As I was leaving the gallery I had a last glimpse
of her, sitting there with drawn face and haggard
eyes that followed me as I passed from her sight,
whilst Ramiro del’ Orca stood beside her murmuring
words that did not reach me. His so-called courtiers
and his men-at-arms were trooping out of the room,
no doubt in obedience to his dismissal.
THE SUNSET
I have heard tell of the calm that comes upon brave
men when hope is dead and their doom has been pronounced.
Uncertainty may have tortured and made cowards of
them; but once that uncertainty is dissolved and suspense
is at an end, resignation enters their soul, and, possessing
it, gives to their bearing a noble and dignified peace.
By the mercy of Heaven they are made, maybe, to see
how poor and evanescent a thing is life; and they
come to realise that since to die is a necessity there
is no avoiding, as well might it betide to-day as
ten years hence.
Such a mood, however, came not to soothe that last
hour of mine, and yet I account myself no coward.
It was an hour of such torture and anguish as never
before I had experienced—much though I had
undergone—and the source of all my suffering
lay in the fact that Madonna Paola was in the hands
of the ogre of Cesena. Had it not been for that
most untoward circumstance I almost believe that while
I waited for the sun to set on that December afternoon,
my mood had not only been calm but even in some measure
joyous, for it must have comforted my last moments
to reflect that for all that Messer Ramiro was about
to hang me, yet had I sown the seeds of his own destruction
ere he had brought me to this pass.
I did, indeed, reflect upon it, and it may even be
that, in spite of all, I culled some grain of comfort
from the reflection. But let that be. My
narrative would drag wearily were I to digress that
I might tell you at length the ugly course of my thoughts
whilst the sands of my last hour were running swiftly
out. For, after all, my concern and yours is
with the story of Lazzaro Biancomonte, sometime known
as Boccadoro the Fool, and not with his philosophies—philosophies
so unprofitable that it can benefit no man that I
should set them down.
My windows faced west, and so I was able to watch
the fall of the sun, and measure by its shortening
distance from the horizon the ebbing of my poor life.
At last the nether rim of that round, fiery orb was
on the point of touching the line of distant hills,
and it was casting a crimson glow along the white,
snow-sheeted landscape that was singularly suggestive
of a tide of blood—a very fitting tide
to flow and ebb about the walls of the Castle of Cesena.
