But upon the summit of the nearest hill they paused and looked over a restless welter of foliage that glittered in the sun, far down into the highway. It bustled like an unroofed ant-hill, for the road was alive with men who seemed from this distance very small. Duke Alessandro's attendants had found him and were clustered in a hubbub about their reviving master. Dwarfish Lorenzino de Medici was the most solicitous among them.
Beyond was the broad river, seen as a ribbon of silver now, and on its remoter bank the leaded roofs of a strong fortress glistened like a child's new toy. Tilled fields showed here and there, no larger in appearance than so many outspread handkerchiefs. Far down in the east a small black smudge upon the pearl-colored and vaporous horizon was all they could discern of a walled city filled with factories for the working of hemp and furs and alum and silk and bitumen.
'It is a very rich and lovely land,' said Eglamore-'this kingdom which a half-hour since lay in the hollow of my hand.' He viewed it for a while, and not without pensiveness. Then he took Graciosa's hand and looked into her face, and he laughed joyously.
JUDITH'S CREED
'It does not appear that the age thought his works worthy of posterity, nor that this great poet himself levied any ideal tribute on future times, or had any further prospect than of present popularity and present profit. So careless was he, indeed, of fame, that, when he retired to ease and plenty, while he was yet little declined into the vale of years, and before he could be disgusted with fatigue or disabled by infirmity, he desired only that in this rural quiet he who had so long mazed his imagination by following phantoms might at last be cured of his delirious ecstasies, and as a hermit might estimate the transactions of the world.'
He was hoping, while his fingers drummed in unison with the beat of his verse, that this last play at least would rouse enthusiasm in the pit. The welcome given its immediate predecessors had undeniably been tepid. A memorandum at his elbow of the receipts at the Globe for the last quarter showed this with disastrous bluntness; and, after all, in 1609 a shareholder in a theater, when writing dramas for production there, was ordinarily subject to more claims than those of his ideals.
He sat in a neglected garden whose growth was in reversion to primal habits. The season was September, the sky a uniform and temperate blue. A peachtree, laden past its strength with fruitage, made about him with its boughs a sort of tent. The grass around his writing-table was largely hidden by long, crinkled peach leaves-some brown and others gray as yet-and was dotted with a host of brightly-colored peaches. Fidgeting bees and flies were excavating the decayed spots in this wasting fruit, from which emanated a vinous odor. The bees hummed drowsily, their industry facilitating idleness in others. It was curious-he meditated, his thoughts straying from 'an uninhabited island'-how these insects alternated in color between brown velvet and silver, as they blundered about a flickering tessellation of amber and dark green… in search of rottenness…
He frowned. Here was an arid forenoon as imagination went. A seasoned plagiarist by this, he opened a book which lay upon the table among several others and duly found the chapter entitled
'So, so!' he said aloud. ''It is a nation,' would I answer Plato, 'that has no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters-'' And with that he sat about reshaping Montaigne's conceptions of Utopia into verse. He wrote-while his left hand held the book flat-as orderly as any county-clerk might do in the recordance of a deed of sale.
Midcourse in larceny, he looked up from writing. He saw a tall, dark lady who was regarding him half- sorrowfully and half as in the grasp of some occult amusement. He said nothing. He released the telltale book. His eyebrows lifted, banteringly. He rose.
He found it characteristic of her that she went silently to the table and compared the printed page with what he had just written. 'So nowadays you have turned pickpocket? My poet, you have altered.'
He said: 'Why, yes. When you broke off our friendship, I paid you the expensive compliment of falling very ill. They thought that I would die. They tell me even to-day I did not die. I almost question it.' He shrugged. 'And to- day I must continue to write plays, because I never learned any other trade. And so, at need, I pilfer.' The topic did not seem much to concern him.
'Eh, and such plays!' the woman cried. 'My poet, there was a time when you created men and women as glibly as Heaven does. Now you make sugar-candy dolls.'
'The last comedies were not all I could have wished,' he assented. 'In fact, I got only some L30 clear profit.'
'There speaks the little tradesman I most hated of all persons living!' the woman sighed. Now, as in impatience, she thrust back her traveling-hood and stood bare-headed.
Then she stayed silent,-tall, extraordinarily pallid, and with dark, steady eyes. Their gaze by ordinary troubled you, as seeming to hint some knowledge to your belittlement. The playmaker remembered that. Now he, a reputable householder, was wondering what would be the upshot of this intrusion. His visitor, as he was perfectly aware, had little patience with such moments of life as could not be made dramatic… He was recollecting many trifles, now his mind ran upon old times… No, no, reflection assured him, to call her beautiful would be, and must always have been, an exaggeration; but to deny the exotic and somewhat sinister charm of her, even to-day, would be an absurdity.
She said, abruptly: 'I do not think I ever loved you as women love men. You were too anxious to associate with fine folk, too eager to secure a patron-yes, and to get your profit of him-and you were always ill-at-ease among us. Our youth is so long past, and we two are so altered that we, I think, may speak of its happenings now without any bitterness. I hated those sordid, petty traits. I raged at your incessant pretensions to gentility because I knew you to be so much more than a gentleman. Oh, it infuriated me-how long ago it was!-to see you cringing to the Court blockheads, and running their errands, and smirkingly pocketing their money, and wheedling them into helping the new play to success. You complained I treated you like a lackey; it was not unnatural when of your own freewill you played the lackey so assiduously.'
He laughed. He had anatomized himself too frequently and with too much dispassion to overlook whatever tang of snobbishness might be in him; and, moreover, the charge thus tendered became in reality the speaker's
