from a projecting green bank, she yielded to the | certain merchant, who lived nearly a hundred desire which the slight shock had given her to sit down and rest. She turned her back on Florence, not meaning to look at it till the monks were quite out of sight; and raising the edge of her cowl again when she had seated herself, she discerned Maso and the mules at a distance where it was not hopeless for her to overtake them, as the old man would probably linger in expectation of her. Meanwhile she might pause a little. She was free and alone. CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE BLACK MARKS BECOME MAGICAL. years before our Bernardo's time, won for himself and his descendants much wealth, and the pleasantly-suggestive surname of Oricellari, or Roccellari, which on Tuscan tongues speedily became Rucellai. And our Bernardo, who stands out more prominently than the rest on this purple back-ground, had added all sorts of distinction to the family name: he had married the sister of Lorenzo de' Medici, and had had the most splendid wedding in the memory of Florentine upholstery; and for these and other virtues he had been sent on embassies to France and Venice, and had been chosen Gonfaloniere; he had not only built himself a fine palace, but had finished putting the black and white marble façade to the church of Santa Maria Novella; he had planted a garden with rare trees, and had made it classic ground by receiving within it the meetings of the Platonic Academy, orphaned by the death of Lorenzo; he had written an excellent, learned book, of a new topographical sort, about ancient Rome; he had collected antiquities; he had a pure Latinity. The simplest account of him one sees reads like a laudatory epitaph, at the end of which the Greek and Ausonian Muses might be confidently requested to tear their hair, and Nature to desist from any second attempt to combine so many virtues with one set of viscera. His invitation had been conveyed to Tito through Lorenzo Tornabuoni, with an emphasis which would have suggested that the object of the gathering was political, even if the public questions of the time had been less absorbing. As it was, Tito felt sure that some party purposes were to be furthered by the excellent flavors of stewed fish and old Greek wine; for Bernardo Rucellai was not simply an influential personage, he was one of the elect Twenty who for three weeks had held the reins of Florence. This assurance put Tito in the best spirits as he made his way to the Via della Scala, where the classic garden was to be found: without it, he might have had some uneasy speculation as THAT journey of Tito's to Rome, which had removed many difficulties from Romola's depart-to whether the high company he would have the ure, had been resolved on quite suddenly, at a supper, only the evening before. Tito had set out toward that supper with agreeable expectations. The meats were likely to be delicate, the wines choice, the company distinguished; for the place of entertainment was the Selva, or Orto de' Rucellai-or, as we should say, the Rucellai Gardens; and the host, Bernardo Rucellai, was quite a typical Florentine grandee. Even his family name has a significance which is prettily symbolic: properly understood, it may bring before us a little lichen, popularly named orcella or roccella, which grows on the rocks of Greek isles and in the Canaries; and having drunk a great deal of light into its little stems and button-heads, will, under certain circumstances, give it out again as a reddish purple dye, very grateful to the eyes of men. By bringing the excellent secret of this dye, called oricello, from the Levant to Florence, a honor of meeting was likely to be dull as well as distinguished; for he had had experience of various dull suppers even in the Rucellai gardens, and especially of the dull philosophic sort, wherein he had not only been called upon to accept an entire scheme of the universe (which would have been easy to him), but to listen to an exposition of the same, from the origin of things to their complete ripeness in the tractate of the philosopher then speaking. It was a dark evening, and it was only when Tito crossed the occasional light of a lamp suspended before an image of the Virgin that the outline of his figure was discernible enough for recognition. At such moments any one caring to watch his passage from one of these lights to another might have observed that the tall and graceful personage with the mantle folded round him was followed constantly by a very different form, thick-set and elderly, in a serge tunic and felt hat. The conjunction might have been taken for mere chance, since there were many passengers along the streets at this hour. But when Tito stopped at the gate of the Rucellai gardens the figure behind stopped too. The sportello, or smaller door of the gate, was already being held open by the servant, who, in the distraction of attending to some question, had not yet closed it since the last arrival, and Tito turned in rapidly, giving his name to the servant, and passing on between the evergreen bushes that shone like metal in the torch-light. The follower turned in too. "Your name ?" said the servant. "Baldassarre Calvo," was the immediate an swer. "You are not a guest; the guests have all passed." "I belong to Tito Melema, who has just gone in. I am to wait in the gardens." The servant hesitated. "I had orders to admit only guests. Are you a servant of Messer Tito ?" like power that was left to him. He leaned to take up the fragments of the dagger; then he turned toward the book which lay open at his side. It was a fine large manuscript, an odd volume of Pausanias. The moonlight was upon it, and he could see the large letters at the head of the page: ΜΕΣΣΗΝΙΚΑ. ΚΒ ́. In old days he had known Pausanias familiarly; yet an hour or two ago he had been looking hopelessly at that page, and it had suggested no more meaning to him than if the letters had been black weather-marks on a wall; but at this moment they were once more the magic signs that conjure up a world. That moonbeam falling on the letters had raised Messenia before him, and its struggle against the Spartan oppression. He snatched up the book, but the light was too pale for him to read further by. No matter; he knew that chapter; he read inwardly. He saw the stoning of the traitor Aristocrates-stoned by a whole people, who cast him out from their bor "No, friend, I am not a servant; I am aders to lie unburied, and set up a pillar with scholar." There are men to whom you need only say, "I am a buffalo," in a certain tone of quiet confidence, and they will let you pass. The porter gave way at once, Baldassare entered, and heard the door closed and chained behind him, as he too disappeared among the shining bushes. Those ready and firm answers argued a great change in Baldassarre since the last meeting face to face with Tito, when the dagger broke in two. The change had declared itself in a startling way. At the moment when the shadow of Tito passed in front of the hovel as he departed homeward, Baldassarre was sitting in that state of after-tremor known to every one who is liable to great outbursts of passion—a state in which physical powerlessness is sometimes accompanied by an exceptional lucidity of thought, as if that disengagement of excited passion had carried away a fire-mist and left clearness behind it. He felt unable to rise and walk away just yet; his limbs seemed benumbed; he was cold, and his hand shook. But in that bodily helplessness he sat surrounded, not by the habitual dimness and vanishing shadows, but by the clear images of the past: he was living again in an unbroken course through that life which seemed a long preparation for the taste of bitterness. For some minutes he was too thoroughly absorbed by the images to reflect on the fact that he saw them, and note the fact as a change. But when that sudden clearness had traveled through the distance, and came at last to rest on the scene just gone by, he felt fully where he was: he remembered Monna Lisa and Tessa. Ah! he then was the mysterious husband; he who had another wife in the Via de' Bardi. It was time to pick up the broken dagger and go-go and leave no trace of himself; for to hide his feebleness seemed the thing most verses upon it, telling how time had brought home justice to the unjust. The words arose within him, and stirred innumerable vibrations of memory. He forgot that he was old: he could almost have shouted. The light was come again, mother of knowledge and joy! In that exultation his limbs recovered their strength. He started up with his broken dagger and book, and went out under the broad moonlight. It was a nipping frosty air, but Baldassarre could feel no chill-he only felt the glow of conscious power. He walked about and paused on all the open spots of that high ground, and looked down on the domed and towered city, sleeping darkly under its sleeping guardians, the mountains; on the pale gleam of the river; on the valley vanishing toward the peaks of snow; and felt himself master of them all. That sense of mental empire which belongs to us all in moments of exceptional clearness was intensified for him by the long days and nights in which memory had been little more than the consciousness of something gone. That city, which had been a weary labyrinth, was material that he could subdue to his purposes now. His mind glanced through its affairs with flashing conjecture; he was once more a man who knew cities, whose sense of vision was instructed with large experience, and who felt the keen delight of holding all things in the grasp of language. Names! Images! His mind rushed through its wealth without pausing, like one who enters on a great inheritance. But amidst all that rushing eagerness there was one end presiding in Baldassarre's consciousness-a dark deity in the inmost cell, who only seemed forgotten while his hetacomb was being prepared. And when the first triumph in the certainty of recovered power had had its way his thoughts centred themselves on Tito. That fair slippery viper could not escape him now. Thanks to struggling justice, the heart that never quivered with tenderness for another had its sensitive selfish fibres that could be reached by the sharp point of anguish. The soul that bowed to no right bowed to the great lord of mortals, Pain. He could search into every secret of Tito's life now he knew some of the secrets already, and the failure of the broken dagger, which seemed like frustration, had been the beginning of achievement. Doubtless that sudden rage had shaken away the obstruction which stifled his soul. Twice before, when his memory had partially returned, it had been in consequence of sudden excitation: once when he had had to defend himself from an enraged dog; once when he had been overtaken by the waves and had had to scramble up a rock to save himself. Yes; but if this time, as then, the light were to die out, and the dreary conscious blank come back again! This time the light was stronger and steadier; but what security was there that before the morrow the dark fog would not be round him again? Even the fear seemed like the beginning of feebleness: he thought with alarm that he might sink the faster for this excited vigil of his on the hill, which was expending his force; and after seeking anxiously for a sheltered corner where he might lie down, he nestled at last against a heap of warm garden straw, and so fell asleep. From that time till the evening on which we have seen him enter the Rucellai gardens he had been incessantly, but cautiously, inquiring into Tito's position and all his circumstances; and there was hardly a day on which he did not contrive to follow his movements. But he wished not to arouse any alarm in Tito: he wished to secure a moment when the hated favorite of blind fortune was at the summit of confident ease, surrounded by chief men on whose favor he depended. It was not any retributive payment or recognition of himself for his own behoof on which Baldassarre's whole soul was bent: it was to find the sharpest edge of disgrace and shame by which a selfish smiler could be pierced; it was to send through his marrow the most sudden shock of dread. He was content to lie hard and live stintedly—he had spent the greater part of his remaining money in buying another poniard: his hunger and his thirst were after nothing exquisite but an exquisite vengeance. He had avoided addressing himself to any one whom he suspected of intimacy with Tito, lest an alarm raised in Tito's mind should urge him either to flight, or to some other counteracting measure which hard-pressed ingenuity might devise. For this reason he had never entered Nello's shop, which he observed that Tito frequented; and he had turned aside to avoid meeting Piero di Cosimo. er from the agitating presence of that fear, or from some other causes, he had twice felt a sort of mental dizziness, in which the inward sense or imagination seemed to be losing the distinct forms of things. Once he had attempted to enter the Palazzo Vecchio and make his way into a council-chamber where Tito was, and had failed. But now on this evening he felt that his occasion was come. CHAPTER XXXIX. When he opened his eyes again it was daylight. The first moments were filled with strange The possibility of frustration gave added eabewilderment: he was a man with a double gerness to his desire that the great opportunity identity; to which had he awaked?—to the life he sought should not be deferred. The desire of dim-sighted sensibilities, like the sad heirship was eager in him on another ground: he tremof some fallen greatness, or to the life of recov-bled lest his memory should go again. Whethered power? Surely the last, for the events of the night all came back to him: the recognition of the page in Pausanias; the crowding resurgence of facts and names; the sudden wide prospect which had given him such a moment as that of the Mænad in the glorious amaze of her morning waking on the mountain top. He took up the book again; he read; he remembered without reading. He saw a name, and the images of deeds rose with it; he saw the mention of a deed, and he linked it with a name. There were stories of inexpiable crimes, but stories also of guilt that seemed successful. There were sanctuaries for swift-footed miscreants; baseness had its armor, and the weapons of justice sometimes broke against it. What then? If baseness triumphed every where else, if it could heap to itself all the goods of the world, and even hold the keys of hell, it would never triumph over the hatred itself awaked. It could devise no torture that would seem greater than the torture of submitting to its smile. Baldassarre felt the indestructible, independent force of a supreme emotion, which knows no terror and asks for no motive-which is itself an everburning motive, consuming all other desire. And now, in this morning light, when the assurance came again that the fine fibres of association were active still, and that his recovered self had not departed, all his gladness was but the hope of vengeance. A SUPPER IN THE RUCELLAI GARDENS. On entering the handsome pavilion Tito's quick glance soon discerned in the selection of the guests the confirmation of his conjecture that the object of the gathering was political, though, perhaps, nothing more distinct than that strengthening of party which comes from goodfellowship. Good dishes and good wine were at that time believed to heighten the consciousness of political preferences; and in the inspired ease of after-supper talk it was supposed that people ascertained their own opinions with a clearness quite inaccessible to uninvited stomachs. The Florentines were a sober and frugal people; but wherever men have gathered wealth Madonna della Gozzoviglia and San Buonvino I have had their worshipers; and the Rucellai were among the few Florentine families who kept a great table and lived splendidly. It was not probable that on this evening there would be any attempt to apply high philosophic theories; and there could be no objection to the bust of Plato looking on, or even to the modest presence of the cardinal virtues in fresco on the walls. entine would think if the life could come into him again under his leathern belt and bone clasp, and he could see silver forks on the table. And it was agreed on all hands that the habits of posterity would be very surprising to ancestors, if ancestors could only know them. And while the silver forks were just dallying with the appetizing delicacies that introduced the more That bust of Plato had been long used to look serious business of the supper-such as morsels down on conviviality of a more transcendental of liver, cooked to that exquisite point that they sort, for it had been brought from Lorenzo's villa would melt in the mouth-there was time to adafter his death, when the meetings of the Platonic | mire the designs on the enameled silver centres Academy had been transferred to these gardens. of the brass service, and to say something, as Especially on every thirteenth of November, re-usual, about the silver dish for confetti, a masterputed anniversary of Plato's death, it had looked piece of Antonio Pollajuolo, whom patronizing from under laurel leaves at a picked company Popes had seduced from his native Florence to of scholars and philosophers, who met to eat and more gorgeous Rome. drink with moderation, and to discuss and admire, perhaps with less moderation, the doctrines of the great master-on Pico della Mirandola, once a Quixotic young genius, with long curls, astonished at his own powers, and astonishing Rome with heterodox theses; afterward a more humble student, with a consuming passion for inward perfection, having come to find the universe more astonishing than his own cleverness -on innocent, laborious Marsilio Ficino, picked out young to be reared as a Platonic philosopher, and fed on Platonism in all its stages till his mind was perhaps a little pulpy from that too exclusive diet-on Angelo Poliziano, chief literary genius of that age, a born poet, and a scholar without dullness, whose phrases had blood in them and are alive still-or, farther back, on Leon Battista Alberti, a reverend sen-day vanish from the eyes of the faithful to be ior when those three were young, and of a much grander type than they-a robust, universal mind, at once practical and theoretic, artist, man of science, inventor, poet; and on many more valiant workers whose names are not registered where every day we turn the leaf to read them; but whose labors make a part, though an unrecognized part, of our inheritance, like the plowing and sowing of past generations. "Ah! I remember," said Niccolò Ridolfi, a middle-aged man, with that negligent ease of manner which, seeming to claim nothing, is really based on the life-long consciousness of commanding rank--"I remember our Antonio getting bitter about his chiseling and enameling of these metal things, and taking in a fury to painting, because, said he, 'the artist who puts his work into gold and silver puts his brains into the melting-pot.' "And that is not unlikely to be a true foreboding of Antonio's," said Giannozzo Pucci. "If this pretty war with Pisa goes on, and the revolt only spreads a little to our other towns, it is not only our silver dishes that are likely to go; I doubt whether Antonio's silver saints round the altar of San Giovanni will not some worshiped more devoutly in the form of coin." "The Frate is preparing us for that already," said Tornabuoni. "He is telling the people that God will not have silver crucifixes and starving stomachs; and that the church is best adorned with the gems of holiness and the fine gold of brotherly love.” "A very useful doctrine of war-finance, as many a Condottiere has found," said Bernardo Rucellai, dryly. "But politics come on after the confetti, Lorenzo, when we can drink wine enough to wash them down; they are too solid to be taken with roast and boiled." "Yes, indeed," said Niccolò Ridolfi. "Our Bernardo Rucellai was a man to hold a distinguished place in that Academy even before he became its host and patron. He was still in the prime of life, not more than four and forty, with a somewhat haughty, cautiously-dignified presence; conscious of an amazingly pure Latin-Luigi Pulci would have said this delicate boiled ity, but, says Erasmus, not to be caught speak- kid must be eaten with an impartial mind. I ing Latin-no word of Latin to be sheared off remember one day at Careggi, when Luigi was him by the sharpest of Teutons. He welcomed in his rattling vein, he was maintaining that noTito with more marked favor than usual, and thing perverted the palate like opinion. 'Opin gave him a place between Lorenzo Tornabuoni ion,' said he, 'corrupts the saliva-that's why and Giannozzo Pucci, both of them accomplish- men took to pepper. Skepticism is the only ed young members of the Medicean party. philosophy that doesn't bring a taste in the mouth. Nay,' says poor Lorenzo de' Medici, 'you must be out there, Luigi. Here is this untainted skeptic, Matteo Franco, who wants hotter sauce than any of us.' 'Because he has Of course, the talk was the lightest in the world while the brass bowl, filled with scented water, was passing round, that the company might wash their hands, and rings flashed on white fingers under the wax-lights, and there a strong opinion of himself,' flashes out Luigi, was the pleasant fragrance of fresh white dam-which is the original egg of all other opinion. ask newly come from France. The tone of re- He a skeptic? He believes in the immortality mark was a very common one in those times. of his own verses. He is such a logician as that Some one asked what Dante's pattern old Flor- preaching friar who described the pavement of the bottomless pit.' Poor Luigi! his mind was like sharpest steel, that can touch nothing without cutting." peacock cooked according to the recipe of Apicius for cooking partridges, namely, with the feathers on, but not plucked afterward, as that "And yet a very gentle-hearted creature," great authority ordered concerning his partridges; said Giannozzo Pucci. "It seemed to me his on the contrary, so disposed on the dish that it talk was a mere blowing of soap-bubbles. What might look as much as possible like a live peadithyrambs he went into about eating and drink-cock taking its unboiled repose. Great was the ing! and yet he was as temperate as a butter fly." The light talk and the solid eatables were not soon at an end; for after the roast and boiled meats came the indispensable capon and game, and, crowning glory of a well-spread table, a skill required in that confidential servant who was the official carver, respectfully to turn the classical though insipid bird on its back, and expose the plucked breast from which he was to dispense a delicate slice to each of the honorable company, unless any one should be of so |