God's Playthings 14

God's Playthings 14

“Did I not say I would not have your flatteries?”

 

“What, then, was your meaning?”

 

“Ten years ago you would not have asked; no man would have asked. I am

old. Lucrezia old!–ah, Gods above!”

 

“You are beautiful,” he repeated. “But how should I dare to touch you

with my mouth?”

 

“You would have dared, if you had thought me desirable,” she answered

hoarsely. “You cannot guess how beautiful I was–before you were born,

Orsini.”

 

He felt a sudden pity for her; the glamour of her fame clung round her

and gilded her. Was not this a woman who had been the fairest in Italy

seated beside him?

 

He raised her hand and kissed the palm, the only part that was not

hidden with jewels.

 

“You are sorry for me,” she said.

 

Orsini started at her quick reading of his thoughts.

 

“I am the last of my family,” she added. “And sick. Did you know that I

was sick, Orsini?”

 

“Nay, Madonna.”

 

“For weeks I have been sick. And wearying for Rome.”

 

“Rome,” he ventured, “is different now, Madonna.”

 

“Ahè!” she wailed. “And I am different also.”

 

Her hand lay on his knee; he looked at it and wondered if the things

he had heard of her were true. She had been the beloved child of her

father, the old Pope, rotten with bitter wickedness; she had been

the friend of her brother, the dreadful Cesare–her other brother,

Francesco, and her second husband–was it not supposed that she knew how

both had died?

 

But for twenty-one years she had lived in Ferrara, patroness of poet

and painter, companion of such as the courteous gentle Venetian, Pietro

Bembo.

 

And Alfonso d’Este, her husband, had found no fault with her; as far as

the world could see, there had been no fault to find.

 

Ormfredo Orsini stared at the hand sparkling on his knee and wondered.

 

“Suppose that I was to make you my father confessor?” she said. The

white mantle had fallen apart and the bosom of her gown glittered, even

in the twilight.

 

“What sins have you to confess, Madonna?” he questioned.

 

She peered at him sideways.

 

“A Pope’s daughter should not be afraid of the Judgment of God,” she

answered. “And I am not. I shall relate my sins at the bar of Heaven

and say I have repented–Ahè–if I was young again!”

 

“Your Highness has enjoyed the world,” said Orsini.

 

“Yea, the sun,” she replied, “but not the twilight.”

 

“The twilight?”

 

“It has been twilight now for many years,” she said, “ever since I came

to Ferrara.”

 

The moon was rising behind the cypress trees, a slip of glowing light.

Lucrezia took her chin in her hand and stared before her; a soft breeze

stirred the tall reeds in the pool behind her and gently ruffled the

surface of the water.

 

The breath of the night-smelling flowers pierced the slumbrous air; the

palace showed a faint shape, a marvellous tint; remote it looked and

uncertain in outline.

 

Lucrezia was motionless; her garments were dim, yet glittering, her

face a blur; she seemed the ruin of beauty and graciousness, a fair

thing dropped suddenly into decay.

 

Orsini rose and stepped away from her; the perfume of her unguents

offended him. He found something horrible in the memory of former

allurement that clung to her; ghosts seemed to crowd round her and

pluck at her, like fierce birds at carrion.

 

He caught the glitter of her eyes through the dusk; she was surely

evil, bad to the inmost core of her heart; her stale beauty reeked of

dead abomination.… Why had he never noticed it before?

 

The ready wit of his rank and blood failed him; he turned away towards

the cypress trees.

 

The Duchess made no attempt to detain him; she did not move from her

crouching, watchful attitude.

 

When he reached the belt of laurels he looked back and saw her dark

shape still against the waters of the pool that were beginning to be

touched with the argent glimmer of the rising moon. He hurried on,

continually catching the strings of his lute against the boughs of the

flowering shrubs; he tried to laugh at himself for being afraid of an

old, sick woman; he tried to ridicule himself for believing that the

admired Duchess, for so long a decorous great lady, could in truth be a

creature of evil.

 

But the conviction flashed into his heart was too deep to be uprooted.

 

She had not spoken to him like a Duchess of Ferrara, but rather as the

wanton Spaniard whose excesses had bewildered and sickened Rome.

 

A notable misgiving was upon him; he had heard great men praise her,

Ludovico Ariosto, Cardinal Ippolito’s secretary and the noble Venetian

Bembo; he had himself admired her remote and refined splendour. Yet,

because of these few moments of close talk with her, because of a

near gaze into her face, he felt that she was something horrible, the

poisoned offshoot of a bad race.

 

He thought that there was death on her glistening painted lips, and

that if he had kissed them he would have died, as so many of her lovers

were reputed to have died.

 

He parted the cool leaves and blossoms and came on to the borders of a

lake that lay placid under the darkling sky.

 

It was very lonely; bats twinkled past with a black flap of wings; the

moon had burnt the heavens clear of stars; her pure light began to fill

the dusk. Orsini moved softly, with no comfort in his heart.

 

The stillness was intense; he could hear his own footfall, the soft

leather on the soft grass. He looked up and down the silence of the

lake.

 

Then suddenly he glanced over his shoulder. Lucrezia Borgia was

standing close behind him; when he turned her face looked straight into

his.

 

He moaned with terror and stood rigid; awful it seemed to him that she

should track him so stealthily and be so near to him in this silence

and he never know of her presence.

 

“Eh, Madonna!” he said.

 

“Eh, Orsini,” she answered in a thin voice, and at the sound of it he

stepped away, till his foot was almost in the lake.

 

His unwarrantable horror of her increased, as he found that the glowing

twilight had confused him; for, whereas at first he had thought she was

the same as when he had left her seated by the pool, royal in dress and

bearing, he saw now that she was leaning on a stick, that her figure

had fallen together, that her face was yellow as a church candle, and

that her head was bound with plasters, from the under edge of which her

eyes twinkled, small and lurid.

 

She wore a loose gown of scarlet brocade that hung open on her arms

that showed lean and dry; the round bones at her wrist gleamed white

under the tight skin, and she wore no rings.

 

“Madonna, you are ill,” muttered Ormfredo Orsini. He wondered how long

he had been wandering in the garden.

 

“Very ill,” she said. “But talk to me of Rome. You are the only Roman

at the Court, Orsini.”

 

“Madonna, I know nothing of Rome,” he answered, “save our palace there

and sundry streets—”

 

She raised one hand from the stick and clutched his arm.

 

“Will you hear me confess?” she asked. “All my beautiful sins that I

cannot tell the priest? All we did in those days of youth before this

dimness at Ferrara?”

 

“Confess to God,” he answered, trembling violently.

 

Lucrezia drew nearer.

 

“All the secrets Cesare taught me,” she whispered. “Shall I make you

heir to them?”

 

“Christ save me,” he said, “from the Duke of Valentinois’ secrets!”

 

“Who taught you to fear my family?” she questioned with a cunning

accent. “Will you hear how the Pope feasted with his Hebes and

Ganymedes? Will you hear how we lived in the Vatican?”

 

Orsini tried to shake her arm off; anger rose to equal his fear.

 

“Weed without root or flower, fruitless uselessness!” he said hoarsely.

“Let me free of your spells!”

 

She loosed his arm and seemed to recede from him without movement;

the plasters round her head showed ghastly white, and he saw all the

wrinkles round her drooped lips and the bleached ugliness of her bare

throat.

 

“Will you not hear of Rome?” she insisted in a wailing whisper. He fled from her, crashing through the bushes.