All knelt, making the sign of the cross. Il Moro raised himself very slowly, his face rigid, expressive less of grief than of extreme tension of spirit; he breathed heavily and loud like one toiling up the steep hillside. Suddenly he stretched out his arms, gave one wild cry:—
'Bice!' and fell senseless upon the corpse.
Of the spectators Leonardo alone had remained calm; his clear searching eyes were fixed upon the Duke. The look of supreme suffering in a human face, or its expression in the gestures of the body, was to his eyes a rare and beautiful manifestation of nature, an exceptional experience. Not a wrinkle, not the quivering of a muscle escaped his passionless all-seeing eyes. Presently, over-mastered by the desire to draw, he slipped from the room to fetch his sketch-book.
In the lower halls, whither the artist bent his steps, the candles were dying out in black smoke and gutterings of wax. The chariots of Numa and Augustus, and all the pompous allegorical paraphernalia employed to glorify Il Moro and his Beatrice, were unspeakably melancholy and wretched in the morning brilliance. In one room he saw the overthrown and trampled Arco dell' Amore.
Standing by the moribund fire he was beginning his sketch, when in the chimney-corner he noticed the boy who had personified the Golden Age. He had fallen asleep, huddled up, his hands clutching his knees, his head dropped upon them. The faint heat from the dying embers had not sufficed to warm the poor little naked and gilded body. Leonardo touched him on the shoulder, but the child did not look up. He moaned piteously and the artist took him in his arms. Then he opened frightened eyes, blue as violets, and wailed.
'Let me go home! Let me go home!'
'What is your name?' asked Leonardo.
'Lippi. Let me go home! Let me go home! I am so cold. I feel so sick.'
His eyelids fell heavily, and he babbled deliriously.—
'Tornerà l'età dell' oro,