II
Gardens surrounded Leonardo's house outside Milan—between the fortress and the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie—and thence came a fine perfume of fruits and herbs, thyme, and bergamot, and fennel. The moon had set. Swallows under the windows were twittering and preparing to fly, ducks splashed and quacked in the neighbouring pond. The candle was dying in its socket; voices of the pupils were heard from the studio hard by.
The students were two, Giovanni Boltraffio and Andrea Salaino. Giovanni was copying an anatomical figure, and sitting before a contrivance for the study of perspective—a wooden frame with a string network which corresponded with lines traced on the drawing-paper: Salaino was fitting a slab of alabaster to a wooden panel. He was a pretty lad with innocent eyes and fair curls, petted by the Master, who drew his angels from him.
'How think you, Andrea?' asked Boltraffio, 'will Messer Leonardo soon finish this machine?'
'God knows!' answered Salaino whistling, and settling the embroidered flaps of his new slippers. 'Last year he sat two months at it and nothing resulted but laughter. That crooked bear Zoroastro set himself to fly at all hazards. The master forbade him, but he did it. The fool hung himself all round with a necklace of bullock's bladders, lest he should break anything if he fell; then he mounted the roof, flapped his wings; and true it is he rose, but God wot 'twas the wind carried him, and presently he turned topsy-turvy and fell plump on to a dunghill; by the Lord's mercy 'twas soft and he broke no bones, but the bladders burst with a roar like a cannon, the daws in the belfry fled away for very terror, and there lay the new Icarus kicking the air, on his head in the manure.'
Just then the third pupil entered, Cesare da Sesto, a man no longer young; sickly, and splenetic, with malicious but intelligent eyes. He had a sandwich in one hand, wine in the other.
'Peuh! the sour stuff!' he said frowning and spitting, 'and the ham, by my troth, is boot-leather—yet one pays two thousand ducats annually for these delicacies!'
'Try the other cask from under the pantry stair.'
'I have tried it. Of the two 'tis the worse;' then pointing to Salaino's new plum-coloured and gaily-feathered cap, he added, 'Oho! oho! some of us, it seems, get new things. But 'tis the second month since they got any new ham in the kitchen. Of a certainty things are well managed here! We lead dog's lives. Marco vows on the bones of his mother that the master has not one soldo left in the bag. He has squandered everything on these cursed wings of his, and begins his sparing by starving us. But I'll teach you where else his money goes. In gifts for his darlings, in medals and velvet caps. Have you no shame, Andrea, to receive alms? Is Messer Leonardo your father or your brother? or are you still a baby?'