Little Novels of Italy Part 18

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 a.s.sa.s.sin; 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 n.o.ble 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 hara.s.sed 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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.