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Then he saw the uselessness of striving to keep up a master's pose with this servant of the sea and of the hills. "I came by water," he said, smiling. "I swam, Gasparino." The boy answered the smile, and suddenly the tension between them was broken, and they were at their ease again. "I will show you another way, signore, if you are not afraid." Maurice laughed out gayly.
There are such organizations as Gasparino describes; they are men of the physical and moral nature of Casanova and the Regent of Orleans. Rodrigo's beauty was noted by many of his contemporaries even when he was pope. In 1493 Hieronymus Portius described him as follows: "Alexander is tall and neither light nor dark; his eyes are black and his lips somewhat full.
From the pen-portraits left of him by Gasparino of Verona, and Girolamo Porzio, we know him for a tall, handsome man with black eyes and full lips, elegant, courtly, joyous, and choicely eloquent, of such health and vigour and endurance that he was insensible to any fatigue.
"And I made five. Didn't I, signore?" "You're a dead shot, Gasparino. Did you hear us, Hermione?" "Yes," she said. "But you didn't hear me." "You? Did you call?" "Yes." "Why?" "Sebastiano's got a message for you," Hermione said. She could not tell him now the absurd impulse that had made her call him.
Maurice appeared at the sitting-room door and came slowly down the steps. Gaspare stared. "Eccomi!" "Why, signorino, what is the matter? What has happened?" "Happened? Nothing!" "Then why do you look so black?" "I! It's the shadow of the awning on my face." He smiled. He kept on smiling. "I say, Gasparino, how splendid the donkeys are! And you, too!"
I'll sleep up there when we get home." He pointed to the mountain. His eyes were dancing with gayety. "The frittura, Gasparino, the frittura! And then the tarantella, and then 'O sole mio'!" He looked towards the rising sun, and began to sing at the top of his voice: "O sole, o sole mio, Sta 'n fronte a te, Sta 'n fronte a te!"
I will always be free." He stretched himself on the warm ground like a young animal, then added: "I shall not take a wife ever." Maurice shut the book and stretched himself, too, then moved away from the rock, and lay at full length with his hands clasped behind his head and his eyes, nearly shut, fixed upon the glimmer of the sea. "Why not, Gasparino?"
A few years later, when Paul II occupied the papal throne, the historian Gasparino of Verona described Cardinal Borgia as follows: "He is handsome; of a most glad countenance and joyous aspect, gifted with honeyed and choice eloquence. The beautiful women on whom his eyes are cast he lures to love him, and moves them in a wondrous way, more powerfully than the magnet influences iron."
Numbered among them were some who had great fame for transcribing; learned men, who knew Latin almost, if not quite, as well as they knew their mother-tongue, Cosimo of Cremona, Leonardo Giustiniani of Venice, Guarino of Verona, Biondo Flavio, Gasparino Barzizza, Sarzana, Niccoli, Vitturi, Lazarino Resta, Faccino Ventraria, and some others; in fact, a host; for nearly all the literary men, in consideration of the enormous sums they obtained for copies of the ancient classics carefully and correctly written, devoted themselves to the occupation of transcription, as, in these times, men of the highest attainments in letters, some, too, of the greatest, even European, celebrity, give their services, for the handsome remunerations they receive, to the newspaper and periodical press.
It was not the moment for combat, and it was not unpleasant, after all so he phrased it in his mind to be looked after, thought for, educated in the etiquette of the Enchanted Isle by a son of its soil, with its wild passions and its firm repressions linked together in his heart. "Gasparino," he said, meekly. "I want you to look after me. But don't be unkind to me.
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