The Fool looked frankly amazed.
'Montano,' cried Bembo, 'whom, in my pride of place, I have forgotten! I will go down among the people where he lies, and seek to heal his wounds, and sing Christ's parables to simple hearts. Love lies not in palaces. I will seek Montano.'
'Come, then,' said Cicada.
'Nay, in a little,' said the boy. 'Let the kind night find us first. I will flaunt my creed no longer in the sun.'
From behind the barred door of Lupo's shop came the sound of muffled laughter. The tragic incongruity of it in that house of ruin was at least arresting enough to halt a pedestrian here and there on his passage along the dark, wet-blown street outside. The mirth broke gustily, with little snarls at intervals, bestial and worrying; hearing which, the lingerer would perhaps hurry on his way with a shudder, crossing himself against, or spitting out like a bad odour, the influence of the fiend who had evidently got hold of the master armourer. Libera nos à malo!
The fiend, in fact, in possession was no other than Messer Montano's Cerberus, and its orgy, had the listener known it, had more than justified his apprehensions. The mirth which terrified his heart was perhaps even a degree more deadly in its evocation than anything he could imagine. It was really laughter so dreadful that, had he guessed its import, he had rushed, in an agony of self-vindication, to summon the watch. But guessing nothing, unless it might be Lupo's madness under the shock of his misfortunes, he simply crossed himself and hurried away.
Blood conspiracies are rarely successful. Perhaps a too scrupulous forethought against contingencies tends to clog the issues. If that is so, the recklessness of these men may, in a measure, have spelt their present security. A laugh, after all, is less open to suspicion than a whisper. Who could imagine a fatal thrust in a guffaw? Nevertheless, every chuckle uttered here punctuated a stab.
In rehearsal only at present, it is true; but practice, good practice, sirs. The victim of the attack was a dummy, contrived suggestively to represent Galeazzo. At least the habit made the man; and hate and a stinging imagination supplied the rest.
It stood in a dusky corner by the dead forge. Not so much light as would certainly guide a hand was allowed to fall upon it; for deeds of darkness, to be successful, must be prepared against darkness. Its stuffed, daubed face, staring from out this gloom, was like nothing human. To catch sudden sight, within a vista of dim lamp-shine, of its motionless eyes and features warped with stabs, was to gasp and shrink, as if one had looked into a glass and seen Death reflected back. Its suggestion of reality (and it possessed it) was to seek rather in velvet and satin; in a cunning, familiar disposition of its dress; in the sombre but profuse sparkle of artificial gems with which it was looped and hung. Thence came a grotesque and wicked semblance to a doomed figure. For the rest, in the bloodless slashes, gaping, rag-exuding, which had taken it cunningly in weak places—through the neck, under the gorget, between joints of the mail with which Lupo's craft had fitted it—there was a suggestiveness almost more horrible than truth.
It was in actual fact a sop to Cerberus, was this grisly-ludicrous doll, fruit of the decision (which had followed much discussion of ways and means) to postpone its prototype's murder to some occasion of public festivity, when the sympathies of the mob might be kindled and a revolution accomplished at a stroke. Politic Cerberus must nevertheless have something to stay the gnawing and craving of a delayed revenge which had otherwise corroded him. He took a ferociously boyish delight in fashioning this lay-figure, and, having made, in whetting his teeth on it; in clothing it in purple and fine linen; in addressing it wheedlingly, or ironically, or brutally, as the mood swayed him. And to-night his mood, stung by the tempest, perhaps, was unearthly in its wildness. It rose in fiendish laughter; it mocked the anguish of the blast, a threefold litany, now blended, now a trifurcating blasphemy. There were the roaring bass of Visconti, Lampugnani's smooth treble, the deadly considered baritone of Olgiati. And, punctuating all, like the tap of a baton, flew the interjections of Messer Montano, the conductor:—