IT chanced that Raymond through come misadventure failed to keep his appointment with his friend Campano, and went alone to the Cardinal’s palace. He stayed a short time, and then, according to his promise, returned home to await the visit of Theodore, who soon afterward made his appearance.
Manuel had prepared for them an elegant though simple repast of fruit, vine, and confectionery. The tiny “atrium” where they sat resembled, as closely as antiquarian research could make it, the room where a Fabius or a Cincinnatus might have received his guests; the amphora that held the wine, the cups from which they drank it, the graceful lamp filled with olive oil in which a lighted wick was floating, were all strictly “after the antique,” and wore the forms with which the remains of Pompeii have made us so familiar.
But the two young men who were wearing out the night in eager, passionate talk were not after the antique at all; their surroundings, contrasted with themselves, looked a pale and faded anachronism. They were not old Greeks or Romans; they were men of the fifteenth century, men of the Renaissance, with the warm blood of a world’s new springtime flowing in their veins and its passions stirring their hearts.
Each had to hear and to applaud the other’s successes in the schools. Raymond told of his with modest and becoming satisfaction. His only serious disappointment had been the death of Pope Pius, which had not only deprived him, in common with others, of a kind patron, but rendered useless his ode upon the Crusade. Theodore spoke of his own achievements with something of the old cynicism; and yet even Theodore kindled into enthusiasm as he talked of his pupils, evidencing the joy every earnest thinker feels when he finds he can transfuse his thought into the souls of others. Raymond, accustomed to see this passion strongly exemplified in him whom he reverently called “the Master,” entered into it with sympathy and interest. “It must have been hard to leave such scholars,” he said.
“Life is not all thought, it is action too,” replied Theodore. “Needs must that I visit my brethren and look upon their burdens.”
“Is the philosopher still so much the Jew?”
“Still?” Theodore repeated indignantly. “Know you not that for long ages the Jew has been the philosopher of the land of his exile? What hand but his has cherished and fed the lamp lit by the sages of the East, that else would have gone out long ago in the thick darkness of modern superstition? Who translated Averroës, annotated his immortal text, carried forward his sublime and daring speculations? While the Goim have been worshipping stocks and stones, and feeding the sluggish spark of intellect that remained to them on garbage like the tales of that friar we heard today, the sons of the grand old Sheik Abraham have been looking deep into the heart of nature and of man, and nourishing the life of the spirit in the darkness of their long night of adversity, as he nourished his beneath the stars of the Eastern sky.”
“I have only heard Averroës and his school spoken of with hatred and aversion,” Raymond said. “The Humanists―we are all Humanists here―have been always at war with the physicians and the rationalists.”
“Especially when the Humanists are gentlemen, like Petrarch, and the physicians boors, like the rationalist doctor who offended his refined ear by the old vulgar jest, falsely attributed to Averroës, about the ‘Three Impostors,’ Moses, Mahomet, and― that Other whom I will not name, for never yet have I spoken irreverently of the greatest Jew that ever lived. Yet at bottom we are allies, fighting the same battles against the same foes. You yourself, Count Raymond Chalcondyles, Grecian by birth, Latin by education, Artist by nature, Humanist by choice―tell me frankly, how do you regard holy mother Church?”
Raymond answered with all the freedom his school allowed themselves when discussing such subjects, “Well, we laugh at her, but we like her on the whole. She is a fond, indulgent sort of mother, who gives us cakes and comfits, and shuts her eyes to our little peccadilloes, letting us fool her with a few set forms and soft speeches. We contrive to pay and to please, and so we are let alone.”
“What if that fond, indulgent mother should someday change suddenly into an avenging fury, a Medea bathing hot hands in the blood of her own children? What if Giulio’s wild dream be true, and there sits on these seven hills, not the Mother and Mistress of Churches, but a woman drunk with the blood of saints and martyrs, arrayed in purple and scarlet, decked with gold and jewels, and having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness?”
“Gold and jewels, purple and scarlet, are here no doubt in abundance,” Raymond mused, “but―”
“But you are happy, and therefore you are tolerant you have never suffered, and therefore you have never cursed or hated. Go to the homes of my people; go there as a Jew, and see their misery, their degradation―as surely the fruits of long ages of oppression as the poison berry of the nightshade grows from its bitter root―and you would hold other language, I dare to think. Measure the distance between David, Nehemiah, Daniel, the great Rabbis who made the Talmud, Moses Maimonides and his disciples, and that poor wretch I took yesterday from the dust of the Corso, who fawns on the hand. that strikes him, and blesses and thanks the giver for the alms they fling him as they would a bone to a dog―and yet he is an elder, a man of respectable family, of blameless life.”
“But, Theodore, it is not fair to take the few, the heroes and philosophers of any race, and contrast them with the vulgar. Circumstances do not make all the difference between a King David and a vendor of old clothes.”
“Fire does not make all the difference between gold and dross, but it shows it; for each behaves in it after its kind. We have walked for generations in the furnace heated seven times. It has made of us heroes, philosophers, martyrs―or at the other pole, peddlers, cheats, usurers, liars. For mark―you have forbidden us honor, arms, renown; you have barred our every path to glory and greatness, branded us with the brand of Cain, treated us as the offscouring of the earth. Had we been a poor weak race we should long ago have perished utterly off the face of the earth. But because we are strong to do and to Buffer, because the life in us is vigorous and tenacious as that of the cedar on our native hills, against which the storms have beat in vain since Solomon planted it with the aid of the genii, we are here. We learned long ago that there are two things you cannot keep from us, gold and knowledge. The nobler spirits of our race have sought the one, the baser pursued the other. With what result? Oppressed, robbed, plundered a thousand times over, yet still, by fair means or by foul, the Jewish merchant and usurer spoils the souls of them that spoiled him, and grows rich at the Bates of the impoverished Goim. Meanwhile, the Jewish thinker teaches philosophy to the few daring spirits amongst the Goim who care for philosophy at all; the Jewish physician takes charge of the health of his Holiness; the Jewish astrologer sells his secrets to cardinals and bishops. No longer, as in earlier and perhaps happier days, do I quote the grand poetry of Isaiah and Ezekiel to prove the glorious future that awaits my people, but I appeal to the stern logic of facts, and I say that metal which has borne the furnace and the hammer as this has done is worthy to be forged hereafter into the two-edged sword of the conqueror.”
“That supposes,” said Raymond, “a hand to forge and a hand to wield the blade.” He paused for a moment or two, listening rather anxiously to voices in the adjoining apartment, which was separated from theirs only by a curtain. “I was somewhat afraid,” he said, “that Manuel―and what is your servant’s name?”
“Giulio; I thought I had told you.”
“That Manuel and Giulio might not agree, as Manuel, though an excellent fellow, has some awkward peculiarities. But I am reassured. I think he must be favoring your man with his whole history; I hear him talking of the wife and child he lost long ago in Constantinople, which he never does even to me.”
“Giulio contrives to make every one talk without saying much himself.”
“If he is a poor scholar, could we not get him a place here, and mend his fortunes?”
Theodore shook his head. “No, no; the best kindness you can do Giulio is to ignore his existence. Truth is, Count Raymond―for I know a secret is safe with you―we Jews, being in everlasting revolt against the world that now is, which it is the fashion to can the Church, feel a natural sympathy with Christians who are rebels and outlaws too, Ishmaels, every man’s hand against them, and theirs against every man. You remember Abraham’s tenderness to Ishmael?” (Raymond remembered nothing about it, but that was no matter.) “Ever since the Holy Catholic Church has been mistress of the world, Ishmael has been going up and down through the lands of the Goim. His children have many names―Paulicians, Cathari, Manichæans, Fraticelli, Lollards, Albigenses, Waldenses, Insabbatici, Poor Men of Lyons. If they know their real opinions themselves, certainly no one else does. I dare say some of them believe quite as little as I―or you―others as much, or more, than their oppressors. But one thing they have all in common. Between them and the Power that sits on these seven hills is a hatred bottomless as the pit of Gehenna. At her hands they have endured, through long ages, horrors and agonies that make them my people’s rivals for the crown of sorrow. Yet they, like my people, survive. Rooted out from one country by fire and sword, and strange forms of lingering death, straightway they spring up in another.”
“Do you think, then, that they too have a future?”
“How can I tell? I may say, however, that one of them had almost made me a convert to his sect. He was a Manichee, one whose opinions Giulio most devoutly abhors, for rival heretics can hate like philosophers and curse like friars. He found me in a dark and bitter hour, when first I gave up the faith learned at my mother’s knee―the faith in Jehovah, the Lord of Hosts, the King of Israel.”
Raymond looked surprised, if not distressed.
“Then you have given up that faith?” he said.
So great is the power of earnestness and reality, that Raymond had sometimes strengthened in his own heart the feeble flickering sentiment he called faith by a half-unconscious reference to his friend’s strong reliance upon the living God, the God of his fathers.
“Yes,” Theodore answered; “I have looked deep into the things that are, and I see―nothing beyond. No one has ever seen anything. It is all guessing and dreaming.”
“Well―perhaps―I dare say―you may be right,” Raymond admitted, but rather with awakened curiosity and interest than with the sadness in which he ought to have spoken some of the saddest words that man can utter.
“I hold with the great Arab philosophers, and with those of my own race,” Theodore went on, “that our senses tell us the truth, and all the truth. They show us nothing but matter, and there is nothing else. Out of its latent force everything is evolved, and to it everything returns.”
“The Master would not go so far as that; but I think he is a Stoic, like the old Romans,” Raymond said, with unabated cheerfulness.
“I am at rest now,” continued Theodore. “Time was when I felt like a forsaken child, wailing in the dark for its mother. I forced myself to face the terrible truth. I went forth and looked upon the miseries of my people, and I said, ‘No one cares, no one helps. Neither in heaven nor on earth is there justice, mercy, or pity.’ I saw that this creed of despair fitted the facts of the case, as a key the wards of the lock it is made for. If there is a God to do justice, then why is not justice done? Every miserable Jew tortured for the sake of his hard-won gold, every wretched heretic burned at the stake, is an argument for Averroës.”
“Not necessarily. The suffering may be deserved―or something good may come out of it, we know not what or how,” said Raymond, dimly guessing a flaw in his friend’s reasoning, yet not knowing where to touch it.
“It was a relief to catch at the Manichean compromise of the Two Principles, to believe in a good One, just, merciful, loving, but not necessarily omnipotent―always struggling with evil, destined perhaps in the end to be overcome by it.” A momentary light flashed over the stern, sad face of Theodore, as he added, “I dreamed, and the dream was sweet, that I would fight for Him against evil, wrong, and cruelty, and at last fall with Him, if fate so willed it. Only a dream, the shadow of a shade! The ‘Two Principles’ of Manes melt away and vanish into air, with all the other follies and fancies of our childhood, and the world’s. It is a terrible world, moving on, like some great resistless engine, without mind or will, but impelled by an iron necessity, from the germ out of which it sprang to the ruin I suppose it will crumble into. Out of that ruin, I suppose, other worlds will groom. What care I? A part of it myself, infinitely little, I must fulfill my destiny. When I die ‘the universal will be joined to the Universe, and the particular will return to the part,’ in the words of the great Joseph ben Juda, the pupil of Maimonides.”
Both were silent, and in the silence the voice of Giulio from the other room reached their ears distinctly.
“‘In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.’”
Each looked in the face of the other; neither said a word, but tears were gathering in the eyes of Theodore.
A loud knocking at the door broke the silence with such startling suddenness that both sprang to their feet. But Raymond recovered his self-possession in a moment.
“Some of my friends are playing a carnival trick upon me,” he said. “They know you are here, and that we are almost alone, as I gave Giacopo a holiday. Don’t mind them.” Then, raising his voice, “Stay, Manuel, I will go to the door myself.”
Which he did; and was immediately laid hold upon by strong arms, and pinioned. He struggled desperately, half laughing, half breathless.
“Hands off! This is past a joke,” he cried. “Agathocles, I know the shape of your hand.”
“Let me caution you, signor, not to name any of your acquaintances. It may do them a serious injury,” said a person who seemed to be the captain of the armed band, now rapidly filling the room.
It was an age of violence, and Rome was often the theater of wild deeds of private vengeance. Could Raymond have offended some Colonna or Orsini? No; ―for he had never made an enemy, so far as he knew, and the nobles of late had always respected the scholars. No; ―for these men bore the Papal arms and uniform.
Theodore, in his doctor’s robe, advanced to demand an explanation, but was rudely thrust aside; as was Manuel, in spite of his desperate struggles to aid his master. But Giulio succeeded in making his voice heard for a moment.
“Possibly there is some mistake, signori,” he said. “Whom does your warrant command you to arrest?”
“Count Raymond Chalcondyles,” was the ready answer. “You may go, you others. The sooner the better.”
Raymond began to comprehend that he was a prisoner―the prisoner of his Holiness. But of what his offense could be, he had not the faintest conception.
“What am I accused of?” he asked.
“Our business is to be silent; yours to deliver up to us, without delay, all books, letters, or other writings this house may contain belonging to Messer Pomponius Laetus. And see that you conceal nothing.”
For the first time in his life Raymond stood face to face with peril, possibly with death. It proved the temper of his soul. Drawing himself up to his full height, he said, with a flash of scorn, “Find the master’s writings as you may; you shall have no help from me. Nor shall you find aught unworthy of a sage or a scholar.”
“We shall soon see that, young gentleman.”
Raymond was bound, and closely watched by some of the band, whilst others seized books and broke open desks and boxes.
“I am his servant, surely you will let me go with him,” pleaded Manuel in agony.
“Go to the evil one, with your leavened wafer, you accursed Greek schismatic!” was the urbane reply.
Theodore, much more adroit, slipped some gold into the hand of the captain, a German mercenary. “Let me say two words to my friend,” he whispered.
“Do not use violence with the prisoner,” said that gentleman, a good deal mollified. “Allow his friend to approach him and to receive his instructions.”
Theodore drew near to Raymond, who said to him hurriedly, in Greek, “Send Manuel to Venice at once—at once. Bid him warn the Master not to return, but to conceal himself. Someone must have slandered him to the Pope; though wherefore, or in what manner, I have not the least idea. I understand nothing about this affair. Let Manuel also tell my mother what has happened; but with management, so as not to alarm her. And you, Theodore, go yourself and relate everything to Cardinal Bessarion.”
“That will I. Remember, there are countrymen of mine in the Pope’s palace― everywhere. We will do all we can. God be with thee, dear friend.”
Words that, from the lips of Theodore, could have meant no more than an assurance of friendship and affection. But in that meaning they were utterly sincere.
A few minutes more, and Theodore and Giulio stood face to face in gloomy silence, the floor around them strewn with rifled chests, damaged books, and broken furniture. A little apart, Manuel wept and wailed, wringing his hands in the bitterness of his anguish. “How shall I ever hold up my face to my lady? Not to speak of my blessed master and lord, who is with the saints in Paradise. Holy St. Nicholas of Myra have pity on the boy! Blessed St. John of Antioch deliver him out of the hands of these pitiless Latins, who are as bad as infidel Turks! Aiao! Aiao! I knew harm would come of it―we came to live here on the fifth day of the month; on the fifth day aleo Signor Pomponio left us; five letters we have received from him, and five times―”
“Cease thy useless lamentations!” cried Theodore, seizing his arm without ceremony, as he was about to tear his hair and beard. “Better serve thy young lord like a man than cry for him like a girl. Giulio, my friend, run to my lodging and bring me the casket thou knowest of. Slip on this domino of Count Raymond’s, so mayest thou pass for some belated reveler. Manuel, find me an ink horn―here are paper and gens; then put on thy sword and cloak ready for a journey.”
Giulio started on his errand, while Manuel, subdued by the doctor’s air of authority, found the ink horn, and disappeared to obey the rest of his orders.
Theodore wrote a hurried letter to his father, referring him to Manuel for details of what had happened, and imploring him to use all his influence on behalf of Raymond. Might not his financial dealings enable him to put the screw upon some personages very near his Holiness? After disposing of the affair that just then filled all his thoughts he added hastily―since confidential messengers between Borne and Venice must be made the most of, being few and costly― “I arrived here the day before yesterday, after a prosperous journey. I have already fulfilled the commission you gave me. I repaired to the Palazzo Porcaro, and having represented that I came from you, was fortunate enough to procure an interview with the Signorina Viola. She is much changed since I used to know her at Venice. I gave your message, and she answered that she. wished to have the things belonging to her grandfather, which you hold in your keeping, sent hither to her. It were well to send them by Manuel when he returns. They say she―”
Here Theodore paused, as if uncertain, and looking up saw that Manuel stood by his side ready equipped for the journey. So he brought his letter, to a close, merely adding those expressions of filial respect which were customary at the time, and which he could use in all sincerity.
The casket Giulio was charged to bring contained his stock of ready money, and that he gave to Manuel, telling him to make his way on foot for the first stage to avoid suspicion, and then to hire horses for the rest of the journey. “Go in peace,” he said, “and be thy watchword ‘Speed and silence.’”
Meanwhile Raymond watched the breaking of the day in a gloomy cell within the massy walls of the Castle of St. Angelo. He sat idle, almost stupefied, his eyes fixed on the iron bars of his little window, his mind filled with amazement and perplexity, rather than with alarm or distress. If he felt Mar it was for his beloved and venerated Master, far more than for himself.