Yet the next bridge—the last bridge—was passed. He was conscious of it; but in the tumult of his blood, he could only feel vaguely that he was safe and might land. But where? The current was having its way with him: he hardly knew where he was: exhaustion was bringing on the dreamy state that precedes unconsciousness.
But now there were eyes that discerned him—aged eyes, strong for the distance. Baldassarre, looking up blankly from the search in the runlet that brought him nothing, had seen a white object coming along the broader stream. Could that be any fortunate chance for him? He looked and looked till the object gathered form: then he leaned forward with a start as he sat among the rank green stems, and his eyes seemed to be filled with a new light. Yet he only watched—motionless. Something was being brought to him.
The next instant a man’s body was cast violently on the grass two yards from him, and he started forward like a panther, clutching the velvet tunic as he fell forward on the body and flashed a look in the man’s face.
Dead—was he dead? The eyes were rigid. But no, it could not be—Justice had brought him. Men looked dead sometimes, and yet the life came back into them. Baldassarre did not feel feeble in that moment. He knew just what he could do. He got his large fingers within the neck of the tunic and held them there, kneeling on one knee beside the body and watching the face. There was a fierce hope in his heart, but it was mixed with trembling. In his eyes there was only fierceness: all the slow-burning remnant of life within him seemed to have leaped into flame.
Rigid—rigid still. Those eyes with the half-fallen lids were locked against vengeance. Could it be that he was dead? There was nothing to measure the time: it seemed long enough for hope to freeze into despair.
Surely at last the eyelids were quivering: the eyes were no longer rigid. There was a vibrating light in them; they opened wide.
“Ah, yes! You see me—you know me!”
Tito knew him; but he did not know whether it was life or death that had brought him into the presence of his injured father. It might be death—and death might mean this chill gloom with the face of the hideous past hanging over him forever.
But now Baldassarre’s only dread was, lest the young limbs should escape him. He pressed his knuckles against the round throat, and knelt upon the chest with all the force of his aged frame. Let death come now!
Again he kept his watch on the face. And when the eyes were rigid again, he dared not trust them. He would never lose his hold till someone came and found them. Justice would send some witness, and then he, Baldassarre, would declare that he had killed this traitor, to whom he had once been a father. They would perhaps believe him now, and then he would be content with the struggle of justice on earth—then he would desire to die with his hold on this body, and follow the traitor to hell that he might clutch him there.
And so he knelt, and so he pressed his knuckles against the round throat, without trusting to the seeming death, till the light got strong and he could kneel no longer. Then he sat on the body, still clutching the neck of the tunic. But the hours went on, and no witness came. No eyes descried afar off the two human bodies among the tall grass by the riverside. Florence was busy with greater affairs, and the preparation of a deeper tragedy.
Not long after those two bodies were lying in the grass, Savonarola was being tortured, and crying out in his agony, “I will confess!”
It was not until the sun was westward that a wagon drawn by a mild grey ox came to the edge of the grassy margin, and as the man who led it was leaning to gather up the round stones that lay heaped in readiness to be carried away, he detected some startling object in the grass. The aged man had fallen forward, and his dead clutch was on the garment of the other. It was not possible to separate them: nay, it was better to put them into the wagon and carry them as they were into the great Piazza, that notice might be given to the Eight.
As the wagon entered the frequented streets there was a growing crowd escorting it with its strange burden. No one knew the bodies for a long while, for the aged face had fallen forward, half hiding the younger. But before they had been moved out of sight, they had been recognised.
“I know that old man,” Piero di Cosimo had testified. “I painted his likeness once. He is the prisoner who clutched Melema on the steps of the Duomo.”
“He is perhaps the same old man who appeared at supper in my gardens,” said Bernardo Rucellai, one of the Eight. “I had forgotten him. I thought he had died in prison. But there is no knowing the truth now.”
Who shall put his finger on the work of justice, and say, “It is there”? Justice is like the Kingdom of God—it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.
