The Shame of Motley Part 14

She looked at me, a puzzled glance in her eyes, a bewildered expression knitting her fine brows.

"I do not take your meaning, my friend," she complained.

"Then mark the enucleation. I will expound this meaning of mine through the medium of a parable. In Babylon of old, there dwelt a king whose name was Belshazzar, who, having fallen into habits of voluptuousness and luxury, was so enslaved by them as to feast and make merry whilst a certain Darius, King of the Medes, was marching in arms against his capital. At a feast one night the fingers of a man's hand were seen to write upon the wall, and the words they wrote were a belated warning: 'Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.'"

She looked at me, her eyes round with inquiry, and a faint smile of uncertainty on her lips.

"Let me confess that your elucidation helps me but little."

"Ponder it, Madonna," I urged her. "Subst.i.tute Giovanni Sforza for Belshazzar, Cesare Borgia for King Darius, and you have the key to my parable."

"But is it indeed so? Does danger threaten Pesaro from that quarter?"

"Aye, does it," I answered, almost impatiently. "The tide of war is surging up, and presently will whelm us utterly. Yet here sits the Lord Giovanni making merry with b.a.l.l.s and masques and burle and banquets, wholly unprepared, wholly unconscious of his peril. There may be no hand to write a warning on his walls--or else, as in the case of Babylon, the hand will write when it is too late to avert the evil--yet there are not wanting other signs for those that have the wit to read them; nor is a wondrous penetration needed."

"And you think then--" she began.

"I think that if you are obdurate with him, he and your brother may hurry you by force into this union. But if you temporise with half-promises, with suggestions that before Christmas you may grow reconciled to his wishes, he will be patient."

"But what if Christmas comes and finds us still in this position?"

"It will need a miracle for that; or, at least, the death of Cesare Borgia--an unlikely event, for they say he uses great precautions.

Saving the miracle, and providing Cesare lives, I will give the Lord Giovanni's reign in Pesaro at most two months."

We had halted now, and were confronting each other in the descending gloom.

"Lazzaro, dear friend," she cried, almost with gaiety, "I was wise to take counsel with you. You have planted in my heart a very vigorous growth of hope."

We turned soon after, and started to retrace our steps, for she might be ill-advised to remain absent overlong.

I left her on the terrace in a very different spirit from that in which she had come to me, bearing with me her promise that she would act as I had advised her. No doubt I had taken a load from her gentle soul, and oddly enough I had taken, too, a load from mine.

Things fell out as I said they would in far as Giovanni Sforza and Filippo were concerned. Madonna's seeming amenability to their wishes stayed their insistence, and they could but respect her wishes to let the betrothal be delayed yet a little while. And during the weeks that followed, it was I scarce know whether more pitiable or more amusing to see the efforts that Giovanni made to win her ardently desired affection.

Love has sharp eyes at times, and a dullard under the influence of the baby G.o.d will turn shrewd and exert rare wiles in the conduct of his wooing. Giovanni, by some intuition usually foreign to his dull nature, seemed to divine what manner of man would be Madonna Paola's ideal, and strove to pa.s.s himself off as possessed of the attributes of that ideal, with an ardour that was pitiably comical. He became an actor by the side of whom those comedians that played impromptus for his delectation were the merest bunglers with the art. He gathered that Madonna Paola loved the poets and their stately diction, and so, to please her better, he became a poet for the season.

"Poeta nascitur" the proverb runs, and that proverb's truth was doubtless forced home upon the Lord Giovanni at an early stage of his excursions into the flowery meads of prosody. Fortunately he lacked the supreme vanity that is the attribute of most poetasters, and he was able to see that such things as after hours of midnight-labour he contrived to pen, would evoke nothing but her amus.e.m.e.nt--unless, indeed, it were her scorn--and render him the laughing-stock of all his Court.

So, in the wisdom of despair, he came to me, and with a gentleness that in the past he had rarely manifested for me, he asked me was I skilled in writing verse. There were not wanting others to whom he might have gone, for there was no lack of rhymsters about his Court; but perhaps he thought he could be more certain of my silence than of theirs.

I answered him that were the subject to my taste, I might succeed in throwing off some pa.s.sable lines upon it. He pressed gold upon me, and bade me there and then set about fashioning an ode to Madonna Paola, and to forget, when they were done, under pain of a whipping to the bone, that I had written them.

I obeyed him with a right good-will. For what subject of all subjects possible was there that made so powerful an appeal to my inclinations?

Within an hour he had the ode--not perhaps such a poem as might stand comparison with the verses of Messer Petrarca, yet a very pa.s.sable effusion, chaste of conceit and palpitating with sincerity and adoration. It was in that that I addressed her as the "Holy Flower of the Quince," which was the symbol of the House of Santafior.

So great an impression made that ode that on the morrow the Lord Giovanni came to me with a second bribe and a second threat of torture.

I gave him a sonnet of Petrarchian manner which went near to outshining the merits of the ode. And now, these requests of the Lord Giovanni's a.s.sumed an almost daily regularity, until it came to seem that did affairs continue in this manner for yet a little while, I should have earned me enough to have repurchased Biancomonte, and, so, ended my troubles. And good was the value that I gave him for his gold. How good, he never knew; for how was he, the clod, to guess that this despised jester of his Court was pouring out his very soul into the lines he wrote to the tyrant's orders?

It is scant wonder that, at last, Madonna Paola who had begun by smiling, was touched and moved by the ardent worship that sighed from those perfervid verses. So touched, indeed, was she as to believe the Lord Giovanni's love to be the pure and holy thing those lines presented it, and to conclude that his love had wrought in him a wondrous and enn.o.bling transformation. That so she thought I have the best of all reasons to affirm, for I had it from her very lips one day.

"Lazzaro," she sighed, "it is occurring to me that I have done the Lord Giovanni an injustice. I have misgauged his character. I held him to be a shallow, unlettered clown, devoid of any finer feelings. Yet his verses have a merit that is far above the common note of these writings, and they breathe such fine and lofty sentiments as could never spring from any but a fine and lofty soul."

How I came to keep my tongue from wagging out the truth I scarcely know.

It may be that I was frightened of the punishment that might overtake me did I betray my master; but I rather think that it was the fear of betraying myself, and so being flung into the outer darkness where there was no such radiant presence as Madonna Paola's. For had I told her it was I had penned those poems that were the marvel of the Court, she must of necessity have guessed my secret, for to such quick wits as hers it must have been plain at once that they were no vapourings of artistry, but the hot expressions of a burning truth. It was in that--in their supreme sincerity--that their chief virtue lay.

Thus weeks wore on. The vintage season came and went; the roses faded in the gardens of the Palazzo Sforza, and the trees put on their autumn garb of gold. October was upon us, and with it came, at last, the fear that long ago should have spurred us into activity. And now that it came it did not come to stimulate, but to palsy. Terror-stricken at the conquering advance of Valentino--which was the name they now gave Cesare Borgia; a name derived from his Duchy of Valentinois--Giovanni Sforza abruptly ceased his revelling, and made a hurried appeal for help to Francesco Gonzaga, Lord of Mantua--his brother-in-law, through the Lord of Pesaro's first marriage. The Mantuan Marquis sent him a hundred mercenaries under the command of an Albanian named Giacomo. As well might he have sent him a hundred figs wherewith to pelt the army of Valentino!

Disaster swooped down swiftly upon the Lord of Pesaro. His very people, seeing in what case they were, and how unprepared was their tyrant to defend them, wisely resolved that they would run no risks of fire and pillage by aiding to oppose the irresistible force that was being hurled against us.

It was on the second Sunday in October that the storm burst over the Lord Giovanni's head. He was on the point of leaving the Castle to attend Ma.s.s at San Domenico, and in his company were Filippo Sforza of Santafior and Madonna Paola, besides courtiers and attendants, amounting in all to perhaps a score of gallant cavaliers and ladies. The cavalcade was drawn up in the quadrangle, and Giovanni was on the point of mounting, when, of a sudden, a rumbling noise, as of distant thunder, but too continuous for that, arrested him, his foot already in the stirrup.

"What is that?" he asked, an ashen pallor overspreading his effeminate face, as, doubtless, the thought of the enemy came uppermost in his mind.

Men looked at one another with fear in their eyes and some of the ladies raised their voices in querulous beseeching for rea.s.surance. They had their answer even as they asked. The Albanian Giacomo, who was now virtually the provost of the Castle, appeared suddenly at the gates with half a score of men. He raised a warning hand, which compelled the Lord Giovanni to pause; then he rasped out a brisk command to his followers.

The winches creaked, and the drawbridge swung up even as with a clank and rattle of chains the portcullis fell.

That done, he came forward to impart the ominous news which one of his riders had brought him at the gallop from the Porta Romana.

A party of some fifty men, commanded by one of Cesare's captains, had ridden on in advance of the main army to call upon Pesaro to yield to the forces of the Church. And the people, without hesitation, had butchered the guard and thrown wide the gates, inviting the enemy to enter the town and seize the Castle. And to the end that this might be the better achieved, a hundred or so had traitorously taken up arms, and were pressing forward to support the little company that came, with such contemptuous daring, to storm our fortress and prepare the way for Valentino.

It was a pretty situation this for the Lord Giovanni, and here were fine opportunities for some brave acting under the eyes of his adored Madonna Paola. How would he bear himself now? I wondered.

He promised mighty well once the first shock of the news was overcome.

"By G.o.d and His saints!" he roared, "though it may be all that it is given me to do, I'll strike a blow to punish these dastards who have betrayed me, and to crush the presumption of this captain who attacks us with fifty men. It is a contempt which he shall bitterly repent him."

Then he thundered to Giacomo to marshal his men, and he called upon those of his courtiers who were knights to put on their armour that they might support him. Lastly he bade a page go help him to arm, that he might lead his little force in person.

I saw Madonna Paola's eyes gleam with a sudden light of admiration, and I guessed that in the matter of Giovanni's valour her opinions were undergoing the same change as the verses had caused them to undergo in the matter of his intellect.

Myself, I was amazed. For here was a Lord Giovanni I seemed never to have known, and I was eager to behold the sequel to so fine a prologue.

CHAPTER IX. THE FOOL-AT-ARMS

That valorous bearing that the Lord Giovanni showed whilst, with Madonna Paola's glance upon him, his fear of seeming afraid was greater than his actual fear of our a.s.sailants, he cast aside like a mantle once he was within the walls of his Castle, and under the eyes of none save the page and myself, for I followed idly at a respectful distance.

He stood irresolute and livid of countenance, his eagerness to arm and to lead his mercenaries and his knights all departed out of him. It was that curiosity of mine to see the sequel to his stout words that had led me to follow him, and what I saw was, after all, no more than I might have looked for--the proof that his big talk of sallying forth to battle was but so much acting. Yet it must have been acting of such a quality as to have deceived even his very self.

Now, however, by the main steps, he halted in the cool gloom of the gallery, and I saw that fear had caught his heart in an icy grip and was squeezing it empty. In his irresolution he turned about, and his gloomy eye fell upon me loitering in the porch. At that he turned to the page who followed in obedience to his command.

"Begone!" he growled at the lad, "I will have Boccadoro, there, to help me arm." And with a poor attempt at mirth--"The act is a madness," he muttered, "and so it is fitting that folly should put on my armour for it. Come with me, you," he bade me, and I, obediently, gladly, went forward and up the wide stone staircase after him, leaving the page to speculate as he listed on the matter of his abrupt dismissal.

I read the Lord Giovanni's motives, as clearly as if they had been written for me by his own hand. The opinion in which I might hold him was to him a matter of so small account that he little cared that I should be the witness of the weakness which he feared was about to overcome him--nay, which had overcome him already. Was I not the one man in Pesaro who already knew his true nature, as revealed by that matter of the verses which I had written, and of which he had a.s.sumed the authorship? He had no shame before me, for I already knew the very worst of him, and he was confident that I would not talk lest he should destroy me at my first word. And yet, there was more than that in his motive for choosing me to go with him in that hour, as I was to learn once we were closeted in his chamber.

"Boccadoro," he cried, "can you not find me some way out of this?" Under his beard I saw the quiver of his lips as he put the question.