*CHAPTER XX* More and more drearily the burden of his long days pressed upon Tassino. He was not built for heroic endurance; and to have to suffer Damocles’ fate without the feast was a very death-in-life to him. Here, in this dingy cabin, was no solace of wine to string his nerves; no charm of lights to scare away bogies; no outlook but upon beastliness and squalor. He seemed stranded on a mud-bank amidst the ebbing life of the city, and he despaired that the tide would ever turn and release him. Listening at his grille, he would often curse to hear the name of his hated rival—’Bembo! Bembe, Bambino!’ sing out upon the swarming air. It was the rallying-cry of the new socialism, the popular catchword of the moment; and he hugged himself in the thought of what it would spell to Galeazzo on his return, and by what racking and rending and stretching of necks he would mark his appreciation of its utterers’ enthusiasm. If the Duke would only come back! Here was the last of three who desired, it appeared, each for a very different reason, the re-installation of an ogre in his kingdom. But, in the meanwhile, he cowered in an endless apprehension as to his own safety, which Ludovico’s last visit had certainly done nothing to reassure. On the contrary, it had but served to intensify the gloom of mystery in which he dwelt. He had since made sundry feeble-artful attempts to discover from Narcisso what secret attached to the ring, which, it appeared, that amiable peculator was accused of having filched, and why Messer Ludovico was so set on possessing it. Needless to say, his efforts met with no success whatever; and the corrosion of a new suspicion was all that they added to his already palsied nerves. The sick flabbiness and demoralisation of him grew positively pitiful, as he stood day after day at his grille, watching and moping and snivelling, and sometimes wishing he were dead. Well, the thicker the mud, the more productive the tide when it comes; but he was fairly sunk to his neck before it floated him out. One day, gazing down, his attention was attracted to a figure which had halted near below his coign of espial. As things went, there was nothing so remarkable in this figure, in its alien speech or apparel, as to make it arresting otherwise than by reason of its contiguity to himself. It was simply that of a crinkled hag, swart, snake-locked, cowled, her dress jingling with sequins, her right hand clawed upon a crutch. She appeared, in fact, just an old Levantine hoodie-crow, of the breed which was familiar enough to Milan in these cataclysmic days, when all sorts of queer, tragic fowl were being driven northwards from overseas before a tidal wave of Islamism. For half Christendom was writhing at this time under the embroidered slipper of the Turk, while other half was fighting and scratching and backing within its own ranks, in a _sauve qui peut_ from Sultan Mahomet’s ever nearer-resounding tread.