The White Company
of us at the 'Rose de Guienne' to-night, which is two doors from the
hotel of the 'Half Moon,' so if you would drain a cup with a few simple
archers you will be right welcome.”
Alleyne promised to be there if his duties would allow, and then,
slipping through the crowd, he rejoined Ford, who was standing in talk
with the two strangers, who had now reached their own doorstep.
“Brave young signor,” cried the tall man, throwing his arms round
Alleyne, “how can we thank you enough for taking our parts against those
horrible drunken barbarians. What should we have done without you? My
Tita would have been dragged away, and my head would have been shivered
into a thousand fragments.”
“Nay, I scarce think that they would have mishandled you so,” said
Alleyne in surprise.
“Ho, ho!” cried he with a high crowing laugh, “it is not the head upon
my shoulders that I think of. Cospetto! no. It is the head under my arm
which you have preserved.”
“Perhaps the signori would deign to come under our roof, father,” said
the maiden. “If we bide here, who knows that some fresh tumult may not
break out.”
“Well said, Tita! Well said, my girl! I pray you, sirs, to honor my
unworthy roof so far. A light, Giacomo! There are five steps up. Now
two more. So! Here we are at last in safety. Corpo di Bacco! I would
not have given ten maravedi for my head when those children of the devil
were pushing us against the wall. Tita mia, you have been a brave girl,
and it was better that you should be pulled and pushed than that my head
should be broken.”
“Yes indeed, father,” said she earnestly.
“But those English! Ach! Take a Goth, a Hun, and a Vandal, mix them
together and add a Barbary rover; then take this creature and make him
drunk--and you have an Englishman. My God! were ever such people upon
earth! What place is free from them? I hear that they swarm in Italy
even as they swarm here. Everywhere you will find them, except in
heaven.”
“Dear father,” cried Tita, still supporting the angry old man, as he
limped up the curved oaken stair. “You must not forget that these good
signori who have preserved us are also English.”
“Ah, yes. My pardon, sirs! Come into my rooms here. There are some who
might find some pleasure in these paintings, but I learn the art of war
is the only art which is held in honor in your island.”
The low-roofed, oak-panelled room into which he conducted them was
brilliantly lit by four scented oil lamps. Against the walls, upon the
table, on the floor, and in every part of the chamber were great sheets
of glass painted in the most brilliant colors. Ford and Edricson gazed
around them in amazement, for never had they seen such magnificent works
of art.
“You like them then,” the lame artist cried, in answer to the look of
pleasure and of surprise in their faces. “There are then some of you who
have a taste for such trifling.”
“I could not have believed it,” exclaimed Alleyne. “What color! What
outlines! See to this martyrdom of the holy Stephen, Ford. Could you not
yourself pick up one of these stones which lie to the hand of the wicked
murtherers?”
“And see this stag, Alleyne, with the cross betwixt its horns. By my
faith! I have never seen a better one at the Forest of Bere.”
“And the green of this grass--how bright and clear! Why all the painting
that I have seen is but child's play beside this. This worthy gentleman
must be one of those great painters of whom I have oft heard brother
Bartholomew speak in the old days at Beaulieu.”
The dark mobile face of the artist shone with pleasure at the unaffected
delight of the two young Englishmen. His daughter had thrown off her
mantle and disclosed a face of the finest and most delicate Italian
beauty, which soon drew Ford's eyes from the pictures in front of him.
Alleyne, however, continued with little cries of admiration and of
wonderment to turn from the walls to the table and yet again to the
walls.
“What think you of this, young sir?” asked the painter, tearing off the
cloth which concealed the flat object which he had borne beneath his
arm. It was a leaf-shaped sheet of glass bearing upon it a face with a
halo round it, so delicately outlined, and of so perfect a tint, that it
might have been indeed a human face which gazed with sad and thoughtful
eyes upon the young squire. He clapped his hands, with that thrill of
joy which true art will ever give to a true artist.
“It is great!” he cried. “It is wonderful! But I marvel, sir, that you
should have risked a work of such beauty and value by bearing it at
night through so unruly a crowd.”
“I have indeed been rash,” said the artist. “Some wine, Tita, from the
Florence flask! Had it not been for you, I tremble to think of what
might have come of it. See to the skin tint: it is not to be replaced,
for paint as you will, it is not once in a hundred times that it is not
either burned too brown in the furnace or else the color will not hold,
and you get but a sickly white. There you can see the very veins and the
throb of the blood. Yes, diavolo! if it had broken, my heart would have
broken too. It is for the choir window in the church of St. Remi, and
we had gone, my little helper and I, to see if it was indeed of the size
for the stonework. Night had fallen ere we finished, and what could we
do save carry it home as best we might? But you, young sir, you speak as
if you too knew something of the art.”
“So little that I scarce dare speak of it in your presence,” Alleyne
answered. “I have been cloister-bred, and it was no very great matter to
handle the brush better than my brother novices.”
“There are pigments, brush, and paper,” said the old artist. “I do not
give you glass, for that is another matter, and takes much skill in the
mixing of colors. Now I pray you to show me a touch of your art. I thank
you, Tita! The Venetian glasses, cara mia, and fill them to the brim. A
seat, signor!”
While Ford, in his English-French, was conversing with Tita in her
Italian-French, the old man was carefully examining his precious head to
see that no scratch had been left upon its surface. When he glanced up
again, Alleyne had, with a few bold strokes of the brush, tinted in a
woman's face and neck upon the white sheet in front of him.
“Diavolo!” exclaimed the old artist, standing with his head on one side,
“you have power; yes, cospetto! you have power, it is the face of an
angel!”
“It is the face of the Lady Maude Loring!” cried Ford, even more
astonished.
“Why, on my faith, it is not unlike her!” said Alleyne, in some
confusion.
“Ah! a portrait! So much the better. Young man, I am Agostino Pisano,
the son of Andrea Pisano, and I say again that you have power. Further,
I say, that, if you will stay with me, I will teach you all the secrets
of the glass-stainers' mystery: the pigments and their thickening,
which will fuse into the glass and which will not, the furnace and the
glazing--every trick and method you shall know.”
“I would be right glad to study under such a master,” said Alleyne; “but
I am sworn to follow my lord whilst this war lasts.”
“War! war!” cried the old Italian. “Ever this talk of war. And the men
that you hold to be great--what are they? Have I not heard their names?
Soldiers, butchers, destroyers! Ah, per Bacco! we have men in Italy who
are in very truth great. You pull down, you despoil; but they build up,
they restore. Ah, if you could but see my own dear Pisa, the Duomo, the
cloisters of Campo Santo, the high Campanile, with the mellow throb of
her bells upon the warm Italian air! Those are the works of great men.
And I have seen them with my own eyes, these very eyes which look upon
you. I have seen Andrea Orcagna, Taddeo Gaddi, Giottino, Stefano, Simone
Memmi--men whose very colors I am not worthy to mix. And I have seen the
aged Giotto, and he in turn was pupil to Cimabue, before whom there was
no art in Italy, for the Greeks were brought to paint the chapel of the
Gondi at Florence. Ah, signori, there are the real great men whose names
will be held in honor when your soldiers are shown to have been the
enemies of humankind.”
“Faith, sir,” said Ford, “there is something to say for the soldiers
also, for, unless they be defended, how are all these gentlemen whom you
have mentioned to preserve the pictures which they have painted?”
“And all these!” said Alleyne. “Have you indeed done them all?--and
where are they to go?”
“Yes, signor, they are all from my hand. Some are, as you see, upon one
sheet, and some are in many pieces which may fasten together. There are
some who do but paint upon the glass, and then, by placing another sheet
of glass upon the top and fastening it, they keep the air from their
painting. Yet I hold that the true art of my craft lies as much in the
furnace as in the brush. See this rose window, which is from the model
of the Church of the Holy Trinity at Vendome, and this other of the
'Finding of the Grail,' which is for the apse of the Abbey church. Time
was when none but my countrymen could do these things; but there is
Clement of Chartres and others in France who are very worthy workmen.
But, ah! there is that ever shrieking brazen tongue which will not let
us forget for one short hour that it is the arm of the savage, and not
the hand of the master, which rules over the world.”
A stern, clear bugle call had sounded close at hand to summon some
following together for the night.
“It is a sign to us as well,” said Ford. “I would fain stay here forever
amid all these beautiful things--” staring hard at the blushing Tita as
he spoke--“but we must be back at our lord's hostel ere he reach it.”
Amid renewed thanks and with promises to come again, the two squires
bade their leave of the old Italian glass-stainer and his daughter. The
streets were clearer now, and the rain had stopped, so they made their
way quickly from the Rue du Roi, in which their new friends dwelt, to
the Rue des Apotres, where the hostel of the “Half Moon” was situated.
CHAPTER XXII. HOW THE BOWMEN HELD WASSAIL AT THE “ROSE DE GUIENNE.”
“Mon Dieu! Alleyne, saw you ever so lovely a face?” cried Ford as they
hurried along together. “So pure, so peaceful, and so beautiful!”
“In sooth, yes. And the hue of the skin the most perfect that ever I
saw. Marked you also how the hair curled round the brow? It was wonder
fine.”
“Those eyes, too!” cried Ford. “How clear and how tender--simple, and
yet so full of thought!”
“If there was a weakness it was in the chin,” said Alleyne.
“Nay. I saw none.”
“It was well curved, it is true.”
“Most daintily so.”
“And yet----”
“What then, Alleyne? Wouldst find flaw in the sun?”
“Well, bethink you, Ford, would not more power and expression have been
put into the face by a long and noble beard?”
“Holy Virgin!” cried Ford, “the man is mad. A beard on the face of
little Tita!”
“Tita! Who spoke of Tita?”
“Who spoke of aught else?”
“It was the picture of St. Remi, man, of which I have been discoursing.”
“You are indeed,” cried Ford, laughing, “a Goth, Hun, and Vandal, with
all the other hard names which the old man called us. How could you
think so much of a smear of pigments, when there was such a picture
painted by the good God himself in the very room with you? But who is
this?”
“If it please you, sirs,” said an archer, running across to them,
“Aylward and others would be right glad to see you. They are within
here. He bade me say to you that the Lord Loring will not need your
service to-night, as he sleeps with the Lord Chandos.”
“By my faith!” said Ford, “we do not need a guide to lead us to their
presence.” As he spoke there came a roar of singing from the tavern upon
the right, with shouts of laughter and stamping of feet. Passing under