Suddenly, again, the nightingale sang; a throbbing, silver song. It was the same bird, Alberic felt sure; but it was in front of him now, and was calling him onwards. The fire-flies wove their golden dance a few steps in front, always a few steps in front, and drew him up-hill through the orchard.
As the ground became steeper, the long trellises, black and crooked, seemed to twist and glide through the blue moonlight grass like black gliding snakes, and, at the top, its marble pillarets, clear in the moonlight, slumbered the little Gothic palace of white marble. From the solitary sentinel pine broke the song of the nightingale. This was the place. A breeze had risen, and from the shining moonlit sea, broken into causeways and flotillas of smooth and of fretted silver, came a faint briny smell, mingling with that of the irises and blossoming lemons, with the scent of vague ripeness and freshness. The moon hung like a silver lantern over the orchard; the wood of the trellises patterned the blue luminous heaven, the vine leaves seemed to swim, transparent, in the shining air. Over the circular well, in the high grass, the fire-flies rose and fell like a thin fountain of gold. And, from the sentinel pine, the nightingale sang.
Prince Alberic leant against the brink of the well, by the trough carved with antique designs of serpent-bearing maenads. He was wonderfully calm, and his heart sang within him. It was, he knew, the hour and place of his fate.
The nightingale ceased: and the shrill songs of the crickets was suspended. The silvery luminous world was silent.
A quiver came through the grass by the well; a rustle through the roses. And, on the well’s brink, encircling its central blackness, glided the Snake.
“Oriana!” whispered Alberic. “Oriana!” She paused, and stood almost erect. The Prince put out his hand, and she twisted round his arm, extending slowly her chilly coil to his wrist and fingers.
“Oriana!” whispered Prince Alberic again. And raising his hand to his face, he leaned down and pressed his lips on the little flat head of the serpent. And the nightingale sang. But a coldness seized his heart, the moon seemed suddenly extinguished, and he slipped away in unconsciousness.
When he awoke the moon was still high. The nightingale was singing its loudest. He lay in the grass by the well, and his head rested on the knees of the most beautiful of ladies. She was dressed in cloth of silver which seemed woven of moon mists, and shimmering moonlit green grass. It was his own dear Godmother.
IX
When Duke Balthasar Maria had got through the rehearsals of the ballet called Daphne Transformed, and finally danced his part of Phoebus Apollo to the infinite delight and glory of his subjects, he was greatly concerned, being benignly humoured, on learning that he had very nearly lost his grandson and heir. The Dwarf, the Jesuit, and the Jester, whom he delighted in pitting against one another, had severely accused each other of disrespectful remarks about the dancing of that ballet; so Duke Balthasar determined to disgrace all three together and inflict upon them the hated presence of Prince Alberic. It was, after all, very pleasant to possess a young grandson, whom one could take to one’s bosom and employ in being insolent to one’s own favourites. It was time, said Duke Balthasar, that Alberic should learn the habits of a court and take unto himself a suitable princess.
The young prince accordingly was sent for from Sparkling Waters, and installed at Luna in a wing of the Red Palace, overlooking the Court of Honour, and commanding an excellent view of the great rockery, with the verde antique apes and the Porphyry Rhinoceros. He found awaiting him on the great staircase a magnificent staff of servants, a master of the horse, a grand cook, a barber, a hairdresser and assistant, a fencing master, and four fiddlers. Several lovely ladies of the Court, the principal ministers of the Crown and the Jesuit, the Dwarf and the Jester, were also ready to pay their respects. Prince Alberic threw himself out of the glass coach before they had time to open the door, and bowing coldly, ascended the staircase, carrying under his cloak what appeared to be a small wicker cage. The Jesuit, who was the soul of politeness, sprang forward and signed to an officer of the household to relieve his highness of this burden. But Alberic waved the man off; and the rumour went abroad that a hissing noise had issued from under the prince’s cloak, and, like lightning, the head and forked tongue of a serpent.
Half-an-hour later the official spies had informed Duke Balthasar that his grandson and heir had brought from Sparkling Waters no apparent luggage save two swords, a fowling piece, a volume of Virgil, a branch of pomegranate blossom, and a tame grass snake.
Duke Balthasar did not like the idea of the grass snake; but wishing to annoy the Jester, the Dwarf, and the Jesuit, he merely smiled when they told him of it, and said: “The dear boy! What a child he is! He probably, also, has a pet lamb, white as snow, and gentle as spring, mourning for him in his old home! How touching is the innocence of childhood! Heigho! I was just like that myself not so very long ago.” Whereupon the three favourites and the whole Court of Luna smiled and bowed and sighed: “How lovely is the innocence of youth!” while the Duke fell to humming the well-known air, “Thrysis was a shepherd boy,” of which the ducal fiddlers instantly struck up the ritornello.
“But,” added Balthasar Maria, with that subtle blending of majesty and archness in which he excelled all living princes, “but it is now time that the prince, my grandson, should learn”—here he put his hand on his sword and threw back slightly one curl of his jet black peruke—“the stern exercises of Mars; and, also, let us hope, the freaks and frolics of Venus.”
Saying which, the old sinner pinched the cheek of a lady of the very highest quality, whose husband and father were instantly congratulated by all the court on this honour.
Prince Alberic was displayed next day to the people of Luna, standing on the balcony among a tremendous banging of mortars; while Duke Balthasar explained that he felt towards this youth all the fondness and responsibility of an elder brother. There was a grand ball, a gala opera, a review, a very high mass in the cathedral; the Dwarf, the Jesuit, and the Jester each separately offered his services to Alberic in case he wanted a loan of money, a love letter carried, or in case even (expressed in more delicate terms) he might wish to poison his grandfather. Duke Balthasar Maria, on his side, summoned his ministers, and sent couriers, booted and liveried, to three great dukes of Italy, carrying each of these in a morocco wallet emblazoned with the arms of Luna, an account of Prince Alberic’s lineage and person, and a request for particulars of any marriageable princesses and dowries to be disposed of.
X
Prince Alberic did not give his grandfather that warm satisfaction which the old duke had expected. Balthasar Maria, entirely bent upon annoying the three favourites, had said, and had finally believed, that he intended to introduce his grandson to the delight and duties of life, and in the company of this beloved stripling to dream that he, too, was a youth once more: a statement which the court took with due deprecatory reverence, as the duke was well known never to have ceased to be young.
But Alberic did not lend himself to so touching an idyll. He behaved, indeed, with the greatest decorum, and manifested the utmost respect for his grandfather. He was marvellously assiduous in the council chamber, and still more so in following the military exercises and learning the trade of a soldier. He surprised everyone by his interest and intelligence in all affairs of state; he more than surprised the Court by his readiness to seek knowledge about the administration of the country and the condition of the people. He was a youth of excellent morals, courage and diligence; but, there was no denying it, he had positively no conception of sacrificing to the Graces. He sat out, as if he had been watching a review, the delicious operas and superb ballets which absorbed half the revenue of the duchy. He listened, without a smile of comprehension, to the witty innuendoes of the ducal table. But worst of all, he had absolutely no eyes, let alone a heart, for the fair sex. Now Balthasar Maria had assembled at Luna a perfect bevy of lovely nymp
hs, both ladies of the greatest birth, whose husbands received most honourable posts military and civil, and young females of humbler extraction, though not less expressive habits, ranging from singers and dancers to slave-girls of various colours, all dressed in their appropriate costume: a galaxy of beauty which was duly represented by the skill of celebrated painters on all the walls of the Red Palace, where you may still see their fading charms, habited as Diana, or Pallas, or in the spangles of Columbine, or the turban of Sibyls. These ladies were the object of Duke Balthasar’s most munificently divided attentions; and in the delight of his newborn family affection, he had promised himself much tender interest in guiding the taste of his heir among such of these nymphs as had already received his own exquisite appreciation. Great, therefore, was the disappointment of the affectionate grandfather when his dream of companionship was dispelled, and it became hopeless to interest young Alberic in anything at Luna, save despatches and cannons.
The Court, indeed, found the means of consoling Duke Balthasar for this bitterness, by extracting therefrom a brilliant comparison between the unfading grace, the vivacious, though majestic, character of the grandfather, and the gloomy and pedantic personality of the grandson. But, although Balthasar Maria would only smile at every new proof of Alberic’s bearish obtuseness, and ejaculate in French, “Poor child! he was born old, and I shall die young!” the reigning Prince of Luna grew vaguely to resent the peculiarities of his heir.
In this fashion things proceeded in the Red Palace at Luna, until Prince Alberic had attained his twenty-first year.
He was sent, in the interval, to visit the principal Courts of Italy, and to inspect its chief curiosities, natural and historical, as befitted the heir to an illustrious state. He received the golden rose from the Pope in Rome; he witnessed the festivities of Ascension Day from the Doge’s barge at Venice; he accompanied the Marquis of Montferrat to the camp under Turin; he witnessed the launching of a galley against the Barbary corsairs by the Knights of St. Stephen in the port of Leghorn, and a grand bullfight and burning of heretics given by the Spanish Viceroy at Palermo; and he was allowed to be present when the celebrated Dr. Borri turned two brass buckles into pure gold before the Archduke at Milan. On all of which occasions the heir-apparent of Luna bore himself with a dignity and discretion most singular in one so young. In the course of these journeys he was presented to several of the most promising heiresses in Italy, some of whom were of so tender age as to be displayed in jewelled swaddling-clothes on brocade cushions; and a great many possible marriages were discussed behind his back. But Prince Alberic declared for his part that he had decided to lead a single life until the age of twenty-eight or thirty, and that he would then require the assistance of no ambassadors or chancellors, but find for himself the future Duchess of Luna.
All this did not please Balthasar Maria, as indeed nothing else about his grandson did please him much. But, as the old duke did not really relish the idea of a daughter-in-law at Luna, and as young Alberic’s whimsicalities entailed no expense, and left him entirely free in his business and pleasure, he turned a deaf ear to the criticisms of his councillors, and letting his grandson inspect fortifications, drill soldiers, pore over parchments, and mope in his wing of the palace, with no amusement save his repulsive tame snake, Balthasar Maria composed and practised various ballets, and began to turn his attention very seriously to the completion of the rockery grotto and of the sepulchral chapel, which, besides the Red Palace itself, were the chief monuments of his glorious reign.
It was this growing desire to witness the fulfilment of these magnanimous projects which led the Duke of Luna into an expected conflict with his grandson. The wonderful enterprises above mentioned involved immense expenses, and had periodically been suspended for lack of funds. The collection of animals in the rockery was very far from complete. A camelopard of spotted alabaster, an elephant of Sardinian jasper, and the entire families of a cow and sheep, all of correspondingly rich marbles, were urgently required to fill up the corners. Moreover, the supply of water was at present so small that the fountains were dry save for a couple of hours on the very greatest holidays; and it was necessary for the perfect naturalness of this ingenious work that an aqueduct twenty miles long should pour perennial streams from a high mountain lake into the grotto of the Red Palace.
The question of the sepulchral chapel was, if possible, even worse; for, after every new ballet, Duke Balthasar went through a fit of contrition, during which he fixed his thoughts on death; and the possibilities of untimely release, and of burial in an unfinished mausoleum, filled him with terrors. It is true that Duke Balthasar had, immediately after building the vast domed chapel, secured an effigy of his own person before taking thought for the monuments of his already buried ancestors; and the statue, twelve feet high, representing himself in coronation robes of green bronze brocaded with gold, holding a sceptre and bearing on his head, of purest silver, a spiky coronet set with diamonds, was one of the curiosities which travellers admired most in Italy. But this statue was unsymmetrical, and moreover had a dismal suggestiveness, so long as surrounded by empty niches; and the fact that only one half of the pavement was inlaid with discs of sardonyx, jasper, and cornelian, and that the larger part of the walls were rough brick without a vestige of the mosaic pattern of lapis-lazuli, malachite, pearl, and coral, which had been begun round the one finished tomb, rendered the chapel as poverty-stricken in one aspect as it was magnificent in another. The finishing of the chapel was therefore urgent, and two more bronze statues were actually cast, those to wit of the duke’s father and grandfather, and mosaic workmen called from the Medicean works in Florence. But, all of a sudden the ducal treasury was discovered to be empty, and the ducal credit to be exploded.
State lotteries, taxes on salt, even a sham crusade against the Dey of Algiers, all failed to produce any money. The alliance, the right to pass troops through the duchy, the letting out of the ducal army to the highest bidder, had long since ceased to be a source of revenue either from the Emperor, the King of Spain, or the Most Christian One. The Serene Republics of Venice and Genoa publicly warned their subjects against lending a single sequin to the Duke of Luna; the Dukes of Parma and Modena began to worry about bad debts; the Pope himself had the atrocious bad taste to make complaints about suppression of church dues and interception of Peter’s pence. There remained to the bankrupt Duke Balthasar Maria only one hope in the world, the marriage of his grandson.
There happened to exist at that moment a sovereign of incalculable wealth, with an only daughter of marriageable age. But this potentate, although the nephew of a recent Pope, by whose confiscations his fortunes were founded, had originally been a dealer in such goods as are comprehensively known as drysalting; and, rapacious as were the princes of the Empire, each was too much ashamed of his neighbours to venture upon alliance with a family of so obtrusive an origin. Here was Balthasar Maria’s opportunity; the drysalter prince’s ducats should complete the rockery, the aqueduct, and the chapel; the drysalter’s daughter should be wedded to Alberic of Luna, that was to be third of the name.
XI
Prince Alberic sternly declined. He expressed his dutiful wish that the grotto and the chapel, like all other enterprises undertaken by his grandparent, might be brought to an end worthy of him. He declared that the aversion to drysalters was a prejudice unshared by himself. He even went so far as to suggest that the eligible princess should marry not the heir-apparent, but the reigning Duke of Luna. But, as regarded himself, he intended, as stated, to remain for many years single. Duke Balthasar had never in his life before seen a man who was determined to oppose him. He felt terrified and became speechless in the presence of young Alberic.
Direct influence having proved useless, the duke and his councillors, among whom the Jesuit, the Dwarf and the Jester had been duly re-instated, looked round for means of indirect persuasion or coercion. A celebrated Venetian beauty was sent for to L
una, a lady frequently employed in diplomatic missions, which she carried through by her unparalleled grace in dancing. But Prince Alberic, having watched her for half an hour, merely remarked to his equerry that his own tame grass snake made the same movements as the lady, infinitely better and more modestly. Whereupon this means was abandoned. The Dwarf then suggested a new method of acting on the young Prince’s feelings. This, which he remembered to have been employed very successfully in the case of a certain Duchess of Malfi, who had given her family much trouble some generations back, consisted in dressing up a certain number of lacqueys as ghosts and devils, hiring some genuine lunatics from a neighbouring establishment, and introducing them at dead of night into Prince Alberic’s chamber. But the Prince, who was busy at his orisons, merely threw a heavy stool and two candlesticks at the apparitions; and, as he did so, the tame snake suddenly rose up from the floor, growing colossal in the act, and hissed so terrifically that the whole party fled down the corridor. The most likely advice was given by the Jesuit. This truly subtle diplomatist averred that it was useless trying to act upon the Prince by means which did not already affect him; instead of clumsily constructing a lever for which there was no fulcrum in the youth’s soul, it was necessary to find out whatever leverage there might already exist.
The Big Book of Classic Fantasy Page 64