*CHAPTER XXVII*
Murdered? Ay; struck down in a moment on the threshold of God's house,lest his bloody footsteps entering should desecrate its pavement;snatched away to perdition from under the very shadows of stone saints,the gleam of the golden doors fading out of the horror of his fadingeyes. He had had but time for one cry--'O Mother of God!'--asoul-clutch as wild as when a drowning man grasps at a flowering reed.In vain; he is under; the fair blossom whisks erect again, dashing thetears from her eyes; the white face far below is a stone among thestones.
'_So passeth the world's glory!_'
The choir sang, the organ thundered on; and still their blended fervour,while the dead body was relaxing and settling into the pool itself hadmade, rose poignant, sharper, more unearthly, piercing with tragicutterance its own burden, until at length, flood crashing upon flood,the roar of human passion below burst and overwhelmed it.
What had happened?
This.
As the Duke entered the church by the west door, a full-bodiedgentleman, dressed all in mail, with a jaque of crimson satin, hadstepped from the crowd to make a way for him; which having affected todo, he had turned, and raising his velvet beret with his left hand, anddropping on one knee as if to crave some boon, had swiftly driven adagger into Galeazzo's body, and again, as the Duke fell away from thestroke, freeing the blade, into his throat. Whereat, springing on themortal cry that followed, flew other sparks of crimson from the body ofthe spectators, and pierced the doomed man with vicious stings,labouring out cries as they stabbed:--
'For my sister!'
'For liberty!'--until the hilts slipping in their fingers sent theiraims wavering.
It was all the red act of a moment--the lancing of a ripenedabscess--the gush, the scream, the silence.
And then, the sudden stun and stupefaction yielding to mad tumult.
None might know the gross body of this terror; only for the moment redcoats and their partisans seemed paramount. But for the moment. Thenext, the scarlet clique seemed to break up and scatter, like a ball ofred clay in a swirl of waters, and, flying on all sides, was caught andheld in isolated particles among the throng. Whereat, for the firsttime, authority began to feel its paralysed wits, and to counter-shriekthe desperate appeals of murder to rally and combine for liberty. Amighty equerry of the Duke, one da Ripa, fought, bellowing andstruggling, to pull out his sword. Francione, a fellow of Visconti's,stabbed him under the armpit, and he wobbled and dropped amid thescreaming crush, grinning horribly. Lampugnani, smiling andinsinuative, slipped into a wailing group of women, and urged his softpassage through it, making for the door. He was almost out when,catching his foot in a skirt plucked sickly from his passing, hestumbled and rolled; and the spear of a giant Moor, who on the instantmounted the steps, passed through his throat.
His body was first-fruits to the frenzied people without. They seizedand bowled it through the streets, whacking it into shreds; thenreturned, breathed and blooded, for more. They were in high feather,ripe for prey and plunder. Galeazzo was dead! Viv' Anarchia!
They pressed their way into the tumult; snatched gems and trinkets fromthe hair and bosoms of girls half mad with terror; took their brief tollof dainties, and only fell away, pushing and gabbling, before the onsetof the ducal guard.
Order followed presently; and then the tally and reckoning. The lastfell swift enough to crown an orgy of perfection: screams in thesquares; dismembered limbs; mangled scarecrows tossing in file from thebattlements. Only two principals, Olgiati and Visconti, escaping forthe moment, were reserved for later torments. A conspiracy, like nearall blood conspiracies, abortive; founded on the common error thatslaves abhor their bonds. They do not, in this world of unequal giftsand taxes. Moreover, it is inconsistent to suppose one can inauguratean era of tolerance with murder.
Olgiati, the last of that dark band to suffer, was also its only martyr.He had struck for a principle, straight in itself, oblique in itsfanatic workings. Cursed by his father, abandoned by his friends andrelatives, committed to unspeakable tortures, his courage never blenchedor wavered. He gloried in his deed to the last; and, if a prayerescaped him, it was only that his executioners should vouchsafe himstrength at the end to utter forth his soul in prayer. To Bona he senta gentle message, deprecating his own instrumentality in the inevitableretributions of Providence. She answered, saintly vengeance, with apriest, urging him to save his soul by penitence. He retorted that, byGod's mercy, his final deed should serve his sins for all atonement;and, so insisting, was carried to his mortal mangling. At the lastmoment a cry escaped him: 'Mors acerba: fama perpetua!' and, with that,and the shriek of 'Courage, Girolamo!' on his lips, he passed to hisaccount.
'The peace of Italy is dead!' cried Pope Sixtus on the day when news ofthe crime was brought to him. His prophecy found its firstjustification in a fervent appeal from the Duchess of Milan that hewould posthumously absolve of his sins the man whom 'next to God she hadloved above all else in the world.'
And no doubt, being left to the present mercy of factions, she believedit.
*EPILOGUE*
Long after the body of that tragedy had been committed to its eternalsleep, silently and by night, under the pavement of the vast cathedral;long after, in years so remote that the very bones of it, crumbling intoashes, might hardly be distinguished from the fibrous weeds of thegolden shroud in which they had first been laid, fit moral to the deadlyirony of human glory; long after, when the rise and fall of LudovicoSforza, ripe achievement of his house and race, were already grown atale for the wind to sob and whisper through lonely keyholes of awinter's night, there survived in Lombard legend the story of amarvellous boy, who, coming to earth and Milan once upon a time withsome strange message of Christ in Arcady, had taken the winter in men'shearts with a brief St. Martin's summer of delight, and had so, in thebright morning of his promise, been snatched back to the heaven'snursery from which he had estrayed, leaving faint echoes of divinity inhis wake. It whispered of a tomb, to which old tyranny had consignedthis embodied angel, found emptied, like its sacred prototype's; and ofthe awe thereat which had fallen on its searchers. A fable, scared awayat first in the strenuous roar of Time struggling for the mastery ofgreat events; yet, in the later days of peace, still to be heard, veryfaint and far like a lark's song, dropping from the clouds.
Sweet music, but a fable; and therefore more potent than reality to movemen's hearts. Beatitudes are pronounced on things less tangible. HadBernardo preached a creed more orthodox, he had been at this day acalendared saint on the strength of it. But he had only interpreted thehuman Christ to a people his prince and comrade had wrought to redeem.
There had been those who--unless crushed under the fall of the tyrannywhich had sustained them--might have nipped the legend at its sprouting;telling how, on the night of that first dark and dire confusion, acavalier, taking advantage of the brief anarchy that reigned, hadappeared, with a force of his adherents, before the provost-marshal ofthat date, and had demanded of his hands the body of the martyred boy;how, kissing and wrapping the poor corpse in a costly cloak, thiscavalier had lifted it with giant strength to his pommel, and,dismissing his silent followers, had ridden forth with his burden intothe snowy darkness of the plains; how, in the ghostly dawn of a winter'smorning, there had broken tears and wailing from a spectral thronggathered about the portal of an abbey in the distant hills; how, whenpresently the spring came with music of birds and gushing waters, therewere no turves so green, no daisies so lush and fearless in all themonastic God's-acre, as those which the heart-stricken sorrow andtenderness of a newly received brother had brought to cover the grave ofone, the youngest and most innocent of all the silent community gatheredthereto.
God rest thee, Carlo! Peace to thy faithful, passionate heart.
An imperishable love, whose fruits, descended from that ancient stock,we eat to-day.
But the body of the Fool, flung into a pit
, was the carrion which firstenriched its roots.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press
A Jay of Italy Page 27