III
Merula had come to Florence on a mission from his lord, to purchase rare books from the library of the great Lorenzo. He was lodged in the house of Buonaccorsi, as great an enthusiast as himself for the learning and the arts of the ancients. Journeying to Florence he had fallen into an acquaintance with Giovanni Boltraffio at a road-side inn, and under the pretext that he required an amanuensis, he had brought him in his company to Messer Cipriano's house.
When Boltraffio entered, Merula was in the act of examining with reverent attention a much-worn volume, which had the appearance of a Missal or a Psaltery. He gingerly passed a damp sponge over the parchment—parchment of the most delicate kind, made from the skin of a still-born lamb; here and there he rubbed it with pumice-stone, smoothed it with the blade of a knife and with a polisher; then holding it up to the light, studied it afresh.
'Dainty darlings!' he murmured, sucking in his lips with delight; 'come forth to the light of heaven! Ah, how many and how beautiful ye are!'
He raised his bald head from his work and showed a bloated, red-nosed countenance, mobile brows, and eyes small and colourless, but brimming with vivacity; poured wine into a cup beside him on the window-sill, drank it, coughed, and was returning to his work when he caught sight of Giovanni.
'Ha, little monk!' he called out merrily. 'You have been lacking to me: "Where can my little monk be gone?" quoth I. "Fallen in love, of a surety, with one of the fair maids of Florence." Fair enough, I warrant you, and falling in love is no sin. Nor have I been wasting my time neither. You never have seen such a pretty piece in your life. Will you have me show her to you? Not I; for you'll be whispering the thing to the four winds! And to think I bought her for a song from a Hebrew rag-vendor! Well, well, I suppose I must show you; you only!' And beckoning mysteriously he whispered, 'Come here with you—closer—here!'
And he pointed to a page closely covered with the angular characters of ecclesiastical writing: praises of the Virgin, psalms, prayers, interspersed with huge musical notation. Then he opened the book at another page, and raised it to the light on a level with Giovanni's eyes; the boy noticed that where Merula had scraped away the ecclesiastical writing there emerged other characters—barely distinguishable—not letters, but the ghosts of letters, pallid, attenuated, faint, still lingering impressed upon the parchment.
'See you? See you?' cried Merula, triumphantly; 'is it not a darling? Did I not tell you, little brother, 'twas a pretty piece!'
'But what is it?' asked Giovanni, astounded.
'That's what I can't yet tell you. Fragments of an antique anthology; new riches it may be of the Hellenic muse. And, perchance, but for me they would never have come out into God's light—would have been entombed to the end of time under antiphons and psalms of penitence!' And Merula explained to his pupil how some Middle Age, monkish copyist, wishing to use the precious parchment, had expunged, as he thought, the old Pagan writing, and scrawled his pieties over it. As the old man spoke, the sun filled the room with its slowly dying, evening red; in this last radiance the shade of the antique letters, the ghost of the ancient writing, showed itself with redoubled clearness.
'You see! you see!' cried Merula in an ecstasy, 'The dead are rising from their age-long sepulchres! It is a hymn to the Olympian gods! Already you can decipher the first lines!'
And translating from the Greek, he read:—
'Glory to the gentle, the richly-crowned Dionysus,
Glory to thee, far-darting Phœbus, silver-bowed, terrible,
God of the flowing curls, slayer of the sons of Niobe——'
And here is a hymn to that Venus, of whom you, little monk, have such a mighty dread:—
'Glory to thee, golden-limbed mother, Aphrodite,
Delight of the gods and of mortals.'
But here the verses broke off, hidden under the pious over-writing. Giovanni lowered the book, and at once the traces of the old Greek letters grew faint and confused, sinking into the yellow smoothness of the parchment. Nothing was visible but the clear, black, greasy characters of the monkish scribe, the penitential psalm, and the huge square notes for the chant:—
'Give ear to my prayer, O God, and hide not thyself from my supplication. My heart is sore pained within me, and the terrors of death are fallen upon me.'
The roseate reflection faded away, and darkness filled the room. Merula poured wine from the earthen pitcher, drank, and offered it to his companion.
'To my health, boy. Vinum super omnia bonum diligamus! You refuse? Well, well! as you will. I will drink for you. But what is ill with you, little monk? You are as green as if you were drowning. Has that bigot of an Antonio been scaring you with his prophesyings? Spit on them, Giovanni, spit on them! A pox upon all these croakings of ill-voiced ravens! Confess now, you have been with Antonio?'
'Ay.'
'And of what did he speak?'
'Of Antichrist, and of Messer Leonardo da Vinci.'
'So I thought! You have no speech but of Leonardo! Has he bewitched you, simpleton? Hear me now, lad; remove that folly out of your head, and content you as my secretary. I will show you the world; teach you grammar, law; make you an orator and a court poet. There's the road to riches and fame. Painting! what rubbish is that? Seneca called it a trade—no business for a free man. Turn your eyes upon the artists; are they not all ignorant, rude persons——'
'Nay, I have been told Messer Leonardo is a great scholar.'
'You tell me news. Where is his Latin, pr'ythee? He confounds Cicero and Quintilian, and has not even a smack of Greek about him. A scholar you call him, do you?'
'But,' urged Boltraffio, 'he has made wondrous machines; and his studies of the phenomena of nature——'
'Machines! pf—f! Studies of nature! How far is that going to take you? In my Elegantiæ Linguæ Latinæ I have culled more than two thousand turns of speech; on my soul, new, and elegance itself. Would you know how much it cost me? But to apply wheels to machinery, and to watch the manner of the flying of birds and the sprouting of the grass in the fields—call you that learning? 'Tis the idleness, the vain toying of babes.'
The old man paused: his face had grown stern. Then taking his young friend by the arm, he continued with gravity:—
'Hearken, Giovanni; and what I say to you burn it deep into your mind. Our teachers are the Greeks and the Romans; they have done all that the mind of man can do upon this earth. For us there is nothing left but to follow in their footsteps: is it not written, "The disciple is not greater than his lord?"' He lifted his wine, and looking straight into Giovanni's eyes with malicious mirth, all his lines and wrinkles dissolving in one broad smile, he added:—
'O youth! youth! I look upon you, little monk, and I envy you. You are a bud blowing in the spring, that is what you are. And you, simpleton, contemn women, and scorn wine, and would make of yourself a hermit and a recluse. For all that, you have a little devil there in your heart; oh, I read you well enough, my friend, through and through to your very soul! Some day that little devil will peep out; it is vain for you to deny it. However glum you may be, there are those who will be merry in your company. See, Giovanni, carino you're this parchment—penitential psalms outside, and under them a hymn to Aphrodite!'
'Messer Giorgio,' said Giovanni, 'it grows dark; were it not well I brought the lights?'
'Why this haste, lad? It pleases me to converse in the twilight, and to recall my lost youth.' His tongue had grown stammering and his phrases less perspicuous. 'I know,' he muttered, 'that you are gazing at me, and thinking, "He is drunk, the old rascal, and talking his folly." Yet I have that here within me,' and he tapped his bald forehead complacently and nodded. 'I speak not for boasting,' he went on, 'but inquire of the scholars whether any have ever surpassed Merula in the elegance of his Latin. Who was it who discovered Martial? Who read the famed inscription on the gate of Tibur? That meant climbing till your head reeled, stones breaking from under your feet, as you clung to a bunch of twigs and thought to fall headlong. Whole days under the blazing sun, just to read and to copy those few ancient letters! And the peasant maids as they passed would cry to each other, "See yon fat quail up there seeking a nesting place!" And I would answer them with some gallantry, and when they had passed by would set me to my work again. Once, concealed under the ivy and the thorns, where the stones had fallen in ruin, I found these two sole words, "Gloria Romanorum!"' And as if listening to the echo of majestic utterance too long silenced, Merula repeated in low, awestruck tones, '"Gloria Romanorum!"'—Glory of the Romans!'
But then, with an uncertain wave of the hand, he added, 'By my troth! 'tis something to remember, even though the past returns no more.' And raising his glass, he sang hoarsely the students' drinking-song:—
'Not a single jot miss I,
Not a single drop, Sir!
All my life to the cask I go,
And by the cask I'll stop, Sir.
Wine I love and singing to 't,
And the Latin Graces;
If I drink my throat'll do 't
Better than Horatius.
Vintage spins our brains about
Dum vinum potamus;
Lads, to Bacchus let us shout,
Te Deum laudamus!'
He fell a-coughing and was unable to finish. By this time it was dark, and Giovanni could barely see his master's face. Outside it was still raining, and the swollen and frequent drops plashed noisily in the streaming courtyard below.
'Hear me, little monk,' stuttered Merula; 'what was it I was saying? My wife is a handsome woman—no—that wasn't it. Have patience. Yes, I have it now. You know the line: "Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento." Ah! they were the giants, the lords of the universe!' Here his voice shook, and Giovanni saw tears in his eyes. 'I repeat, giants. While to-day—it is a scandal to speak it! but let us take this duke of ours, Ludovico Il Moro, Duke of Milan. True it is I am paid by him, am writing his history, am a sort of Titus Livius, and am comparing the cowardly hare, the man of straw, to Pompey and to Cæsar; but in my soul, Giovanni, in my soul'—He stopped, and glanced at the door with the suspiciousness of a practised courtier; then bending closer to his companion, he whispered, 'In the soul of old Merula the love of liberty is not dead, and will never die. Repeat it not, but I tell you our times are evil, evil as never before. And the men! it sickens me to see them; rotten! mere clods of earth! And they curl up their noses, and think themselves as the ancients. I would fain know what they are so proud of. Hearken; an acquaintance of mine writes to me from Greece, that not many weeks ago in the island of Chios, the convent washer-women as they were beating the linen at dawn, found on the seashore—a god! a real ancient god; a Triton with his fishy-tail, and fins, and scales. The silly fools were affrighted and fled, thinking it the Devil. But when they saw him weak and old, and it would seem sick, lying on his belly on the sand, and warming his green scales in the sun, his hair grey, and his eyes dim as those of a sucking babe, then they took courage, the cowardly wretches! and came around him showering him with Christian prayers, and beat him to death like a dog; he, the ancient deity, last of the mighty gods of the ocean; it might be a scion of Poseidon himself!'
And the old man shook his head sorrowfully, and maudlin tears rolled down his cheeks as he thought of the sea-monster done to death by Christian laundresses. A servant entered bearing a candle, and closed the shutters; with the darkness the pagan phantoms shrank away and vanished. The pair were called to supper, but Merula was so heavy with wine that they had to carry him to bed.
It was long before Boltraffio slept, and as he listened to the peaceful snores of Messer Giorgio, he thought, as usual, of Leonardo da Vinci.