VII
That year the winter was very severe. Drifting ice broke the bridges of the Loire, people were frozen on the roads, wolves came into the suburbs of the town, and prowled even under the windows of the château. One morning Francesco found a half-frozen swallow on the verandah and carried it to Leonardo, who revived it with the warmth of his breath, and established it in a cage near the fire, meaning to restore it to liberty in the spring. The Master no longer attempted to paint, and had hidden the unfinished picture with his brushes and paints in the darkest corner of the studio. The days went by in idleness. Sometimes the notary visited them and talked of the harvests, the salt tax, and the comparative merits of Languedoc and Limousin sheep. Sometimes Francesco's confessor came, Fra Guglielmo, an Italian by birth, but long settled at Amboise, a simple pleasant old man, who could tell stories about the Florence of his youth which made Leonardo laugh.
The early twilight came on, and the visitors took their departure. Then for hours at a time Leonardo would pace up and down the room, occasionally glancing at Astro. Now more than ever the cripple seemed to him a living reproach, the mockery of the one great aim of his life, the making of wings for men. Astro sat in a corner, his feet drawn up under him, winding long strips of linen on a stick, whittling sticks, carving tops, or with his eyes blinking he would rock himself slowly and, smiling, sing his unchanging song:—
'Cucurlu! Curlu!
Eagles and cranes,
Up they flew!'
At last it became quite dark, and silence descended upon the house. Out of doors the boughs of the old trees creaked and roared in the storm, and the roar was like the voice of malignant giants. The eerie howling of wolves was heard in the outskirts of the forest. Francesco piled logs on the fire, and Leonardo sat down beside it. The young man played on the lute and could sing very pleasantly. He tried to dispel the Master's melancholy by his music; once he sang him an old song composed by Lorenzo Il Magnifico for the 'Mask of Bacchus and Ariadne,' a favourite with Leonardo, who had known it in his youth:—
'Quant' è bella giovinezza
Ma sen fugge tuttavia?
Chi vuol esser lieto, sia;
Di doman non v'è certezza.'
The Master listened, greatly moved; he remembered the summer night, the dark shadows, the brilliant moonlight in the lonely street, the sounds of the lute from the marble loggia, the same tender love-song. And he remembered, too, his thoughts of La Gioconda. Francesco, sitting at the old man's feet, looked up and saw that tears were falling from the fading eyes.
Sometimes Leonardo would read over his old diaries, and occasionally he still wrote in them, but of the subject which now chiefly occupied his thoughts—Death.
'Thou see'st that thy hope and thy desire to return to thy native land, and to thy old life, is like the desire of the moth for the flame, and that Man (who, ceaseless in desire, joyous in impatience, ever awaits a new spring, and thinketh that his desire is slow in its fulfilment) does not know that he expecteth but his own destruction and his end. But this expectation is the quintessence of nature, the soul of the elements, and finding itself in the soul of man, it is the desire to return from the body unto Him who made it.'
'In nature nothing exists but Force and Movement; and force is the volition of happiness, the eternal striving of the universe after final equilibrium and the Prime Mover.'
'Every part desires to be united with its whole that it may escape imperfection.'
'As the day well spent gives pleasant dreams, life well lived shall give a happy death.'
'Every evil leaves bitterness in the memory, except the greatest evil, which is death, for it destroys the memory together with the life.'
'When I thought I was learning to live, I was but learning how to die.'
'The outward necessity of nature corresponds with the outward necessity of reason: everything is reasonable, all is good, because all is necessary.'
Thus his reason justified death, the will of the Prime Mover; yet in the depth of his heart something rebelled.
Once he dreamed that he awoke in a coffin buried alive under the earth, and with desperate resolution and panting for breath he strove to raise the lid of his prison.
Next morning he told Francesco of his desire that he should lie unburied till the first signs of decomposition should show themselves. He still loved life with a blind unreasoning love, still clung to it and dreaded death as a black pit into which that day or the next he would fall with a cry of the utmost terror. All the consolations of reason, all he had said of divine necessity and the will of the Prime Mover, vanished like smoke before this shrinking of the flesh. He would have relinquished his immortality for one ray of earthly sunshine, one waft of the spring, for the perfume of expanding leaves, for a bunch of yellow flowers from the Monte Albano, where he had been a happy child.
At night, when he could not sleep, Francesco would read to him from the Gospels. Never had they seemed to him so new, so rare in excellence, so little understood of men. Some sayings, as he thought out their meaning, deepened for him like wells.
"Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." Was this indeed the answer to the question of his whole life, 'Shall not men have wings?'
"And having ended all his temptation, the devil departed from him for a season." What did that mean? When did the devil return to him again?
Words which might have seemed to him full of the greatest error, contrary to experience and natural law, still did not repel him.
'If ye have faith as a grain of mustard-seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place, and it shall remove.'
He had always thought that the final knowledge and the final faith would lead by different paths to the same goal, the blending of outward and inward necessity, the will of man and the will of God. Yet was not the sting of the words in the fact that to have faith, even as a grain of mustard-seed, was more difficult than to see the mountain remove unto yonder place?
But there was a saying of Christ's still more enigmatical: "I thank thee, Father, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." How reconcile this with the injunction, "Be ye wise as serpents"?
And, again, "Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not neither do they spin. Take no thought saying what shall we eat or what shall we drink, for after all these things do the Gentiles seek, and your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things."
Leonardo recalled his discoveries and inventions, the machines for giving men power over nature, and asked himself:—
'Is all this care for the body—what shall we eat and what shall we drink, and the like—is it mammon worship? Is there nothing in human toil, in knowledge, but the mere profit? Is knowledge like Martha, who is careful and troubled about many things, but not about the one thing needful? Is love like Mary, who has chosen the good part and sitteth at the Master's feet?'
He knew by experience the temptations inseparable from knowledge.
It seemed to the dying man that he was already face to face with the black, the dreadful pit, into which, if not to-day then to-morrow, he too must fall with a last despairing cry:—
'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'