and behind one of your citizens, that he may be affable and condescending to you. ‘See, what a tall Pisan we keep,’ say you, ‘to march before him with the drawn sword flashing in our eyes!—and yet Lorenzo smiles at us. What goodness!’ And you think the death of a man, who would soon have saddled and bridled you as the Sforza has saddled and bridled Milan—you think his death is the scourge God is warning you of by portents. I tell you there is another sort of scourge in the air.”
“Nay, nay, Ser Cioni, keep astride your politics, and never mount your prophecy; politics is the better horse,” said Nello. “But if you talk of portents, what portent can be greater than a pious notary? Balaam’s ass was nothing to it.”
“Ay, but a notary out of work, with his inkbottle dry,” said another bystander, very much out at elbows. “Better don a cowl at once, Ser Cioni: everybody will believe in your fasting.”
The notary turned and left the group with a look of indignant contempt, disclosing, as he did so, the sallow but mild face of a short man who had been standing behind him, and whose bent shoulders told of some sedentary occupation.
“By San Giovanni, though,” said the fat purchaser of leeks, with the air of a person rather shaken in his theories, “I am not sure there isn’t some truth in what Ser Cioni says. For I know I have good reason to find fault with the quattrini bianchi myself. Grumble, did he say? Suffocation! I should think we do grumble; and, let anybody say the word, I’ll turn out into the piazza with the readiest, sooner than have our money altered in our hands as if the magistracy were so many necromancers. And it’s true Lorenzo might have hindered such work if he would—and for the bull with the flaming horns, why, as Ser Cioni says, there may be many meanings to it, for the matter of that; it may have more to do with the taxes than we think. For when God above sends a sign, it’s not to be supposed he’d have only one meaning.”
“Spoken like an oracle, Goro!” said the barber. “Why, when we poor mortals can pack two or three meanings into one sentence, it were mere blasphemy not to believe that your miraculous bull means everything that any man in Florence likes it to mean.”
“Thou art pleased to scoff, Nello,” said the sallow, round-shouldered man, no longer eclipsed by the notary, “but it is not the less true that every revelation, whether by visions, dreams, portents, or the written word, has many meanings, which it is given to the illuminated only to unfold.”
“Assuredly,” answered Nello. “Haven’t I been to hear the Frate in San Lorenzo? But then, I’ve been to hear Fra Menico in the Duomo too; and according to him, your Fra Girolamo, with his visions and interpretations, is running after the wind of Mongibello, and those who follow him are like to have the fate of certain swine that ran headlong into the sea—or some hotter place. With San Domenico roaring è vero in one ear, and San Francisco screaming è falso in the other, what is a poor barber to do—unless he were illuminated? But it’s plain our Goro here is beginning to be illuminated for he already sees that the bull with the flaming horns means first himself, and secondly all the other aggrieved taxpayers of Florence, who are determined to gore the magistracy on the first opportunity.”
“Goro is a fool!” said a bass voice, with a note that dropped like the sound of a great bell in the midst of much tinkling. “Let him carry home his leeks and shake his flanks over his wool-beating. He’ll mend matters more that way than by showing his tun-shaped body in the piazza, as if everybody might measure his grievances by the size of his paunch. The burdens that harm him most are his heavy carcass and his idleness.”
The speaker had joined the group only in time to hear the conclusion of Nello’s speech, but he was one of those figures for whom all the world instinctively makes way, as it would for a battering-ram. He was not much above the middle height, but the impression of enormous force which was conveyed by his capacious chest and brawny arms bared to the shoulder, was deepened by the keen sense and quiet resolution expressed in his glance and in every furrow of his cheek and brow. He had often been an unconscious model to Domenico Ghirlandajo, when that great painter was making the walls of the churches reflect the life of Florence, and translating pale aerial traditions into the deep colour and strong lines of the faces he knew. The naturally dark tint of his skin was additionally bronzed by the same powdery deposit that gave a polished black surface to his leathern apron: a deposit which habit had probably made a necessary condition of perfect ease, for it was not washed off with punctilious regularity.
Goro turned his fat cheek and glassy eye on the frank speaker with a look of deprecation rather than of resentment.
“Why, Niccolò,” he said, in an injured tone, “I’ve heard you sing to another tune than that, often enough, when you’ve been laying down the law at San Gallo on a festa. I’ve heard you say yourself, that a man wasn’t a mill-wheel, to be on the grind, grind, as long as he was driven, and then stick in his place without stirring when the water was low. And you’re as fond of your vote as any man in Florence—ay, and I’ve heard you say, if Lorenzo—”
“Yes, yes,” said Niccolò. “Don’t you be bringing up my speeches again after you’ve swallowed them, and handing them about as if they were none the worse. I vote and I speak when there’s any use in it: if there’s hot metal on the anvil, I lose no time before I strike; but I don’t spend good hours in tinkling on cold iron, or in standing on the pavement as thou dost, Goro, with snout upward, like a pig under an oak-tree. And as for Lorenzo—dead and gone before his time—he was a man who had an eye for curious iron-work; and if anybody says he wanted to make himself a tyrant, I say, ‘Sia; I’ll not deny which way the wind blows when every man can see the weathercock.’ But that only means that Lorenzo was a crested hawk, and there are plenty of hawks without crests whose claws and beaks are as good for tearing. Though if there was any chance of a real reform, so that Marzocco (the stone Lion, emblem of the Republic) might shake his mane and roar again, instead of dipping his head to lick the feet of anybody that will mount and ride him, I’d strike a good blow for it.”
“And that reform is not far off, Niccolò,” said the sallow, mild-faced man, seizing his opportunity like a missionary among the too light-minded heathens; “for a time of tribulation is coming, and the scourge is at hand. And when the Church is purged of cardinals and prelates who traffic in her inheritance that their hands may be full to pay the price of blood and to satisfy their own lusts, the State will be purged too—and Florence will be purged of men who love to see avarice and lechery under the red hat and the mitre because it gives them the screen of a more hellish vice than their own.”
“Ay, as Goro’s broad body would be a screen for my narrow person in case of missiles,” said Nello; “but if that excellent screen happened to fall, I were stifled under it, surely enough. That is no bad image of thine, Nanni—or, rather, of the Frate’s; for I fancy there is no room in the small cup of thy understanding for any other liquor than what he pours into it.”
“And it were well for thee, Nello,” replied Nanni, “if thou couldst empty thyself of thy scoffs and thy jests, and take in that liquor too. The warning is ringing in the ears of all men: and it’s no new story; for the Abbot Joachim prophesied of the coming time three hundred years ago, and now Fra Girolamo has got the message afresh. He has seen it in a vision, even as the prophets of old: he has seen the sword hanging from the sky.”
“Ay, and thou wilt see it thyself, Nanni, if thou wilt stare upward long enough,” said Niccolò; “for that pitiable tailor’s work of thine makes thy noddle so overhang thy legs, that thy eyeballs can see nought above the stitching-board but the roof of thy own skull.”
The honest tailor bore the jest without bitterness, bent on convincing his hearers of his doctrine rather than of his dignity. But Niccolò gave him no opportunity for replying; for he turned away to the pursuit of his market business, probably considering further dialogue as a tinkling on cold iron.
“Ebbene” said the man with the hose round his neck, who had lately migrated from another knot of talkers, “they are safest who cross themselves and jest at nobody. Do you know that the Magnifico sent for the Frate at the last, and couldn’t die without his blessing?”
“Was it so—in truth?” said several voices. “Yes, yes—God will have pardoned