The Duke's Motto: A Melodrama

by Justin H. McCarthy

A belated patriotism stirring vaguely in Faenza’s muddled mind tempted him to resent the hunch-back’s slights upon the land which had been unlucky enough to mother him.

"All men of Italy are not knaves," he growled, huskily, and, half rising from his seat with crimsoned visage, he was busying himself to say more, when Staupitz, who was as interested as the others in Master Æsop’s scandalous chronicle, clapped one bear’s paw on Faenza’s shoulder and another bear’s paw across Faenza’s mouth, and thus forced him at once, by sheer effort of brute strength, to a sitting posture and to silence. This action on the part of the man whom for the time being he had consented to accept as his general, combined with the cold glance of cruelty and scorn which Æsop gave him, served to cool Faenza’s hot blood. He heard Æsop say, dryly, "Some men of Italy are fools," and might perchance have flamed again, to his misluck, but that Staupitz, breathing thickly in his ear, whispered: "Idiot, he mocks a Mantuan. Are not you Naples born and bred?" Faenza, recovering his composure, resolved himself swiftly from an Italian in general to a Neapolitan in particular, with a clannish antagonism to alien states. He spat upon the floor. "Damn all Mantuans!" he muttered, and did no more to interrupt the flow of Æsop’s discourse.

"As I was saying, this princeling of Gonzague affected a great show of friendship for his ducal brother of Nevers, and this same friendship he left—it was, indeed, wellnigh all he had to leave—to his only son and only child, the present prince of Gonzague."

He made a momentary halt, as if he were observing curiously the effect of his words upon his hearers, then resumed:

"The young Louis de Gonzague and the young Louis de Nevers were almost of an age. Each was an only child, each was an only son, each was clever, each was courageous, each was comely, each was the chosen heart’s friend of a namesake king, each was much a lover of ladies, each was much loved by ladies."

Æsop grinned hideously as he said these words, and his left hand fumbled lovingly at the little volume that lay hid in the breast of his doublet, but he did not delay the flow of his words.

"The chief difference between the two young men who were bound so closely by ties of blood and yet more closely by ties of personal affection was that while Louis de Nevers was the heir to all the treasures of his house, Louis of Gonzague was heir to little more than a rotting palace and a hollow title. And yet, by the irony of nature that seemed to deny long life to any of the stock of Nevers, Louis de Gonzague was the next of kin to his cousin, and the heir to all his wealth if by any ill chance the dear young duke should die unmarried."

Here Æsop deliberately shut his mouth for several seconds, while the listening bandits, persuaded that some thrilling news was toward, nudged each other with their elbows and riddled the watchful hunchback with imploring glances that entreated him to proceed. Thus mutely importuned, Æsop opened his mouth again:

"But the difference in the youths’ fortunes never made any difference in their friendship. The purse of the rich Nevers was always open to the fingers of the poor Gonzague, and the poor Gonzague had always too true an appreciation of the meaning of friendship to deny his heart’s brother the privilege of ministering to his needs. And as the young Nevers did not hint at the slightest inclination to marry and settle down, but always declared himself and approved himself the most vagrant of lovers and the most frivolous of libertines, there seemed no reason for the good Gonzague to be uneasy as to his possible heritage. Moreover, the young Duke of Nevers was something delicate of constitution, as it would seem, for all his skill as a soldier and swordsman and his fame as a lady’s man. Once when he was the guest of his cousin of Gonzague in Mantua he fell ill of a strange fever that came near to ending his days, and was only saved by his French physician, who tended him day and night and took him back to France in the first dawn of his convalescence."

Æsop stopped and blinked at his hearers viciously, looking like some school-master that wonders how much or how little of what he has been saying his pupils have understood. Cocardasse was the first to show intelligence and to give it tongue.