'Here's a comrade blithe
To the wild wood hieth—
Follow and find!
Loving both least and best,
His love takes still a zest
From the song-time of the wind.
The chuckling birds they greet him,
The does run forth to meet him—
Follow and find!
Strange visions shall thou see;
Learn lessons new to thee
In the song-time of the wind.
Couldst, then, the dear bird kill
That kiss'd thee with her bill?
Follow and find
How great, having strength, to spare
That trusting Soft-and-fair
In the song-time of the wind.
He is both God and Man;
He is both Christ and Pan—
Follow and find
How, in the lovely sense,
All flesh being grass, wakes thence
The song-time of the wind.
It was, I say, popular with the Lotharios. The novelty of this sort of renunciation tickled their sensoriums famously. It suggested a quite new and captivating form of self-indulgence, in the rapture to be gathered from an indefinite postponement of consummations. The sense of gallantry lies most in contemplation. I do not think it amounted to much more. Teresa and Elisabetta enjoyed their part in the serio-comic sport immensely, and were the most cuddlesome lambs, frisking unconscious under the faltering knife of the butcher. Madonna Caterina laughed immoderately to see their great mercy-pleading eyes coquetting with the greatly-withheld blade. But then she had no bump of reverence. The little wretch disliked sanctity in any form; loved aggressiveness better than meekness; was always in her heart a little Amazonian terrier-bitch, full of fight and impudence. It might have gone crossly with Messer Bembo had she been in her adoptive mother's position of trustee for him.
But luckily, or most unluckily for the boy, he was in more accommodating hands. This was the acute period of his proselytising. He had been persuaded back to court, and Bona had received him with moist eyes and open arms, and indeed a very yearning pathos of emotionalism, which had gathered a fataler influence from the contrition which in the first instance must be his. He had stood before her not so much rebuking as rebuked. Knowing her no longer saint, but only erring woman, it added a poignancy to his remorse that he had led her into further error by his abuse of her trust. She had answered his confession with a lovely absolution:—
'What is lost is lost. Thou art the faithfullest warrant of my true observance of my lord's wishes. Only if thou abandon'st me am I betrayed.'
Could he do aught after this but love her, accept her, her fervour and her penitence, for a first factor in the crusade he had made his own? And, while the soft enchantment held, no general could have wished a loyaler adjutant, or one more ready to first-example in herself the sacrifices he demanded. She abetted him, as she had promised, in all his tactics; lent the full force of an authority, which his sweetness and modesty could by no means arrogate to himself, to compel the reforms he sang. She gave, amongst other gifts, her whole present soul to the righting of the wrong done to the girl Lucia and her father; and when all her efforts to discover the vanished Tassino had failed, and she, having sent on her own initiative a compensatory purse of gold to the blind armourer, had learned how Lucia had banged the gift and the door in the messenger's face, was readily mollified by Bernardo's tender remonstrance: 'Ah, sweet Madonna! what gold can give her father eyes, or her child a name!'
'What! it is born?' she murmured.
'I saw it yesterday,' said Bembo. 'It lay in her lap, like the billet that kills a woman's heart.'
And, indeed, he had not, because of his re-exaltation, ceased to visit his friends, or to go to occasional discussion with the crabbed Montano; whose moroseness, nevertheless, was petrifying. Yet had he even sought to interest the Duchess there; though, for once, without avail; for she dared not seem to lend her countenance to that banned, if injured, misanthrope.
So she led the chorus to his soloing, and helped and mothered him with an infatuation beyond a mother's. Like the Emperor's jewelled nightingale, he was the sweetest bird to pet while his tricks were new. His voice entranced the echoes of those sombre chambers and blood-stained corridors. The castello was reconsecrated in his breath, and the miasma from its fearful pits dispelled. His lute was his psalter and psaltery in one: it interpreted him to others, and himself to himself. Its sob was his sorrow, and its joy his jubilance. He could coax from it wings to expression inexpressible by speech alone. Here is one of his latest parables, or apologues, baldly running, as it appears, on the familiar theme, which, through that vehicle, he translated for his hearers into rapture:—
'Down by a stream that muttered under ice—
Winter's thin wasted voice, straining for air—
Lo! Antique Pan, gnawing his grizzled beard.
Chill was the earth, and all the sky one stone,
The shrunk sedge shook with ague; the wild duck,
Squattering in snow, sent out a feeble cry.
Like a stark root the black swan's twisted neck
Writhed in the bank. The hawk shook by the finch;
The stoat and rabbit shivered in one hole;
And Nature, moaning on a bedded drift,
Cried for delivery from her travail:—
"O Pan! what dost thou? Long the Spring's delayed!
O Pan! hope sickens. Son, where art thou gone?"
Thereat he heaved his brows; saw the starved fields,
The waste and horror of a world's eclipse;
And all the wrong and all the pity of it
Rushed from him in a roar:—
"I'm passed, deposed: call on another Pan!
Call Christ—the ates foretel him—he'll respond.
I'm old; grown impotent; a toothless dog.
New times, new blood: the world forgets my voice.
This Christ supplants me: call on him, I say.
Whence comes he? Whence, if not from off the streets?
Some coxcomb of the Schools, belike—some green,
Anæmic, theoretic verderer,
Shaping his wood-lore from the Herbary,
And Nature from his brazen window-pots.
The Fates these days have gone to live in town—
Grown doctrinaires—forgot their rustic loves.
Call on their latest nominee—call, call!
He'll ease thee of thy produce, bear it home,
And in alembics test and recompose it.
Call, in thine agony—loud—call on Christ:
He'll hear maybe, and maybe understand!"
"No Pan," she wailed: "No other Pan than thou!"
"What!" roared he, mocking: "Christ not understand?
Your loves, your lores, your secrets—will he not?
Not by his books be master of your heart?
Gods! I am old. I speak but by the woods;
And often nowadays to rebel ears.
He'll do you better: fold your fogs in bales;
Redeem your swamps; sweep up your glowing leaves;
People his straight pastures with your broods;
Shape you for man, to be his plain helpmeet;
No toys, no tricks, no mysteries, no sports—
But sense and science, scorning smiles and tears."
Raging, he rose: A light broke on the snow:
The ice upon the river cracked and spun:
Long milky-ways of green and starry flowers
Grew from the thaw: the trees nipped forth in bud:
The falcon sleeked the wren; the stoat the hare;
And Nature with a cry delivered was.
Pan stared: A naked child stood there before him,
Warming a frozen robin in his hands.
Shameless the boy was, fearless, white as milk;
No guile or harm; a sweet rogue in his eyes.
And he looked up and smiled, and lisped a word:—
"Brother, thou take and cure him, make him well.
Or teach me of thy lore his present needs."
"Brother!" choked Pan. "My father was a God.
Who art thou?" "Nature's baby," said the child.
"Man was my father; and my name is Christ."
He slid his hand within the woodman's palm:—
"Dear elder brother, guide me in my steps.
I bring no gift but love, no tricks but love's—
To make sweet flowers of frost—locked hearts unfold—
The coney pledge the weasel in a kiss.
Canst thou do these?" "No, by my beard," said Pan.
Gaily the child laughed: "Clever brother thou art;
Yet can I teach thee something." "All," said Pan.
He groaned; the child looked up; flew to his arms:—
"O, by the womb that bore us both, do love me!"
A minute sped: the river hushed its song:
The linnet eyed the falcon on its branch:
The bursting bud hung motionless—And Pan
Gave out a cry: "New-rooted, not deposed!
Come, little Christ!" So hand in hand they passed,
Nature's two children reconciled at last.'