IX
Boltraffio went to the cathedral, where that morning Fra Girolamo Savonarola was to preach. As he entered, the last notes of the organ were dying away under the resounding arches of Santa Maria del Fiore. The throng had filled the church with suffocating heat and with the low rustlings of unceasing small movements. Men, women, and children were separated from each other by drawn curtains. Under the arches, slender and narrow like arrow-heads, deep gloom and mystery reigned as in a sleeping forest. The rays of sunlight, refracted by brilliantly coloured glass, fell in rainbow hues upon the congregation and upon the grey marble of the pillars. The semi-darkness surrounding the altar was broken by the glare of candles. Mass was over and the crowd was awaiting the preacher. All looks were fixed on the wooden pulpit.
Giovanni found a place in the crowd and listened to the whisperings of his neighbours.
'Will he come soon?' was asked impatiently by a carpenter of low stature, with a pale perspiring face and lank hair bound by a fillet.
'God knows!' responded a tinker, big and red-faced, but asthmatic. 'He has with him at San Marco a certain little brother named Marufi, with a hunchback and a stammering tongue, and 'tis he chooses the hour for his coming. We waited four hours once, and had thought there would be no preaching, yet in the end he came.'
'Santo Dio Benedetto! And I have waited since midnight! I am blind for sleep and for want of a crumb in my mouth. I could sit down upon knives!'
'Did I not tell thee, Damiano, 'twas matter of patience? Even now we are so far from the pulpit we shall hear naught.'
'Eh! We shall hear well enough. When he falls to at his shouting and his thundering, not the deaf only but the very dead must needs hear.'
'They say now, that he prophesies.'
'Not yet! Not till he has built Noah's Ark.'
'He has built it; to the last plank. Yea, and made a parabolic description thereof. Its length, Faith; its breadth; Charity; its altitude, Hope. Haste, he says, haste to the Ark of Salvation, while the doors stand wide. The day cometh when the doors will be put to, and then many shall weep that they have not repented and have not come in time to enter within. To-day he preaches of the Flood, the seventeenth verse of the sixth chapter of the book of Genesis.'
'They say he has had another vision, War, Pestilence!'
'The horsedealer in Vallombrosa said that a night or two agone great hosts fought in the sky over the city, and one could hear the clash of swords and the dinting of armour.'
'And it is a certainty, good folk, that on the Nunziata in the Chiesa dei Servi has been seen a bloody sweat.'
'Go to! And tears run nightly from the Madonna on the Rubaconte bridge. Lucia, my aunt, saw it herself!'
'And it means no good, rest assured. The Lord have mercy on us, miserable sinners!'
Meanwhile, among the women, there was a disturbance. An old woman fainted, and when lifted up, still did not recover her senses. The whole multitude indeed was worn by the interminable waiting; the pale carpenter seemed unable to sustain himself longer.
But suddenly a wave stirred the sea of heads, and a whisper ran through the church.
'He is coming!'
'Nay, 'tis not he, 'tis Fra Domenico da Pescia.'
'I tell you, yea, 'tis he! He has come.'
Giovanni saw a man in the black and white Dominican habit girdled with a rope, who slowly ascended the pulpit-stair and removed his cowl. His face was emaciated and yellow as wax, his lips thick, his nose aquiline, his forehead low. His left hand fell weakly on the desk, his right he raised clutching the crucifix; and silently with burning eyes he looked upon the trembling and expectant crowd. Profound silence reigned, in which each man could hear the beating of his own heart. The eyes of the monk glowed increasingly, till they were like fiery coals; but he still kept silence, and the strain of waiting became unendurable. It seemed that in another moment the crowd would burst into screams.
Yet the calm became deeper, more awful; till suddenly, rending the silence, came the terrible, lacerating, superhuman cry of the friar:—
'Ecce ego adduco aquas super terram, Behold I bring a Flood upon the earth!'
A shudder passed through the crowd, raising the hair from the head. Giovanni paled; he fancied the earth quaking, the cathedral arches about to fall. Beside him the stalwart tinker was shaking like a leaf, his teeth chattering. The head of the feeble carpenter had sunk backward on his shoulders as if he had received a blow, his face was shrivelled, his eyelids closed.
What followed was not a sermon but a delirium, which took hold of these thousands of people and shook them as a storm shakes the withered leaves. Giovanni listened, scarcely understanding. Detached phrases reached his ear:—
'See ye, see how the heavens have already darkened; the sun is purple, like clotted blood. Flee! Hide yourselves! There cometh even now a rain of brimstone and fire; a hail of fiery stones and thunderbolts. Fuge O Sion quae habitas apud filiam Babylonis! O Italy, chastisement cometh upon chastisement. After pestilence, war; and hunger after war! Judgment is here, judgment is there! Everywhere there is judgment. Among you the living suffice not to carry the dead. The dead in your houses shall be so many that the grave-diggers shall call to you to throw them out, and shall heap them on carts, yea, to the very necks of the horses, and shall throw them one upon the other and burn them. And then again they shall go through the streets and cry, "Who has any dead? Who has any dead?" And you will answer them: "I throw to you my son, I throw to you my brother, I throw to you my husband!" And then they shall go further, and always they shall cry: "Bring forth your dead! bring forth your dead!" O Florence! O Rome! O Italy! Past is the time of songs and of feasting; ye are sickened unto death. Lord, Thou art witness, that with my words I would have averted this ruin! But I can no more. I have no words more. I can but weep, and run over with my tears. Mercy! Mercy! O merciful Lord! Alas! my poor people! Alas! my Florence!'
He opened his arms, and the last words had sunk to a scarcely audible whisper. They passed over the crowd and died away, like the rustle of wind in the leaves—a sigh of infinite pity.
Pressing his white lips on the crucifix, he knelt and burst into sobs. The sermon was ended. The slow, heavy organ-notes rolled out, persuasive and immense, increasingly solemn and terrible, like the sound of the mighty ocean.
A woman's voice cried 'Misericordia!'
And thousands of voices answered, calling one to another; and like corn stalks bowing before the wind, the people fell upon their knees, line upon line, wave upon wave, crowding upon, striking against each other, like a flock of sheep panic-struck at the advance of a storm; and the long, agonising wail of penitents upon whom pressed the terror of immediate ruin, rose to Heaven, mingling with the pealing of music, shaking the ground, the marble pillars, and the vaults of the cathedral.
'Misericordia! Misericordia!'
Giovanni also sank to his knees, sobbing. The tall tinker rolled against him, breathing hard; the pale carpenter caught his breath and cried like a child, moaning—
'Misericordia!'
And Boltraffio remembered his pride, and his love of life, his desire to escape from Fra Benedetto, and to give himself up to the dangerous arts of Messer Leonardo, the enemy of God; he recalled the past fearful night on the Hill of the Mill, the recovered Venus, his sinful enthusiasm for the heathen beauty of the 'White She-devil'; stretching forth his hands to heaven, he mingled his voice with that of the despairing crowd, and cried—
'Lord! Lord! have compassion on me! I have sinned before thee. Pardon, and have mercy.'
At that moment, raising his face, wet with tears, he saw at his side the tall, upright form of Leonardo da Vinci. The artist, leaning carelessly against a column, held in his right hand his unfailing sketch-book; with his left he was drawing; now and then he glanced at the pulpit as if hoping to see once more the head of the preacher.
A stranger, and surrounded by the terrified crowd, Leonardo maintained a superb composure. In his cool, blue eyes, on his thin lips, tightly compressed like those of a man of minute observation, there was the same aloofness and curiosity with which he had mathematically measured the body of the Aphrodite. At sight of him the tears dried in Giovanni's eyes, and the prayer was silenced upon his lips.
Leaving the church he followed the artist and asked permission to see his sketch. Leonardo demurred, but presently handed the boy his sketch-book. And Giovanni saw a frightful caricature; not Savonarola, but an old and hideous devil in the dress of a monk, like the preacher indeed, but as if disfigured by self-inflicted and torturing penance, his pride and his desires still unsubdued. The lower jaw protruded, wrinkles intersected the cheek, the neck was twisted and black as a mummy's, the bushy, beetling brows, the rabid glance scarce preserved a semblance of humanity. All that was dark, terrible, and superstitious, all which gave Savonarola into the power of the deformed, tongue-tied visionary Marufi, was expressed by Leonardo in this sketch; brought out with neither anger nor pity, but with an imperturbable and impartial clear-sightedness.
And Giovanni remembered his words: 'L'ingegno dell' pittore vuol essere a similitudine dello specchio. The genius of the painter should be as a mirror, reflecting all objects, and colours, and movements, itself ever transparent and serene.'
The pupil of Benedetto raised his eyes to the artist's face, and felt that though threatened by eternal damnation, though he were to find in Messer Leonardo a veritable servant of Antichrist, yet to leave him had become impossible; an irresistible force was drawing him to this man; woe unto him if he failed to penetrate into the very depths of this being and of his art.