In the fortress of Vigevano the Duke of Milan sat at wine with his gentlemen, his dark face a core of gloom, blighting the revel. Flushed cheeks; sparkling cups; hot dyes of silk and velvet, and the starry splintering of gems; sconces of flaming tapers, and, between, banners of purple and crimson, like great moths, hanging on the walls above the heads of shining, motionless men-at-arms, whose staves and helmets trickled light—all this, the whole rich damasked picture, seemed, while the sullen eye commanded it, to poise upon its own fall and change, like the pieces in a kaleidoscope,—the Duke rose and passed out; and already, with a leap and clatter, it had tumbled into a frolic of whirling colours.
This company, in short, conscious of its deserts, had felt any cold-watering of its spirits at the present pass intolerable. There were captains in it, raw from the icy plains of Piedmont, whence they had come after rallying their troops into winter quarters, against a resumption of hostilities in the spring. Tried men of war, and seasoned toss-pots all, they claimed to spend after their mood the wages of valour, vindicated in many a hard-wrung victory. They had stood, Charles the Bold of Burgundy opposing, for the integrity of Savoy, and had trounced its invaders well over the border. The sense of triumph was in them, and, consequently, of grievance that it should be so discounted by a royal mumps, who till yesterday had been their strutting and crowing cock of conquest. What had happened in the interval, so to return him upon his old damned familiar self?
Something beyond their rude guessing—something which, at a breath, had re-enveloped him in that cloud of constitutional gloom, which action and the rush of arms had for a little dispelled. The change had taken him earlier in the day, when, about the hour of Mass, a little white, cake-fed Milanese had come whipping into Vigevano on a foam-dropping jade, and, crying as he clattered over the drawbridge to the castle, 'Ho there, ho there! Despatches for the Duke!' had been snapped up by the portcullis, and gulped and disposed of; and was now, no doubt—since no man had set eyes on him since—in process of being digested.
It may have been he that was disagreeing with their lord, and sending the black bile to his cheek; or it may have been that second tale-bearer who, riding in about midday from the capital, had brought news of the fire which, the evening before, had gutted his Grace's private closet. Small matters in any case; and in any case, the death's-head having withdrawn itself from the feast, hail the bright reaction from that malign, oppressive gloom! A fresh breeze blows through the hall; the candle-flames are jigging to the rafters; away with mumps and glumps! Via-via! See the arras blossom into a garden; the sentries, leaning to it, relax into smiling Gabriels of Paradise; the wine froth and sparkle at the cup rim! 'Way, way for the Duke's Grace!' the seneschal had cried at the door; and Galeazzo, clumsily ushered by Messer Castellan, that blunt old one-eyed Cyclops, had slouched heavily out, and the curtain had dropped and blotted him from the record.
He turned sharply to the sound of its thud, and gave a quick little stoop and start, as if he were dodging something. The face—that haunting, indefinable ghost—was it behind him again, unlayed, in spite of all the hope and promise? Why not, since its exorcist had proved himself a Judas?
He ground his teeth, and moved on, muttering and maddening. Only yesterday he had been flattering himself with the thought of returning to his capital wreathed in all the glamour of conquest. And now! False fire—false, damning fire. What victor was he, who could not command himself? What vicegerent of the All-seeing, who could nominate a traitor and hypocrite to be his proxy? And he had so believed in the accursed boy!
The prophecy of the monk Capello stuck like a poisonous burr in his soul. He could not shake it off. Now, he remembered, was the near season for its maturing—a superstition aggravated tenfold by the thought that its ripening had been let to prosper in the sun of his own credulous trust. And he could not temporise while the moment struck and passed, for his fate turned upon the moment. Moreover, Christmas was at hand, a time dear to the traditions of his house; and, rightly or mistakenly, he believed that upon a maintenance of those traditions depended his house's prevalence. His acts must continue to compare royally, in seasonable largesse and bounty, with those of Francesco, its yet adored founder; and he could not afford to ignore those obligations. He felt himself trapped, and turning, turning, between the devil and the deep sea.
But he was not without a sort of desperado courage; and fury lent him nerve.
'Lead on, lead on, Castellano,' he snarled, grinning like a wolf. 'The calf by now should be in train for his blooding.'
They found him stalled deep among the foundations of the fortress, in a stone chamber whose kiln-like conformation shaped itself horribly to the needs and privacies of the 'question.' He might, this Tassino, have been a calf indeed, by the deadly pallor of his flesh. From the moment when, still in the glow of his send-off, he had dared, producing his pièce de conviction before the Duke, to incriminate Bona on its evidence, and had been gripped by the neck for his pains, and flung, squealing like a rat, into this sewer, it had never warmed by a degree from this livid hue. Sickened, rather, since here, dreadfully interned throughout the day, like a schoolboy locked in with an impossible imposition, he had been left to writhe and moan, in awful anticipation of the coming inquisition and its likely consequences to himself. They were prefigured for him, in order to the sharp-setting of his wits, in a score or so instruments, all slack and somnolent and unstrung for the time being, but suggestive of hideous potentialities in their tautening. The rack riveted to the floor; the pulley pendent from the ceiling; the stocks in the corner, with the chafing-dish, primed with knobs of charcoal, ready at its foot-holes; the escalero or chevalet, which was a trough for strangling recalcitrant hogs in, limb by limb; the iron dice for forcing into the heels, and the canes for twisting and breaking the fingers; the water-bag and the thumbscrew and the fanged pincers—such, and such in twenty variations of hook and stirrup and dangling monstrosities of block and steel, but all pointing a common moral of terrific human pain, where the inducements to a calmly thought-out self-exculpation which had been offered to Tassino's solitary consideration. No wonder that, when at last the key turned and the harsh door creaked to admit his inquisitors, he should have screamed out with the mortal scream of a creature that finds itself cut off from escape in a burning house.