Little Novels of Italy Part 22

"Citizens," said the Borgia, in fact, "I pledge you my sacred word that the d.u.c.h.ess 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 pa.s.sion not been pent in one wicked place) fell to kissing the flouted clay.

Getting up from this tribute, he was faced by Cesare Borgia and his men; by Cesare who, used to such stratagems as this of late, had had the whole story out of Ludovic at Milan, and forestalled Nona by buying up the troop of "Centaurs" before ever he entered the city. Thus had Amilcare been sold by his own purchase, and thus Grifone griped in his own springe. Cesare found him, I say, and Grifone knew in the first crossing of their eyes that his hour had come.

He bore it without a wink, and lucky he might think it that for Cesare also the time was short. He was sooner dead than he dared to hope, and died cursing the name of Borgia. But that was a seasoned name.

"The populace is on fire, Highness," reported a breathed captain. "It clamours for the d.u.c.h.ess 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 pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing throngs.

"Evviva Madonna! Hail, d.u.c.h.ess 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 la.s.so!_ 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 G.o.d," said Bianca Maria. "Let her be decently buried, but not here."

It was, however, explained that for reasons of policy the d.u.c.h.ess 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 pa.s.sion is out.

I almost despair of winning your applause for poor Molly Lovel, yet will add this finally in her justification. Women are most loved when they are lovely, most lovely when they are meek. This is not to say that they will be worthily loved or loyally: there are two sides to a bargain. Yet this one thing more: they are neither meek nor lovely unless they love.

And since Molly Lovel, on my showing, was both in a superlative degree, it follows that she must have loved much. She was ill repaid while she lived; let now that measure be meted her which was accorded another Molly whose surname was Magdalene.

MESSER CINO AND THE LIVE COAL

I

It is not generally known that the learned Aristotle once spent the night in a basket dangled midway betwixt attic and bas.e.m.e.nt 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 gra.s.s; the lady rides him in the mannish way. In pictures he is always doting, humbled to the dust or cradled in his basket, when he is not showing his paces on the lawn. By all accounts it was a bad case of green-sickness, as such late cases are. You are to understand that he refused all nourishment, took delight in no manner of books, could not be stayed by the nicest problems of Physical Science--such as whether the beaver does indeed catch fish with his tail, the truth concerning the eyesight of the lynxes of Boeotia, or what gave the partridge such a reputation for heedless gallantry. But it would be unprofitable to inquire into all this; Aristotle was not the first enamoured sage in history, nor was he the last. And where he bowed his laborious front it was to be hoped that Messer Cino of Pistoja might do the like. It is of him that I am to speak. The story is of Selvaggia Vergiolesi, the beautiful romp, and of Messer Guittoncino de' Sigibuldi, that most eminent jurist, familiarly known as Cino da Pistoja in the affectionate phrasing of his native town.

Love-making was the mode in his day (which was also Dante's), but Master Cino had been all for the Civil Law. The Digest, the Pandects, the Inst.i.tutes of Gaius and what not, had given him a bent back before his time, so that he walked among the Pistolese beauties with his eyes on the ground and his hands knotted behind his decent robe. Love might have made him fatter, yet he throve upon his arid food; he sat in an important chair in his University; he had lectured at Bologna (hive of sucking Archdeacons), at Siena, at Perugia. Should he prosper, he looked to Florence for his next jump. As little as he could contrive was he for Pope or Emperor, Black or White, Farinata or Cerchi; banishment came that road. His friend Dante was footsore with exile, halfway over Apennine by this time; Cino knew that for him also the treading was very delicate. Const.i.tutionally 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 a.s.sessorship of Civil Causes, where his solemn chair, where his t.i.tle 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 cla.s.s, got cold feet, and turned poet.

II

It was a strange hour when Love leaped the heart of Cino, that staid jurisconsult, to send him reeling up the sunny side of the piazza heedless of his friends or his enemies. To his dying day he could not have told you how it came upon him. Being a man of slow utterance and of a mind necessarily bent towards the concrete, all he could confess to himself throughout the terrible business was, that there had been a cataclysm. He remembered the coldness of his feet; cold feet in mid April--something like a cataclysm! As he turned it over and over in his mind a lady recurred with the persistence of a refrain in a ballad; and words, quite unaccustomed words, tripped over his tongue to meet her.

What a lovely vision she had made!--"Una donzella non con uman' volto (a gentle lady not of human look)." Well, what next? Ah, something about "Amor, che ha la mia virtu tolto (Love that has reft me of my manly will)." Then should come _amore_, and of course _cuore_, and _disi_, and _anch' io_! This was very new; it was also very strange what a fascination he found in his phrenetic exercises. Rhyme, now: he had called it often enough a jingle of endings; it were more true to say that it was a jingle of mendings, for it certainly soothed him. He was making a G.o.ddess in his own image; poetry--Santa Cecilia! he was a poet, like his friend Dante, like that supercilious young tomb-walker Guido Cavalcanti. A poet he undoubtedly became; and if his feet were cold his heart was on fire.

What happened was this, so far as I am informed. At the north angle of the church of San Giovanni fuori Civitas there is a narrow lane, so dark that at very noon no sunlight comes in but upon blue bars of dust slant-wise overhead. This lay upon Cino's daily beat from his lodgings to the Podesta;[1] and here it was that he met Selvaggia Vergiolesi.

She was one of three young girls walking hand in hand up the alley on their way from early ma.s.s, 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 ma.s.s-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 pa.s.s 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 embarra.s.s this demure professor, to presume upon her s.e.x while discarding it, was a great joke after a tediously droned ma.s.s 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 a.s.sessor of Civil Causes, a brazier with only too good a draught. For love in love-learned Tuscany was then a roaring wind; it came rhythmically and set the glowing ma.s.s beating like the sestett of a sonnet. One lived in numbers in those days; numbers always came. You sonnetteered upon the battlefield, in the pulpit, on the Bench, at the Bar. Throughout the moil of his day's work at the Podesta those clinging long words, in themselves inspiration, _diso, piacere, vaghezza, gentilezza, diletto, affetto,_ beautiful twins that go ever embraced, wailed in poor Cino's ears, and insensibly shaped themselves coherent. He thought they were like mirrors, so placed that each gave a look of Selvaggia. Before the end of the day he had the whole of her in a sonnet which, if it were as good as it was comfortable, should needs (he thought) be excellent. The thrill which marked achievement sent the blood to his head; this time he gloried in cold feet. He wrote his sonnet out fair upon vellum in a hand no scribe at the Papal Court could have bettered, rolled it, tied it with green and white silk (her colours, colours of the hawthorn hedge!), and went out into the streets at the falling-in of the day to deliver it.

The Palazzo Vergiolesi lay over by the church of San Francesco al Prato, just where the Via San Prospero debouches into that green place. Like all Tuscan palaces it was more fortress than house, a dark square box of masonry with a machicollated lid; and separate from it, but appurtenant, had a most grim tower with a slit or two halfway up for all its windows.

Here, under the great escutcheon of the Vergiolesi, Cino delivered his missive. The porter took it with a bow so gracious that the poet was bold to ask whether the Lady Selvaggia was actually within.