'Hark you, Giovanni,' he said in a changed voice, 'who told you I loved him? You never guessed it?'
'He told me himself.'
'He? Then he believes——'
His voice broke. Nothing remained to be said, and each was lost in his own thoughts, his own griefs. At the next cross-road they parted.
Giovanni, with eyes on the ground, walked mechanically along the narrow path skirting the canal in whose dark waters no star was reflected. He repeated to himself, scarce consciously, 'As like as a man and his own phantom! His own phantom!'
XV
At the beginning of March 1499, and at the moment when he least expected it, Leonardo received his salary, which had been for two years unpaid. It was reported at this time that Il Moro, overwhelmed by the news of the alliance concluded against him by the Doge of Venice, the Pope, and the King of France, intended to flee to the German Emperor upon the first appearance in Lombardy of the French forces; and that it was in order to secure the fidelity of his subjects during his absence that he lightened the taxes, paid his creditors, and heaped largesses upon his friends. A little later Leonardo received a fresh mark of his patron's favour: the gift of sixteen perches of vineyard land, acquired from the monastery of San Vittore near the Porta Vercellina, 'which,' so ran the deed of gift, 'Ludovico Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, confers on Leonardo da Vinci, the Florentine, most famous of painters.'
Leonardo went to express his thanks to the Duke, and was not granted an interview till very late in the evening, owing to the pressure of state affairs. Il Moro had passed the whole day in tedious conversation with secretaries and treasurers, in verifying accounts for munition of war, in loosing old knots and tying new ones in that web of deceit and treachery, which had pleased him well when he had been the spidery master of the threads, but which was another matter now he found himself in the position of a fly.
His business despatched, the Duke went to the Gallery of Bramante, which looked down upon the castle moat. The stillness of the night was broken at times by the blare of a trumpet, by the challenge of sentinels, by the clank of the drawbridge chains. As soon as he had entered the gallery, his page, Ricciardetto, fixed torches in iron sconces against the wall, and handed his master a gold platter with small pieces of bread. These Ludovico threw to the swans which, attracted by the reflection from the windows, had come sailing over the black mirror of the water in the moat. Isabella d'Este, his lost Beatrice's sister, had sent him these swans from Mantua, where the flat shores of the Mincio, thick with reeds and willow-trees, were a renowned breeding-place for great flocks of these beautiful birds. Feeding them was his chief recreation after the business and anxieties of the day. They reminded him of his childhood, by the weed-grown pools of Vigevano; and here in the gloomy castle moat, among frowning embrasured walls, high towers, cannon balls, and bombards, the noiseless snow-white creatures, gliding like phantoms through the silver moonlit mist upon the scarce visible water in which stars were reflected, seemed to him full of mystery and charm.