'The song he sang to me!' she murmured: 'Ah, me, if that hour could be mine! A saint in heaven?—not Bona's! she hath a lord—no saint, did he love her. He looked at me: it came from his heart. If that hour could be mine! Not then—'twere a sin—but now! That one hour—cherished—unspent—the seed of the unquickened pledge between us to all eternity. I could be content, knowing him a saint through that abstinence. My hour—mine—to passion to my breast—the shadow of the child that would not be born to me. He looked at me—no spectre of a dead lost love in his eyes—only a hopeless quest—bonds never to be riven. But now—Ah! I cannot kill him!'

She hid her eyes, shuddering. Narcisso, vaguely troubled, gloomed at her.

'You will not go to Messer Ludovico?' he said.

She returned to knowledge of him, as to a sense of pain out of oblivion.

'Go,' she said coldly. 'Leave all to me. You have done well, and been paid your wages.'

And he did not demur. It was not in her nature to gild her favours unnecessarily. Gold came less lavishly from her than kisses. Her pounds of flesh were her most profitable assets. She was a spendthrift in everything but money.

CHAPTER XIV

'Messer Bembo,' said Montano, between meditative and caustic, 'you do not agree that our poor Lupo's definition of a perfect government, an autocracy with an angel at its head, is a practicable definition?'

He was sitting, as often during the last few days, at talk with the boy, on subjects civic, political, and theological. They had discussed at odd times the whole ethics of government, from the constitution of Lycurgus to the code of Thomas Aquinas: they had expounded, each in his way, a scheme or a dream of socialism: they had agreed, without prejudice, to liken the evolution of the simple Church of Peter into the complicated fabric of the fourth Sixtus to a woodland cottage, bought by some great princely family, and improved into a summer palace, which was grown out of harmony with its environments. Somewhat to his amazement, Montano discovered that the boy was the opposite to a dogmatic Christian; that his was a religion, which, while conforming or adapting itself to the orthodox, was in its essence a religion of mysticism. No doubt the traditions of his origin were, to some extent, to seek for this. A pledge, so to speak, of spontaneous generation, Bernardo accounted for himself on a theory of reincarnation from another sphere. He believed in the possibility of the resurrection of the body, which, though destroyed, and many times destroyed, could be, in its character of mere soul-envelope or soul expression, as regularly reconstructed at the will of its informing spirit. Death, he declared, was just the beginning of the return of that divested spirit to the spring of life—to the river welling in the central Eden from the loins of the Father, the spouse of Nature, the secret, the unspeakable God, of whom was Christ, his own dear brother and comrade.

He would tell Messer Montano, with his sweet, frank eyes arraigning that crabbed philosopher's soul, how this unstained first-born of Nature, this sinless heir of love, this wise and pitying Christ, moved by an infinite compassion to see the wounded souls of his brothers—those few who had not made their backward flight too difficult—come, soiled and earth-cloyed, to seek their reincarnation in the spring, had descended, himself, upon earth at last, sacrificing his birthright of divinity, that he might teach men how to live. And the men his brothers had slain him, in jealousy, even as Cain slew Abel; yet had his spirit, imperishably great, continued to dwell in their midst, knowing that, did it once leave the earth, it must be for ever, and to mankind's eternal unregeneracy. For, so Bernardo insisted, there was an immutable law in Nature that no soul reincarnated could re-enter the sphere from which it was last returned, but must seek new fields of action. Wherefore all earth-loving spirits, which we call apparitions, were such as after death clung about the ways of men, in a yearning hopefulness to redeem them by touching their hearts with sympathy and their eyes with a mist of sorrow. And, of such gentle ghosts, Christ was but the first in faith and tenderness.