossness of the body, which attenuatedinto feeble legs. One could not look on him and gather from crown tofoot the assurance of a single generous youthful impulse. The curse ofan inherited despotism had wrinkled him from his birth.

  An effeminate luxury, which was presently to make Milan a byword amongthe austerer principalities, spoke in his dress. His short-skirtedtunic, puff-shouldered, and pinched and pleated at the waist within agem-encrusted girdle, was of Damascene silk, rose-coloured and linedwith costliest fur. His hose were of white satin; his slippers, ofcrimson velvet, sparkled with rosettes of diamonds and rubies. On hishead he wore a cap of maintenance, also of red velvet, and sewn withpearls; and a short jewelled dagger hung at his waist.

  By his side, a very foil to his magnificence, stood one in asad-coloured cloak. This was Lascaris, a Greek professor, whom he hadinvited to Milan for his learning, and used, like Pharaoh, to expoundhim his dreams. For he was subject to evil dreams, was thisGaleazzo--hauntings and visions which wrought in him that state that hewould become a very madman if so little as the shadow of an oppositioncrossed his imagination. And even now such a mood was working in him,as he lounged darkly conning the life of the hall from his eyrie.

  That was a deep, semi-domed alcove, approached from the main chamber bya short avenue of square-sided pillars, and roofed with a mosaic ofultramarine and gold, into which were wrought the arms of the Sforzasand Viscontis, the lilies of France and the red cross of Savoy.Entablatures of white marble carved into bas-reliefs filled theinter-columniations of this approach; while the pillars themselves, ofdark green panels inlai
d on white, were sprayed and flowered withexquisite mouldings in gold. The capitals, blossoming crowns of giltfoliage and marble faces, supported a white cornice, which at thealcove's mouth ran down into twin fluted shafts, between which rose ashallow flight of steps to a sort of dais or shrine within. And thence,from a carved marble bench, Galeazzo looked down on the soft surgingmotley of the throng in the hall below.

  Every sound there was instinctively subdued to the occasion: thelaughter of girls, the thrum of lutes, the ring of steel and rustle ofsilk. Not so much as a misdirected glance, even, would venture toappropriate to the company's cynic merriment the figure of a solitarycaptive, who stood bound and guarded at the foot of the dais. Yet itwas plain that this captive felt the enforced forbearance, and mocked itwith a bitterer cynicism than its own.

  He was a small, ill-formed, harsh-featured man, very soberly dressed,and with a cropped head--a feature sufficiently disdainful of the bushedand elaborately waved locks of those by whom he was surrounded.Lean-throated and short-sighted, his face was a face to scorn falsehoodwithout loving truth, a face the mouthpiece of dead languages for deadlanguages' sake, a face the contemner of the present just because it wasthe present and alive. As he stood, loweringly phlegmatic as any cagedhate, his peering eyes and snarling lip would occasionally liftthemselves together, not towards the glittering lord of destinies on thedais, but towards his henchman, the Greek, who would answer thechallenge with a stare of serene and opulent contempt. And so a longinterval of silence held them opposed.

  Suddenly the Duke stirred from his black reverie, his lips sputteringlittle inarticulate blasphemies. His knee peevishly dismissing thehound, he gripped an arm of the bench, and turning gloomily on Lascaris,uttered the one impatient word, 'Well?'

  The Greek, temporising for the moment, inclined his smooth,black-bearded face, so that the oily essence on his hair, which wasfoppishly crimped and snooded, was wafted to the Sforza nostrils,offending their delicacy. Galeazzo, momentarily repelled, rallied to aharsher frown, and demanded: 'The fruit, man, the fruit of all thismeditation? Jesu! it should be rotten-ripe by its smell!'

  Lascaris expanded his chest, unoffended, and, caressing his beard,answered impassively:--

  'Thou questionest of this vision, Theosutos? I answer, How many changescan be rung on a carillon of eight bells? By such measure shalt thouimagine, an thou canst, the changes possible to the myriad of particlesthat go to the composition of a single human eye. Now, in theunthinkable dispersements and readjustments of Infinity, shall it notsometimes happen that two particles, or two thousand particles, or twobillion particles, out of the sum of particles which were that eye,shall chance together again, and recover, because of that meeting, somevery ancient, very remote impression which they once absorbed in common?These, Theosutos, be the ghosts, haphazard, indefinable, visible to oneand unseen of all the rest, which make the solitary seer; these be thelonely hauntings of the ages--dust blown over desolate places, tocommingle a moment at some cross roads, and weave a phantom wreath ofmemory, and so again be cast and scattered among the cycles. Thy visionis but a shadow of old dead years.'

  An ill-repressed stutter of laughter from the prisoner at the foot ofthe steps greeted the finish of this exegesis. Lascaris flushedscarcely perceptibly. The Duke took no more notice of man or sound thanhe would have of a whimpering dog. Once or twice he stammered an oath,gnawing his finger, and frowning up, and down, and up again at theGreek. Finally he broke out, in a fury:--

  'Now, by the Host, thou consolest me--now, by the Host! To reconcile tothis spectre by arguing it perpetual! To----'

  Grinding his teeth, he clipped his long fingers on the bench arm, as ifhe were about to spring. Lascaris forestalled him with a placid word:--

  'Not perpetual. The mood invokes these shadows, as the mood shall laythem.'

  Galeazzo snarled.

  'The mood! What mood, fool? You shift and shift. God! it will be themood of the mood next. Hast thou no master-key to all? Go to, then!'

  He sank back into his cushions, glooming and panting. The sleek olivemask of the face near him yielded no sign of perturbation.

  Gradually a very deadly expression came to usurp in the Duke's eyes thatblinder madness of desperation. An indolent smile relaxed his features.He yawned, it was because, the soul horror being temporarily withdrawn,the incontinent devil was supplanting in him the tempestuous one. Herolled lazily about, addressing his creature once more:--

  'You doctors--all the same! Big words to little cures. Treat a State'sconstitution or a man's--'tis the word's the thing. Ye woo not thetruth, but her raiment. Hear'st me? I had a tutor once, a crabbedfellow called Montano.'

  He yawned again. The prisoner below (Cola Montano himself) gaspedslightly, and shot one stealthy glance his way. Lascaris sniggered.

  'Surely, lord,' he said, 'we need no reminding while the man himselfkeeps his tongue.'

  A half-suppressed snarl broke from the prisoner. Galeazzo, hunched onhis cushions, stared vacantly before him.

  'Ah!' he said, 'he could talk. I remember him, a midwife to thewind--as ye all be--as ye all be. What of the fellow?'

  Lascaris wondered.

  'Little, in truth, Magnificence, save in so far as your Magnificence waspleased to introduce his name.'

  'Did I? I had forgot. What was the connection? Empty words, was itnot, and vainglory and presumption?'

  'And discontent. Add it thereto, Illustrious.'

  'Discontent? Of what? The man prospers, I understand, on his school ofall the virtues. Discontent? Why, hath he not risen to thatindependence of power that he dares lampoon his prince? Discontent?'

  'Like Alexander, thou standest in his light, Theosutos.'

  'Discontent?'

  'Ay, that he should be twitted with having schooled a despot.'

  'Why, true; he taught me how to score a lesson with a scourge. Myshoulders could tell.'

  'Gods! did he dare?'

  'He dared. 'Twas a fellow of Roman mettle.'

  'He would dare more now.'

  'What?'

  'A republic, so they say.'

  'Ah! he should be the man for visions--a seer, an exorcist.'

  'Short-sighted for a seer, Illustrious. The man cannot see the lengthof his own nose.'

  'Yet may he see far. I would he were here.'

  The prisoner, wrought at last beyond self-control, turned on the Greekand squirted a little shriek of venom--

  'Yet through and through thee, thou loathsome, envious pimp!'

  Then he whipped upon the other--

  'And why not a republic, Galeazzo? Thy father Francesco was arepublican at heart, else had he never given his son's leading-stringsinto my hands. There was a confederacy dreamed of in his day--Genoa,Milan, and Venice; Florence, Sienna, and Bologna. One rampart to therolling Alps, one wall on which barbarian hordes might burst and wastethemselves in foam. Northwards, a baffled sea; south, all Italy atranquil haven, a watered garden, where knowledge with all its flowersshould find space, and breathing-space to grow. Dost thou love Italy?Then why not a republic, Galeazzo?'

  The Duke, as utterly impassive as if he were deaf, turned musingly toLascaris.

  'I heard one talk once,' said he, 'of a confederacy of republics, as whoshould say, An army all serfs. Words! The tails must obey the heads.Every ox knows it.'

  'Saving the frog-ox,' giggled the Greek, 'who bursts himself inemulation.'

  'Ah!' murmured the Duke, 'the frog-ox: see us tickle his self-puffery.'

  He feigned to catch sight all at once of Montano. His eyes opened widein astonishment: he held out his hands.

  'What!' he cried, 'the man of visions! the very man! Come hither, oldfriend. I was but now speaking of thee.'

  His guards permitting him, Montano sullenly mounted the steps, and stoodfacing the tyrant. His arms hung very plainly fettered before him; butthe other never took his languid, smiling eyes from his face.

  'Galeazzo,' said the scholar, harsh
and quick, 'I did not write theepigrams; but no matter. You seek to make an example; I submit myself.It is the despot's part to lay hands on order and sobriety. Despatch,then. Thou wilt serve my ends better than thine own. Every blow tofreedom is a link gone from thy mail.'

  The Duke listened to him as if in bland wonder.

  'Epigrams! An example!' he exclaimed. 'O, surely there is some mistakehere.'

  The thick brows of the prisoner contracted over his leaden eyes. He sethis teeth, breathing between them. Galeazzo appealed to Lascaris:--

  'Know'st aught of this?'

  The Greek shook his head ineffably, licking his lips.

  'No,' said Galeazzo, 'nor is it conceivable that my old friend andreprover should condescend to that meaner scourge. Jesu! for one of hislearning and condition to incur the fate of the common lampooner. Why, Imind me how one was invited to a ragout minced of his own tongue.'

  'Yes, Illustrious.'

  'And another to having his couplets scored in steel on the soles of hisfeet.'

  'Yes, Illustrious.'

  'And yet another to boiling eggs under his arm-pits, since he was cleverat hatching those winged epigrams'--he turned smoothly again to thetutor--'but not clever, as thou art, at reforming constitutions.'

  He fell back, with a sleek and hateful smile; then, sighing suddenly,advanced his body again.

  'I am troubled, Montano, I am troubled, and, since you chance to behere----'

  He yielded the explanation to Lascaris.

  'I weary of relating. Tell him of my symptoms, thou'--and he sunk oncemore into his cushions.

  The Greek diagnosed, his shifty eyes refusing to encounter the hardinquisition of the other's:--

  'His Magnificence is of late ever conscious of a face behind him,mournful and threatening. And still, if he turns to challenge it, it isbehind him; and still behind, maddening him with a thought of somethinghe can never overtake.'

  Galeazzo fixed his burning eyes on the prisoner, as if, through all hismockery, the hunger of a hopeless hope betrayed his soul.

  'Canst _thou_ strike it away,' he whispered hoarsely, 'or at least tellme what it is?'

  Montano growled:--

  'Ghosts, and dead years, and eye-particles! This trash ofpseudo-science--a saltimbanco braying in a doctor's skin! Less licence,Galeazzo, and more exercise--'tis all contained in that. This vision isbut a swimming blot of bile.'

  He was really half-deceived, half-convinced. The Duke seemed to listenreassured, then slowly rose, and, with an ingratiatory smile, patted hiserst tutor's shoulder.

  'Old honest friend,' he said, 'and ever true to the Roman in thee! Thouhast spoken as one might expect. Bile, is it--bile? and little wonder inthis upset of constitutions. Ebbene! we will take instant means tothrow it off.'

  He made a sign to the chief of the guard below.

  'Andrea!'

  Lascaris slunk back with a little gloating smile. The officer broughtup his men about Montano. The Duke murmured softly:--

  'Take good Messer Cola, and--' he paused a little, gazing winningly intohis captive's surprised, splenetic face--'and have him soundly floggedbefore the gate-house--to the bone, Andrea, tell Messer Jacopo.'

  Before the luring treachery of this stroke the prisoner stood for onemoment shocked, aghast. The next, as the guard seized him, he brokeinto a storm of vituperations and blasphemies, calling upon all the godsof Rome to protect him from a monster. Andrea crushed his mailed handdown on his writhing lips; he was dragged away struggling and screaming.As he disappeared Galeazzo descended mincingly to the hall, bent onpursuing the show. A cloud of courtiers, male and female flocked, likerooks following a plough, in his wake. As he left the citadel and wascrossing the outer ward, two ladies--one a young woman in her latetwenties; the other a slim, pale girl of thirteen--broke from a group ofattendants, and came, wreathed in one embrace, to accost him. Theelder, looking in his face with a certain questioning anxiety, spoke himwith a propitiatory smile and sigh:--

  'Galeazino, O thou little sweetest burden on my heart!'

  The endearment was really an inquiry, a warning; for there was aforeboding madness in his eyes. He made as if he would have struck herfrom his path. Her child companion caught his wrist with a merry cry:--

  'My little father, whither sportest thou without thy women?'

  He changed the direction of his hand and flipped the younger's cheek.

  'Come, then, chuck,' said he. 'There is a frolic toward that will speedan idle hour.'

  She caught up her skirts and followed him, as did the other, but lessclosely.

  The gatehouse commanded from its battlements an open panorama of thetown as far as the piazza of the duomo. Immediately to its front, in abare extended space, stood the whipping-post, a stout beam set on end ona stage and furnished with hooks and chains. Already on the groundbeside this (by preconcerted arrangement indeed) was a certainfunctionary, much respected of Milan. This was Messer Jacopo, the highcourt executioner--one, by virtue of his dealings in blood, almost on anequality with the master herald himself. Immobile and voiceless, hestood there like a model in an armoury. A short shirt of mail, and overit a scarlet jerkin with a plain dagger at the waist; hose of sobergrey; a bonnet and shoes of black velvet, the first adorned with a redquill, the second with red rosettes; gorget and steel gauntlets--suchwas the whole of Messer Jacopo, save for the wooden, inessential detailof his face and its fixed eyes of glass. There was something painfullyhuman, by contrast, in his understrappers, two or three of whom stood athand in leathern aprons--men of a rich, moist physique and greasy palms,and jocund, slaughter-house expression. These were on bantering termswith the mob, with all that loose raff of the neighbourhood, which hadcome streaming and pushing and chattering to witness the sport. It wasnot often that the rats of the quarter Giovia had a master of philosophyto desert.

  They had not long to wait. Almost simultaneously a little surging groupappeared at the gates, and a throng of gay heads above the ramparts.The jostle and delighted whisper went among the crowd. What proportionwould the scourging of a prince's tutor bear to the punishment itavenged? It surely would not be allowed to lose by procrastination.They craned their necks to catch an early sight of the victim. One ofthe assistants whipped experimentally through his fingers a thick, cruelthong of bullock-hide. It clacked a dry tongue.

  'Be quiet, thirsty one,' he cried boisterously. 'In a moment thou shaltdrink thyself to a sop.'

  Up on the ramparts the ladies, with bright, inquisitive eyes, stood bytheir lord. The girl Catherine, petted love-child of her father, huggedconfidingly to his arm.

  'Padre mio,' she said, 'how sweet the world looks from here! I couldfancy we were all Lazaruses, laughing down on that wicked Dives!'