X

Il Moro returned to the Sala della Rocchetta, where reigned a mournful silence. A woman passing with a basket of swaddling clothes, approached him and said.

'Her Excellency has been delivered.'

'Does she live?' he stammered, very pale.

'Yes, she lives; but the infant is still-born. She is very weak; and she desires to speak with your Highness.'

He went to her room; and there on the pillows he saw a small shrunken face like a child's, pallid and calm, with great eyes surrounded by livid circles, and turbid as if a spider's web were drawn over them; familiar and yet strange. He bent over her silently.

'Send for Isabella! Quickly!' she gasped.

He gave the order; and presently the tall, young, graceful woman with the proud sad look, the widow of Gian Galeazzo, entered the room and approached the dying Beatrice. All retired except Ludovico and the confessor.

For a few minutes the two women whispered together. Then Isabella kissed the other's cold forehead, knelt by the bedside and prayed, covering her face with her hands.

Beatrice signed to her husband.

'Vico, forgive me! Weep not. Remember my spirit will be always with you. I know it was I only—I only whom——'

She could not complete the sentence, but he understood her meaning.

'It was I only whom you loved.' Slowly she turned her eyes to him, eyes already darkening, and murmured:—

'One kiss—on my lips....'

The monk was reciting the last prayers for the dying, and the attendants, who had re-entered, responded in chorus.

The Duke felt the lips beneath his own turn cold and stiff; in that long kiss she had breathed her last faint sigh.

'She is dead,' said Marliani.

All knelt, making the sign of the cross. Il Moro raised himself very slowly, his face rigid, expressive less of grief than of extreme tension of spirit; he breathed heavily and loud like one toiling up the steep hillside. Suddenly he stretched out his arms, gave one wild cry:—

'Bice!' and fell senseless upon the corpse.

Of the spectators Leonardo alone had remained calm; his clear searching eyes were fixed upon the Duke. The look of supreme suffering in a human face, or its expression in the gestures of the body, was to his eyes a rare and beautiful manifestation of nature, an exceptional experience. Not a wrinkle, not the quivering of a muscle escaped his passionless all-seeing eyes. Presently, over-mastered by the desire to draw, he slipped from the room to fetch his sketch-book.

In the lower halls, whither the artist bent his steps, the candles were dying out in black smoke and gutterings of wax. The chariots of Numa and Augustus, and all the pompous allegorical paraphernalia employed to glorify Il Moro and his Beatrice, were unspeakably melancholy and wretched in the morning brilliance. In one room he saw the overthrown and trampled Arco dell' Amore.

Standing by the moribund fire he was beginning his sketch, when in the chimney-corner he noticed the boy who had personified the Golden Age. He had fallen asleep, huddled up, his hands clutching his knees, his head dropped upon them. The faint heat from the dying embers had not sufficed to warm the poor little naked and gilded body. Leonardo touched him on the shoulder, but the child did not look up. He moaned piteously and the artist took him in his arms. Then he opened frightened eyes, blue as violets, and wailed.

'Let me go home! Let me go home!'

'What is your name?' asked Leonardo.

'Lippi. Let me go home! Let me go home! I am so cold. I feel so sick.'

His eyelids fell heavily, and he babbled deliriously.—

'Tornerà l'età dell' oro,

Cantiam tutti: "Viva il Moro!"'

Leonardo wrapped the boy in his own cloak, laid him in a chair and roused the servants in the ante-chamber who were sleeping off the effects of their cups. He learned from them about the child: that he was motherless, the son of a tinker in the Broletto Novo, who, for twenty scudi, had sold his child to the mumming, though warned that he might die of being gilded. Leonardo returned, wrapped the boy snugly in his furs, and was carrying him out of the palace to the nearest drug shop that the paint might be removed from his skin. Suddenly, however, he paused, for he remembered the drawing he had just commenced, and the interesting look of despair in Ludovico's face.

'Ah, well,' he thought, 'I shall scarce forget it. The chief thing is the wrinkle over the arched eyebrows, and the strange smile which one might think full of serenity, even of enthusiasm. The expression of immense grief is like enough to that of immoderate joy; and truly Plato has said that the two emotions, rising upon different bases, converge at their apex.'

Then feeling the tremble of the frozen child, he added to himself ironically—

'Poor little sick bird—our Age of Gold!'

And he pressed him with such tenderness to his heart that the little lad fancied his mother had risen from her grave, and was comforting him.