On a dark cabinet stood a little broken figure of Tanagra, showing a dancing woman with a full robe held out; near her was an elusive glass of blue colour on a milk-white stem, like a bubble trembling to disperse. Above the bed hung a black crucifix and under it a red light burned with a quivering flame.
A scent of sandal-wood, nard and spikenard, was in the chamber; stirred occasionally by the breeze that whispered over Florence and entered the open window, this perfume strengthened and was wafted out into the street.
The sick man never moved as the hours went by; save that his eyes were opened and fixed with an enigmatic look on the quiet street below, he might have been asleep.
This young man, who sat alone gazing at Florence this November midday was one of the most famous people in Italy. The “Phoenix of Genius,” they called him, and he had early been renowned for his precocious learning, his vast industry, his beauty and his noble nature. To all his qualities his princely rank gave lustre; he had been one of the most intimate friends of Lorenzo il Magnifico, and there was no one who could excel the brilliance of his reputation. As a prince who preferred letters to arms and distinction in the arts to any other ambition, he was unique; no man could ever have been more courted and praised and extolled than this man had been.
But to-day he was forgotten.
For it was the day fixed for the entry of the King of France into Florence, and though he came under the pretence of peace and an invitation to a treaty, he came stained with Italian blood and in the guise of a conqueror. And the Conte della Mirandola had been among the brightest in the bright rule of the resplendent Medici. Giovanni Pico had been at the death-bed of the great Lorenzo, who had spoken almost his last words to the gentle youth who had heard the Friar he had brought to Florence, Frà Girolamo, refuse the haughty ruler absolution unless he gave Florence her liberty.
And Lorenzo had turned his face to the wall and refused, and died with his sins on his head, and now his sons were eating the bread of charity in Rome, and Frà Girolamo was the greatest man in Florence, and Charles of France was entering the proud city at the twenty-first hour to-day.
Giovanni Pico thought of these things and of his dead friend, Lorenzo dei Medici; he believed that it was better for that Prince to have died, in pain of soul, than to have lived to see Florence to-day, changed indeed as it was since the days of his rule.
The Conte della Mirandola was changed also. It would have amazed Lorenzo to know that his most brilliant courtier was yearning for the plain habit of the brotherhood of St. Mark, and that the most learned and splendid noble in Florence wished to leave the world and follow Frà Girolamo Savonarola the steep way to Heaven.
But so it was with Giovanni. For some years past the eloquence of the Friar had wrought much with him; and lately, as the fierce politics of Italy sifted and clashed–as all the things he had known and loved fell and were broken–Giovanni Pico turned, as so many of the Florentines, to the shelter offered by the brotherhood of St. Mark.