Brazenhead in Milan/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I.
HOW CAPTAIN BRAZENHEAD PROVED HIMSELF TO BE TWICE AS OLD AS HE LOOKED.
THAT many times repeated asseveration of Captain Salomon Brazenhead's, that he had formed one of the suite of Duke Lionel, when that prince went out to Lombardy to marry Visconti's daughter, and that, in consequence, the poet Chaucer—"little Smugface," as he was pleased to call him—was his fellow-traveller and bosom friend, bore at the first blush the stamp of truth. It was always supported by vigorous reminiscence; the older he grew, the more positive he was of it. Like the Apostle, confronted by tales of the sort, we might partly believe it. It would make him out to have been one hundred and five years old at the time of his death, or necessitate his having been born into this world with thirty-seven years already to his score. Here is a problem for the historian which we may prudently leave him.
I think it was his manner of telling the tale which gave confidence to those who had watched his rapt gaze into the embers of the hearth, who had observed his easy length of leg and hands clasped behind his head, and the pleasant gloss which recollection might well have laid upon his sombre and seldom-smiling lips. "It all comes back to me," he would say, "by my head, and so it does! Little Smugface! Little scrivening Geoffrey, and his age-long tales of Troy town! Blithely he strung stave to stave—and we, a gay company of drones, clustered about the honey of his tongue; and my lord's grace pounding before us on his black courser! He would rehearse of Dido, the lily queen, of the piled faggots, of the flame. Ha! and she in the midst, as white as an egg! It welled out of him like treacle from a broken crock; and my lord's grace, with ears set back, lost not a syllabub of it. Long days, brave days—ah, how they rise and beckon me!" It really sounds very plausible.
All this as it may be, what is beyond cavil is that I find him at Pavia in the year 1402, a fine figure of a man, scarred, crimson, shining in the face, his hair cropped in the Burgundian mode, moustachios to the ears, holding this kind of discourse to a lank and cavernous warrior, three times his own apparent age, who had proposed, I gather, before a tavern full of drinkers, to eat him raw. He stood astraddle, one arm crooked, one hand on his hip. He looked at his rival's boots; but his words must have winged directly to his heart. "Who eats me chokes, for I am like that succulent that conceals, d'ye see, his spines in youthful bloom. You think you have to do with a stripling: not you, pranking boy, not you. I am a seamed and notch-fingered soldier, who belched Greek fire while you were in your swaddling-clout. I was old in iniquity ere they weaned you. Or do you vie with me in perils, by cock, do you so? Five times left for dead; trampled six times out by the rearguard of the host I had lead to victory; crucified, stoned, extenuated, cut into strips; in prisons frequent, in deaths not divided—what make you of it? And you to tell me that your green guts can pouch old Leathertripes, for so they dub me who dare? Fob, you are a bladder, I see!"
He bit his thumb, and did that with his fingers to his nose whose import is sinister. I believe no man can bear it and live on. The irons came swinging out, the room cleared; all the frequenters of the tavern sat on the tables, while the tapsters strewed sawdust on the floor. They had need. There was a ding-dong passage of arms of one hundred and thirty seconds, which was ample time for Captain Brazenhead to run his foe through the weazand, wipe his blade in his armpit, finish his drink, and say: "There lies long Italy." All this in one hundred and thirty seconds. Five minutes more remained to the fallen brave, and were not too much for what he had to do—namely, cough blood, say the Ave Maria, and bequeath a pair of horns to the tapster, Gregory.
Captain Brazenhead's reputation was established in Pavia, his age what he pleased. Admirers crowded about him, to pledge and be pledged in cups. He was asked his name, and said that it was Testadirame: his trade, and pointed to his extended foe. It was replied to him by a brother of St. Francis who squinted that then Greek and Greek had met and engaged, seeing that the dead man in life had been Lisciasangue—Lisciasangue the exorbitant, assassin to the Duke of Milan, one of a Mystery of Three.
At this critical moment in his career Captain Brazenhead paused in the act to drink, and looking down over the edge of his flagon, thoughtfully stirred the dead with his toe.
"His sword is a good one," said he, "and I take it, as right is. What he may have in poke I bestow in alms upon the poor drinkers of Pavia. But as to his trade, or mystery, I must hear more of that." One glance at the religious commentator shrivelled him. "Speak!" he commanded him. "Speak, thou flea-pasture, or I split thee!"
Ah, but they spoke. They all spoke at once. They all clambered the tables again and leaned over each other to speak. Straining out their arms, see-sawing in air, they spoke with hands and eyes and voices. Captain Brazenhead, a sword to the good, listened and learned. To the ready reckoner he was, the accounts were soon cast up. If there were in Milan twenty-nine churches, thirty convents of religion, and seven-and-thirty jails, all full; if there were no penalty in the code but that of death; and if it were true that the Duke, feeling the cares of his lands, the needs of his subjects, and his own advancing years, had relaxed his personal activities, and now did his justice by deputy—then it was most certain that the Mystery of Three could not afford to lose the services of Lisciasangue: no, nor Duke Galeazzo neither. His Grace's condition was indeed deplorable, robbed of one-third of his assassins. "I see the aged monarch," mused Captain Brazenhead, overheard by a sympathetic throng, "maimed, as you might say, of his right hand. I see his prisons full to brim-point, his lieutenants at work night and day to keep abreast of the flood. But alas for the Duke of Milan! they have lost a friend, maybe; he has lost a member. Gentlemen!" he cried this aloud with a surprising gallantry. "Gentlemen, you must pity him, since you have hearts; but I must help him or be untrue to this good arm. Now, then, the next man that offers to drink with me shall not have nay."
Reasoning of this sort enkindled his wits. He could not restore the Duke his Lisciasangue; the dead was most dead; but so far as might be he would repair his fault. If, so doing, he opened a career for himself, shall he be blamed for the added glow which the thought lent to his blood? Not by any generous man. "There lies long Italy," he had said, and the words flashed up again and revealed him a nation at his feet. To Milan, to Milan—and "there lies long Italy in the cup of my hand," says he.