Baronte knew it all so well, and waited impassive for the sequel, his eyes canvassing the breathless house rather than the performer. And then suddenly the bow descended, with a blow like a melodious sledge-hammer, and the wild, lovely orgy had begun.
Paganini surely had never played before as he played that night. It was all stupendous, unsurpassable, horrible. The very violin seemed to bend and spring beneath his hands like the body of a young witch, alluring, eluding, brutifying. At the finish it was with a feeling of utter emotional collapse that Baronte crept from the house and sought his lodgings. This thing must end, he told himself—somehow this thing must end, and to-morrow.
In the late morning he rose—to ominous skies and a sensation of stifling heat. A haggard ghost of himself, he sought the Master’s hotel. He knew the obscene creature’s customs—to fast at times, to gorge at times, to lie brooding all day, hating company as he hated priests and doctors; sometimes to break abroad in a wild convulsion of energy, and go tearing none knew whither. And to-day Fortune, whether for good or evil, favoured Baronte. As he approached the hotel, with the intent to take counsel of his friend Varano, he saw the demoniac figure itself issue from the portal, and hurry with distracted visage northwards. He hesitated a moment—then started in pursuit.
Near the bridge Alle Grazie stood three men—an itinerant butcher, a bird-vender, and one, a pert, showy vagabond, with a pallid face, and the dirty little finger-nail of his left hand grown long as a charm against the evil eye. The butcher, in blue jacket and leathern cap, carried in one hand a single joint of meat upon a hook, and in the other a shrill small horn on which to blow its praises; the bird-seller, a stalwart, bronzed young fellow, with gold rings in his ears and his shirted torso half bared to the heat, bore over his shoulders a yoke of cord, from each of whose ends hung a netted sieve alive with twittering songsters; the loafer carried nothing but himself, and that cheaply. As the figure of the Maestro, hopping like a great crow, approached and passed, the bird-seller stared, the butcher gaped, and the loafer, crossing himself with a muttered prayer, sprang back into the roadway—and collided with Baronte, who pushed him aside and sped on.
“The devil!” gasped the loafer; and the bird-seller laughed deridingly.
“In escaping the smoke you have jumped into the fire, gossip,” said he. “The second was the true devil.”
He looked it, indeed, if his burning eyes were any criterion, as he hurried in the wake of the receding figure. It led him across the south-eastern angle of the city to the gate of the Pinti, through which it passed like a striding shadow, and thence, turning northwards, took the winding ascent to Fiesole. Baronte followed, with what purpose he himself did not know.
It was a terrible day, lowering, oppressive, fateful with tempest. And all in a moment the heavens were delivered. They burst in a crash of rain and fire that made the reason stagger. Through the smoke of flung water Baronte could still see the figure mounting before him, gesticulating, whirling its long arms, from time to time uttering peals of loud laughter that mingled unearthly with the tumult of the storm. And then, all in a moment, it was gone.
A ruined villa stood up stark and streaming against the sky. Baronte, panting to the shelter of its broken walls, was suddenly aware, in a brief lull of the storm, of a voice clamant hard by. It wailed, it laughed, it sobbed; it uttered, it seemed, inarticulate blasphemies; it sought to out-roar the thunder, to out-screech the wind. With an answering cry the young man ran round—and staggered to a stop before the vision which his eyes encountered. For there, prone among the tumbled masonry and the long weeds and grass, lay the figure of the black Master himself.
It was flung upon its back, writhing as if in torment. It screamed; it hugged and crumpled itself into grotesque contortions; it gnashed grinning teeth; its eyeballs glinted like porcelain in the lightning.