At the mouth of it he was suddenly confronted by three of the bargelli. A lanthorn was raised and flashed on his patrician garments. An officer stepped forward briskly.
“Whence are you, sir?” he asked.
“From Piazza Navona,” answered Beltrame without hesitation.
“This way?” And the officer pointed up the alley.
“Why, yes. This way.”
One of the bargelli laughed. The officer stepped closer to Beltrame, and bade the lanthorn-bearer hold the light in the gentleman’s face.
“This alley, sir, has but one entrance - this. Now, sir, again whence are you?”
Confused, Beltrame sought shelter in bluster. He would not be interrogated. Was not a gentleman free to walk where he listed? Let them beware how they incommoded him. He was Messer Beltrame Severino.
The officer increased in courtesy but diminished nothing in his firmness.
“A man has been done to death down there,” he informed Beltrame, “and you would be well advised to return full answers to my questions, unless you prefer to go before the Ruota.”
Beltrame bade him go to the devil. Whereupon the men laid hands upon him, and the officer made bold to examine his weapons. Despite his precautions, Beltrame grew afraid, for he had wiped them in the dark.
The officer looked along the sword, then peered under the quillons of the hilt. What he saw there caused him to touch the spot with his finger, and then examine this.
“Wet blood,” said he, and added curtly to his men, “Bring him with you.”
They carried him off that he might tell what story he pleased to the president of the Ruota, and explain his wanderings in that blind alley by the Braschi.
Now it happened that the hole that Beltrame made in Angelo d’Asti’s fair body was not large enough for the escape of so great a soul. Yet might it have proved so but for another thing that happened. As they were bearing him away from the scene of the combat, wondering who he might be, and whither they should carry him, the group was met by Marco Fregosi - Madonna Lavinia’s brother, and Angelo’s good friend.
At sight of Angelo’s face, Marco made the bearers pause, and demanded to know what had befallen. Then, upon finding that the poet’s life was not yet extinct, he ordered them to carry him to his villa on Banchi Vecchi - the house which Angelo had left but an hour or so ago.
They nursed him back to health and wholeness. The beautiful Lavinia in a passion of solicitude tended him herself. Could she have done less? For you are to know that they brought him in with the red rose still tight between his teeth, and she had recognised her love token. If anything had still been wanting to complete Angelo’s conquest of her virgin heart, that thing he now afforded.
It was nine days before he opened his eyes to reason and understanding, his danger overpast; life and happiness awaiting him. They told him he was at the Villa Fregosi, and the very announcement did as much to complete his recovery as their tender efforts had done to bring it thus far.
On the morrow he saw Lavinia at last. Her brother brought her to him, and seeing him awake again her eyes filled with tears, as sweet as those had been bitter with which she had watered his pillow and her own - though he knew it not, nor dreamed it - during the first days of sojourn with them, when his vital fire seemed on the point of extinction.
It was on the occasion of this visit that Marco asked him for the details of what had happened, the story of how he had come by his hurt, expressing at the same time his own suspicions that it was Beltrame who had all but slain him.
“Ay,” answered Angelo wistfully, “Beltrame it was - the coward! He wore a mesh of steel in secret, and forced me into a combat that must end in murder.”
“And upon what grounds did you quarrel?” was Marco’s next question, heedless of his sister’s heightening distress.
“We fought for a rose; this.” He bore his hand half-way to his lips; then, bethinking him, he smiled, and dropped it back upon the coverlet.
“I have kept it for you,” said Lavinia through her tears.
The light of a great joy leaped to the poet’s eyes to answer her; a flush mounted to his pale brow.
“You fought for a rose?” quoth Marco, frowning. “I hardly understand.”
“You wouldn’t,” said Angelo. “’Twas a rose of Paradise.”
Marco looked grave. “Lavinia,” said he, rising gently, “I think perhaps we had better leave him. His mind is wandering again.”
“No, no,” laughed Angelo, and his tone was reassuring. “Tell me — what of Beltrame?”
“He is dead,” said Marco.
“Dead?” And for all that he had suffered at Beltrame’s hands, for all that Beltrame had sought his life, there was distress in Angelo’s voice and in the glance he bent upon Marco. “How came he to die?”
“By the will and pleasure of the Lord Cesare Borgia. He was hanged.”
“And I think he deserved it, Angelo,” said Lavinia. “He deserved it for his attempt to murder you, if not for the thing for which they punished him.”
“For what else, then, did he suffer?”
“Do you remember,” she said, “that afternoon at the Vatican?”
“Yes,” he answered, mystified.
“And how the Duke of Valentinois came in, so very angry, and told of the verses that had been found that day upon the statue of Pasquino, and how his bargelli were seeking for the author?”
“Yes, yes. But what has this to do with Beltrame?”
“He was the author,” said Marco.
“Beltrame?”
“It was proved so. It fell out thus,” Marco related. “It was his attempt to murder you that destroyed him. He was found near the Braschi a few moments after the bargelli had discovered you. There was blood on his sword, and so they carried him before the Tribunal of the Ruota, which began his examination with the usual formality of having him searched. In his pocket was found the original of those very verses, with all the erasures and emendations and substitutions that a writer makes in perfecting his work. He denied all knowledge of them; told, I know not what preposterous lies. But they put him to the question. At the third hoist he confessed.”
“Confessed?” quoth Angelo, his eyes dilating.
“Ay; the torture drew it from him. He may perhaps have thought they would not go the length of hanging him, or else, that since you were doubtless dead, they would hang him in any case, and so that he might at least avoid further agonies by confessing and being done with it. Cesare Borgia is tired of pasquinades, and wished to make an ensample. And so they hanged him next morning beside the statue of Pasquino.”
Angelo sank back on his pillows, and stared at the ceiling for some moments.
“He was undoubtedly a coward,” said he at length, smiling bitterly, “and he met a coward’s fate. He deserved to die. And yet he was not the author of that pasquinade.”
“Not the author? How do you know?”
“Because - Are we alone? Because,” said Angelo softly, “it was I who wrote it.”
“You, Angelo?” cried brother and sister in a breath. Angelo’s eyes were wandering round the room, reflecting the bewilderment that filled his soul. Suddenly they paused, fastening upon a garment of shot silk that was thrown across a chair.
“What is that?” he asked abruptly, pointing.
“That? Your doublet,” answered Marco. “They fetched it with you from the Braschi, when you were wounded.”
Angelo sank back again, and he smiled never so faintly.
“That makes it clear,” he said. “Beltrame took the wrong doublet in the dark. The verses were in my pocket.”
Lavinia’s hand stole over Angelo’s where it lay upon the coverlet. He raised his eyes to hers. “We owe him much - to this Beltrame,” he said slowly. “I could have known no peace while they were hunting the author of that pasquinade. He has satisfied the hunters, and so removed the danger of discovery from me. That is something. But I owe him more, do I not, Lavinia?”
; “Why, what else do you owe him?” inquired Marco.
“This brother of yours is a very dull fellow, Lavinia,” said Angelo, smiling as the blessed smile.
THE BANNER OF THE BULL
CONTENTS
THE URBINIAN
THE PERUGIAN
THE VENETIAN
THE URBINIAN
I
In that shrewd chapter of his upon a prince’s choice of ministers — of which I shall presently have more to say — Messer Niccolò Macchiavelli discovers three degrees in the intelligence of mankind. To the first belong those who understand things for themselves by virtue of their own natural endowments; to the second those who have at least the wit to discern what others understand; and to the third those who neither understand things for themselves nor yet through the demonstrations which others afford them. The first are rare and excellent, since they are the inventive and generative class; the second are of merit, since if not actually productive, they are at least reproductive; the third, being neither one nor the other, but mere parasites who prey for their existence — and often profitably — upon the other two, are entirely worthless.
There is yet a fourth class which the learned and subtle Florentine appears to have overlooked, a class which combines in itself the attributes of those other three. In this class I would place the famous Corvinus Trismegistus, who was the very oddest compound of inventiveness and stupidity, of duplicity and simplicity, of deceit and credulity, of guile and innocence, of ingenuity and ingenuousness, as you shall judge.
To begin with, Messer Corvinus Trismegistus had mastered — as his very name implies — all the secrets of Nature, of medicine, and of magic; so that the fame of him had gone out over the face of Italy like a ripple over water.
He knew, for instance, that the oil of scorpions captured in sunshine during the period of Sol in Scorpio — a most essential condition this — was an infallible cure for the plague. He knew that to correct an enlargement of the spleen, the certain way was to take the spleen of a goat, apply it for four-and-twenty hours to the affected part, and thereafter expose it to the sun; in a measure as the goat’s spleen should desiccate and wither, in such measure should the patient’s spleen be reduced and restored to health. He knew that the ashes of a wolf’s skin never failed as a remedy for baldness, and that to arrest bleeding at the nose nothing could rival an infusion from the bark of an olive-tree, provided the bark were taken from a young tree in the case of a young patient, and from an old tree in the case of an old patient. He knew that serpents stewed in wine, and afterwards eaten, would make sound and whole a leper, by conferring upon him the serpent’s faculty of changing its skin.
Deeply, too, was he versed in poisons and enchantments, and he made no secret — so frank and open was his nature — of his power to conjure spirits and, at need, to restore the dead to life. He had discovered an elixir vitae that preserved him still young and vigorous at the prodigious age of two thousand years, which he claimed to have attained; and another elixir, called Acqua Celeste — a very complex and subtle distillation this — that would reduce an old man’s age by fifty years, and restore to him his lost youth.
All this and much more was known to Corvinus the Thrice-Mage, although certain folk of Sadducaic mind have sought to show that the sum of his knowledge concerned the extent to which he could abuse the credulity of his contemporaries and render them his dupes. Similarly it was alleged — although his adherents set it down to the spite and envy that the great must for ever be provoking in the mean — that his real name was just Pietro Corvo, a name he got from his mother, who kept a wine-shop in Forli, and who could not herself with any degree of precision have named his father. And these deriders added that his having lived two thousand years was an idle vaunt since there were still many alive who remembered to have seen him as an ill-kempt, dirty urchin wallowing in the kennels of his native town.
Be all that as it may, there is no denying that he had achieved a great and well-deserved renown, and that he waxed rich in his mean dwelling in Urbino — that Itala Atene, the cradle of Italian art and learning. And to wax rich is, after all, considered by many to be the one outward sign of inward grace, the one indubitable proof of worth. To them, at least, it follows that Messer Corvinus was worthy.
This house of his stood in a narrow street behind the Oratory of San Giovanni, a street of crazy buildings that leaned across to each other until, had they been carried a little higher, they must have met in a Gothic arch, to exclude the slender strip of sky which, as it was, remained visible.
It was a quarter of the town admirably suited to a man of the magician’s studious habits. The greater streets of Urbino might tremble under the tramp of armed multitudes in those days when the Lord Cesare Borgia, Duke of Valentinois and Romagna, was master of the city, and the peaceful, scholarly Duke Guidobaldo a fugitive outcast. Down that narrow, ill-paved gap of sordid dwellings came no disturbers of the peace. So that Corvinus Trismegistus was left to pursue his studies unmolested, to crush his powders, and distil his marvellous elixirs.
Thither to seek his help and his advice came folk from every quarter of Italy. Thither in the first hour of a fair June night, about a fortnight after Cesare Borgia’s occupation of Urbino, came, attended by two grooms, the Lady Bianca de’ Fioravanti. This Lady Bianca was the daughter of that famous Fioravanti who was Lord of San Leo, the only fortress in Guidobaldo’s territory which, emboldened by its almost impregnable position, still held out in defiance of the irresistible Valentinois.
With much had heaven blessed Madonna Bianca. Wealth was hers and youth, and a great name; culture and a beauty that has been the subject of some songs. And yet, with all these gifts there was still something that she lacked — something without which all else was vain; something that brought her by night, a little fearfully, to the grim house of Messer Corvinus as a suppliant. To attract the less attention she came on foot and masked, and with no more attendance than just that of her two grooms. As they entered the narrow street, she bade one of these extinguish the torch he carried. Thereafter, in the dark, they had come, almost groping, stumbling on the rough kidney stones, to the magician’s door.
‘Go knock, Taddeo,’ she bade one of her servants.
And on her words there happened the first of those miracles by which Madonna Bianca was to be convinced beyond all doubting of the supernatural quality of the powers that Messer Corvinus wielded.
Even as the servant took his first step towards the door, this opened suddenly, apparently of itself, and in the passage appeared a stately, white-robed Nubian bearing a lanthorn. This he now raised, so that its yellow shafts showered their light upon Madonna and her followers. There was, of course, no miracle in that. The miracle lay in another apparition. In the porch itself, as if materialized suddenly out of the circumambient gloom, stood a tall, cloaked figure, black from head to foot, the face itself concealed under a black visor. This figure bowed, and waved Madonna onward into the house.
She drew back in fear; for, having come to a place of wonders, expecting wonders, she accounted it but natural that wonders she should find, and it never entered her mind to suppose that here was but another who sought Corvinus, one who had arrived ahead of her, and in response to whose earlier knock it was that the door had opened, just a courteous gentleman who stood now deferring to her sex and very obvious importance.
Devoutly she crossed herself, and observing that the act did not cause this black famulus — as she supposed him — to dissolve and vanish, she reflected that at least his origin could not be daemoniac, took courage and went in, for all that her knees shook under her as she passed him.
The supposed famulus followed close upon her heels, the grooms came last, together and something cowed, though they were men she had chosen for the stoutness of their courage. The gloom, the uncanny gentleman in black, the grinning Nubian, all teeth and eyeballs, affected them unpleasantly.
The Nubian closed the door and barred it, the metal ringing shrilly
as it fell. Then he faced about to ask them formally what and whom they sought. It was the lady who answered, unmasking as she spoke.
‘I am Bianca de’ Fioravanti, and I seek the very learned Messer Corvinus Trismegistus.’
The Nubian bowed silently, bade her follow, and moved down the long stone passage, his lanthorn swinging as he went, and flinging its yellow disc of light to and fro upon the grimy walls. Thus they came to a stout oaken door studded with great nails of polished steel, and by this into a bare anteroom. There were dried rushes on the floor, a wooden bench was set against the wall, and upon a massive, four legged table stood an oil-lamp, whose ruddy, quivering flame, ending in a pennon of black smoke, shed a little light and a deal of smell.
Their guide waved a brown hand towards the bench. ‘Your lackeys may await your excellency here,’ said he.
She nodded, and briefly gave her order to the grooms. They obeyed her, though with visible reluctance. Then the Nubian opened a second door, at the chamber’s farther end. He drew aside a heavy curtain, with a startling clash of metal rings, and disclosed what seemed at first no more than a black gap.
‘The dread Corvinus Trismegistus bids you enter,’ he announced.
For all the stoutness of her spirit the Lady Bianca now drew back. But as her eyes remained fixed upon the gap, she presently saw the gloom in part dispelled, and dimly she began to perceive some of the furnishings of that inner room. She took courage, bethought her of the great boon she sought at the magician’s hands, and so crossed the dread threshold and passed into that mysterious chamber.
After her, in close attendance, ever silent, came the gentleman of the mask. Believing him to be of the household of the mage, and his attendance a necessary condition, she made no demur to it; whilst the Nubian, on the other hand, supposing him, from his mask and the richness of his cloak, to be her companion, made no attempt to check his ingress.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 434
