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The Strolling Saint, a novel by Rafael Sabatini |
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Book 2. Giuliana - Chapter 3. Preux-Chevalier |
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_ BOOK II. GIULIANA CHAPTER III. PREUX-CHEVALIER In the days that followed I found Messer Fifanti in queerer moods than ever. Ever impatient, he would be easily moved to anger now, and not a day passed but he stormed at me over the Greek with which, under his guidance, I was wrestling. And with Giuliana his manner was the oddest thing conceivable; at times he was mocking as an ape, at times his manner had in it a suggestion of the serpent; more rarely he was his usual, vulturine self. He watched her curiously, ever between anger and derision, to all of which she presented a calm front and a patience almost saintly. He was as a man with some mighty burden on his mind, undecided whether he shall bear it or cast it off. Her patience moved me most oddly to pity; and pity for so beautiful a creature is Satan's most subtle snare, especially when you consider what a power her beauty had to move me as I had already discovered to my erstwhile terror. She confided in me a little in those days, but ever with a most saintly resignation. She had been sold into wedlock, she admitted, with a man who might have been her father, and she confessed to finding her lot a cruel one; but confessed it with the air of one who intends none the less to bear her cross with fortitude. And then, one day, I did a very foolish thing. We had been reading together, she and I, as was become our custom. She had fetched me a volume of the lascivious verse of Panormitano, and we sat side by side on the marble seat in the garden what time I read to her, her shoulder touching mine, the fragrance of her all about me. She wore, I remember, a clinging gown of russet silk, which did rare justice to the splendid beauty of her, and her heavy ruddy hair was confined in a golden net that was set with gems--a gift from my Lord Gambara. Concerning this same gift words had passed but yesterday between Giuliana and her husband; and I deemed the doctor's anger to be the fruit of a base and unworthy mind. I read, curiously enthralled--though whether by the beauty of the lines or the beauty of the woman there beside me I could not then have told you. Presently she checked me. "Leave now Panormitano," she said. "Here is something else upon which you shall give me your judgment." And she set before me a sheet upon which there was a sonnet writ in her own hand, which was as beautiful as any copyist's that I have ever seen. I read the poem. It was the tenderest and saddest little cry from a heart that ached and starved for an ideal love; and good as the manner seemed, the matter itself it was that chiefly moved me. At my admission of its moving quality her white hand closed over mine as it had done that day in the library when we had read of "Isabetta and the Pot of Basil." Her hand was warm, but not warm enough to burn me as it did. "Ah, thanks, Agostino," she murmured. "Your praise is sweet to me. The verses are my own." I was dumbfounded at this fresh and more intimate glimpse of her. The beauty of her body was there for all to see and worship; but here was my first glimpse of the rare beauties of her mind. In what words I should have answered her I do not know, for at that moment we suffered an interruption. Sudden and harsh as the crackling of a twig came from behind us the voice of Messer Fifanti. "What do you read?" We started apart, and turned. Either he, of set purpose, had crept up behind us so softly that we should not suspect his approach, or else so engrossed were we that our ears had been deafened for the time. He stood there now in his untidy gown of black, and there was a leer of mockery on his long, white face. Slowly he put a lean arm between us, and took the sheet in his bony claw. He peered at it very closely, being without glasses, and screwed his eyes up until they all but disappeared. Thus he stood, and slowly read, whilst I looked on a trifle uneasy, and Giuliana's face wore an odd look of fear, her bosom heaving unsteadily in its russet sheath. He sniffed contemptuously when he had read, and looked at me. "Have I not bidden you leave the vulgarities of dialect to the vulgar?" quoth he. "Is there not enough written for you in Latin, that you must be wasting your time and perverting your senses with such poor illiterate gibberish as this? And what is it that you have there?" He took the book. "Panormitano!" he roared. "Now, there's a fitting author for a saint in embryo! There's a fine preparation for the cloister!" He turned to Giuliana. He put forward his hand and touched her bare shoulder with his hideous forefinger. She cringed under the touch as if it were barbed. "There is not the need that you should render yourself his preceptress," he said, with his deadly smile. "I do not," she replied indignantly. "Agostino has a taste for letters, and..." "Tcha! Tcha!" he interrupted, tapping her shoulder sharply. "I had no thought for letters. There is my Lord Gambara, and there is Messer Cosimo d'Anguissola, and there is Messer Caro. There is even Pordenone, the painter." His lips writhed over their names. "You have friends enough, I think. Leave, then, Ser Agostino here. Do not dispute him with God to whom he has been vowed." She rose in a fine anger, and stood quivering there, magnificently tall, and Juno, I imagined, must have looked to the poets as she looked then to me. "This is too much!" she cried. "It is, madam," he snapped. "I agree with you." She considered him with eyes that held a loathing and contempt unutterable. Then she looked at me, and shrugged her shoulders as who would say: "You see how I am used!" Lastly she turned, and took her way across the lawn towards the house. There was a little silence between us after she had gone. I was on fire with indignation, and yet I could think of no words in which I might express it, realizing how utterly I lacked the right to be angry with a husband for the manner in which he chose to treat his wife. At last, pondering me very gravely, he spoke. "It were best you read no more with Madonna Giuliana," he said slowly. "Her tastes are not the tastes that become a man who is about to enter holy orders." He closed the book, which hitherto he had held open; closed it with an angry snap, and held it out to me. "Restore it to its shelf," he bade me. I took it, and quite submissively I went to do his bidding. But to gain the library I had to pass the door of Giuliana's room. It stood open, and Giuliana herself in the doorway. We looked at each other, and seeing her so sorrowful, with tears in her great dark eyes, I stepped forward to speak, to utter something of the deep sympathy that stirred me. She stretched forth a hand to me. I took it and held it tight, looking up into her eyes. "Dear Agostino!" she murmured in gratitude for my sympathy; and I, distraught, inflamed by tone and look, answered by uttering her name for the first time. "Giuliana!" Having uttered it I dared not look at her. But I stooped to kiss the hand which she had left in mine. And having kissed it I started upright and made to advance again; but she snatched her hand from my clasp and waved me away, at once so imperiously and beseechingly that I turned and went to shut myself in the library with my bewilderment. For full two days thereafter, for no reason that I could clearly give, I avoided her, and save at table and in her husband's presence we were never once together. The repasts were sullen things at which there was little said, Madonna sitting in a frozen dignity, and the doctor, a silent man at all times, being now utterly and forbiddingly mute. But once my Lord Gambara supped with us, and he was light and trivial as ever, an incarnation of frivolity and questionable jests, apparently entirely unconscious of Fifanti's chill reserve and frequent sneers. Indeed, I greatly marvelled that a man of my Lord Gambara's eminence and Governor of Piacenza should so very amiably endure the boorishness of that pedant. Explanation was about to be afforded me. On the third day, as we were dining, Giuliana announced that she was going afoot into the town, and solicited my escort. It was an honour that never before had been offered me. I reddened violently, but accepted it, and soon thereafter we set out, just she and I together. We went by way of the Fodesta Gate, and passed the old Castle of Sant' Antonio, then in ruins--for Gambara was demolishing it and employing the material to construct a barrack for the Pontifical troops that garrisoned Piacenza. And presently we came upon the works of this new building, and stepped out into mid-street to avoid the scaffoldings, and so pursued our way into the city's main square--the Piazza del Commune, overshadowed by the red-and-white bulk of the Communal Palace. This was a noble building, rather in the Saracenic manner, borrowing a very warlike air from the pointed battlements that crowned it. Near the Duomo we came upon a great concourse of people who were staring up at the iron cage attached to the square tower of the belfry near its summit. In this cage there was what appeared at first to be a heap of rags, but which presently resolved itself into a human shape, crouching in that narrow, cruel space, exposed there to the pitiless beating of the sun, and suffering Heaven alone can say what agonies. The murmuring crowd looked up in mingled fear and sympathy. He had been there since last night, a peasant girl informed us, and he had been confined there by order of my Lord the Cardinal-legate for the odious sin of sacrilege. "What!" I cried out, in such a tone of astonished indignation that Monna Giuliana seized my arm and pressed it to enjoin prudence. It was not until she had made her purchases in a shop under the Duomo and we were returning home that I touched upon the matter. She chid me for the lack of caution that might have led me into some unpardonable indiscretions but for her warning. "But the very thought of such a man as my Lord Gambara torturing a poor wretch for sacrilege!" I cried. "It is grotesque; it is ludicrous; it is infamous!" "Not so loud," she laughed. "You are being stared at." And then she delivered herself of an amazing piece of casuistry. "If a man being a sinner himself, shall on that account refrain from punishing sin in others, then is he twice a sinner." "It was my Lord Gambara taught you that," said I, and involuntarily I sneered. She considered me with a very searching look. "Now, what precisely do you mean, Agostino?" "Why, that it is by just such sophistries that the Cardinal-legate seeks to cloak the disorders of his life. 'Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor?' is his philosophy. If he would encage the most sacrilegious fellow in Piacenza, let him encage himself." "You do not love him?" said she. "O--as to that--as a man he is well enough. But as an ecclesiastic...O, but there!" I broke off shortly, and laughed. "The devil take Messer Gambara!" She smiled. "It is greatly to be feared that he will." But my Lord Gambara was not so lightly to be dismissed that afternoon. As we were passing the Porta Fodesta, a little group of country-folk that had gathered there fell away before us, all eyes upon the dazzling beauty of Giuliana--as, indeed, had been the case ever since we had come into the town, so that I had been singularly and sweetly proud of being her escort. I had been conscious of the envious glances that many a tall fellow had sent after me, though, after all, theirs was but as the jealousy of Phoebus for Adonis. Wherever we had passed and eyes had followed us, men and women had fallen to whispering and pointing after us. And so did they now, here at the Fodesta Gate, but with this difference, that, at last, I overheard for once what was said, for there was one who did not whisper. "There goes the leman of my Lord Gambara," quoth a gruff, sneering voice, "the light of love of the saintly legate who is starving Domenico to death in a cage for the sin of sacrilege." Not a doubt but that he would have added more, but that at that moment a woman's shrill voice drowned his utterance. "Silence, Giuffre!" she admonished him fearfully. "Silence, on your life!" I had halted in my stride, suddenly cold from head to foot, as on that day when I had flung Rinolfo from top to bottom of the terrace steps at Mondolfo. It happened that I wore a sword for the first time in my life--a matter from which I gathered great satisfaction--having been adjudged worthy of the honour by virtue that I was to be Madonna's escort. To the hilt I now set hand impetuously, and would have turned to strike that foul slanderer dead, but that Giuliana restrained me, a wild alarm in her eyes. "Come!" she panted in a whisper. "Come away!" So imperious was the command that it conveyed to my mind some notion of the folly I should commit did I not obey it. I saw at once that did I make an ensample of this scurrilous scandalmonger I should thereby render her the talk of that vile town. So I went on, but very white and stiff, and breathing somewhat hard; for pent-up passion is an evil thing to house. Thus came we out of the town and to the shady banks of the gleaming Po. And then, at last, when we were quite alone, and within two hundred yards of Fifanti's house, I broke at last the silence. I had been thinking very busily, and the peasant's words had illumined for me a score of little obscure matters, had explained to me the queer behaviour and the odd speeches of Fifanti himself since that evening in the garden when the Cardinal-legate had announced to him his appointment as ducal secretary. I checked now in my stride, and turned to face her. "Was it true?" I asked, rendered brutally direct by a queer pain I felt as a result of my thinking. She looked up into my face so sadly and wistfully that my suspicions fell from me upon the instant, and I reddened from shame at having harboured them. "Agostino!" she cried, such a poor little cry of pain that I set my teeth hard and bowed my head in self-contempt. Then I looked at her again. "Yet the foul suspicion of that lout is shared by your husband himself," said I. "The foul suspicion--yes," she answered, her eyes downcast, her cheeks faintly tinted. And then, quite suddenly, she moved forward. "Come," she bade me. "You are being foolish." "I shall be mad," said I, "ere I have done with this." And I fell into step again beside her. "If I could not avenge you there, I can avenge you here." And I pointed to the house. "I can smite this rumour at its foulest point." Her hand fell on my arm. "What would you do?" she cried. "Bid your husband retract and sue to you for pardon, or else tear out his lying throat," I answered, for I was in a great rage by now. She stiffened suddenly. "You go too fast, Messer Agostino," said she. "And you are over-eager to enter into that which does not concern you. I do not know that I have given you the right to demand of my husband reason of the manner in which he deals with me. It is a thing that touches only my husband and myself." I was abashed; I was humiliated; I was nigh to tears. I choked it all down, and I strode on beside her, my rage smouldering within me. But it was flaring up again by the time we reached the house with no more words spoken between us. She went to her room without another glance at me, and I repaired straight in quest of Fifanti. I found him in the library. He had locked himself in, as was his frequent habit when at his studies, but he opened to my knock. I stalked in, unbuckled my sword, and set it in a corner. Then I turned to him. "You are doing your wife a shameful wrong, sir doctor," said I, with all the directness of youth and indiscretion. He stared at me as if I had struck him--as he might have stared, rather, at a child who had struck him, undecided whether to strike back for the child's good, or to be amused and smile. "Ah!" he said at last. "She has been talking to you?" And he clasped his hands behind him and stood before me, his head thrust forward, his legs wide apart, his long gown, which was open, clinging to his ankles. "No," said I. "I have been thinking." "In that case nothing will surprise me," he said in his sour, contemptuous manner. "And so you have concluded...?" "That you are harbouring an infamous suspicion." "Your assurance that it is infamous would offend me did it not comfort me," he sneered. "And what, pray, is this suspicion? "You suspect that... that--O God! I can't utter the thing." "Take courage," he mocked me. And he thrust his head farther forward. He looked singularly like a vulture in that moment. "You suspect that Messer Gambara... that Messer Gambara and Madonna... that..." I clenched my hands together, and looked into his leering face. "You understand me well enough," I cried, almost angrily. He looked at me seriously now, a cold glitter in his small eyes. "I wonder do you understand yourself?" he asked. "I think not. I think not. Since God has made you a fool, it but remains for man to make you a priest, and thus complete God's work." "You cannot move me by your taunts," I said. "You have a foul mind, Messer Fifanti." He approached me slowly, his untidily shod feet slip-slopping on the wooden floor. "Because," said he, "I suspect that Messer Gambara... that Messer Gambara and Madonna... that... You understand me," he mocked me, with a mimicry of my own confusion. "And what affair may it be of yours whom I suspect or of what I suspect them where my own are concerned?" "It is my affair, as it is the affair of every man who would be accounted gentle, to defend the honour of a pure and saintly lady from the foul aspersions of slander." "Knight-errantry, by the Host!" quoth he, and his brows shot up on his steep brow. Then they came down again to scowl. "No doubt, my preux-chevalier, you will have definite knowledge of the groundlessness of these same slanders," he said, moving backwards, away from me, towards the door; and as he moved now his feet made no sound, though I did not yet notice this nor, indeed, his movement at all. "Knowledge?" I roared at him. "What knowledge can you need beyond what is afforded by her face? Look in it, Messer Fifanti, if you would see innocence and purity and chastity! Look in it!" "Very well," said he. "Let us look in it." And quite suddenly he pulled the door open to disclose Giuliana standing there, erect but in a listening attitude. "Look in it!" he mocked me, and waved one of his bony hands towards that perfect countenance. There was shame and confusion in her face, and some anger. But she turned without a word, and went quickly down the passage, followed by his evil, cackling laugh. Then he looked at me quite solemnly. "I think," said he, "you had best get to your studies. You will find more than enough to engage you there. Leave my affairs to me, boy." There was almost a menace in his voice, and after what had happened it was impossible to pursue the matter. Sheepishly, overwhelmed with confusion, I went out--a knight-errant with a shorn crest. _ |
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