Idalia/Volume 2/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III.
"MONSIGNORE."
In one of the fairest nooks of the Bay of Naple stood a palace in the perfection of taste, from the frescoes on its walls within to the delicate harebell-like campanile, that threw its slim shaft aloft, looking towards Amalfi. Fronting the sea, a small oval-shaped pier ran out into the water, with a broad flight of steps terminating it; above this, the natural growth of the country had hung a self-woven screen of orange and myrtle boughs; a place of embarkation, or disembarkation, lonely, secure, and unlooked on by anything save lofty Anacapri far above, hanging like an eagle's nest among the clouds. In the shadow of the evening a boat stopped there, a man alighted, dismissed the rowers, and went on along the length of the little quay to an arched door of curious cinque-cento work; it was the private entrance of the palazetto, which, despite the humility of the diminutive it was given, stretched up and around in wing on wing in stately architectare, and numbered ninety chambers.
He was admitted, and entered the house, lighted with a flood of light, crowded with a glittering suite of attendants of all grades, and seemingly endless in its vastness, with chamber and corridor opening out one on another in wearying succession of splendour, relieved from monotony, however, by the exquisite pieces of sculpture and of painting that studded the whole like a second Pitti. Some thirty of these corridors and reception-rooms ended in a little chamber, small at least by comparison, hung with purple velvet, its furniture of silver and of ebony, its only painting a superb Ecce Homo of Leonardo's, its windows narrow and lancet-shaped, the whole now illumined with a soft amber light;—this was the sanctuary of Monsignore Villaflor.
Monsignore rose with aflfability—he was ever affable—and advanced with courtly grace. Monsignore was a handsome and portly man, with the beautiful Neapolitan eyes and the beautiful Neapolitan face; a little losing the symmetry of his figure now, and over his fiftieth year, but a very noble person still. He wore the violet robes of a bishop, and on his hand sparkled the bishop's amethyst ring. Looking at him, it was hard to believe that the race of prince-bishops had died out, for he was a very princely person. He was not like St. Philip Neri, he was not like Reginald de la Pole, he was not like Acacius, or François Xavier, or the great martyred man who looked across to England with those sublime words—"Terram Anglicæ video, et favente Domino terram intrabo, sciens tamen certissimè quod mihi immineat passio"—and kept his oath, and went. Monsignore was not like any of these; but he was excessively like Cardinal Bembo, he was excessivelj like Cardinal Mazarin.
Victor Vane bowed before him with the grace of a courtier and the reverence of a son of the Church; with the Paris literati he was a Cartesian, with the Germans a Spinozian, with the English men of science a Rationalist, a Pantheist, a Monotheist, or a Darwinian, with the Mountain an Atheist, as best suited; but with the Monsignori he was always deferential to the Faith. They met as those who have often met for the advancement of mutual aims, but they met also as those who have to play a delicate game with each other, in which the cards must be studiously concealed. Both were perfect diplomatists, The game opened gracefully, courteously, cautiously, with a little trifling on either side; but they approached their respective points in it more quickly, less warily, than usual, for he who before had but played into the hands of Monsignore to betray him, now came to play into his hands with sincerity.
This was not the first by many audiences the brilliant Bishop, the favourite of the Vatican, had given to one who had been until the night before this the deadliest foe of his Church, of his king, of his projects, of his policies; for Giulio Villaflor had been duped despite all his finesses, and had believed the gentle and adroit Englishman his tool, while he was, in truth, the tool himself. Monsignore had his silken webs over Italy, and Franco, and Austria, and Spain; Monsignore had his secret sbirri of the ablest; Monsignore knew everything; was the lover of great ladies who played the spy in palaces, never gave a Benedicite without some diplomatic touch, never administered the Viaticum but what the Church was the richer for a legacy, never yet was compromised by a lie, yet never yet was driven to the vulgarity of the truth;—but even Monsignore had been trepanned by Victor Vane. The secret of the defeat was this; Giulio Villaflor loved power well, but he loved other things as well; the pleasures of the table, the scent of pure wines, and the gleam of almond eyes and snowy bosoms. His opponent had loved nothing but power; until now, for the first time, he loved a woman and loved a revenge. Hence, now for the first time, also, he played into Villaflor's hands.
A dusky red tinged the pale clear brown cheek of the Bishop, and in his eyes was the gleam that those who knew him had learned to tremble sorely at when too few were found for the dungeons of the Vicaria, or out of the crowds of Easter-day one face dared look a frank defiance at him while the Silver Trumpets sounded.
"All the revolutionists have not menaced us and braved us as this one woman has done!" he muttered. "All the rebels of Sardinia and Sicily have not the danger in them that Idalia has. The man is bad enough, but she"
"Conrad can be bought," put in Vane, gently; there was, indeed, an overstrained quietude in his face and in his tone. "Name the price your Grace will give; I will purchase him for you to-morrow."
Monsignore bent his head with a slight smile.
"Promise what you will, I can confide perfectly in your discretion!" he said, with his suave dignity of grace; he reserved to himself the right to refuse ratification of the promises when the fish should be fairly baited and hooked. "He is but a secondary matter—can she be bought?"
"No!" Into the calm immutability of her betrayer's voice there glided a half sullen, half bitter, yet withal admiring savageness; he was recalling to memory the imperial disdain with which she had swept from him the night before, the indifference with which she had disregarded alike his entreaties and his threats. "What could be offered her that could eclipse what she has? She has wealth—she has dominion—she has a power wider than yours!"
The last words were almost bluntly uttered; for the moment he felt a thrill of triumph in flinging the splendour and the influence of the woman by whom he had been rejected in the teeth of even the purples and the pomps of Eternal Rome.
The dusky red glowed slightly brighter in Monsignore's cheek, a flush of anger; he waved his delicate white hand with an expressive action.
"While they last! But if she had choice between retaining these—under our pleasure—and losing them—say in the casemates of the Capuano yonder; what then, my son? She would yield?"
"She would never yield."
He answered calmly, still with that restrained and impassive serenity on him; by the tone, he said as though he had spoken it that no menace, no pang, no death, would make Idalia what he was now—a renegade.
"Altro! she is a woman?" said Monsignore, with the mockery of the Neapolitan laugh in the protrusion of his handsome under lip.
"We waste words, Monsignore," said Victor Vane, abruptly. "She is not like other women."
"Contumacious! Then she must feel the arm of the Church." The words were spoken without any ruffle of that silken and unctuous tone in which Giulio Villaflor whispered softest tones in the ear of Austrian and Parisian beauty, but in the lustrous eyes gleamed a glance cold as ice, fierce as lust, dangerous as steel. "My son, tell us all that you know once more."
"All that I know!" There was a smile that flickered across his features one moment, though it passed too instantaneously for it to be even caught by Villaflor, "That would take hours. I can give you heads, and bring you proofs as you require them. I know that she arranged the escape of the two Ronaldeschi from the galleys. I know that she has effected the flight of Carradino from his prison; I know that through her twenty thousand muskets will find their way to Poland, and the same into Tuscany, by routes that all your sbirri will never discover; I know that it was at her salons in Paris that the war of Sicily was first organised; I know that she is the life, the soul, the core, the prophetess of every national movement. I know that she holds the threads of every insurrectionary movement from the Apennines to the Caucasus"
Monsignore made a slight gesture of impatience; while shading his eyes with the hand on which the episcopal amethyst glittered, he narrowly watched the immutable countenance of his companion.
"We know all these, and much more," he said, with an accent of disappointed irritation. "If we can once secure her person, we have witness enough against her to consign her twenty times over to the peine forte et dure, to the prison, or the convent cell, for her lifetime. Idalia!—she is Satanas!—you have more to tell than these stories, figlio mio?"
"Or I would not have wearied your Grace tonight," assented Vane, still with that calm and undeviating air as of one who, having learnt a recitation by heart, mechanically, yet unwaveringly, repeats it out. "Yes, I know more; I know that she is—here."
"Here!"
Despite the perfect self-command and the trained immobility of the courtly Churchman, surprise and exultation for once escaped him, uncontrolled and unconcealed; his eyes lightened, his hand grasped the ivory and ebon elbow of his state chair, his lips moved rapidly.
"Here! She has the daring of a Cæsar!"
And there was in the words an accent of compelled admiration that was, perhaps, from such an antagonist as this great Priest of Rome, the highest homage that Idalia had ever yet extorted; for it was homage wrung out in unwilling veneration from the hatred and the cunning of an implacable foe.
Vane started, as though stung, and turned his face towards the grand dark canvas of the Ecce Homo, away from the fall of the light. When the astute Churchman, who had been his own hated enemy and duped tool so long, and whom he now used as the weapon of his vengeance—when the haughty Catholic, who pursued her with the rancour of his creed, and with the unpardoning bitterness of a mighty and unscrupulous priesthood against those who dare to defy and to disdain it—when, from the unwilling admiration of Giulio Villaflor, this tribute was wrung to the lofty and unconquerable courage of the woman whom he had come hither to betray into the unsparing hands of her foes, he—the traitor—felt for one moment sunk into depths of shame; felt for one moment the full depravity and vileness of that abyss into which thwarted ambition and covetous revenge had drawn him.
Yet if he would have repented and retracted, he could not; and would not have done so if he could. The word was spoken; he had delivered her over into the power of her adversaries, had delivered over her beautiful neck to the brand, her proud head to the cord, her wealth to the coffers of the Bourbon, her loveliness to the mercy of Rome, her life to the hell of the Dungeon. It was done; and still as he turned to the dark shadow of the Leonardo with that loathing of the light which murderers feel when every ray that touches them seems to them as though seeking out their crime, he would not have undone it if he could. For he had loved her, and now hated her with a great insatiate hate; so near these passions lie together.
"Here!" echoed Villaflor once more, while his large eyes lighted with the fire of the tiger, though that fire was subdued under the droop of his velvet lashes. "In Naples! And I not to know it?"
In that single sentence was told a terrible reckoning that waited for those of his people—of his spies—who had been thus treacherous; or for the carelessness which had withheld from him the near presence of the woman whom he had watched, waited, plotted, bribed, schemed to entrap with all the intricacies and resources of his astute intellect and far-spread meshes, for so long.
"In Capri—and without disguise," answered Vane, turning his head from a seemingly negligent glance at the Leonardo; his eyes were quite clear, his countenance quite frank, his smile gentle and delicately satirical as usual. He was now attuned to his part again, and the evil in him gaining the sole mastery upon him, made him take a Borgian pleasure in thus preparing drop on drop, with the precision and the genius of science, the poison that was to consume and wither the brilliant life of the woman he had vainly loved. "Remember! first, she is unaware that you know all your Grace could alone have known through me—she is unaware that there are any proofs against her in the possession of the Neapolitan Court; secondly, she is one to whom the meaning of fear and submission is unknown; she claims the Greek blood of Artemisia—she has Artemisian daring; thirdly, she has so attached the Marinari to her, that, good subjects and brainless beasts though these Capriotes be, she could scarce be touched on their shore with impunity; fourthly and chiefly, so many swords would leap out of their scabbards for Idalia, despite the many dead men who have, dying, cursed her, so world-wide and so well known is the dominion of her beauty, that I believe she thinks that none of the governments dare touch her. She relies on this: that Sicily is in revolt, Naples in ferment; one public act, such as these poor, blind, contumacious mules call tyranny, done to a woman whose loveliness could excite the populace, and whose genius could command it like Idalia's, and the crisis which is, as even you confess, often so near, might come, despite you and the Palace, with a thunder you could not still by the thunder of the Vatican, Holy Father."
There was a bitter irony hidden under the gentle courtliness of the words, and of the apologetic softness of the smile with which they were uttered. He had been a foe and a traitor to Giulio Villaflor so long, that he could not at once abandon the refined pleasure of thrusting silken taunts against that silken Churchman. The words lashed the passions of the Neapolitan as was purposed; that dusky scarlet glow came again into his cheek, his nostrils dilated, his fine lips quivered haughtily; for the instant he lost the unctuousness of the Palace Priest, and had the grand arrogance of a Wolsey, a Richelieu, or a Granvella.
He moved as though to rise from his ivory chair—as though to go into the van of combat for the Church and for the Nobles, like the warrior-bishops of the past.
"Do you think I fear the people!—a beast that crouches to the whip, and kicks the fallen, that cringes when its paunch is empty, and bullies when it is bold with a full feed! I fear the people! By the Mother of God, I would teach them such obedience that they should never breathe, but by my will!"
For the moment there flashed out the old spirit of the Colonna and the Este in the unusual outbreak of proud passion; arrogant, cruel, and iron though the words were, Giulio Villaflor, as he spoke them, was a grander and a better man, because a truer and a bolder, than in the velvet sweetness, the courtly maskings of his palatial sanctities, of his episcopal voluptuousness, of his blending of courtier, statesman, saint, and roué. He who heard, smiled that delicate smile that meant a malice and an irony so infinite, yet never betrayed this unless it were desired to be betrayed.
"Then," he asked, softly, "you would dare arrest her in Capri?"
The eyes of Monsignore flashed upon him.
"Dare is not a word to use to Rome!"
It was the haughty defiance and self-deification of the Pontifical Power roused, as it had roused of old against Emperors and Kings, rebels in the Cloisters and rebels in the Courts, against the sceptre of Barbarossa as against the science of Abélard, of the Power which refuses to see that this day is not as that, which denies that the dawn has shone because its fiat has gone forth for darkness to endure.
"Your Grace cannot think that I used the word save as suggestive of what is expedient. Your object is to make the Countess Vassalis a political prisoner. Is it advisable to allow her the halo of political martyrdom? Do you wish to give the enemies of the Church and King the power to compare you to a second Cyril, and her to a second Hypatia?"
Giulio Villaflor smiled a very expressive, a very devilish smile, mellow though it was.
"No. I have no desire to deify another Greek courtesan."
Was the word as foul slander to the living Athenian as it was to the dead Alexandrian?
His smile was answered in his listener's eyes; in that instant Víctor almost forgave him the animosities of lengthened years, in that instant almost loved him and admired him; their natures were so kindred, they could stab so well with the same weapon.
"Precisely!" he said, with that persuasive tact which, never save once, under the contempt of Idalia, had deserted him. "Then pardon me, Monsignore; but will it not be well to conduct this matter with as little publicity as may be? Where there is danger for her, there will she remain; I know what she is. She has all the finesse of a Greek, but she has none of a Greek's cowardice! Moreover, it is to secure Viana that she is here (we will come to his affair afterwards); he is all but gained to her, and he is rash and reckless to foolhardiness. At his villa of Antina, in the interior, there is, the day after to-morrow, a reunion of the 'Alpe al Mar' confederates, and, under cover of a masquerade, its political purpose has been kept strictly secret. Had even you not known of it through me, you would never have heard of it in any other light than as one of Carlo's splendid eccentricities and extravagant entertainments. There is a password which, also, but through me, your Grace's choicest experts would not have been able to surprise. Ah, Monsignore, there is mine under mine; government spies are too often content to believe that when they have explored the topmost one they know all! There, at Antina, will be the Countess Vassalis, and not she alone: Caffradali, Aldino, Villlari, Laldeschi, all the Neapolitans who are written in your Livre Rouge will meet. You may strike a great stroke at one blow; by day-dawn Viana and his glittering maskers may fill the Castel Capuano, if you will. Ask for what proofs against them you choose, you can have sufficient to justify the galleys for life against one and all of them; out of their own words shall you convict them, and, once yours, how shall this lawless Empress, this queenly Democrat, this patrician with the Marseillaise on her lips, this liberator with the pride of all the Empires in her heart, ever escape again to mine your thrones with her arts, to sap your creeds with her ironies, to arm your enemies with her riches, to overthrow your policies with her genius, to dare, to mock, to scheme, to revolutionise, to rule—to be, in one word, Idalia? Where will her power be when the same fetters as Poerio's hang on her wrists, where her loveliness when day and night the skies alone look on it from a chink in a dungeon wall, where her triumphs and her victories when the felon's branding-iron eats its hot road into her breast? She will be dead—as dead as in her grave."
The persuasive eloquence with which nature had endowed him left his tongue with a silken stealing sound, like the gliding movement of some serpentine thing, made more ornate in its eloquence by the richness of the Italian words he used. But there was beneath it the hiss of hatred, the ravenous thirst of desired vengeance, the lust that painted to itself her doom, and gloated on its own pictures with a hellish pleasure.
Giulio Villaflor caught that accent, and thought, with his acute trained wisdom:
"He has loved her—he will be true to us, then. There is no hate so sure-footed and so relentless as that hate."
"Figlio mio," he said, with his mellowest smile, resting his glance so cruel yet so caressing on the man who henceforward would be no longer his master, but his instrument, once having let him glean his secret, "you should have been in our Church; you have an orator's powers. How many souls you would have won!"
"Pardon me, your Eminence! it is more amusing work, more to my taste at least—to lose them."
Monsignore smiled a gentle reproof.
"'Your Eminence!' You give me too high a title, my son."
"Forgive me a mistake the world will soon ratify! I only anticípate the future by a month or two."
Giulio Villaflor was flattered; courted though he was, he was not aboye the bait to his vanity and his ambition. The Cardinal's hat was the goal of his daring yet wary desires, and in his own mind he foresaw himself soon or late a second Leo X; Pontifex Maximus in all the ancient power of the Papal tiara.
He let his eyes rest for a long moment on those of his companion; they were the deep, soft, full Italian eyes, like the brown, gentle, luminous eyes of the oxen of the Apennines; they could be tender in love as those of Venus Pandemos, they could be spiritual in religion as those of Leonardo's John, but also, they could be impenetrable as those of Talleyrand, they could be piercing in meaning and in discovery as those of Aquaviva, when, instead of the smile of the lover, or the benignity of the priest, he wore the mask of the diplomatist and politician.
"We understand each other, figlio mio?" he said, gently, while the violet gem of the episcopal ring glittered like the glance of a basilisk.
"We do."
They understood each other: and thus silently, while the aromatic light shone on the Vinci Passion, and without the melody of the waters beat sweet measure against the swaying orange-boughs, the seal was set to the unholy barter that betrayed a woman, and played the Iscariot to Liberty.