'If you will seek doubtful company, Messer, you must not cry out to have your fervour misread by it.'
He was about to answer; but she stopped him peremptorily.
'Women will be women, good or bad. We cannot promote a civil war in Milan to avenge some pin-prick to thy conscience. Indeed, sir, we weary a little of this precisianism. Is it come to be a sin to laugh, to warm our hands at a fire, to prefer a fried collop to a wafer? You must forgive us, like the angel that you are. We are human, after all, and pledged to human policies. Our State's before the magistracy. There are things weightier to discuss than a mischief's naughty word. We cannot hear you now.'
She turned away, relenting but a little, though flushed and trembling.
'Come, brother,' she said. 'Shall we not pass to the order of the day?'
Ludovico responded with smooth and smiling alacrity. One could never have guessed by his face the consternation which had seized his soul. Yet, so cleverly had he hoodwinked himself, this sudden leap of light was near staggering him. Merriment and warmth and fried collops? The charge in its utter, its laughable irrelevancy, was, he thought, a little hard on the saint, seeing how the gist of the new creed lay all in a natural enjoyment of life's bounties. What powder had winged such a startling shot?—weariness?—disenchantment?—remorseful hankerings, perhaps, after a discarded suet pudding, which, after all, had been infinitely more native to this woman's taste than the ethereal soufflé, whose frothy prettiness had for the moment appealed to her meat-fed satiety?
The last, most probably. And, in that case——
His brain, through all the mazes of council, went tracing out a busy thread of self-policy. If this were really the end, he must hurry to foreclose on it ere the split widened into a gulf—before ever the first whisper of its opening reached Tassino's ears. The time for temporising was closed.
'It touches, your Grace,' he purred, 'upon the reception to be accorded the envoys of Ferrara and Mantua.'
The wind of a fall, like the wind of an avalanche, runs before the body of it. Messer Bembo, passing out, amazed, from his rebuff, found in himself an illustration of this inevitable human truism. All the envies, spites, and jealousies which his sweetness, under favour, had kept at bay, seemed now gathered in his path to hustle and insult him.