So, but in a less rapt and mystical sense than that in which the holy virgin of Siena had poured out her soul, thought the young Duchess Leonora, wife of Pietro, second son of Cosimo da Medici, Grand Duke of Florence.
The price of love, the price of love! For eleven days she had wept, burning to pay it—indignant, passionate, heart-broken, she had told herself. And now that the altar was ready and the blade bared, what was her desire? Only for mercy—only for life, shameful and abandoned if needs must be, but life on any terms, the least regarded, the most despised. She was so young, so untutored; she had been so led astray by the casuistries of gallantry in this city of profligates. She would confess her sin, plead its extenuations, abase herself before the knees of the father of her child. That at least existed in pledge of her wifely loyalty; no man else could boast so much of her. She had borne that agony, that rapture, with a pure conscience. Surely the father would not murder the mother of his babe! So monstrous a deed would cry aloud for vengeance even in this place of monsters!
And even while she sat with white face and staring eyes, gnawing a tumbled strand of her beautiful auburn hair, she knew that all the extenuations she could plead were but so many aggravations of her crime; that the reptile she had been forced into marrying had insidiously encouraged her infidelity with this very purpose of ridding himself of her; that all the light and flower of her youth were but incentives to the lustful cruelty of one destitute of compassion and nobility. She was to die, somewhere, somehow; and in all that city she had no one courageous friend to whom to turn, no hope anywhere of refuge or escape. Policy, the policy of the devil in this cursed Gehenna, must turn a deaf ear, a blind eye to her peril. The Duke himself——
She shuddered from the very poison of his name. The base emotions it recalled robbed death for the moment of its worst terrors, picturing its shadowy arms the sole merciful asylum from memories too dreadful for endurance. Death, no grisly phantom, but the kind mother, lulling to eternal forgetfulness!
Ah! but she was so young, so young! She buried her face in her hands, and rocked herself to and fro, moaning.
* * * * *
Cosimo, the first of the junior branch of the house of Medici, had come to reign in Florence as absolute Duke in 1537. His wife, Leonora (daughter of Don Pedro de Toledo, Spanish viceroy at Naples), had died twenty-five years later, after having borne him several children, of whom Pietro was the second son. Within a month or two of her death the Duke was involved in an intrigue with a second Leonora de Toledo, niece of the first, a beautiful child who had been placed at the Tuscan Court under her aunt’s care. The circumstances of the liaison being revealed caused such a scandal that Cosimo, in order to quiet it, married the girl to his son Pietro, a libertine of the sickliest odour. The inevitable result followed in that city of furious passions and perverted morals. The young wife, despised and neglected by her husband, robbed, moreover, of her self-respect, accepted the usual cavaliere-servente—in this case one Alessandro Gagi—more, it would seem, out of pique than inclination. At least, when, the flirtation having been noted, Gagi, privately warned of its danger, had elected to resolve a poignant difficulty by retiring into a monastery, Leonora had had no difficulty in transferring her affections to an object more daring, or less discreet, than her melancholy new-fledged young Capuchin. The fresh fancy was a youthful blood of Saint-Étienne, and this time it was a case of genuine passion into which she rushed headstrong. She may have affected to believe that indifference was the worst thing she had to fear from her husband; if she did, she lied to herself, as women will when their desire runs ahead of their prudence. The case of Alessandro Gagi was her sufficient admonition. The dog was not asleep because his eyes were shut.
The lovers met; and this time there was no hint of espionage vouchsafed. But quite suddenly St. Étienne, as we must call him, was ordered off to the Island of Elba. The pretext for his banishment was a fatal duel in which he had lately been engaged with a young nobleman, Francesco Ginori; the real object, undoubtedly, was the procuring of incriminating evidence of the liaison in the shape of written correspondence. St. Étienne, recklessly enamoured, was not long in providing this, or the spies of the husband in intercepting it. The guilty lover was seized, brought back privately to the prison of the Bargello, and there at dead of night strangled. The news of his death was conveyed to Leonora, whether in malice or sympathy, by Francesco, her brother-in-law; and for eleven days thereafter she wept, heedless of consequences, abandoned to her grief. She dreamed in that time that she had the stuff of heroism in her; and her illusionment only came to vanish utterly with the withdrawal of the envoy who, on the twelfth day, had brought her a message from her husband.
This envoy’s voice, his figure, each as chill, as precise, as faultless as the other, still vividly haunted her as she sat. Not a word or tone of his had been ill-considered; not a hair had been out of place in his little pointed black beard, which had lain upon a ruff like biscuit china. His cold, exquisite hands, his jerkin and trunk hose of white silver-sprigged satin, his ivory sword-scabbard—all had been so many graduated harmonies in a picture of icy perfection. He had looked a man built out of frost; and from the heart of frost had come his words, keen, dispassionate, killing:
“His Grace, Madonna, much concerning himself with a distemper into which he hears you reported to be fallen, entreats your company at his Villa of Cafaggiodo, where he is in hopes the silence and the sweeter air will restore to you your health.”