Could he do aught after this but love her, accept her, her fervour and her penitence, for a first factor in the crusade he had made his own? And, while the soft enchantment held, no general could have wished a loyaler adjutant, or one more ready to first-example in herself the sacrifices he demanded. She abetted him, as she had promised, in all his tactics; lent the full force of an authority, which his sweetness and modesty could by no means arrogate to himself, to compel the reforms he sang. She gave, amongst other gifts, her whole present soul to the righting of the wrong done to the girl Lucia and her father; and when all her efforts to discover the vanished Tassino had failed, and she, having sent on her own initiative a compensatory purse of gold to the blind armourer, had learned how Lucia had banged the gift and the door in the messenger’s face, was readily mollified by Bernardo’s tender remonstrance: ’Ah, sweet Madonna! what gold can give her father eyes, or her child a name!’ ’What! it is born?’ she murmured. ’I saw it yesterday,’ said Bembo. ’It lay in her lap, like the billet that kills a woman’s heart.’ And, indeed, he had not, because of his re-exaltation, ceased to visit his friends, or to go to occasional discussion with the crabbed Montano; whose moroseness, nevertheless, was petrifying. Yet had he even sought to interest the Duchess there; though, for once, without avail; for she dared not seem to lend her countenance to that banned, if injured, misanthrope. So she led the chorus to his soloing, and helped and mothered him with an infatuation beyond a mother’s. Like the Emperor’s jewelled nightingale, he was the sweetest bird to pet while his tricks were new. His voice entranced the echoes of those sombre chambers and blood-stained corridors. The castello was reconsecrated in his breath, and the miasma from its fearful pits dispelled. His lute was his psalter and psaltery in one: it interpreted him to others, and himself to himself. Its sob was his sorrow, and its joy his jubilance. He could coax from it wings to expression inexpressible by speech alone. Here is one of his latest parables, or apologues, baldly running, as it appears, on the familiar theme, which, through that vehicle, he translated for his hearers into rapture:— ’Down by a stream that muttered under ice— Winter’s thin wasted voice, straining for air— Lo! Antique Pan, gnawing his grizzled beard. Chill was the earth, and all the sky one stone, The shrunk sedge shook with ague; the wild duck, Squattering in snow, sent out a feeble cry. Like a stark root the black swan’s twisted neck Writhed in the bank. The hawk shook by the finch; The stoat and rabbit shivered in one hole; And Nature, moaning on a bedded drift, Cried for delivery from her travail:— "O Pan! what dost thou? Long the Spring’s delayed! O Pan! hope sickens. Son, where art thou gone?"