"Amor che a null' amato amar perdona." Bellaroba, who pleased the Countess, for the same reasons, no doubt, did not please the Count. It is possible to be too demure, and very little good to have domestic charm if you shut the door upon the amateur. Lionella had never had so much of her lord's society as during the month that followed her return to Ferrara. She did not complain of this; on the contrary, the more the maid held off and the man pursued, the more Lionella was entertained. Angioletto, invited to share her sport, proved dull. She confessed to more than one of her women (including Bellaroba) that if she had not been very much in love with the poet she would have thought him a fool. You see that she made no secret of her weakness. The fact is, she did not consider it a weakness; whereby you have this remarkable position of affairs at the Schifanoia, that Bellaroba was invited to be a student of her husband's amours, and he of hers. Considering the state of their secret hearts this might have led to matter of tragic concern; if they had loved less it would have done so. As it was, they were quite indifferent. Their hours were a series of breathless But it could not last—barely saw its round of eight and twenty days. Lionella was a lady born, as it were, in the purple. Command sat lightly on her; she had never been disobeyed. She now grew querulous, exacting, suspicious, moody, sometimes petulant, sometimes beseeching. It gave Angioletto the deuce's own time now and then; but he might yet have weathered the rocks—for his tact was only equalled by his good temper—if He took it so. Instead of hinting at his duty, or hers, he blundered out the fact that he did not love her. "Dog," cried the Countess, "do you dare to tell me that?" "Madama, I do indeed," he answered sadly, for he saw his house about his ears. Lionella checked herself; she bit her lip, put her hands ostentatiously behind her back. "You had better leave the house, Master Angioletto," said she drily, "before I go further and see to it." He bowed himself out. Then he sought his poor Bellaroba, found her in the garden, drew her aside without trouble of a pretext, and told her the whole story. "My lovely dear," he said, "I am a broken man. There has been a terrible scene with Madama, in which she got so much the worst of it that I was very triumphantly ruined. You behold me decked with the ashes of my scorched prosperity. What is to be done with you? For I must go." "Oh, Angioletto," cried Bellaroba, trembling and catching at his breast, "won't you—can't you—ruin me too? Then we shall be happy again." He pressed her to his heart. "Dearest dear," "Of course I am, Angioletto. But nobody thinks so—not even any priest." "Eh!" he cried, "but that is all the better. Only you and I and Madonna the Virgin of the Greeks know it. She never blabs secrets, and you dare not, and I can't. So you see it is well arranged." She loved him most of all in this gay humour, and provoked him to new flights. "But, you wild boy, how can you see me when you are ruined?" she asked, all her roses in flower at the fun of the thing. "How can you be in the Schifanoia if you are thrust out of it?" Angioletto, with a mysterious air, kissed her for answer. "Leave that to me, my dear," he said. "Never have another of the maids to sleep with you, and lock your chamber door. Now I must go, because I am kicked out. Good-bye, my bride; I shall see you long before another dawn." She let him go at last, and turned to her duties with less sighing than you would have supposed, and no tears at all. Her belief in the wisdom, audacity, and decision of her Angioletto was absolute. She had never known him to fail. Yet if she chanced to think of the towering Count Guarini plying her with flowers and sweatmeats, she shivered to remember her citadel naked of all defences. This made her feel homesick for her lover's arms. Like a sensible Free of the Schifanoia (whose dust he was yet careful to keep upon his shoes for the sake of her it harboured), Angioletto walked briskly down the street, shaping his course for the Borgo. He had been rounding a plan even while he was announcing to Bellaroba that he had it cut and dried; and now he was to execute it. True, it was a little extravagant, depended too much, perhaps, upon other people's estimations of him tallying with his own; but you will have found out by this time that the youth was a realist. Ideas stood for things with him; and, as he said, if he could not make them stand so to his auditory he was no poet. This was a heresy he could not allow even supposititiously. The idea was excellent; the thing, therefore, no less. Therefore he concluded that he should not fail of his plan. Beyond the Porta Angeli, in Borso's day, was to be found a huddle of tenements—fungus-growth upon the city wall—single-storied, single-roomed affairs, mostly the lodging of artificers in the lesser crafts. Among them all there was but one of two floors, a substantial red-brick little house with a most grandiloquent chimney-stack. And very rightly it was so, for it belonged to the Court chimney-sweep. On this eventful noon Sor Beppo, the sweep, was sitting on his doorstep in the sun, eating an Angioletto, stopping before him, took off his scarlet cap with a flourish. "Well, young stabbing blade," said Beppo, "and who may you be?" "Sir," replied the youth, "I am a poet." Beppo rubbed his shooting chin with a noise like the scraping of nutmegs. "Well," said he, "I'll not deny that it's a trade, and a lawful trade; but for my part I sweep noblemen's chimneys and am proud of it. Shake hands, poet." They shook hands, with great cordiality on the poet's part. "Sit down, poet," said Beppo. Angioletto sat on the doorstep beside him without a word. "Will you have an onion, my friend?" the old fellow went on to ask. "Thank you, Sor Beppo, but I have already dined. Let me rather talk to you while you finish your meal." "It is not so much a meal as a relish," said the sweep. "But talk away—we'll never quarrel over terms." "I hope not," Angioletto took him up; "because I have done with poetising and have a mind to try your trade." Beppo, his mouth full of onion, paused in his bite to gape at this dapper page, who, all scarlet and white as he was, talked after such a fashion. "How'll that be now?" he said. "You've never come all this way to crack a joke?" "Ah, never in the world, my friend," cried Angioletto. "I am in earnest." "You may be as earnest as a friar in the pulpit, and yet pretty bad at chimney-work, young master. What do you know of it, pray?" "Nothing at all," replied Angioletto, as if that helped him. "Look at that now," cried the triumphant Sor Beppo. "Pardon me, Master Beppo," said the youth, "you cannot look at it yet, but you very soon shall. Have you a chimney to hand?" "Ah, I might have that," the old man agreed, with a chuckle which ended as a snort. "There might be a chimney in my house that's not been swept for thirty year, having little time and less inclination to sweep 'em for nothing but glory. But, happen there were such a piece of work, what then?" Angioletto pointed into the house. "Is that the chimney, Beppo?" Beppo nodded. "That might be the chimney in question, my gentleman." With a "By your leave, Sor Beppo," Angioletto stepped delicately into the room. He threw down cloak and cap, unstrapped girdle and hanger, "By the Saints, but he's in!" he cried with arms thrown up. "Eh, master, come you back, come you back!" "What do you want?" a muffled voice came from the chimney. Beppo sawed the air. "Don't you play the fool up there, my boy, don't you do it! That's as foul as the grave, that chimney is. I'll have ye on my soul as long as I live, and I can ill afford it, for I've a queasy conscience in my black shell." He seemed to be treading on pins. He was answered, "We will talk of your conscience and its shell when I come back. Take off my shoes, will you?" A neat leg was pushed into the fireplace; then another. Beppo did the office, meek as an acolyte. Then he sighed, for the legs drew up the chimney and vanished in dust. "There goes a lad of spirit to his gloomy end," murmured brokenly the sweep, as he looked at the little red shoes in his hand. "I would not have had that come to pass for twenty gold ducats. But, Lord! who'd 'a thought it of a Court spark, that he should be as good as his word? Not I, used to Courts as a man may be." He fell to scratching his head. "Hey, hey!" he cried, as there was a prodigious scuffling up the chimney. "Now he strangles, now he strangles!" A shower of soot came down. Beppo flacked about the room; then two heavy objects fell. Beppo crept up. "Mary He could await Angioletto's coming now with equal mind. The lad had approved himself. I leave you to judge of the welcome he got when, breathless, scratched, and sable as the night, he showed his white teeth at the door. Beppo, in fact, fell weeping on his neck. By this simple device Angioletto was enabled to keep his word, and Bellaroba to find him black but comely. |