I

Pope Leo X., true to the traditions of the house of the Medici, posed as patron of art and learning. When he heard of his own election he said to his brother:—

'Let us enjoy the papal power, since God has conceded it to us!'

And Fra Mariano, his favourite jester added:—

'Seek your own pleasure, Holy Father! All else is folly.'

The pope surrounded himself with poets, musicians, painters, and scholars. A golden age had dawned for imitative men of letters, who had one unassailable article of faith, the perfection of Cicero's prose and of Virgil's poetry.

The shepherds of Christ's flock avoided the mention of His name, because it was a word unknown to Cicero's Orations. They called nuns, vestals; the Holy Ghost, the Inspiration of the Supreme Jove; and they requested the Pope to include Plato in the roll of saints. Bembo, a future cardinal, owned that he did not read the Epistles of Paul (he called them Epistolaccie) lest he should spoil his style. When Francis I. asked for the Laocoön, Leo X. replied that he would sooner give him the head of Peter the Apostle.

The pope loved his scholars and artists, his poets and pedants; but above all he loved his jesters. He solemnly crowned Cuerno, the celebrated rhymster and drunkard, and was no less liberal to him than to Raphael. He spent huge sums on feasts, though he ate sparingly himself, being afflicted with a weak digestion, and an incurable purulent disease; and his soul was no less sick than his body, for he suffered from continual ennui.

When Leonardo first presented himself at the Vatican he was told that his only hope of obtaining audience of His Holiness was to declare himself a buffoon. He did not follow this good advice, and failed of admission time and again. Of late he had experienced strange forebodings which he tried to put from him as senseless and absurd. It was not anxiety as to his affairs which oppressed him; nor was it his failure to gain adequate recognition from Leo X. or Giuliano de' Medici. He had been too long used to annoyances of this kind. But his vague disquiet, his ominous apprehension, continually increased; till one radiant autumn evening, as he was returning from the Vatican, his heart sank, under the pressure of imminent catastrophe.

He was living in the same house where he had lived during his former visit to Rome; one of the small detached buildings behind St. Peter's, which had belonged to the Papal Mint. It was old and gloomy, and having been unoccupied for several years was exceedingly damp. He entered a large vaulted apartment with cracks on walls and ceiling, and windows overshadowed by the wall of the adjoining house.

In the corner sat Astro the imbecile, his feet drawn up under him, his hands busy whittling sticks, while he purred his monotonous lullaby—

Cucurlu, curlu!

Eagles and cranes

Up they flew!

Leonardo's anxiety perceptibly increased.

'What's the matter, Astro?' he asked kindly, laying his hand on the cripple's head.

'Nothing,' said Astro, with a curious look of intelligence, 'nothing with me. It's Giovanni. But it's all the better for him. He has flown away.'

'Giovanni? Where is Giovanni?' cried Leonardo, suddenly realising that his forebodings had centred on this unhappy disciple. 'Astro! I implore you, my friend, try to remember! Where is Giovanni? I must see him at once. Where is he? What has happened?'

'Don't you understand?' muttered Astro, vainly seeking for the right words. 'He is up there—he has escaped—flown away. You don't understand? I will show you then. It is better for him to have flown away.'

He rolled himself to his feet and shuffled along on his crutches, leading his master up the creaking stair to the attic, where the sun burned hot on the tiled roof, and the sunset rays shone upon the dormer-window. As they entered, startled pigeons fluttered their wings noisily and flew away.

'There he is,' said Astro, simply, and pointed to a dark corner. Leonardo saw the figure of Giovanni, apparently standing, very erect and quite motionless, his widely opened eyes staring fixedly straight before him. 'Giovanni!' cried Leonardo, with shaking voice, a cold sweat bursting out on his forehead.

He drew nearer; saw that the face was strangely distorted; touched the nerveless hand, and felt it cold. The body oscillated heavily to and fro. Giovanni had hanged himself from an iron hook lately inserted for mechanical purposes into the cross beam; and by means of a strong silken cord, one of the attachments of the flying machine.

Astro had fallen back into his torpor, and was looking serenely out of the window. The house stood high, and commanded a view of the tiled roofs, the domes and towers of Rome, of the Campagna spreading like a sea, traversed by long lines of ruined aqueducts, of the hills of Albano and Frascati, of the clear sky where the swallows swooped and circled. Astro watched them, and smiled, and waved his arms joyously as if imitating their flight.

Cucurlu!

Up they flew!

Curlu!

he crooned contentedly.

Leonardo stood, still as a stone, between his two disciples, the imbecile and the suicide.

A few days later he found Giovanni's diary and read it attentively.

'The white witch!' always and everywhere! May she be accursed. The last mystery: two shall be in one. Christ and Antichrist are one. The heaven above—the heaven below!

'No! No! This shall not, must not be! Rather, death!'

'Into thy hands I commit my spirit, O God! Be thou my Judge!'

There came an abrupt end to the entries. Leonardo understood that these words had been penned on the day of the writer's suicide.