LEONORA OF TOLEDO
“For the fruit of the blood belongs to those who bring the price of love.”
So, but in a less rapt and mystical sense than that in which the holy virgin of Siena had poured out her soul, thought the young Duchess Leonora, wife of Pietro, second son of Cosimo da Medici, Grand Duke of Florence.
The price of love, the price of love! For eleven days she had wept, burning to pay it—indignant, passionate, heart-broken, she had told herself. And now that the altar was ready and the blade bared, what was her desire? Only for mercy—only for life, shameful and abandoned if needs must be, but life on any terms, the least regarded, the most despised. She was so young, so untutored; she had been so led astray by the casuistries of gallantry in this city of profligates. She would confess her sin, plead its extenuations, abase herself before the knees of the father of her child. That at least existed in pledge of her wifely loyalty; no man else could boast so much of her. She had borne that agony, that rapture, with a pure conscience. Surely the father would not murder the mother of his babe! So monstrous a deed would cry aloud for vengeance even in this place of monsters!
And even while she sat with white face and staring eyes, gnawing a tumbled strand of her beautiful auburn hair, she knew that all the extenuations she could plead were but so many aggravations of her crime; that the reptile she had been forced into marrying had insidiously encouraged her infidelity with this very purpose of ridding himself of her; that all the light and flower of her youth were but incentives to the lustful cruelty of one destitute of compassion and nobility. She was to die, somewhere, somehow; and in all that city she had no one courageous friend to whom to turn, no hope anywhere of refuge or escape. Policy, the policy of the devil in this cursed Gehenna, must turn a deaf ear, a blind eye to her peril. The Duke himself——
She shuddered from the very poison of his name. The base emotions it recalled robbed death for the moment of its worst terrors, picturing its shadowy arms the sole merciful asylum from memories too dreadful for endurance. Death, no grisly phantom, but the kind mother, lulling to eternal forgetfulness!
Ah! but she was so young, so young! She buried her face in her hands, and rocked herself to and fro, moaning.
* * * * *
Cosimo, the first of the junior branch of the house of Medici, had come to reign in Florence as absolute Duke in 1537. His wife, Leonora (daughter of Don Pedro de Toledo, Spanish viceroy at Naples), had died twenty-five years later, after having borne him several children, of whom Pietro was the second son. Within a month or two of her death the Duke was involved in an intrigue with a second Leonora de Toledo, niece of the first, a beautiful child who had been placed at the Tuscan Court under her aunt’s care. The circumstances of the liaison being revealed caused such a scandal that Cosimo, in order to quiet it, married the girl to his son Pietro, a libertine of the sickliest odour. The inevitable result followed in that city of furious passions and perverted morals. The young wife, despised and neglected by her husband, robbed, moreover, of her self-respect, accepted the usual cavaliere-servente—in this case one Alessandro Gagi—more, it would seem, out of pique than inclination. At least, when, the flirtation having been noted, Gagi, privately warned of its danger, had elected to resolve a poignant difficulty by retiring into a monastery, Leonora had had no difficulty in transferring her affections to an object more daring, or less discreet, than her melancholy new-fledged young Capuchin. The fresh fancy was a youthful blood of Saint-Étienne, and this time it was a case of genuine passion into which she rushed headstrong. She may have affected to believe that indifference was the worst thing she had to fear from her husband; if she did, she lied to herself, as women will when their desire runs ahead of their prudence. The case of Alessandro Gagi was her sufficient admonition. The dog was not asleep because his eyes were shut.
The lovers met; and this time there was no hint of espionage vouchsafed. But quite suddenly St. Étienne, as we must call him, was ordered off to the Island of Elba. The pretext for his banishment was a fatal duel in which he had lately been engaged with a young nobleman, Francesco Ginori; the real object, undoubtedly, was the procuring of incriminating evidence of the liaison in the shape of written correspondence. St. Étienne, recklessly enamoured, was not long in providing this, or the spies of the husband in intercepting it. The guilty lover was seized, brought back privately to the prison of the Bargello, and there at dead of night strangled. The news of his death was conveyed to Leonora, whether in malice or sympathy, by Francesco, her brother-in-law; and for eleven days thereafter she wept, heedless of consequences, abandoned to her grief. She dreamed in that time that she had the stuff of heroism in her; and her illusionment only came to vanish utterly with the withdrawal of the envoy who, on the twelfth day, had brought her a message from her husband.
This envoy’s voice, his figure, each as chill, as precise, as faultless as the other, still vividly haunted her as she sat. Not a word or tone of his had been ill-considered; not a hair had been out of place in his little pointed black beard, which had lain upon a ruff like biscuit china. His cold, exquisite hands, his jerkin and trunk hose of white silver-sprigged satin, his ivory sword-scabbard—all had been so many graduated harmonies in a picture of icy perfection. He had looked a man built out of frost; and from the heart of frost had come his words, keen, dispassionate, killing:
“His Grace, Madonna, much concerning himself with a distemper into which he hears you reported to be fallen, entreats your company at his Villa of Cafaggiodo, where he is in hopes the silence and the sweeter air will restore to you your health.”
And she had looked at him, with a sudden catch at her heart, though the flame of defiance in her still flickered.
“I thank you, Messer. For when is my doom pronounced?”
Whereat the envoy had raised one white hand ineffably.
“Alas, Madonna! Is our dear prince’s tender consideration so hurtful? Even now he waits to welcome you.”
Then she had put out entreating arms to him.
“Messer—a little time to prepare—to say goodbye. I have a son, Messer, a very little child. Look, this is the Vecchio, is it not—the Duke’s palace? I am quite alone in my corner of it, caged, shunned like a leper, yet my every exit from it is guarded. Give me this night in which to part seemingly with all I have left to love on earth.”
His laugh had sounded like the tinkle of ice on glass.
“Love? You wilfully postpone it, madam. Yet will I venture to enlarge upon my credentials to the extent your Grace demands. To-morrow——”
“I will deliver myself without fail to the sacrifice, Messer.”
And, with a patient, deprecating shrug, in which shoulders, eyebrows, and lips were all included, he had made his profound obeisance, and left her. And then!
It came upon her like a stroke, electric, instant, agonising out of numbness. She did not want to die; she had only been tricking herself in the trappings of tragedy; like the spoiled beauty she was, she had believed herself irresistible though playing with devils; and each day’s grace had but confirmed her in her wilful self-delusion. And now at last she was awake and mad with fear—confessed now to herself for the unheroic creature of selfishness and vanity which her deeds had already proclaimed her to the world.
Passion, indeed, often speaks big until it finds itself trapped. Its artificial heat is very susceptible to chills. Then, in proportion as it has burned furious, is the abjectness of its relapse. I speak of it as an emotion apart from love. This poor Leonora, in her craven frenzy, condoned in her mind the offences of the monster in whose relentless grasp she now felt herself writhing. Her leaning towards him, her desire to propitiate, was like a lust. She would swear herself his creature, his sympathiser, his fellow-passionist, if only he would accept and spare her as such. Do not blame her over-harshly. The spirit crazed with fear of darkness has no volition but towards the light. Moreover, the catalogue of the deadly sins was much confused in her time, and some crimes which in our day would be held unpardonable were avowed pleasantries. The butterfly bred to carrion is not easily weaned to honey—our own fair Purple-Emperor is an example—and grapes fattened on bullocks’ blood wither deprived of it. What wonder that this poor lovely creature, bred on corruption, confessed her tastes vitiated? It was life she wanted, and, at the last, even with Pietro da Medici for her boon-fellow. The woman was debased; yet the mother remained. It had been already dusk when the envoy withdrew. Now, with streaming eyes and labouring bosom, she hurried to spend her last night on earth by the cradle of her little Cosimo.
* * * * *
With dawn came hope, came the jocund reassurance of the sun, of the familiar greetings and services and customs. It seemed impossible that tragedy could be lurking behind that kindly commonplace. Leonora’s spirits rose with the morning, heightened with the glowing day. Had the conquering glory of her beauty served her hitherto so implicitly to fail her now? If jealousy were at the bottom of this resentment, she carried the sweetest antidote to it in her bosom. Imploring eyes, lovely submission and lovely solicitation—so she acted the part of a prostitute in her soul, and almost counted the hours to the end.
In the late afternoon she was informed, unasked, that a carriage and escort awaited her in the court by the Via de Leone. Half hysterical, she sought her little boy for the last time, and her tears ran salt over his face as she kissed him.
“Love mummia, bambinetto, always, always!”
It was the attitude of her escort that first struck a chill into her, and caused a declension in her high spirits. They may have been ignorant of her purposed fate; but she was under a ban, and they were under orders. These, it was evident, included uncommunicativeness, rigid surveillance, impassive force. The Villa Cafaggiodo lay at some distance beyond the walls in a lonely country. The young Duchess employed every artifice to delay the journey, now a purchase she must make, now a friend she must speak to, now a church she must visit. She was never denied; she was humoured—and watched—in everything. A subtler treatment had, perhaps, allayed her alarms entirely, as it was evidently the object of the escort to evade attention or suspicion; but these common minds had not the savoir faire to throw off the weight of responsibility under which they laboured. At length they left the city behind, and came into the open country—an abandonment which the girl had dreaded unspeakably, and resisted as long as possible.
And here Madama must alight to pick the wayside flowers—for the month was July—and again, and yet again when she saw one more beautiful than the rest; so that dusk was beginning to fall, windless and melancholy, when they came in sight of the villa. But there was no thought of flowers in her soul, then or at any time; and the loveliest of all the blossoms lay crushed in her little hand when at last the carriage rolled into the courtyard of the Villa Cafaggiodo, and the attendants came round to the door to help her alight.
She looked up at the frowning portal, at the lifeless galleries, and shrank back.
“My lord does not entertain?” she whispered.
“It is his will to be alone, Madonna,” they answered low.
Hardly conscious of her limbs, swaying a little, she mounted the steps, and saw an open door before her. Standing there, as in a fearful dream, she heard a sudden sound below, and started and turned. The carriage, the escort, were all in retreat, returning by the road they had come. She tried to call to them—her dry throat would not articulate; she made a panic move as if to descend, and paused again. They had closed and bolted the gates behind them; she was left quite alone and unprotected in that deserted place.
There was no voice of anything but a little garrulous fountain, which giggled and choked in the courtyard. The cold, grey house-front rose above her; behind and to either side the cypresses reared their inky minarets against an empty sky. In the spaces between, the bushes and flowering shrubs were already clouds of impenetrable shadow, palpitating with suggestion. What might not be beyond or within them, watching for her descent—eyes, horrible eyes! With a shudder she turned to the door, and saw the vast spaces of the vestibule, melancholy, cavernous, waiting to engulf her. But not a sound came from them, or from anywhere. The place seemed wholly vacant and deserted.
Hush! a whisper—a footstep creeping on the stones of the court below. Without pausing to look or convince herself, she fled into the great hall, and found herself at the foot of the staircase, breathing in a mortal fear, clutching at the balustrade for support. A faint glow from the dying day smeared the marble walls, and illumined the limbs of a dozen statues as if with phosphorescence. But the pits of blackness between, more dense in consequence, were dreadfully potential of evil, and, half swooning, she turned to the staircase as her only resource. There was a room above—a room she knew and had slept in—and thither, as to her one ark of refuge in that mad flight, she instinctively made. If she could only reach it before she died of terror!
She was there, had put out a shaking hand to part the tapestry on the wall, when something, unfamiliar to her even in her blind agitation, made her shrink back with a shock like death. She knew the woven picture—Herodias’s daughter, and the dark arm of the executioner holding the bleeding head over the charger. But now the poised hand seemed empty—the head had run to a point—in a sudden sick fascination she peered forward to examine it.
God in heaven! the arm was actual and living; the fingers gripped a dagger!
And, even as she uttered a little whining cry, “Pero! per pietà!” she saw a mad gleam at the crevice, and the arm struck down.
Her scream was still echoing through the empty house as a grinning, soft-snarling beast parted the arras, and, leaping over the prostrate body, turned and bent gloatingly to view it. His poniard stood buried to the hilt in the soft flesh of the shoulder-blade.
“Pietro’s tooth!” he shrieked; “Pietro’s tooth!” His laugh reeled and babbled among the galleries as if scores of invisible feet were suddenly running down to the scene of the crime.
He paused, he listened; with an awful look he suddenly cast himself on his knees by the murdered child, and, raising his bloody hands, besought, in a shaking voice and with tears streaming down his cheeks, Heaven’s pardon for his crime, vowing, in expiation of it, never to marry again.
With moans and sobs he then raised the poor body, silent to his remorse as to his hate, and, passionately kissing the lips, grown desirable to him only in death, with his own hands laid it in the coffin he had ready prepared for it in the very chamber to which the living soul had fled, in thought, for refuge.
That same night it was secretly conveyed to Florence, and buried in the Church of San Lorenzo. The murderer married Beatrice de Menesser seventeen years later. But, no doubt, by then, as a great romancer remarked, he had not only forgotten his vow, but that any reason had ever existed for his making one. God, in mediæval Italy, was credited with as short a memory as man, and with a much more amiable credulity.