Book + 

I + 

I + 

The Threshold + 

“Half god, half beast,” the Princess Valeria once described him, without suspecting that the phrase describes not merely Bellarion, but Man. + 

Aware of this, the anonymous chronicler who has preserved it for us goes on to comment that the Princess said at once too much and too little. He makes phrases in his turn⁠—which I will spare you⁠—and seeks to prove, that, if the moieties of divinity and beastliness are equally balanced in a man, that man will be neither good nor bad. Then he passes on to show us a certain poor swineherd, who rose to ultimate eminence, in whom the godly part so far predominated that naught else was humanly discernible, and a great prince⁠—of whom more will be heard in the course of this narrative⁠—who was just as the beasts that perish, without any spark of divinity to exalt him. These are the extremes. For each of the dozen or so intermediate stages which he discerns, our chronicler has a portrait out of history, of which his learning appears to be considerable. + 

From this, from his general manner, from the fact that most of his illustrations are supplied by Florentine sources, and from the austerely elegant Tuscan language in which he writes, a fairly definite conclusion is possible on the score of his identity. It is more than probable that this study of Bellarion the Fortunate (Bellarione Il Fortunato) belongs to that series of historical portraits from the pen of Niccolò Macchiavelli, of which “The Life of Castruccio Castracane” is perhaps the most widely known. Research, however, fails to discover the source from which he draws. Whilst many of his facts agree completely with those contained in the voluminous, monkish Vita et Gesta Bellarionis, left us by Fra Serafino of Imola, whoever he may have been, yet discrepancies are frequent and irreconcilable. + 

Thus, at the very outset, on the score of his name, Macchiavelli (to cling to my assumption) tells us that he was called Bellarion not merely because he was a man of war, but because he was the very child of War, born as it were out of the very womb of conflict⁠—“e di guerra propriamente partorito.” The use of this metaphor reveals a full acquaintance with the tale of the child’s being plucked from the midst of strife and alarums. But Fra Serafino’s account of the name is the only one that fits into the known facts. That this name should have been so descriptive of Bellarion’s after life merely provides one of those curious instances of homonymy in which history abounds. + 

Continuing his comments upon the Princess Valeria’s phrase, Macchiavelli states that Bellarion’s is not a nature thus to be packed into a sentence. Because of his perception of this fact, he wrote his biographical sketch. Because of my perception of it, I have embarked upon this fuller narrative. + 

I choose to begin at a point where Bellarion himself may be said to make a certain beginning. I select the moment when he is to be seen standing upon the threshold of the secular world, known to him until that moment only from the writings of other men, yet better known to him thus than it is to many who have lived a lifetime among their fellows. After all, to view a scene from a distance is to enjoy advantages of perspective denied to the actors in that scene. + 

Bellarion’s reading had been prodigious. There was no branch of learning⁠—from the Theological Fathers to Vegetius Hyginus on The Art of War⁠—to which he had not addressed his eager spirit. And his exhaustion of all immediately available material for study was one of the causes of his going forth from the peace of the convent of which he was a nursling, in quest of deeper wells of learning, to slake his hot intellectual thirst. Another cause was a certain heretical doctrine of which it was hoped that further study would cure him; a doctrine so subversive of theological teaching that a hundred years later it must have made him closely acquainted with the operations of the Holy Office and probably⁠—in Spain certainly⁠—have brought him to the fire. This abominable heresy, fruit of much brooding, was that in the world there is not, nor can be, such a thing as sin. And it was in vain that the Abbot, who loved him very dearly, sought by argument to convert him. + 

“It is your innocence that speaks. Alas, my child, in the world, from which hitherto you have been mercifully sheltered, you will find that sin is not only real but terribly abundant.” + 

Bellarion answered with a syllogism, the logical formula to which he had reduced his doctrine. He presented it in the Socratic manner of inquiry, which was the method of argument he ever preferred. + 

“Are not all things in the world from God? Is not God the fount of all goodness? Can, therefore, any created thing be other than good?” + 

“And the devil, then?” quoth the Abbot. + 

Bellarion smiled, a singularly sweet smile that had power to draw men’s love and lead them into agreement with him. + 

“Is it not possible that those who invented the devil may have studied divinity in Persia, where the creed obtains that powers of light and darkness, Ormuzd and Ahriman, strive perpetually for mastery of the world? Surely, otherwise, they would have remembered that if the devil exists, God must have created him, which in itself is blasphemy, for God can create no evil.” + 

Aghast, the Abbot descended at a stride from the theological to the practical. + 

“Is it not evil to steal, to kill, to commit adultery?” + 

“Ah, yes. But these are evils between men, disruptive of society, and therefore to be suppressed lest man become as the beasts. But that is all.” + 

“All? All!” The Abbot’s deep-set eyes surveyed the youth with sorrow. “My son, the devil lends you a false subtlety to destroy your soul.” + 

And gently, now, that benign and fatherly man preached him a sermon of the faith. It was followed by others in the days that ensued. But to all the weapons of his saintly rhetoric Bellarion continued to oppose the impenetrable shield of that syllogism of his, which the Abbot knew at heart to be fallacious, yet whose fallacy he laboured in vain to expose. But when the good man began to fear lest this heresy should come to trouble and corrupt the peace and faith of his convent, he consented to speed its author to Pavia and to those further studies which he hoped would cure him of his heretical pravity. And that is how, on a day of August of the year of grace 1407, Bellarion departed from the convent of Our Lady of Grace of Cigliano. + 

He went on foot. He was to be dependent for food and shelter mainly upon the charity of the religious houses that lay on his way to Pavia, and as a passport to these he bore in his scrip a letter from the Abbot of the Grazie. Beside it lay a purse, containing for emergencies five ducats, a princely sum not only in his own eyes, but in those of the Abbot who at parting had bestowed it upon him. The tale of his worldly possessions is completed by the suit of coarse green cloth he wore and the knife at his girdle, which was to serve all purposes from the carving of his meat to affording him a means of defence from predatory beasts and men. To fortify him spiritually in his adventurous pilgrimage through Lombardy he had the Abbot’s blessing and a memory of the fond tears in the eyes of that old man who had reared him from the age of six. At the last the Abbot had again reminded him of the peace of the convent and of the strife and unhappiness that distract the world. + 

“Pax multa in cella, foris autem plurima bella.” + 

The mischief began⁠—and you may account it symbolical⁠—by his losing his way. This happened a mile or two beyond the township of Livorno. Because the peace of the riverside allured a mind that for seventeen years had been schooled in peace, because the emerald meadows promised to be soft and yielding to his feet, he left the dusty highway for the grassy banks of Po. Beside its broad waters winding here about the shallow, pleasant hills of Montferrat, Bellarion trudged, staff in hand, the green hood of his cape thrown back, the long liripipe trailing like a tail behind him, a tall, lithe stripling of obvious vigour, olive-skinned, black-haired, and with dark eyes that surveyed the world bold and fearlessly. + 

The day was hot. The air was laden with the heavy perfumes of late summer, and the river swollen and clouded by the melting snows on distant Monte Rosa. + 

He wandered on, lost in daydreams, until the sunlight passed with the sinking of the sun behind the wooded heights across the river and a breeze came whispering through the trees on his own bank. He checked, his dark eyes alert, a frown of thought rumpling the fair smoothness of his lofty brow. He looked about, became aware of a deep forest on his left, bethought him of the road, remembered where the sun had set, and realised hence that for some time he had been travelling south, and consequently in the wrong direction. In following the allurements offered to his senses he had gone astray. He made some homely philosophy upon that, to his infinite satisfaction, for he loved parallels and antitheses and all such intellectual toys. For the rest, there was about him no doubt or hesitation. He computed, from the time he had taken and the pace at which he had come, the extent to which he had wandered from the road. It must run too far beyond this forest to leave him any hope of lying that night, as he had intended, with the Augustinian fathers at their house on the Sesia, on the frontiers of the State of Milan. + 

Save for the hunger that beset him, he was undismayed. And what after all is a little hunger to one schooled to the most rigid lenten fasts in season? + 

He entered the wood, and resolutely went forward in the direction in which he knew the road to lie. For a half-mile or more he penetrated by a path growing less visible at every step, until darkness and the forest swallowed him. To go on would certainly be to lose himself completely in this maze. Better far to lie down and sleep where he was, and wait for the morning sun to give him his orientation. + 

So he spread his cloak upon the ground, and this proving no harder as a couch than the pallet to which he was accustomed, he slept soundly and peacefully. + 

When he awakened he found the sunlight in the forest and something else of almost more immediate interest; a man in the grey habit of a minor friar. This man, tall and lean, was standing beside him, yet half turned from him in a curious attitude of arrested movement, almost as if the abrupt suddenness with which Bellarion had sat up⁠—a single heartbeat after his eyes had opened⁠—had checked his intention to depart. + 

Thus an instant, then the friar was facing him again, his hands folded within the loose sleeves of his robe, a smile distending his countenance. He uttered a benedictory greeting. + 

“Pax tecum.” + 

“Et tecum, frater, pax,” was Bellarion’s mechanical answer, what time he studied this stranger’s villainous, patibulary countenance, marking the animal looseness of mouth, and the craft peering from the little eyes that were black beads thrust into a face of clay. A closer scrutiny softened his judgment. The man’s face was disfigured, ridged, scarred, and pitted from the smallpox. These scars had contracted the skin about the eyes, thus altering their expression, and to the ravages of the disease was also due the sickly pallor overspreading cheek and brow. + 

Considering this and the habit which the man wore⁠—a habit which Bellarion had no cause to associate with anything that was not sweet and good⁠—he disposed himself to make amends for the hastiness of his first assumptions. + 

“Benedictus sis,” he murmured, and with that abandoned Latin for the vulgar tongue. “I bless the Providence that sends you to a poor traveller who has lost his way.” + 

The friar laughed aloud at that, and the lingering apprehension left his eyes, which thus relieved grew pleasanter to look upon. + 

“Lord! Lord! And I like a fool and coward, having almost trod upon you, was for creeping off in haste, supposing you a sleeping robber. This forest is a very sanctuary of thieves. They infest it, thick as rabbits in a warren.” + 

“Why, then, do you adventure in it?” + 

“Why? Ohé! And what shall they steal from a poor friar-mendicant? My beads? My girdle?” He laughed again. A humorous fellow, clearly, taking a proper saintly joy in his indigenous condition. “No, no, my brother. I have no cause to go in fear of thieves.” + 

“Yet supposing me a thief, you were in fear of me?” + 

The man’s smile froze. This stripling’s simple logic was disconcerting. + 

“I feared,” he said at last, slowly and solemnly, “your fear of me. A hideous passion, fear, in man or beast. It makes men murderers at times. Had you been the robber I supposed you, and, waking suddenly, found me beside you, you might have suspected some intent to harm you. It is easily guessed what would have followed then.” + 

Bellarion nodded thoughtfully. No explanation could have been more complete. The man was not only virtuous, but wise. + 

“Whither do you journey, brother?” + 

“To Pavia,” Bellarion answered him, “by way of Santa Tenda.” + 

“Santa Tenda! Why, that is my way too; at least as far as the Augustinian Monastery on the Sesia. Wait here, my son, and we will go together. It is good to have a comrade on a journey. Wait but some few moments, to give me time to bathe, which is the purpose for which I came. I will not keep you long.” + 

He went striding off through the grass. Bellarion called after him: + 

“Where do you bathe?” + 

Over his shoulder the friar answered him: “There is a rivulet down yonder. But a little way. Do not stray from that spot, so that I may find you again, my son.” + 

Bellarion thought the form of address an odd one. A minorite is brother, not father, to all humanity. But it was no suspicion based on this that brought him to his feet. He was a youth of cleanly habits, and if there was water at hand, he too would profit by it. So he rose, picked up his cloak, and went off in the wake of the swiftly moving friar. + 

When, presently, he overtook him, Bellarion made him a present of a proverb. + 

“Who goes slowly, goes soundly.” + 

“But never gets there,” was the slightly breathless answer. “And it’s still some way to the water.” + 

“Some way? But you said⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Aye, aye. I was mistaken. One place is like another in this labyrinth. I am none so sure that I am not as lost as you are.” + 

It must have been so, for they trudged a full mile before they came to a brook that flowed westward towards the river. It lay in a dell amid mossy boulders and spreading fronds of ferns all dappled now with the golden light that came splashing through the trees. They found a pool of moderate dimensions in a bowl of grey stone fashioned by the ceaseless sculpture of the water. It was too shallow to afford a bath. But the friar’s ablutionary dispositions scarce seemed to demand so much. He rinsed face and hands perfunctorily, whilst Bellarion stripped to the waist, and displaying a white torso of much beauty and more vigour, did what was possible in that cramped space. + 

After that the friar produced from one of the sack-like pockets of his habit an enormous piece of sausage and a loaf of rye bread. + 

To Bellarion who had gone supperless to bed this was as the sight of manna in the desert. + 

“Little brother!” he cooed in sheer delight. “Little brother!” + 

“Aye, aye. We have our uses, we little brothers of Saint Francis.” The minorite sliced the sausage in two equal halves. “We know how to provide ourselves upon a journey.” + 

They fell to eating, and with the stilling of his hunger Bellarion experienced an increasing kindliness to this Good Samaritan. At the friar’s suggestion that they should be moving so as to cover the greater part of the road to Casale before the noontide heat, Bellarion stood up, brushing the crumbs from his lap. In doing so his hand came in contact with the scrip that dangled from his girdle. + 

“Saints of God!” he ejaculated, as he tightened his clutch upon that bag of green cloth. + 

The beady eyes of the minorite were upon him, and there was blank inquiry in that ashen, corrugated face. + 

“What is it, brother?” + 

Bellarion’s fingers groped within the bag a moment, then turned it inside out, to reveal its utter emptiness. He showed his companion a face which blended suspicion with dismay. + 

“I have been robbed!” he said. + 

“Robbed?” the other echoed, then smiled a pitying concern. “My surprise is less than yours, my son. Did I not say these woods are infested by thieves and robbers? Had you slept less soundly you might have been robbed of life as well. Render thanks to God, Whose grace is discernible even in misfortune. For no evil befalls us that will not serve to show how much greater that evil might have been. Take that for comfort ever in adversity, my child.” + 

“Aye, Aye!” Bellarion displayed ill-humour, whilst his eyes abated nothing of their suspicious glance. “It is easy to make philosophy upon the woes of others.” + 

“Child, child! What is your woe? What is the full sum of it? What have you lost, when all is said?” + 

“Five ducats and a letter.” Bellarion flung the answer fiercely. + 

“Five ducats!” The friar spread his hands in pious remonstrance. “And will you blaspheme God for five ducats?” + 

“Blaspheme?” + 

“Is not your furious frame of mind a blasphemy, your anger at your loss where there should be a devout thankfulness for all that you retain? And you should be thankful, too, for the Providence that guided my steps towards you in the hour of your need.” + 

“I should be thankful for that?” Bellarion stressed the question with mistrust. + 

The friar’s countenance changed. A gentle melancholy invested it. + 

“I read your thoughts, child, and they harbour suspicion of me. Of Me!” he smiled. “Why, what a madness! Should I turn thief? Should I imperil my immortal soul for five paltry ducats? Do you not know that we little brothers of Saint Francis live as the birds of the air, without thought for material things, our trust entirely in God’s providence? What should I do with five ducats, or five hundred? Without a single minted coin, with no more than my gown and my staff I might journey from here to Jerusalem, living upon the alms that never fail us. But assurances are not enough for minds poisoned by suspicion.” He flung wide his arms, and stood cruciform before the youth. “Come, child, make search upon me for your ducats, and so assure yourself. Come!” + 

Bellarion flushed, and lowered his head in shame. + 

“There⁠ ⁠… there is not the need,” he answered lamely. “The gown you wear is a full assurance. You could not be what you are and yet the thing that for a moment I⁠ ⁠…” He broke off. “I beg that you’ll forgive my unworthiness, my brother.” + 

Slowly the friar lowered his arms. His eyes were smiling again. + 

“I will be merciful by not insisting.” He laid a hand, lean and long in the fingers as an eagle’s claw upon the young man’s shoulder. “Think no more of your loss. I am here to repair it. Together we will journey. The habit of Saint Francis is wide enough to cover both of us, and you shall not want for anything until you reach Pavia.” + 

Bellarion looked at him in gratitude. “It was Providence, indeed, that sent you.” + 

“Did I not say so? And now you see it for yourself. Benedicamus Domine.” + 

To which Bellarion sincerely made the prescribed answer: “Deo gratias!” + 

II + 

The Grey Friar + 

They made their way towards the road, not directly, but by a course with which Fra Sulpizio⁠—as the friar announced himself named⁠—seemed singularly well acquainted. It led transversely across the forest. And as they went, Fra Sulpizio plied Bellarion with questions. + 

“There was a letter, you said, that was stolen with your gold?” + 

“Aye,” Bellarion’s tone was bitter. “A letter worth many times five ducats.” + 

“Worth many times⁠ ⁠… ? A letter?” The incredulity on the friar’s face was ludicrous. “Why, what manner of letter was that?” + 

Bellarion, who knew the contents by heart, recited them word for word. + 

Fra Sulpizio scratched his head in perplexity. “I have Latin enough for my office; but not for this,” he confessed, and finding Bellarion’s searching glance upon him, he softened his voice to add, truly enough: “We little brothers of Saint Francis are not famed for learning. Learning disturbs humility.” + 

Bellarion sighed. “So I know to my cost,” said he, and thereafter translated the lost letter: “This is our dearly beloved son Bellarion, a nutritus of this house, who goes hence to Pavia to increase his knowledge of the humanities. We commend him first to God and then to the houses of our own and other brethren orders for shelter and assistance on his journey, involving upon all who may befriend him the blessing of Our Lord.” + 

The friar nodded his understanding. “It might have been a grievous loss, indeed. But as it is, I will do the office of your letter whilst I am with you, and when we part I will see you armed with the like from the Prior of the Augustinians on the Sesia. He will do this at my word.” + 

The young man thanked him with a fervour dictated by shame of certain unworthy suspicions which had recurred. Thereafter they trudged on a while in silence, broken by the friar at last. + 

“And is your name Belisario, then? An odd name, that!” + 

“Not Belisario. Bellario, or rather, Bellarione.” + 

“Bellarione? Why, it is even less Christian than the other. Where got you such a name?” + 

“Not at the font, you may be sure. There I was christened Ilario, after the good Saint Hilary, who is still my patron saint.” + 

“Then why⁠ ⁠… ?” + 

“There’s a story to it; my story,” Bellarion answered him, and upon slight encouragement proceeded to relate it. + 

He was born, he told the friar, as nearly as he could guess, some six years after the outbreak of the Great Schism, that is to say, somewhere about the year 1384, in a village of whose name, like that of his own family, he had no knowledge. + 

“Of my father and my mother,” he continued, “I can evoke no mental picture. Of my father my only positive knowledge is that he existed. Of my mother I know that she was a termagant of whom the family, my father included, stood in awe. Amongst my earliest impressions is the sense of fear that invaded us at the sound of her scolding voice. It was querulous and strident; and I can hear it to this day harshly raised to call my sister. Leocadia was that sister’s name, the only name of all my family that I remember, and this because I must often have heard it called in that dread voice. There were several of us. I have one vivid memory of perhaps a half-dozen tumbling urchins, playing at some game in a bare chill room, that was yellow washed, lighted by an unglazed window beyond which the rain was streaming down upon a narrow dismal street. There was a clang of metal in the air, as if armourers were at work in the neighbourhood. And we were in the charge, I remember, of that same Leocadia, who must have been the eldest of us. I have an impression, vague and misty, of a lanky girl whose lean bare legs showed through a rent in her tattered petticoat. Faintly I discern a thin, pinched face set in a mane of untidy yellow hair, and then I hear a heavy step and the creak of a stair and a shrill, discordant voice calling ‘Leocadia!’ and then a scuttle amongst us to shelter from some unremembered peril. + 

“Of my family, that is all that I can tell you, brother. You’ll agree, perhaps, that since my memory can hold so little it is a pity that it should hold so much. But for these slight impressions of my infancy I might weave a pleasant romance about it, conceive myself born in a palace and heir to an illustrious name. + 

“That these memories of mine concern the year 1389 or 1390 I know from what the Abbot tells me, and also from later studies and deductions of my own. As you may know, there was at that time a bitter war being waged hereabouts between Ghibelline Montferrat and Guelphic Morea. It may have ravaged these very lands by which we travel now. One evening at the hour of dusk a foraging troop of Montferrat horse swept into my native place. There was pillage and brutality of every kind, as you can imagine. There was terror and confusion in every household, no doubt, and even in our own, although Heaven knows we had little cause to stand in dread of pillage. I remember that as night descended we huddled in the dark listening to the sounds of violence in the distance, coming from what I now imagine to have been the more opulent quarter of that township. I can hear my mother’s heavy breathing. For once she inspired no terror in us, being herself stricken with terror and cowed into silence. But this greater terror was upon us all, a sense of impending evil, of some horror advancing presently to overwhelm us. There were snivelling, whimpering sounds in the gloom about me from Leocadia and the other children. It is odd, how things heard have remained stamped upon my mind so much more vividly than things seen, which usually are more easily remembered. But from that moment my memory begins to grow clear and consecutive, perhaps from the sudden sharpening of my wits by this crisis. + 

“It was probably the instinct to withdraw myself beyond the reach of that approaching evil, which drew me furtively from the room. I remember groping my way in the dark down a steep crazy staircase, and tumbling down three stone steps at the door of that hovel into the mud of the street. + 

“I picked myself up, bruised and covered with filth. At another time this might have set me howling. Just then my mind was filled with graver concerns. In the open the noises were more distinct. I could hear shouts, and once a piercing scream that made my young blood run cold. Away on my right there was a red glow in the sky, and associating it with the evil that was to be escaped, I turned down the alley and made off, whimpering as I ran. Soon there was an end to the houses, and I was out of their shadow in the light of a rising moon on a road that led away through the open country into eternity as it must have seemed to me. From this I have since argued either that the township had neither gates nor walls, or else that the mean quarter we inhabited was outside and beyond them. + 

“I cannot have been above five years of age, and I must have been singularly sturdy, for my little legs bore me several miles that night, driven by unreasoning fear. At last I must have sunk down exhausted by the roadside, and there fallen asleep, for my next memory is of my awakening. It was broad daylight, and I was in the grasp of a big, bearded man who from his cap to his spurs was all steel and leather. Beside him stood the great bay horse from which he had just leaped, and behind him, filling the road in a staring, grinning, noisy cluster, was ranged a troop of fully fifty men with lances reared above them. + 

“He soothed my terrors with a voice incredibly gentle in one so big and fierce, and asked me who I was and whence I came, questions to which I could return no proper answers. To increase my confidence, perhaps, he gave me food, some fruit and bread⁠—such bread as I had never tasted. + 

“ ‘We cannot leave you here, baby,’ he said. ‘And since you don’t know where you belong, I will take charge of you.’ + 

“I no longer feared him or those with him. What cause had I to fear them? This man had stroked and petted and fed me. He had used me more kindly than I could remember ever to have been used before. So when presently I was perched in front of him on the withers of his great horse, I knew no sense but one of entire satisfaction. + 

“Later that day we came to a town, whose inhabitants regarded us in cringing awe. But, perhaps, because its numbers were small, the troop bore itself with circumspection, careful to give no provocation. + 

“The man-at-arms who had befriended me kept me in his train for a month or more. Then, the exigencies of the campaign against Morea demanding it, he placed me with the Augustinian fathers at the Grazie near Cigliano. They cared for me as if I had been a prince’s child instead of a stray waif picked up by the roadside. Thereafter at intervals he would come to visit me, and these visits, although the intervals between them grew ever longer, continued for some three or four years, after which we never saw or heard of him again. Either he died or else lost interest in the child he had saved and protected. Thereafter the Augustinians were my only friends. They reared me, and educated me, hoping that I would one day enter the order. They made endeavours to trace my birthplace and my family. But without success. And that,” he ended, “is all my story.” + 

“Ah, not quite all,” the friar reminded him. “There is this matter of your name.” + 

“Ah, yes. On that first day when I rode with my man-at-arms we went to a tavern in the town I mentioned, and there he delivered me into the hands of the taverner’s wife, to wash and clothe me. It was an odd fancy in such a man, as I now realise; but I am persuaded that whilst he rode that morning with my little body resting in the crook of his great arm, he conceived the notion to adopt me for his own. Men are like that, their natures made up of contradictory elements; and a rough, even brutal, soldier of fortune, not normally pitiful, may freakishly be moved to pity by the sight and touch of a poor waif astray by the roadside.” And on that he fell to musing. + 

“But the name?” the friar reminded him again. + 

He laughed. “Why, when the taverner’s wife set me before him, scoured clean and dressed in a comely suit of green cloth, not unlike the suit I am wearing now⁠—for I have affected green ever since in memory of him and of the first fair raiment I ever wore, which was of his providing⁠—it may be that I presented a comely appearance. He stared at me in sheer surprise. I can see him now, seated on a three-legged stool in a patch of sunlight that came through the blurred glass of the window, one hand on the knee of his booted leg, the other stroking his crisp black beard, his grey eyes conning me with an increasing kindliness. + 

“ ‘Come hither, boy,’ he bade me, and held out his hand. + 

“I went without fear or hesitation. He rested me against his knee, and set a hand upon my head still tingling from its recent combing. + 

“ ‘What did you tell me is your name?’ he asked. + 

“ ‘Ilario,’ I answered him. + 

“He stared a moment, then a smile half scornful broke upon his rugged, weather-beaten face. ‘Ilario, thou? With that solemn countenance and those big melancholy eyes?’ He ran on in words which I remember, though I barely caught their meaning then. ‘Was there ever an Ilario less hilarious? There’s no hilarity about you, child, nor ever has been, I should judge. Ilario! Faugh! Bellario, rather, with such a face. Is he not a lovely lad?’ He turned me about for the approval of the taverner’s wife, who stood behind me, and she, poor woman, made haste to agree, with fawning smiles, as she would have agreed with anything uttered by this dread man who must be conciliated. ‘Bellario!’ he repeated, savouring the word of his invention with an inventor’s pride. ‘That were a better name for him, indeed. And by the Host, Bellario he shall be renamed. Do you hear me, boy? Henceforth you are Bellario.’ ” + 

Thus, he explained, the name so lightly bestowed became his own; and later because of his rapid and rather excessive growth, the monks at the Grazie fell into the habit of calling him Bellarione, or big Bellario. + 

It still wanted an hour or so to noon when the twain emerged from the forest onto the open road. A little way along this they came upon a homestead set amid rice-fields, now denuded, and vineyards where men and women were at the labours of the vintage, singing as they harvested the grape. And here Bellarion had an instance of how the little brothers of Saint Francis receive alms without being so much as put to the trouble of asking for them. For at sight of the friar’s grey frock, one of the labourers, who presently announced himself the master of the homestead, came hurrying to bid them stay and rest and join the household at dinner, of which the hour was at hand. + 

They sat down to rough, abundant fare in the roomy kitchen, amid the members of that considerable family, sharing with them the benches set against a trestle table of well-scoured deal. + 

There was a cereal porridge, spread, like mortar, upon a board into which each dipped a wooden spoon, and, after this, came strips of roast kid with boiled figs and bread moist and solid as cheese. To wash all down there was a rough red wine, sharp on the palate, but wholesome and cool from the cellar, of which the friar drank over-copiously. + 

They numbered a round dozen at table; the old peasant and his wife, a nephew and seven children of full age, three of whom were young women, red-lipped, dark-skinned, deep-bosomed wenches with lusty brown arms and bright eyes which were over-busy about Bellarion for his ease. + 

Once, across the board, he caught the eye of the friar, and about these and the fellow’s loose lips there played a smile of sly and unpleasant amusement at Bellarion’s uneasiness under these feminine attentions. Later, when Fra Sulpizio’s excessive consumption of wine had brought a flush to the cheekbones of that pallid face and set a glitter in the beady eyes, Bellarion caught him pondering the girls with such a wolfish leer that all his first instincts against the man were roused again, and not the thought of his office or the contemplation of his habit could efface them. + 

After dinner the friar must rest awhile, and Bellarion beguiled the time of waiting, which was also the time of siesta in which all labour is suspended, by wandering in the vineyard whither the peasant’s daughters led him, and where they engaged him in chatter that he found monstrous tedious and silly. + 

Yet but for this and the fact that the vineyard bordered on the road, Bellarion’s association with the friar would have ended there, and all his subsequent history must have been different indeed. The minorite’s siesta was shorter than might have been expected, and when something less than an hour later he resumed his journey, so confused was he by sleep and wine that he appeared to have forgotten his companion quite. Had not Bellarion seen him striding away along the road to Casale, it is certain the young man would have been left behind. + 

Nor did he manifest much satisfaction when Bellarion came running after him. The scowl on his face argued displeasure. But his excuses and his explanations that he was but half awake permitted the assumption that it was himself with whom he was displeased. + 

He moved briskly now, swinging his long legs in great strides, and casting ever and anon a glance behind him. + 

Bellarion offered a remonstrance at the pace, a reminder that Casale was but some two leagues away and they had the afternoon in which to reach it. + 

“If I go too fast for you, you may follow at your leisure,” the friar grumbled. + 

It was for an instant in Bellarion’s mind to take him at his word, then, partly perversity, and partly a suspicion which he strove in vain to stifle, overcame his natural pride. + 

“No, no, little brother. I’ll accommodate my pace to yours, as befits.” + 

A grunt was the only answer; nor, indeed, although Bellarion made several attempts to resume conversation, was there much said between them thereafter as they trudged on in the heat of the afternoon along the road that crosses the fertile plains from Trino to Casale. + 

They did not, however, proceed very far on foot. For, being presently overtaken by a string of six or seven mules with capacious panniers slung on either flank, the leading beast bestridden by the muleteer, Bellarion received another demonstration of how a little brother of Saint Francis may travel upon charity. As the column advanced upon them at a brisk trot, Fra Sulpizio stepped to the middle of the road, with arms held wide as if to offer a barrier. + 

The muleteer, a brawny, black-bearded fellow, drew rein within a yard of him. + 

“What now, little brother? How can I serve you?” + 

“The blessing of God upon you, brother! Will you earn it by a little charity besought in the name of the Blessed Francis? If your beasts are not overladen, will you suffer them to carry a poor footsore Franciscan and this gentle lad into Casale?” + 

The muleteer swung one cross-gartered leg over to the side of the other and slipped to the ground, that he might assist them to mount, each on one of the more lightly laden mules. Thereupon, having begged and received Fra Sulpizio’s blessing, he climbed back into his own saddle and they were off at a sharp trot. + 

To Bellarion the experience of a saddle, or of what did duty for a saddle, was as novel as it was painful, and so kept his thoughts most fully engaged. It was his first essay in equitation, and the speed they made shook and tossed and bruised him until there was not a bone or muscle in his body that did not ache. His humour, too, was a little bruised by the hilarity which his efforts to maintain his seat excited in his two companions. + 

Thankful was he when they came in sight of the brown walls of Casale. These surged before them almost suddenly in the plain as they took a bend of the road; for the city’s level position was such as to render it inconspicuous from afar. The road led straight on to the San Stefano Gate, towards which they clattered over the drawbridge spanning the wide moat. There was a guardhouse in the deep archway, and the door of this stood open revealing some three or four soldiers lounging within. But they kept a loose and careless guard, for these were peaceful times. One of them, a young man in a leather haqueton, but bare of head, sauntered forward as far as the doorway to fling a greeting at the muleteer, which was taken by the fellow as permission to pass on. + 

From that gateway, cool and cavernous, they emerged into one of the streets of the busy capital of the warlike State of Montferrat, which at one time, none so far distant, had bidden fair to assume the lordship of Northern Italy. + 

They proceeded slowly now, perforce. The crooked street, across which the crazy houses seemed to lean towards each other so as to exclude the sunlight from all but a narrow middle line, was thronged with people of all degrees. It was ever a busy thoroughfare, this street of San Stefano, leading from the gate of that name to the Cathedral Square, and from his post of vantage on the back of the now ambling mule, Bellarion, able at last to sit unshaken, looked about him with deep interest upon manifestations of life known to him hitherto through little more than the imagination which had informed his extensive reading. + 

It was market-day in Casale, and before the shops the way was blocked by trestle tables, on which the merchants displayed their wares, shouting their virtues to lure the attention of the wayfarers. + 

Through this they came, by low and narrow archways, to an even greater bustle in the open space before the cathedral, founded, as Bellarion knew, some seven hundred years before by Liutprand, King of the Lombards. He turned to stare at the Roman architecture of the red and white façade, flanked by slender square towers, each surmounted by an hexagonal extinguisher roof. He was still considering the cruciform windows when the mule halted and recalled his attention. + 

Ahead of him Fra Sulpizio was slipping to the ground, bestowing thanks and invoking the blessings of God upon the muleteer. Bellarion dismounted, a little stiff from his ride and very thankful to be at the end of it. The muleteer flung them a “God guard you,” over his shoulder, and the string of mules passed on. + 

“And now, brother, we’ll seek a supper, if you please,” the friar announced. + 

To seek it was natural enough, but hardly, thought Bellarion, in the tavern across the square, whither he was led. + 

On the threshold, under the withered bough that was hung as a sign above the portal, the young man demurred, protesting that one of the religious houses of the town were a fitter resort, and its charitable shelter more suitable to a friar mendicant. + 

“Why, as to charity,” quoth Fra Sulpizio, “it is on charity I depend. Old Benvenuto here, the taverner, is my cousin. He will make us free of his table, and give me news of my own folk at the same time. Is it not natural and proper that I seek him?” + 

Reluctantly Bellarion was forced to agree. And he reminded himself, to buttress a waning faith in his companion, that not once had he voiced a suspicion of the friar’s actions to which the friar’s answer had not been ready and complete. + 

III + 

The Door Ajar + 

The event which was to deviate Bellarion so abruptly and brutally from the peaceful ways of a student and a scholar, and to extinguish his cherished hopes of learning Greek at Pavia under the far-famed Messer Chrysolaras, was upon him so suddenly and so unheralded that he scarcely realised it until it was overpast. + 

He and the friar had supped in the unclean and crowded common room of the hostelry of the Stag⁠—so called, it is presumed, in honour of the Lords of Montferrat, who had adopted the stag as their device⁠—and it is to be confessed that they had supped abundantly and well under the particular auspices of Ser Benvenuto, the host, who used his cousin Fra Sulpizio with almost more than cousinly affection. He had placed them a little apart from the noisy occupants of that low-ceilinged, grimy chamber, in a recess under a tall, narrow window, standing open, so that the stench, compounded of garlic, burnt meats, rancid oil, and other things, which pervaded the apartment was here diluted for them by the pure evening air. And he waited upon them himself, after a protracted entertainment with the friar, conducted in a mutter of which nothing reached Bellarion. He brought them of his best, of which the most conspicuous item was a lean and stringy fowl, and he produced for them from his cellar a flask of Valtelline which at least was worthy of a better table. + 

Bellarion, tired and hungry, did justice to the viands, without permitting himself more than a passing irritation at his companion’s whining expositions of the signal advantages of travelling under the aegis of the blessed Francis. The truth is that he did not hear more than the half of all that Fra Sulpizio found occasion to urge. For one thing, in his greed, the friar spoke indistinctly, slobbering the while at his food; for another, the many tenants of the inn were very noisy. They made up a motley crowd, but had this in common, that all belonged to the lower walks of life, as their loud, coarse speech, freely interlarded with blasphemy and obscenity, abundantly bore witness. There were some peasants from Romaglia or Torcella, or perhaps from Terranova beyond the Po, who had come there to market, rude, brawny men for the most part, accompanied by their equally brawny, bare-legged women. There were a few labourers of the town and others who may have been artisans, one or two of them, indeed, so proclaimed by their leather aprons; and at one table a group of four men and a woman were very boisterous over their wine. The men were soldiers, so to be judged at a glance from their leather haquetons and studded girdles with heavy daggers slung behind. The woman with them was a gaudy, sinuous creature with haggard, painted cheeks, whose mirth, now shrill, now raucous, was too easily moved. When first he heard it Bellarion had shuddered. + 

“She laughs,” he had told the friar, “as one might laugh in hell.” + 

For only answer Fra Sulpizio had looked at him and then veiled his eyes, almost as if, himself, he were suppressing laughter. + 

Soon, however, Bellarion grew accustomed to the ever-recurring sound and to the rest of the din, the rattle of platters and drinking-cans, the growling of a dog over a bone it had discovered among the foul rushes rotting on the bare earthen floor. + 

Having eaten, he sat back in his chair, a little torpid now, and drowsy. Last night he had lain in the open, and he had been afoot almost since dawn. It is little wonder that presently, whilst again the taverner was muttering with his cousin the friar, he should have fallen into a doze. + 

He must have slept some little while, a half-hour, perhaps, for when he awakened the patch of sunlight had faded from the wall across the alley, visible from the window under which they sat. This he did not notice at the time, but remembered afterwards. In the moment of awakening, his attention was drawn by the friar, who had risen, and instantly afterwards by something else, beyond the friar. At the open window behind and above Fra Sulpizio there was the face of a man. Upon the edge of the sill, beneath his face, were visible the fingers by which he had hoisted himself thither. The questing eyes met Bellarion’s, and seemed to dilate a little; the mouth gaped suddenly. But before Bellarion could cry out or speak, or even form the intention of doing either, the face had vanished. And it was the face of the peasant with whom they had dined that day. + 

The friar, warned by Bellarion’s quickening stare, had swung round to look behind him. But he was too late; the window space was already empty. + 

“What is it?” he asked, suddenly apprehensive. “What did you see?” + 

Bellarion told him, and was answered by an obscenely morphological oath, which left him staring. The friar’s countenance was suddenly transfigured. A spasm of mingled fear and anger bared his fangs; his beady eyes grew cruel and sinister. He swung aside as if to depart abruptly, then as abruptly halted where he stood. + 

On the threshold surged the peasant, others following him. + 

The friar sank again to his stool at the table, and composed his features. + 

“Yonder he sits, that friar rogue! That thief!” Thus the peasant as he advanced. + 

The cry, and, more than all, the sight of the peasant’s companions, imposed a sudden silence upon the babel of that room. First came a young man, stalwart and upright, in steel cap and gorget, booted and spurred, a sword swinging from his girdle, a dagger hanging on his hip behind; a little crimson feather adorning his steel cap proclaiming him an officer of the Captain of Justice of Casale. After him came two of his men armed with short pikes. + 

Straight to that table in the window recess the peasant led the way. “There he is! This is he!” Belligerently he thrust his face into the friar’s, leaning his knuckles on the table’s edge. “Now, rogue⁠ ⁠…” he was beginning furiously, when Fra Sulpizio, raising eyes of mild astonishment to meet his anger, gently interrupted him. + 

“Little brother, do you speak so to me? Do you call me rogue? Me?” He smiled sadly, and so calm and gently wistful was his manner that it clearly gave the peasant pause. “A sinner I confess myself, for sinners are we all. But I am conscious of no sin against you, brother, whose charity was so freely given me only today.” + 

That saintly demeanour threw the peasant’s simple wits into confusion. He was thrust aside by the officer. + 

“What is your name?” + 

Fra Sulpizio looked at him, and his look was laden with reproach. + 

“My brother!” he cried. + 

“Attend to me!” the officer barked at him. “This man charges you with theft.” + 

“With theft!” Fra Sulpizio paused and sighed. “It shall not move me to the sin of anger, brother. It is too foolish: a thing for laughter. What need have I to steal, when under the protection of Saint Francis I have but to ask for the little that I need? What use to me is worldly gear? But what does he say I stole?” + 

It was the peasant who answered him. + 

“Thirty florins, a gold chain, and a silver cross from a chest in the room where you rested.” + 

Bellarion remembered how the friar had sought to go slinking off alone from the peasant homestead, and how fearfully he had looked behind him as they trudged along the road until overtaken by the muleteer. And by the muleteer it would be, he thought, that they had now been tracked. The officer at the gate would have told the peasant of how the friar and his young companion in greed had ridden in; then the peasant would have sought the muleteer, and the rest was clear: as clear as it was to him that his companion was a thieving rogue, and that his own five ducats were somewhere about that scoundrel’s person. + 

In future, he swore, he would be guided by his own keen instincts and the evidence of his senses only, and never again allow a preconception to befool him. Meanwhile, the friar was answering: + 

“So that not only am I charged with stealing; but I have returned evil for good; I have abused charity. It is a heavy charge, my brother, and very rashly brought.” + 

There was a murmur of sympathy from the staring, listening company, amongst whom many lawless ones were, by the very instinct of their kind, ready to range themselves against any who stood for law. + 

The friar opened his arms, wide and invitingly: + 

“Let me not depart from my vows of humility in the heat of my own defence. I will say nothing. Do you, sir, make search upon me for the gear which this man says I have stolen, though all his evidence is that it chanced to be in a room in which for a little while I rested.” + 

“To accuse a priest!” said someone in a tone of indignation, and a murmur arose at once in sympathy. + 

It moved the young officer to mirth. He half swung on his heel so as to confront those mutterers. + 

“A priest!” he jeered. Then, his keen eyes flashed once more upon the friar. “When did you last say Mass?” + 

Before that simple question Fra Sulpizio seemed to lose some of his assurance. Without even giving him time to answer, the officer fired another question. “What is your name?” + 

“My name?” The friar was looking at him from eyes that seemed to have grown beadier than ever in that white, pitted face. “I’ll not expose myself to ribald unbelief. You shall have written proof of my name. Behold.” And from his gown he fetched a parchment, which he thrust under the soldier’s nose. + 

The officer conned it a moment, then his eyes went over the edge of it back to the face of the man that held it. + 

“How can I read it upside down?” + 

The friar’s hands, which shook a little, made haste to turn the sheet. As he did so Bellarion perceived two things; that the sheet had been correctly held at first; and that it was his own lost letter. He had a glimpse of the Abbot’s seal as the parchment was turned. + 

He was momentarily bewildered by a discovery that was really threefold: first, the friar was indeed the thief who had rifled his scrip; second, he must be in a more desperate case than Bellarion suspected, to seek to cloak himself under a false identity; and, third, the pretence that the document proffered upside down was a test to discover whether the fellow could read, a trap into which the knave had tumbled headlong. + 

The officer laughed aloud, well pleased with his own cleverness. “I knew you were no clerk,” he mocked him. “I have more than a suspicion who you really are. Though you may have stolen a friar’s habit, it would need more than that to cover your ugly, pockmarked face and that scar on your neck. You are Lorenzaccio da Trino, my friend; and there’s a halter waiting for you.” + 

The mention of that name made a stir in the tavern, and brought its tenants a step nearer to the group about that table in the window recess. It was a name known probably to every man present with the single exception of Bellarion, the name of a bandit of evil fame throughout Montferrat and Savoy. Something of the kind Bellarion may have guessed. But at that moment the recovery of the Abbot’s letter was his chief concern. + 

“That parchment’s mine!” he cried. “It was stolen from me this morning by this false friar.” + 

The interpolation diverted attention to himself. After a moment’s blank stare the officer laughed again. Bellarion began actively to dislike that laugh of his. He was too readily moved to it. + 

“Why, here’s Paul disowning Peter. Oh, to be sure, the associate becomes the victim when the master rogue is taken. It’s a stale trick, young cockerel. It won’t serve in Casale.” + 

Bellarion bristled. He assumed a great dignity. “Young sir, you may come to regret your words. I am the man named in that parchment, as the Abbot of the Grazie of Cigliano can testify.” + 

“No need to plague Messer the Abbot,” the officer mocked him. “A taste of the cord, my lad, a hoist or two, and you’ll vomit all the truth.” + 

“The hoist!” Bellarion felt the skin roughening along his spine. + 

Was it to be taken for granted that he was a rogue, simply from his association with this spurious friar; and were his bones to be broken by the torturers to make him accuse himself? Was this how justice was dispensed? + 

He was bewildered, and, as he afterwards confessed, he grew suddenly afraid. And then there was a cry from the peasant, and things happened quickly and unexpectedly. + 

Whilst the officer’s attention had been on Bellarion, the false friar had moved very soft and stealthily nearer to the window. The peasant it was who detected the movement and realised its import. + 

“Lay hands on him!” he cried, in sudden alarm lest his florins and the rest should take flight again, and, that alarm spurring him, himself he leapt to seize Lorenzaccio by arm and shoulder. Fury blazed from the bandit’s beady eyes; his yellow fangs were bared in a grin of rage; something flashed in his right hand, and then his knife sank into the stomach of his assailant. It was a wicked, vicious, upward, ripping thrust, like the stroke of a boar’s tusk, and the very movement that delivered it flung the peasant off, so that he hurtled into the arms of the two soldiers, and momentarily hampered their advance. That moment was all that Lorenzaccio needed. He swung aside, and with a vigour and agility to execute, as remarkable as the rapidity of the conception itself, he hoisted himself to the sill of the narrow, open window, crouched there a second, measuring his outward leap, and was gone. + 

He left a raging confusion behind him, and an exclamatory din above which rang fierce and futile commands from the Podestà’s young officer. One of the men-at-arms supported the swooning body of the peasant, whilst his fellow vainly and stupidly sought to follow by the way Lorenzaccio had gone, but failed because he lacked the bandit’s vigour. + 

Bellarion, horror-stricken and half stupefied, stood staring at the wretched peasant whose hurt he judged to be mortal. He was roused by a gentle tugging at his sleeve. He half turned to find himself looking into the painted face of the woman whose laughter earlier had jarred his sensibilities. It was a handsome face, despite the tawdriness it derived from the raddled cheeks and too vividly reddened lips. The girl⁠—she was little more⁠—looked kindly concern upon him out of dark, slanting eyes that were preternaturally bright. + 

“Away, away!” she muttered feverishly. “This is your chance. Bestir!” + 

“My chance?” he echoed, and was conscious of the colour mounting to his cheeks. + 

His first emotion was resentment of this misjudgment; his next a foolish determination to stand firm and advance his explanations, insisting upon justice being done him. All this whilst he had flung his question “My chance?” With the next heartbeat he perceived the strength of the appearances against him. This poor drab, these evil ones about her and him, offering him their sympathy only because they believed him made kin with them by evil, advised the only course a sane man in his case must follow. + 

“Make haste, child!” the woman urged him breathlessly. “Quick, or it will be too late.” + 

He looked beyond her at the others crowding there, to meet glances that seemed to invite, to urge, and from one bloated face, which he recognized for Benvenuto’s, came an eloquent wink, whilst the fellow jerked a dirty thumb backwards towards the door in a gesture there was no misunderstanding. Then, as if Bellarion’s sudden resolve had been reflected in his face, the press before him parted, men and women shouldered and elbowed a way for him. He plunged forward. The company closed behind him, opening farther ahead, closed again as he advanced and again opened before him, until his way to the door was clear. And behind him he could hear the young officer’s voice raised above the din in oaths and imprecations, urging his men-at-arms to clear a way with their pikes, calling upon those other soldiers lounging there to lend a hand, so as to make sure, at least, of one of these two rogues. + 

But that rascally company, it seemed, was skilled in the tactics the occasion needed. Honest men there may have been, and no doubt there were amongst them. But they were outnumbered; and, moreover, honest though they might be, they were poor folk, and therefore so far in sympathy perhaps with an unfortunate lad as not to hinder him even if they would not actively help. And meanwhile the others, making pretence of being no more than spectators, solicitous for the condition of the peasant who had been stabbed, pressed so closely about the officer and his men that the latter had no room in which to swing their pikes. + 

All this Bellarion guessed, by the sounds behind him, rather than saw. For he gave no more than a single backward glance at that seething group as he flung across the threshold, out of that evil-smelling chamber into the clean air of the square. He turned to the left, and made off towards the cathedral, his first thought being to seek sanctuary there. Then, realising that thus he would but walk into a trap, he dived down an alley just as the officer gained the tavern door, and with a view-halloo started after him, his two pikemen and the other soldiers clattering at his heels. + 

As Bellarion raced like a stag before hounds down that narrow street of mean houses in the shadow of Liutprand’s great church, it may well be that he recalled the Abbot’s parting words, “Pax multa in cella, foris autem plurima bella,” and wished himself back in the tranquillity of the cloisters, secure from the perils and vexations of secular existence. + 

This breathless flight of his seemed to him singularly futile and purposeless. He knew what he was running from; but not what he might be running to, nor indeed whither to run at all. And for escape, knowledge of the latter is as important as of the former. Had not instinct⁠—the animal instinct of self-preservation⁠—been stronger than his reason, he would have halted, saved his breath, and waited for his pursuers to overtake him. For he was too intelligent to wear himself in attempting to escape the inescapable. Fortunately for him, the instinct of the hunted animal sent him headlong forward in despite of reason. And presently there was reason, too, to urge him. This when he realized that, after all, his pursuers were not as fleet of foot as himself. Be it from their heavy boots and other accoutrements, be it from his greater youth and more Spartan habits of life, he was rapidly outdistancing them, and thus might yet succeed in shaking them off altogether. Then, too, he reflected that if he kept a straight course in his flight, he must end by reaching the wall of this accursed city, and by following this must gain one of the gates into the open country. It was close on sunset. But there would be at least a full hour yet before the gates were closed. + 

Heartened, he sped on, and only once was he in any danger. That was when the straight course he laid himself brought him out upon an open square, along one side of which ran a long grey building with a noble arcade on the ground level. There was a considerable concourse of people moving here both in the open and under the arches, and several turned to stare at that lithe green figure as it sped past. Caring nothing what any might think, and concerned only to cross that open space as quickly as possible, Bellarion gained the narrow streets beyond. Still intent upon keeping a straight line, he turned neither to right nor to left. And presently he found himself moving no longer between houses, but along a grass-grown lane, between high brown walls where the ground underfoot was soft and moist. He eased the pace a little, to give his aching lungs relief; nor knew how nearly spent he was until the peace of his surroundings induced that lessening of effort. It lessened further, until he was merely walking, panting now, and gasping, and mopping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. He had been too reckless, he now told himself. The pace had been too hot. He should have known that it must defeat him. Unless by now he had shaken off those pursuers, or others they might have enlisted⁠—and that was his great fear⁠—he was a lost man. + 

He came to a standstill, listening. He could hear, he fancied, sounds in the distance which warned him that the pursuit still held. Panic spurred his flanks again. But though it might be urgent to resume his flight, it was more urgent still to pause first to recover breath. + 

He had come to a halt beside a stout oaken door which was studded with great nails and set in a deep archway in that high wall. To take his moment’s rest he leaned against these solid timbers. And then, to his amazement, under the weight of his body, the ponderous door swung inwards, so that he almost fell through it into a space of lawn and rosebeds narrowly enclosed within tall boxwood hedges which were very dense and trimly cut. + 

It was as if a miracle had happened, as if that door had been unlocked for his salvation by supernatural agency. Thus thought he in that moment of exaggerated reaction from his panic, nor stayed to reflect that in entering and in closing and bolting that door, he was as likely to entrap as to deliver himself. There was a deep sill, some two feet above the ground, on the inner side. On this Bellarion sat down to indulge the luxury of a sense of security. But not for very long. Presently steps, quick and numerous, came pattering down that lane, to an accompaniment of breathless voices. + 

Bellarion listened, and smiled a little. They would never guess that he had found this door ajar. They would pass on, continuing their now fruitless quest, whilst he could linger until night descended. Perhaps he would spend the night there, and be off in the morning by the time the gates of the city should have been reopened. + 

Thus he proposed. And then the steps outside came to a sudden halt, and his heart almost halted with them. + 

“He paused hereabouts,” said a gruff voice. “Look at the trodden ground.” + 

That was a shrew-eyed sleuth, thought Bellarion as he listened fearfully. + 

“Does it matter?” quoth another. “Will you stand pausing too whilst he makes off? Come on. He went this way, we know.” + 

“Hold, numskull!” It was the gruff voice again. “He came this way, but he went no farther. Bah! Peace, don’t argue with me, man. Use your eyes. It’s plain to see. No one has gone past this door today. He’s here.” And on the word a heavy blow, as from a pike butt, smote the timbers, and brought Bellarion to his feet as if he, himself, had been struck. + 

“But this door is always locked, and he could scarcely have climbed the wall.” + 

“He’s here, I say. Don’t argue. Two men to guard the door, lest he come forth again. The rest with me to the palace. Come.” His voice was harsh and peremptory. There were no further words in answer. Steps moved off quickly returning up the lane. Steps paced outside the door, and there was a mutter of voices of the men placed on guard. + 

Bellarion wondered if prayer would help him. He could think of nothing else that would. + 

IV + 

Sanctuary + 

These grounds into which he had stepped through that doorway in the red wall seemed, so far as the tall hedges of his hortus inclusus would permit him to discover, to be very spacious. Somewhere in their considerable extent there would surely be a hiding-place into which he could creep until the hunt was over. + 

He went forward to investigate, stepping cautiously towards a deep archway cut in the dense boxwood. In this archway he paused to survey a prospect that evoked thoughts of Paradise. Beyond a wide sweep of lawn, whereon two peacocks strutted, sparkled the waters of a miniature lake, where a pavilion of white marble, whose smooth dome and graceful pillars suggested a diminutive Roman temple, appeared to float. Access to this was gained from the shore by an arched marble bridge over whose white parapet trailing geraniums flamed. + 

From this high place the ground fell away in a flight of two terraces, and the overflow from the lake went cascading over granite boulders into tanks of granite set in each of them, with shading vine trellises above that were heavy now with purple fruit. Below, another emerald lawn was spread, sheltered on three sides within high walls of yew, fantastically cut at the summit into the machicolations of an embattled parapet and bearing at intervals deep arched niches in which marble statues gleamed white against the dusky green. Here figures sauntered, courtly figures of men and women more gaudy and glittering in their gay raiment than the peacocks nearer at hand; and faintly on the still warm air of evening came the throbbing of a lute which one of them was idly thrumming. + 

Beyond, on the one open side another shallow terrace rose and upon this a great red house that was half palace, half fortress, flanked at each side by a massive round tower with covered battlements. + 

So much Bellarion’s questing eyes beheld, and then he checked his breath, for his sharp ears had caught the sound of a stealthy step just beyond the hedge that screened him. An instant later he was confronted by a woman, who with something furtive and cautious in her movements appeared suddenly before him in the archway. + 

For a half-dozen heartbeats they stood thus, each regarding the other; and the vision of her in that breathless moment was destined never to fade from Bellarion’s mind. She was of middle height, and her close-fitting gown of sapphire blue laced in gold from neck to waist revealed her to be slender. There was about her an air of delicate dignity, of command tempered by graciousness. For the rest, her hair was of a tawny golden, a shade deeper than the golden threads of the jewelled caul in which it was confined; her face was small and pale, too long in the nose, perhaps, for perfect symmetry, yet for that very reason the more challenging in its singular, elusive beauty. Great wistful eyes of brown, wide-set and thoughtful, were charged with questions as they conned Bellarion. They were singularly searching, singularly compelling eyes, and they drew from him forthwith a frank confession. + 

“Lady!” he faltered. “Of your charity! I am pursued.” + 

“Pursued!” She moved a step, and her expression changed. The wistfulness was replaced by concern in those great sombre eyes. + 

“I am likely to be hanged if taken,” he added to quicken the excellent emotions he detected. + 

“By whom are you pursued?” + 

“An officer of the Captain of Justice and his men.” + 

He would have added more. He would have said something to assure her that in seeking her pity he sought it for an innocent man betrayed by appearances. But she gave signs that her pity needed no such stimulant. She made a little gesture of distraction, clasping her long, tapering hands over which the tight, blue sleeves descended to the knuckles. She flung a swift, searching glance behind her, from the green archway to the open spaces. + 

“Come,” she said, and beckoned him forward. “I will hide you.” And then on a note of deeper anxiety, for which he blessed her tender, charitable heart, she added: “If you are found here, all is lost. Crouch low and follow me.” + 

Obediently he followed, almost on all fours, creeping beside a balustrade of mellow brick that stood breast high to make a parapet for the edge of that very spacious terrace. + 

Ahead of him the lady moved sedately and unhurried, thereby discovering to Bellarion virtues of mental calm and calculating wit. A fool, he told himself, would have gone in haste, and thus provoked attention and inquiry. + 

They came in safety to the foot of the arched marble bridge, which Bellarion now perceived to be crossed by broad steps, ascending to a platform at the summit, and descending thence again to the level of the temple on the water. + 

“Wait. Here we must go with care.” She turned to survey the gardens below, and as she looked he saw her blench, saw the golden-brown eyes dilate as if in fear. He could not see what she saw⁠—the glint of arms upon hurrying men emerging from the palace. But the guess he made went near enough to the fact before she cried out: “Too late! If you ascend now you will be seen.” And she told him of the soldiers. Again she gave evidence of her shrewd sense. “Do you go first,” she bade him, “and on hands and knees. If I follow I may serve as a screen for you, and we must hope they will not see you.” + 

“The hope,” said Bellarion, “is slender as the screen your slenderness would afford me, lady.” He was lying now flat on the ground at her feet. “If only it had pleased Heaven to make you as fat as you are charitable, I’d not hesitate. As it is, I think I see a better way.” + 

She stared down at him, a little frown puckering her white brow. But for the third time in that brief space she proved herself a woman whose mind seized upon essentials and disregarded lesser things. + 

“A better way? What way, then?” + 

He had been using his eyes. Beyond the domed pavilion a tongue of land thrust out into the lake, from which three cypresses rose in black silhouette against the afterglow of sunset, whilst a little alder-bush its branches trailing in the water blunted the island’s point. + 

“This way,” said Bellarion, and went writhing like an eel in the direction of the water. + 

“Where will you go?” she cried; and added sharply as he reached the edge: “It is very deep; two fathoms at the shallowest.” + 

“So much the better,” said Bellarion. “They’ll be the less likely to seek me in it.” + 

He took a succession of deep breaths to prepare himself for the long submersion. + 

“Ah, but wait!” she cried on a strained note. “Tell me, at least⁠ ⁠…” + 

She broke off with a catch in her breath. He was gone. He had slipped in, taking the water quietly as an otter, and save for the wave that sped across the lake no sign of him remained. + 

The lady stood breathlessly at gaze waiting to see the surface broken by his emerging head. But she waited vainly and in growing alarm. The moments passed. Voices behind her became audible and grew in volume. The men-at-arms were advancing swiftly, the courtiers following to see the sport their captain promised. + 

Suddenly from the alder-bush on the island’s point a startled water-hen broke forth in squawking terror, and went scudding across the lake, its feet trailing along the water into which it finally splashed again within a yard of the farther shore. From within the bush itself some slight momentary disturbance sent a succession of ripples across the lesser ripples whipped up by the evening breeze. Then all grew still again, including the alarms of the watching lady who had perceived and read these signs. + 

She drew closer about her white, slender shoulders a little mantle edged with miniver, and moved like one impelled by natural curiosity to meet the soldiers who came surging up the terrace steps. There were four of them, led by that same young officer who had invaded the hostelry of the Stag in quest of Lorenzaccio. + 

“What is this?” the lady greeted him, her tone a little hard as if his abrupt invasion of her garden were in itself an offence. “What are you seeking here?” + 

“A man, madonna,” the captain answered her shortly, having at the moment no breath for more. + 

Her sombre eyes went past him to dwell upon the three glittering gallants in the courtly group of five that followed at the soldier’s heels. + 

“A man?” she echoed. “I do not remember to have seen such a portent hereabouts in days.” + 

Of the three at whom the shaft of her irony was directed two laughed outright in shameless sycophancy; the third flushed scarlet, his glance resentful. He was the youngest by some years, and still a boy. He had her own brown eyes and tawny hair, and otherwise resembled her, save that his countenance lacked the firm strength that might be read in hers. His slim, graceful, stripling figure was gorgeously arrayed in a kilted tunic of gold brocade with long, green, deeply foliated sleeves, the ends of which reached almost to his toes. His girdle was of hammered gold whence hung a poniard with a jewelled hilt, and a ruby glowed in his bulging cap of green silk. One of his legs was cased in green, the other in yellow, and he wore a green shoe on the yellow foot, and a yellow on the green. This, in the sixteenth year of his age, was the Lord Gian Giacomo Paleologo, sovereign Marquis of Montferrat. + 

His two male companions were Messer Corsario, his tutor, a foxy-faced man of thirty, whose rich purple gown would have been more proper to a courtier than a pedant, and the Lord Castruccio da Fenestrella, a young man of perhaps five and twenty, very gorgeous in a scarlet houppelande, and not unhandsome, despite his pallid cheeks, thin lank hair, and rather shifty eyes. It was upon him that Giacomo now turned in peevishness. + 

“Do not laugh, Castruccio.” + 

Meanwhile the captain was flinging out an arm in command to his followers. “Two of you to search the enclosure yonder about the gate. Beat up the hedges. Two of you with me.” He swung to the lady before she could answer her brother. “You have seen no one, highness?” + 

Her highness was guilty of an evasion. “Should I not tell you if I had?” + 

“Yet a man certainly entered here not many minutes since by the garden-door.” + 

“You saw him enter?” + 

“I saw clear signs that he had entered.” + 

“Signs? What signs?” + 

He told her. Her mobile lips expressed a doubt before she uttered it. + 

“A poor warrant that for this intrusion, Ser Bernabó.” + 

The captain grew uncomfortable. “Highness, you mistake my motives.” + 

“I hope I do,” she answered lightly, and turned her shoulder to him. + 

He commanded his two waiting followers. The others were already in the enclosed garden. “To the temple!” + 

At that she turned again, her eyes indignant. “Without my leave? The temple, sir, is my own private bower.” + 

The captain, hesitated, ill-at-ease. “Hardly at present, highness. It is in the hands of the workmen; and this fellow may be hiding there.” + 

“He is not. He could not be in the temple without my knowledge. I am but come from there.” + 

“Your memory, highness, is at fault. As I approached, you were coming along the terrace from the enclosed garden.” + 

She flushed under the correction. And there was a pause before she slowly answered him: “Your eyes are too good, Bernabó.” In a tone that made him change countenance she added: “I shall remember it, together with your reluctance to accept my word.” Contemptuously she dismissed him. “Pray, make your search without regard for me.” + 

The captain stood a moment hesitating. Then he bowed stiffly from the hips, tossed his head in silent command to his men, and so led them off, over the marble bridge. + 

After he had drawn blank, like the soldiers he had sent to search the enclosure, he returned, baffled, with his four fellows at his heels. The Princess Valeria, wandered now in company with those other gay ones along the terrace by the balustrade. + 

“You come empty-handed, then,” she rallied him. + 

“I’ll stake my life he entered the garden,” said the captain sullenly. + 

“You are wise in staking something of no value.” + 

He disregarded alike the taunt and the titter it drew from her companions. “I must report to his highness. Do you say positively, madonna, that you did not see this fellow?” + 

“Lord, man! Do you still presume to question me? Besides, if you’re so confident, why waste time in questions? Continue your search.” + 

The captain addressed himself to her companions. “You, sirs and ladies, did you have no glimpse of this knave⁠—a tall youngster, dressed in green?” + 

“In green!” cried the Lady Valeria. “Now that is interesting. In green? A dryad, perhaps; or, perhaps my brother here.” + 

The captain shook his head. “That is not possible.” + 

“Nor am I in green,” added the young marquis. “Nor have I been outside the garden. She mocks you, Messer Bernabó. It is her cursed humour. We have seen no one.” + 

“Nor you, Messer Corsario?” Pointedly now the captain addressed the pedant, as by his years and office the likeliest, to return him a serious answer. + 

“Indeed, no,” the gentleman replied. “But then,” he added, “we were some way off, as you observed. Madonna, however, who was up here, asserts that she saw no one.” + 

“Ah! But does she so assert it?” the captain insisted. + 

The Lady Valeria looked him over in chill disdain. “You all heard what I said. Repetition is a weariness.” + 

“You see,” the captain appealed to them. + 

Her brother came to his assistance. “Why can’t you answer plainly, and have done, Valeria? Why must you forever remember to be witty? Why can’t you just say ‘no’?” + 

“Because I’ve answered plainly enough already, and my answer has been disregarded. Ser Bernabó shall have no opportunity to repeat an offence I am not likely to forget.” She turned away. “Come, Dionara, and you, Isotta. It is growing chill.” + 

With her ladies obediently following her she descended towards the lower gardens and the palace. + 

Messer Bernabó stroked his chin, a man nonplussed. The Lord Castruccio chided him. + 

“You’re a fool, Bernabó, to anger her highness. Besides, man, what mare’s nest are you hunting?” + 

The soldier was pale with vexation. “You saw as I did that, as we crossed the gardens, her highness was coming from that enclosure.” + 

“Yes, booby,” said Corsario, “and we saw as you did that she came alone. If a man entered by that gate as you say, he got no farther than the enclosed garden, and this your men have searched already. You gain nothing by betraying suspicions. Who and what do you suppose this man?” + 

“Suppose! I know.” + 

“What do you know?” + 

“That he is a rogue, a brigand scoundrel, associate of Lorenzaccio da Trino who slipped through our fingers an hour ago.” + 

“By the Host!” cried Corsario, in genuine surprise. “I thought⁠ ⁠…” He checked abruptly, and dissembled the break by a laugh. “And can you dream that the Lady Valeria would harbour a robber?” + 

“Can I dream, can any man dream, what the Lady Valeria will do?” + 

“I could dream that she’ll put your eyes out if ever the power is hers,” lisped the Lord of Fenestrella with the malice that was of his nature. “You heard her say they are too good, and that she’ll remember it. You should be less ready to tell her all you see. He is a fool who helps to make a woman wise.” + 

The Marquis laughed to applaud his friend’s philosophy, and his glance approved him fawningly. + 

The young soldier considered them. + 

“Sirs, I will resume my search.” + 

When they had searched until night closed in upon the world, investigating every hedge and bush that might afford concealment, the captain came to think that either he had been at fault in concluding that the fugitive had sought shelter in the garden, or else the rogue had found some way out and was now beyond their reach. + 

He retired crestfallen, and the three gentlemen who had accompanied his search and who did not conceal their amusement at its failure went in to supper. + 

V + 

The Princess + 

At about the time that the young Lord of Montferrat was sitting down belatedly to table with his tutor and his gentleman-in-waiting, a very bedraggled and chilled Bellarion, who for two hours had been standing immersed to the chin in water, his head amid the branches of the alder-bush, came cautiously forth at last. He ventured no farther, however, than the shallow tongue of land behind the marble pavilion, ready at the first alarm to plunge back into his watery concealment. + 

There he lay, shivering in the warm night, and taking stock of his plight, an exercise which considerably diminished him in his self-confidence and self-esteem. + 

“Experience,” he had been wont to say⁠—being rather addicted, I gather, to the making of epigrammatic formulae⁠—“is the hornbook of fools, unnecessary for the practical purposes of life to the man of wit.” + 

It is possible that he was tempted to revise this dictum in the light of the events of that disastrous day, recognising that a little of the worldly experience he despised might have saved him most if not all of its disasters. If he admitted this without yet admitting the fallacy of his aphorism, it was only to reach a conclusion even more humiliating. He had strayed from lack of experience, therefore it followed, he told himself, that he was a fool. That is one of the dangers of reasoning by syllogism. + 

He had accepted the companionship of a man whose face pronounced him a scoundrel, and whose various actions in the course of the day confirmed the message of his face, and this for no better reason than that the man wore a Franciscan’s frock. If his sense did not apprise him that a Franciscan’s habit does not necessarily cover a Saint Francis, there was a well-known proverb⁠—cucullum non facit monachum⁠—which he might have remembered. Because sense and memory had alike failed him, he had lost his purse, he had lost the letter which was his passport for the long and arduous journey before him, he had narrowly escaped losing his liberty, and he would be lucky if he were quit of all this mischief without losing his life. The lesser evils of the ruin of a serviceable suit of clothes and the probability of taking a rheum as the result of his immersion went for the moment disregarded. + 

Next he considered the rashness, the senselessness, of his seeking sanctuary in this garden. Was worldly experience really necessary, he wondered, to teach a man that the refuge of which he does not know the exit may easily become a trap? Had he not excelled at the Grazie as a chess-player from his care and ability in pondering the moves that must follow the immediate one? Had he read⁠—amongst other works on the art of war which had ever held his mind in fascination⁠—the De Re Militari of Silvius Faustus to so little purpose that he could not remember one of its first axioms, to the effect that he is an imprudent leader who goes into action without making sure that his line of retreat is open? + 

By such questions as these did Bellarion chastise himself as he crouched shivering in the dark. Still lower did he crouch, making himself one with the earth itself, when presently a moon, like a golden slice of melon, emerged from behind the black bulk of the palace, and shed a ghostly radiance upon those gardens. He set himself then at last to seek a course by which he might extricate himself from this trap and from this city of Casale. + 

He was still far from any solution of that problem when a sound of voices recalled him to more immediate things. Two figures mounting the steps of the terrace had to him the appearance of two black human silhouettes that were being slowly pushed up out of the ground. Their outline defined them for women, even before he made out their voices to be feminine. He wondered would one of them be the gracious and beautiful lady who had given him sanctuary, a lady whose like hitherto he had seen only painted on canvas above altars and in mural frescoes, the existence of whose living earthly counterparts had been to him a matter of some subconscious doubt. + 

At the height of the bridge, so tremulously reflected in silver on the black water below, the ladies paused, speaking the while in subdued voices. Then they came down the nearer steps and vanished into the temple, whence presently one of them emerged upon that narrow, shallow promontory, calling softly, and very vaguely: + 

“Olà! Olà! Messer! Messer!” + 

He recognised the voice, and recognising it realised that its quality was individual and unforgettable. + 

To the Lady Valeria as she stood there, it seemed that a part of the promontory’s clay at her feet heaved itself up amorphously, writhed into human shape, and so resolved itself into the man she sought. She checked a startled outcry, as she understood the nature of this materialisation. + 

“You will be very wet, sir, and cold.” Her voice was gentle and solicitous, very different from that in which she had addressed her brother’s companions and the captain. + 

Bellarion was quite frank. “As wet as a drowned man, and very nearly as cold.” And he added: “I would I could be sure I shall not yet be hung up to dry.” + 

The lady laughed softly at his rueful humour. “Nay, now, we have brought the means to make you dry more comfortably. But it was very rash of you to have entered here without first making sure that you were not observed.” + 

“I was not observed, madonna. Else be sure I should not have entered.” + 

He caught in the gloom the sound of her breath indrawn with the hiss of sudden apprehension. “You were not observed? And yet⁠ ⁠… Oh, it is just as I was fearing.” And then, more briskly, and before he could reply, “But come,” she urged him. “We have brought fresh clothes for you. When you are dry you shall tell me all.” + 

Readily enough he allowed himself to be conducted within the single circular chamber of the marble pavilion, where Madonna Dionara, her lady, awaited. The place was faintly lighted by a lantern placed on a marble table. It contained besides this some chairs that were swathed in coarse sheets, and a long wooden coffer, carved and painted, in shape and size like a sarcophagus, from which another such sheet had just been swept. The three open spaces, between twin pillars facing towards the palace, were now closed by leather curtains. The circular marble floor was laid out as a dial, with the hours in Roman figures of carved brass sunk into the polished surface, a matter this which puzzled him. He was not to guess that this marble pavilion was a copy in miniature of a Roman temple of Apollo, and that in the centre of the domed roof there was a circular opening for the sun, through which its rays so entered that as the day progressed a time-telling shadow moved across the hours figured in their circle on the floor. + 

Overhead there was a confusion of poles and scaffolding and trailing dust-sheets, and in a corner an array of pails and buckets, and all the litter of suspended painters’ work. Dimly, on one of the walls, he could make out a fresco that was half painted, the other half in charcoal outline. + 

On the table, which was swathed like all the other furnishings, the lantern revealed a bundle of red garments lately loosed from a confining cloak of black. Into these he was bidden to change at once. Red, he was told, had been deliberately chosen because all that the captain seemed to know of him was that he had been dressed in green. So that not merely would his protectress render him dry and warm again; she would disguise him. The ladies meanwhile would keep watch in the garden immediately below. They had brought a lute. If one of them should sing to it, this would mean that she sounded the alarm, and he must hide in the coffer, taking with him everything that might betray his presence, including the lantern which he must extinguish. Flint and steel and tinder had not been forgotten, so that light might be rekindled when the danger was overpast. Her highness raised the lid of the coffer to reveal to him the mechanism of the snap lock. This was released, of course, by the key, which should then be withdrawn. Provided he did this, once he allowed the lid to close upon him, none would be able to open it from the outside; whilst from the inside it was an easy matter, even in the dark, to release the catch. Meanwhile the keyhole would provide him with sufficient air and at the same time permit him to judge by sounds of what was happening. The wet garments he removed were to be made into a bundle and dropped into the coffer, whence they would afterwards be taken and destroyed. Finally he was given ten minutes in which to make the change. + 

Abruptly he found himself alone, and so impressed by her commands that already his fingers were swiftly untrussing his points. He went briskly to work, first to strip himself, then to rub himself dry and restore his chilled circulation, for which purpose he heedlessly employed the black cloak in which the fresh garments had been bundled. Then he set about donning that scarlet raiment of fine quality and modish fashion, all the while lost in wonder of her graciousness and resource. She revealed herself, he reflected, as a woman fit to lead and to command, a woman with a methodical mind and a well-ordered intelligence which many a captain of men might envy. And she revealed herself, too, as intensely womanly, an angel of compassion. Although clearly a lady of great rank, she nevertheless went to so much pains and thought to save a wretched fugitive like himself, and this without pausing to ascertain if he were worthy of compassion. + 

As abruptly as she had left him did she now return, even as he was completing his hasty toilet. And she came alone, having left her lady with the lute on guard below. + 

He stood now before her a brave figure, despite his tumbled black locks and the fact that the red hose of fine cloth was a little short for his long shanks, and therefore a little cramping. But the kilted tunic became him well with its girdle of steel and leather which he was buckling even as she entered. + 

She swept forward to the table, and came straight to business. + 

“And now, sir, your message?” + 

His fingers stood arrested on the buckle, and his solemn dark eyes opened wide as they searched her pale face. + 

“Message?” quoth he slowly. + 

“Message, yes.” Her tone betrayed the least impatience. “What has happened? What has become of Ser Giuffredo? Why has he not been near me this fortnight? What did the Lord Barbaresco bid you tell me? Come, come, sir. You need not hesitate. Surely you know that I am the Princess Valeria of Montferrat?” + 

All that he understood of this was that he stood in a princely presence, before the august sister of the sovereign Marquis of Montferrat. Had he been reared in the world he might have been awestricken by the circumstances. But he knew princes and princesses only from books written by chroniclers and historians, who treat them familiarly enough. If anything about her commanded his respect, it was her slim grace and her rather elusive beauty, a beauty that is not merely of colour and of features, but of the soul and mind alive in these. + 

His hands fell limply away from the buckle, which he had made fast at length. His lively countenance looked almost foolish as dimly seen in the yellow light of the lantern. + 

“Madonna, I do not understand. I am no messenger. I⁠ ⁠…” + 

“You are no messenger?” Her tawny head was thrust forward, her dark eyes glowed. “Were you not sent to me? Answer, man! Were you not sent?” + 

“Not other than by an inscrutable Providence, which may desire to preserve me for better things than a rope.” + 

The whimsical note of the answer may have checked her stirring anger. There was a long pause in which she pondered him with eyes that were become unfathomable. Mechanically she loosed the long black cloak that covered her low-cut sheathing gown of sapphire blue. + 

“Why, then, did you come? Was it to spy⁠ ⁠… No, no. You are not that. A spy would have gone differently to work. What are you, then?” + 

“Just a poor scholar on his travels, studying life at first hand and a trifle more rapidly than he can digest it. As for how I came into your garden, let me tell you.” + 

And he told her with admirable succinctness the sorry tale of that day’s events. It drove the last vestige of wrath from her face, and drew the ghost of a smile to the corners of a mouth that could be as tender as imperious. Observing it, he realised that whilst she had given him sanctuary under a misapprehension, yet she was not likely to visit her obvious disappointment too harshly upon him. + 

“And I thought⁠ ⁠…” She broke off and trilled a little laugh, between mirth and bitterness. “It was a lucky chance for you, master fugitive.” She considered him again, and it may be that his stalwart young male beauty had a hand unconsciously in shaping her resolves concerning him. “What am I to do with you?” she asked him. + 

He answered simply and directly, speaking not as a poor nameless scholar to a highborn princess, but as equal to equal, as a young man to a young woman. + 

“If you are what your face tells me, madonna, you will let me profit by an error that entails no less for yourself beyond that of these garments, which, if you wish it⁠ ⁠…” + 

She waved the proposal aside before it was uttered. “Pooh, the garments. What are they?” She frowned thoughtfully. “But I named names to you.” + 

“Did you? I have forgotten them.” And in answer to the hard incredulity of her stare, he explained himself. “A good memory, madonna, lies as much in an ability to forget as in a capacity to remember. And I have an excellent memory. By the time I shall have stepped out of this garden I shall have no recollection that I was ever in it.” + 

Slowly she spoke after a pause. “If I were sure that I can trust you⁠ ⁠…” She left it there. + 

Bellarion smiled. “Unless you are certain that you can, you had better call the guard. But then, how could you be sure that in that case I should not recall the names you named, which are now forgotten?” + 

“Ah! You threaten!” + 

The sharp tone, the catch in her breath, the sudden movement of her hand to her breast showed him that his inference was right. + 

This lady was engaged in secret practices. And the inference itself displayed the swift activity of his wits; just as his answer displayed them. + 

“Nay, lady. I show you only that trust me you must, since if you mistrust me you can no more order my arrest than you can set me free.” + 

“My faith, sir, you are shrewd, for one who’s convent-bred.” + 

“There’s a deal of shrewdness, lady, to be learned in convents.” And then, whether the beauty and charm of her so wrought upon him as to breed in him the desire to serve her, or whether he merely offered a bargain, a return for value received and to be received, it is probable that he did not know himself. But he made his proposal. “If you would trust me, madonna, you might even use me, and so repay yourself.” + 

“Use you?” + 

“As a messenger. In the place of him whom you expected. That is, if you have messages to send, as I think you should have.” + 

“You think it?” + 

“From what you have said.” + 

“I said so little.” She was clearly suspicious. + 

“But I inferred so much. Too much, perhaps. Let me expose my reasoning.” The truth is he was a little vain of it. “You expected a messenger from one Lord Barbaresco. You left the garden-gate ajar to facilitate his entrance when he came, and you were on the watch for him, and alone. Your ladies, one of whom at least is in your confidence, were beguiling the gentlemen and keeping them in the lower garden, whilst you loitered watchful by the hedged enclosure. Hence I argue on your part anxiety and secrecy. You were anxious because no message had come for a fortnight, nor had Messer Giuffredo, the usual messenger been seen. Almost you may have feared that some evil had befallen Messer Giuffredo, if not the Lord Barbaresco, himself. Which shows that the secret practices of which these messages are the subject may themselves be dangerous. Do I read the signs fluently enough?” + 

There was little need for his question. Her face supplied the answer. + 

“Too fluently, I think. Too fluently for one who is no more than you represent yourself.” + 

“It is, madonna, that you are not accustomed to the exercise of pure reason. It is rare enough.” + 

“Pure reason!” Her scorn where his fatuity had expected wonder was like a searing iron. “And do you know, sir, what pure reason tells me?” + 

“I can believe anything, madonna,” he said, alluding to the tone she used with him. + 

“That you were sent to set a trap for me.” + 

He perceived exactly by what steps she had come to that conclusion. He smiled reassuringly, and shook his moist head. + 

“The reasoning is not pure enough. If I had been so sent, should I have been pursued and hunted? And should I not have come prepared with some trivial message, to assure you that I am the messenger you were so very ready to believe me?” + 

She was convinced. But still she hesitated. + 

“But why, concluding so much and so accurately, should you offer to serve me?” + 

“Say from gratitude to one who has saved perhaps my life.” + 

“But I did so under a misapprehension. That should compel no gratitude.” + 

“I like to think, madonna, that you would have shown me the same charity even if there had been no misapprehension. I am the more grateful for what you have done because I choose to believe that in any case you would have done it. Then there is this handsome suit to be paid for, and, lastly and chiefly, the desire to serve a lady in need of service, which I believe is not an altogether strange desire in a man of sensibility. It has happened aforetime.” + 

That was as near as he would go to the confession that she had beglamoured him. Since it was a state of mind that did not rest upon pure reason, it is one to which he would have been reluctant to confess even to himself. + 

She pondered him, and it seemed to him that her searching glance laid bare all that he was and all that he was likely to be. + 

“These are slight and unworldly reasons,” she said at last. + 

“I am possibly an unworldly fellow.” + 

“You must be, indeed, to propose knight-errantry.” + 

But her need, as he had already surmised and as he was later fully to understand, was great and urgent. It may almost have seemed to her, indeed, as if Providence had brought her this young man, not only for his own salvation, but for hers. + 

“The service may entail risk,” she warned him, “and a risk far greater than any you have run tonight.” + 

“Risk sweetens enterprise,” he answered, “and wit can conquer it.” + 

Her smile broadened, almost she laughed. “You have a high confidence in your wit, sir.” + 

“Whereas, you would say, the experience of the last four and twenty hours should make me humble. Its lesson, believe me, has not been lost. I am not again to be misled by appearances.” + 

“Well, here’s to test you, then.” And she gave him her message, which was after all a very cautious one, the betrayal of which could hardly harm her. He was to seek the Lord Barbaresco, of whom she told him nothing beyond the fact that the gentleman dwelt in a house behind the cathedral, which any townsman would point out to him. He was to inquire after his health, about which, he was to add, the absence of news was making her uneasy. As a credential to the Lord Barbaresco she gave him the broken half of a gold ducat. + 

“Tomorrow evening,” she concluded, “you will find the garden-gate ajar again at about the same hour, and I shall be waiting.” + 

VI + 

The Winds of Fate + 

You behold Messer Bellarion treading the giddy slope of high and mysterious adventure, fortuitously launched upon a course whose end he was very far from discerning, but which most certainly was not the University of Pavia, the pursuit of Greek studies, and the recovery of an unblemished faith. + 

Lorenzaccio da Trino has more to answer for than the acts of brigandage for which the law pursued him. + 

In the gloom of that September night, after the moon had set, Bellarion, in raiment which already might be taken to symbolise the altered aim and purpose of his life, whereof himself, poor straw upon the winds of Fate, he was as yet unconscious, slipped from a gateway that was no longer guarded and directed his steps towards the heart of the town. + 

Coming in the Cathedral Square upon a company of the watch, going the rounds with pikes and lanterns, he staggered a little in his gait and broke raucously into song to give himself the air of a belated, carefree reveller. Knowing no bawdy worldly songs proper to a man of his apparent circumstances and condition, he broke into a Gregorian chant, which he rendered in anything but the unisonous manner proper to that form of plainsong. The watch deeming him, as he computed that they would, an impudent parodist, warned him against disturbing the peace of the night, and asked who he was, whence he came, and whither he went. + 

Unprepared for these questions, he rose magnificently and rather incoherently to the occasion. + 

He knew that there was a house of Augustinian fathers in Casale. And boldly he stated that he had been supping there. Thus launched, his invention soared. The Prior’s brother was married to his sister, and he had borne messages to the Prior from that same brother who dwelt in Cigliano, and was, like himself, a subject of the Duke of Savoy. He was lodged with his cousin-german, the Lord Barbaresco, whose house, having arrived but that day in Casale, he was experiencing some difficulty in finding. + 

“Body of Bacchus! Is that the reason?” quoth the leader of the patrol to the infinite amusement of his men. + 

They were as convinced as he himself was appalled by the fluency of his lying. Perhaps from that sympathy which men in his supposed state so commonly command, perhaps from the hope of reward, they volunteered to escort him to his cousin’s dwelling. + 

To the narrow street behind the cathedral of which the Lord Barbaresco’s was the most imposing house, they now conducted him, and loudly they battered on his lordship’s iron-studded door, until from a window overhead a quavering voice desired to know who knocked. + 

“His lordship’s cousin returning home,” replied the officer of the watch. “Make haste to open.” + 

There was a mutter of voices in the dark overhead, and Bellarion awaited fearfully the repudiation that he knew must come. + 

“What cousin?” roared another, deeper voice. “I am expecting no cousin at this hour.” + 

“He is angry with me,” Bellarion explained. “I had promised to return to sup with him.” He threw back his head, called up into the night in a voice momentarily clear. “Although the hour is late, I pray you, cousin, do not leave me standing here. Admit me and all, all, shall be explained.” He stressed the verb, which for the Lord Barbaresco should have one meaning and for the too pertinacious watch another. And then he added certain mystic words to clinch the matter: “And bring a ducat to reward these good fellows. I have promised them a ducat, and have upon me only half a ducat. The half of a ducat,” he repeated, as if with drunken insistence. “And what is half a ducat? No more than a broken coin.” + 

The soldiers grinned at his drunken whimsicality. There was a long moment’s pause. Then the deep voice above said, “Wait!” and a casement slammed. + 

Soon came a rasping of bolts, and the heavy door swung inwards, revealing a stout man in a purple bedgown, who shaded a candle-flame with his hand. The light was thrown up into a red fleshly face that was boldly humorous, with a hooked nose and alert blue eyes under arched black brows. + 

Bellarion was quick to supply the cue. “Dear cousin, my excuses. I should have returned sooner. These good fellows have been most kind to me in this strange town.” + 

Standing a little in front of the unsuspecting members of the watch, he met the Lord Barbaresco’s searching glance by a grimace of warning. + 

“Give them the ducat for their pains, cousin, and let them go with God.” + 

His lordship came prepared, it seemed. + 

“I thank you, sir,” he said to the ancient, “for your care of my cousin, a stranger here.” And he dropped a gold coin into the readily projected palm. He stood aside, his hand upon the edge of the door. “Come you in, cousin.” + 

But once alone with his enforced visitor in the stone passage, dimly lighted by that single candle, his lordship’s manner changed. + 

“Who the devil are you, and what the devil do you seek?” + 

Bellarion showed his fine teeth in a broad smile, all sign of his intoxication vanished. “If you had not already answered those questions for yourself, you would neither have admitted me nor parted with your ducat, sir. I am what you were quick to suppose me. To the watch, I am your cousin, lodging with you on a visit to Casale. Lest you should repudiate me, I mentioned the half-ducat as a password.” + 

“It was resourceful of you,” Barbaresco grunted. “Who sent you?” + 

“Lord! The unnecessary questions that you ask! Why, the Lady Valeria, of course. Behold!” Under the eyes of Messer Barbaresco he flashed the broken half of a ducat. + 

His lordship took the golden fragment, and holding it near the candle-flame read the half of the date inscribed upon it, then returned it to Bellarion, inviting him at last to come above-stairs. + 

They went up, Barbaresco leading, to a long, low-ceilinged chamber of the mezzanine, the walls of which were hung with soiled and shabby tapestries, the floor of which had been unswept for weeks. His lordship lighted a cluster of candles in a leaden candle-branch, and their golden light further revealed the bareness of the place, its sparse and hard-worn furnishings heavy with dust. He drew an armchair to the table where writing-implements and scattered papers made an untidy litter. He waved his guest to a seat, and asked his name. + 

“Bellarion.” + 

“I never heard of the family.” + 

“I never heard of it myself. But that’s no matter. It’s a name that serves as well as another.” + 

“Ah!” Barbaresco accepted the name as assumed. He brushed the matter aside by a gesture. “Your message?” + 

“I bring no message. I come for one. Her highness is distracted by the lack of news from you, and by the fact that, although she has waited daily for a fortnight, in all that time Messer Giuffredo has not been near her.” + 

Bellarion was still far from surmising who this Messer Giuffredo might be or what. But he knew that mention of the name must confirm him in Barbaresco’s eyes, and perhaps lead to a discovery touching the identity of its owner. Because of the interest which the tawny-headed, sombre-eyed princess inspired in him, Bellarion was resolved to go beyond the precise extent of his mission as defined by her. + 

“Giuffre took fright. A weak-stomached knave. He fancied himself observed when last he came from the palace garden, and nothing would induce him to go again.” + 

So that whatever the intrigue, Bellarion now perceived, it was not amorous. Giuffredo clearly was a messenger and nothing more. Barbaresco himself, with his corpulence and his fifty years, or so, was incredible as a lover. + 

“Could not another have been sent in his place?” + 

“A messenger, my friend, is not readily found. Besides, nothing has transpired in the last two weeks of which it was urgently necessary to inform her highness.” + 

“Surely, it was urgently necessary to inform her highness of just that, so as to allay her natural anxiety?” + 

Leaning back in his chair, his plump hands, which were red like all the rest of him that was visible, grasping the ends of its arms, the gentleman of Casale pondered Bellarion gravely. + 

“You assume a deal of authority, young sir. Who and what are you to be so deeply in the confidence of her highness?” + 

Bellarion was prepared for the question. “I am an amanuensis of the palace, whose duties happen to have brought me closely into touch with the Princess.” + 

It was a bold lie, but one which he could support at least and at need by proofs of scholarliness. + 

Barbaresco nodded slowly. + 

“And your precise interest in her highness?” + 

Bellarion’s smile was a little deprecating. + 

“Now, what should you suppose it?” + 

“I am not supposing. I am asking.” + 

“Shall we say⁠ ⁠… the desire to serve her?” and Bellarion’s smile became at once vague and eloquent. This, taken in conjunction with his reticence, might seem to imply a romantic attachment. Barbaresco, however, translated it otherwise. + 

“You have ambitions! So. That is as it should be. Interest is ever the best spur to endeavour.” + 

And he, too, now smiled; a smile so oily and cynical that Bellarion set him down at once for a man without ideals, and mistrusted him from that moment. But he was strategist enough to conceal it, even to reflect something of that same cynicism in his own expression, so that Barbaresco, believing him a kindred spirit, should expand the more freely. And meanwhile he drew a bow at a venture. + 

“That which her highness looks to me to obtain is some explanation of your⁠ ⁠… inaction.” + 

He chose the most noncommittal word; but it roused the Lord Barbaresco almost to anger. + 

“Inaction!” He choked, and his plethoric countenance deepened to purple. To prove the injustice of the charge, he urged his past activities of which he thus rendered an account. Luring him thence, by skilful question, assertion, and contradiction, along the apparent path of argument upon matters of which he must assume the young man already fully informed, gradually Bellarion drew from him a full disclosure of what was afoot. He learnt also a good deal of history of which hitherto he had been in ignorance, and he increased considerably his not very elevating acquaintance with the ways of men. + 

It was an evil enough thing which the Princess Valeria had set herself to combat with the assistance of some dispossessed Guelphic gentlemen of Montferrat, the chief of whom was this Lord Barbaresco; and it magnified her in the eyes of Bellarion that she should evince the high courage necessary for the combat. + 

The extensive and powerful State of Montferrat was ruled at this time by the Marquis Theodore as regent during the minority of his nephew Gian Giacomo, son of that great Ottone who had been slain in the Neapolitan wars against the House of Brunswick. + 

These rulers of Montferrat, from Guglielmo, the great crusader, onwards, had ever been a warlike race, and Montferrat itself a school of arms. Nor had their proud belligerent nature been diluted by the blood of the Paleologi when on the death without male issue of Giovanni the Just a hundred years before, these dominions had passed to Theodore I, the younger son of Giovanni’s sister Violante, who was married to the Emperor of the East, Andronicus Comnenus Paleologus. + 

The present Regent Theodore, however, combined with the soldierly character proper to his house certain qualities of craft and intrigue rarely found in knightly natures. The fact is, the Marquis Theodore had been ill-schooled. He had been reared at the splendid court of his cousin the Duke of Milan, that Gian Galeazzo whom Francesco da Carrara had dubbed “the Great Viper,” in allusion as much to the man’s nature as to the colubrine emblem of his house. Theodore had observed and no doubt admired the subtle methods by which Gian Galeazzo went to work against those whom he would destroy. If he lacked the godlike power of rendering them mad, at least he possessed the devilish craft of rendering them by their own acts detestable, so that in the end it was their own kin or their own subjects who pulled them down. + 

Witness the manner in which he had so poisoned the mind of Alberto of Este as to goad him into the brutal murder of almost all his relatives. It was his aim thus to render him odious to his Ferrarese subjects that by his extinction Ferrara might ultimately come under the crown of Milan. Witness how he forged love letters, which he pretended had passed between the wife and the secretary of his dear friend Francesco Gonzaga, Lord of Mantua, whereby he infuriated Gonzaga into murdering that innocent lady⁠—who was Galeazzo’s own cousin and sister-in-law⁠—and tearing the secretary limb from limb upon the rack, so that Mantua rose against this human wolf who governed there. Witness all those other Lombard princes whom by fraud and misrepresentation, ever in the guise of a solicitous and loving friend, he lured into crimes which utterly discredited them with their subjects. This was an easier and less costly method of conquest than the equipping of great armies, and also it was more effective, because an invader who imposes himself by force can never hope to be so secure or esteemed as one whom the people have invited to become their ruler. + 

All this the Marquis Theodore had observed and marked, and he had seen Gian Galeazzo constantly widening his dominions by these means, ever increasing in power and consequence until in the end he certainly would have made of all Northern Italy a kingdom for his footstool had not the plague pursued him into the Castle of Melegnano, where he had shut himself up to avoid it, and there slain him in the year of grace 1402. + 

Trained in that school, the Marquis Theodore had observed and understood many things that would have remained hidden from an intelligence less acute. + 

He understood, for instance, that to rise by the pleasure of the people is the only way of reaching stable eminence, and that to accomplish this, noble qualities must be exhibited. For whilst men singly may be swayed by vicious appeals, collectively they will respond only to appeals of virtue. + 

Upon this elementary truth, according to Barbaresco, the Marquis Theodore was founding the dark policy which, from a merely temporary regent during the minority of his nephew, should render him the absolute sovereign of Montferrat. By the lavish display of public and private virtues, by affability towards great and humble, by endowments of beneficences, by the careful tempering of justice with mercy where this was publicly desired, he was rendering himself beloved and respected throughout the state. And step by step with this he was secretly labouring to procure contempt for his nephew, to whom in the ordinary course of events he would presently be compelled to relinquish the reins of government. + 

Nature, unfortunately, had rendered the boy weak. It was a weakness which training could mend as easily as increase. But to increase it were directed all the efforts which Theodore took care should be applied. Corsario the tutor, a Milanese, was a venal scoundrel, unhealthily ambitious. He kept the boy ignorant of all those arts that mature and grace the intellect, and confined instruction to matters calculated to corrupt his mind, his nature, and his morals. Castruccio, Lord of Fenestrella, the boy’s first gentleman-in-waiting, was a vicious and depraved Savoyard, who had gamed away his patrimony almost before he had entered upon the enjoyment of it. It was easy to perceive the purpose for which the Regent had made him the boy’s constant and intimate companion. + 

Here Bellarion, with that assumption of knowledge which had served to draw Barbaresco into explanations, ventured to interpose a doubt. “In that matter, I am persuaded that the Regent overreaches himself. The people know that he permits Castruccio to remain; and when they settle accounts with Castruccio they will also present a reckoning to the Regent.” + 

Barbaresco laughed the argument to scorn. + 

“Either you do not realise Theodore’s cunning, or you are insufficiently observant. Have not representations been made already to the Regent that Castruccio is no fit companion for the future Lord of Montferrat, or indeed for any boy? It merely enables Messer Theodore to parade his own paternal virtues, his gentleness of character, the boy’s wilfulness, and the fact that he is, after all, no more than Regent of Montferrat. He would dismiss, he protests, Messer Castruccio, but the Prince is so devoted and attached to him that he would never be forgiven. And, after all, is that not true?” + 

“Aye, I suppose it is,” Bellarion confessed. + 

Barbaresco was impatient of his dullness. “Of course it is. This Castruccio has known how to conquer the boy’s love and wonder, by pretended qualities that fire youth’s imagination. The whole world could hardly have yielded a better tool for the Regent or a worse companion for the little Prince.” + 

Thus were the aims of the Marquis Theodore revealed to Bellarion, and the justifications for the movement that was afoot to thwart him. Of this movement for the salvation of her brother, the Princess Valeria was the heart and Barbaresco the brain. Its object was to overthrow the Marquis Theodore and place the government in the hands of a council of regency during the remainder of Gian Giacomo’s minority. Of this council Barbaresco assumed that he would be the president. + 

Sorrowfully Bellarion expressed a doubt. + 

“The mischief is that the Marquis Theodore is already so well established in the respect and affection of the people.” + 

Barbaresco reared his head and threw out his chest. “Heaven will befriend a cause so righteous.” + 

“My doubt concerns not the supernatural, but the natural means at our command.” + 

It was a sobering reminder. Barbaresco left the transcendental and attempted to be practical. Also a subtle change was observable in his manner. He was no longer glibly frank. He became reserved and vague. They were going to work, he said, by laying bare the Regent’s true policy. Already they had at least a dozen nobles on their side, and these were labouring to diffuse the truth. Once it were sufficiently diffused the rest would follow as inevitably as water runs downhill. + 

And this assurance was all the message that Bellarion was invited to take back to the Princess. But Bellarion was determined to probe deeper. + 

“That, sir, adds nothing to what the Lady Valeria already knows. It cannot allay the anxiety in which she waits. She requires something more definite.” + 

Barbaresco was annoyed. Her highness should learn patience, and should learn to trust them. But Bellarion was so calmly insistent that at last Barbaresco angrily promised to summon his chief associates on the morrow, so that Bellarion might seek from them the further details he desired on the Lady Valeria’s behalf. + 

Content, Bellarion begged a bed for the night, and was conducted to a mean, poverty-stricken chamber in that great empty house. On a hard and unclean couch he lay pondering the sad story of a wicked regent, a foolish boy, and a greathearted lady, who, too finely reckless to count the cost of the ill-founded if noble enterprise to which she gave her countenance, would probably end by destroying herself together with her empty brother. + 

VII + 

Service + 

Stimulated by the insistence of this apparently accredited and energetic representative of the Princess, Messer Barbaresco assembled in his house in the forenoon of the following day a half-dozen gentlemen who were engaged with him upon that crackbrained conspiracy against the Regent of Montferrat. Four of these, including Count Enzo Spigno, were men who had been exiled because of Guelphic profession, and who had returned by stealth at Barbaresco’s summons. + 

They talked a deal, as such folk will; but on the subject of real means by which they hoped to prevail they were so vague that Bellarion, boldly asserting himself, set about provoking revelation. + 

“Sirs, all this leads us nowhere. What, indeed, am I to convey to her highness? Just that here in Casale at my Lord Barbaresco’s house some gentlemen of Montferrat hold assemblies to discuss her brother’s wrongs? Is that all?” + 

They gaped and frowned at him, and they exchanged dark glances among themselves, as if each interrogated his neighbour. It was Barbaresco at last who answered, and with some heat. + 

“You try my patience, sir. Did I not know you accredited by her highness I would not brook these hectoring airs⁠ ⁠…” + 

“If I were not so accredited, there would be no airs to brook.” Thus he confirmed the impression of one deeper than they in the confidence of the Lady Valeria. + 

“But this is a sudden impatience on the Lady Valeria’s part!” said one. + 

“It is not the impatience that is sudden. But the expression of it. I am telling you things that may not be written. Your last messenger, Giuffredo, was not sufficiently in her confidence. How should she have opened her mind to him? Whilst you, sirs, are all too cautious to approach her yourselves, lest in a subsequent miscarriage of your aims there should be evidence to make you suffer with her.” + 

The first part of that assertion he had from themselves; the second was an inference, boldly expressed to search their intentions. And because not one of them denied it, he knew what to think⁠—knew that their aims amounted to more, indeed, than they were pretending. + 

In silence they looked at him as he stood there in a shaft of morning sunlight that had struggled through the curtain of dust and grime on the blurred glass of the mullioned window. And then at last, Count Spigno, a lean, tough, swarthy gentleman, whose expressions had already revealed him the bitterest enemy there of the Marquis Theodore, loosed a short laugh. + 

“By the Host! He’s in the right.” He swung to Bellarion. “Sir, we should deserve the scorn you do not attempt to dissemble if our plans went no farther than⁠ ⁠…” + 

The voices of his fellow conspirators were raised in warning. But he brushed them contemptuously aside, a bold rash man. + 

“A choicely posted arbalester will⁠ ⁠…” + 

He got no further. This time his utterance was smothered by their anger and alarm. Barbaresco and another laid rough hands upon him, and through the general din rang the opprobrious epithets they bestowed upon him, of which “fool” and “madman” were the least. Amongst them they cowed him, and when it was done they turned again to Bellarion who had not stirred from where he stood, maintaining a frown of pretended perplexity between his level black brows. + 

It was Barbaresco, oily and crafty, who sought to dispel, to deviate any assumption Bellarion might have formed. + 

“Do not heed his words, sir. He is forever urging rash courses. He, too, is impatient. And impatience is a dangerous mood to bring to such matters as these.” + 

Bellarion was not deceived. They would have him believe that Count Spigno had intended no more than to urge a course, whereas what he perceived was that the Count had been about to disclose the course already determined, and had disclosed enough to make a guess of the remainder easy. No less did he perceive that to betray his apprehension of this fact might be never to leave that house alive. He could read it in their glances, as they waited to learn from his answer how much he took for granted. + 

Therefore he used a deep dissimulation. He shrugged ill-humouredly. + 

“Yet patience, sirs, can be exceeded until from a virtue it becomes a vice. I have more respect for an advocate of rash courses”⁠—and he inclined his head slightly to Count Spigno⁠—“than for those who practise an excessive caution whilst time is slipping by.” + 

“That, sir,” Barbaresco rebuked him, “is because you are young. With age, if you are spared, you will come to know better.” + 

“Meanwhile,” said Bellarion, completely to reassure them, “I see plainly enough that your message to her highness is scarce worth carrying.” And he flung himself down into his chair with simulated petulance. + 

The conference came to an end soon afterwards, and the conspirators went their ways again singly. Shortly after the departure of the last of them, Bellarion took his own, promising that he would return that night to Messer Barbaresco’s house to inform him of anything her highness might desire him to convey. One last question he asked his host at parting. + 

“The pavilion in the palace gardens is being painted. Can you say by whom?” + 

Barbaresco’s eyes showed that he found the question odd. But he answered that most probably one Gobbo, whose shop was in the Via del Cane, would be entrusted with the work. + 

Into that shop of Gobbo’s, found by inquiry, Bellarion penetrated an hour later. Old Gobbo himself, amid the untidy litter of the place, was engaged in painting an outrageous scarlet angel against a star-flecked background of cobalt blue. Bellarion’s first question ascertained that the painting of the pavilion was indeed in Gobbo’s hands. + 

“My two lads are engaged upon it now, my lord.” + 

Bellarion winced at the distinguished form of address, which took him by surprise until he remembered his scarlet suit with its imposing girdle and gold-hilted dagger. + 

“The work progresses all too slowly,” said he sharply. + 

“My lord! My lord!” The old man was flung into agitation. “It is a beautiful fresco, and⁠ ⁠…” + 

“They require assistance, those lads of yours.” + 

“Assistance!” The old man flung his arms to heaven. “Where shall I find assistants with the skill?” + 

“Here,” said Bellarion, and tapped his breast with his forefinger. + 

Amazed, Gobbo considered his visitor more searchingly. Bellarion leaned nearer, and lowered his voice to a tone of confidence. + 

“I’ll be frank with you, Ser Gobbo. There is a lady of the palace, a lady of her highness⁠ ⁠…” He completed his sentence, by roguishly closing an eye. + 

Gobbo’s lean brown old face cracked across in a smile, as becomes an old artist who finds himself face to face with romance. + 

“You understand, I see,” said Bellarion, smiling in his turn. “It is important that I should have a word with this lady. There are grave matters⁠ ⁠… I’ll not weary you with these and my own sad story. Perform a charitable act to your own profit.” + 

But Gobbo’s face had grown serious. “If it were discovered⁠ ⁠…” he was beginning. + 

“It shall not be. That I promise you full confidently. And to compensate you⁠ ⁠… five ducats.” + 

“Five ducats!” It was a great sum, and confirmed Master Gobbo in the impression made by Bellarion’s appearance, dress, and manner, that here he dealt with a great lord. “For five ducats⁠ ⁠…” He broke off, and scratched his head. + 

Bellarion perceived that he must not be given time for thought. + 

“Come, my friend, lend me the clothes for the part and a smock such as is proper, and do you keep these garments of mine in pledge for my safe return and for the five ducats that shall then be yours.” + 

He knew how to be irresistible, and he was fortunate in his present victim. He went off a half-hour or so later in the garb of his suddenly assumed profession and bearing a note from Gobbo to his sons. + 

Late in the afternoon Bellarion lounged in the pavilion in the palace garden to which his pretence had gained him easy admission. He mixed some colours for the two young artists under their direction. But beyond that he did nothing save wait for sunset when the light would fail and the two depart. Himself, though not without the exertion of considerable persuasions based upon a display of his amorous intentions, he remained behind to clear things up. + 

Thus it happened that, as the Lady Dionara was walking by the lake, she heard herself addressed from the bridge that led to the pavilion. + 

“Madonna! Gracious madonna!” + 

She turned to behold a tall young man with tumbled black hair and a smear of paint across his face in a smock that was daubed with every colour of the rainbow, waving a long-handled brush in a gesture towards the temple. + 

“Would not her highness,” he was asking, “graciously condescend to view the progress of the frescoes.” + 

The Lady Dionara looked down her nose at this greatly presumptuous fellow until he added softly: “And receive news at the same time of the young man she befriended yesterday?” That changed her expression, so swift and ludicrously that Bellarion was moved to silent laughter. + 

To view those frescoes came the Lady Valeria alone, leaving Monna Dionara to loiter on the bridge. Within the temple her highness found the bedaubed young painter dangling his legs from a scaffold and flourishing a brush in one hand, a mahlstick in the other. She looked at him in waiting silence. He did not try her patience. + 

“Madonna, you do not recognise me.” With the sleeve of his smock he wiped the daub of paint from across his features. But already his voice had made him known. + 

“Messer Bellarion! Is it yourself?” + 

“Myself.” He came to the ground. “To command.” + 

“But⁠ ⁠… why this? Why thus?” Her eyes were wide, she was a little breathless. + 

“I have had a busy day, madonna, and a busy night, and I have more to report than may hurriedly be muttered behind a hedge.” + 

“You bring messages?” + 

“The message amounts to nothing. It is only to say that Messer Giuffredo, fancying himself followed and watched on the last occasion, is not to be induced to come again. And in the meanwhile nothing has happened of which it was worth while to inform you. Messer Barbaresco desires me further to say that everything progresses satisfactorily, which I interpret to mean that no progress whatever is being made.” + 

“You interpret⁠ ⁠…” + 

“And I venture to add, having been entertained at length, not only by Messer Barbaresco, but also by the other out-at-elbow nobles in this foolish venture, that it never will progress in the sense you wish, nor to any end but disaster.” + 

He saw the scarlet flame of indignation overspread her face, he saw the anger kindle in her great dark eyes, and he waited calmly for the explosion. But the Lady Valeria was not explosive. Her rebuke was cold. + 

“Sir, you presume upon a messenger’s office. You meddle in affairs that are not your concern.” + 

“Do you thank God for it,” said Bellarion, unabashed. “It is time someone gave these things their proper names so as to remove all misconception. Do you know whither Barbaresco and these other fools are thrusting you, madonna? Straight into the hands of the strangler.” + 

Having conquered her anger once, she was not easily to be betrayed into it again. + 

“If that is all you have to tell me, sir, I will leave you. I’ll not remain to hear my friends and peers maligned by a base knave to whom I speak by merest accident.” + 

“Not accident, madonna.” His tone was impressive. “A base knave I may be. But base by birth alone. These others whom you trust and call your peers are base by nature. Ah, wait! It was no accident that brought me!” he cried, and this with a sincerity from which none could have suspected the violence he did to his beliefs. “Ask yourself why I should come again to do more than is required of me, at some risk to myself? What are your affairs, or the affairs of the State of Montferrat, to me? You know what I am and what my aims. Why, then, should I tarry here? Because I cannot help myself. Because the will of Heaven has imposed itself upon me.” + 

His great earnestness, his very vehemence, which seemed to invest his simple utterances with a tone of inspiration, impressed her despite herself, as he intended that they should. Nor did she deceive him when she dissembled this in light derision. + 

“An archangel in a painter’s smock!” + 

“By Saint Hilary, that is nearer the truth than you suppose it.” + 

She smiled, yet not entirely without sourness. “You do not lack a good opinion of yourself.” + 

“You may come to share it when I’ve said all that’s in my mind. I have told you, madonna, whither these crackbrained adventurers are thrusting you, so that they may advance themselves. Do you know the true import of the conspiracy? Do you know what they plan, these fools? The murder of the Marquis Theodore.” + 

She stared at him round-eyed, afraid. “Murder?” she said in a voice of horror. + 

He smiled darkly. “They had not told you, eh? I knew they dared not. Yet so indiscreet and rash are they that they betrayed it to me⁠—to me of whom they know nothing save that I carried as an earnest of my good faith your broken half-ducat. What if I were just a scoundrel who would sell to the Marquis Theodore a piece of information for which he would no doubt pay handsomely? Do you still think that it was accident brought me to interfere in your concerns?” + 

“I can’t believe you! I can’t!” and again she breathed, aghast, that horrid word: “Murder!” + 

“If they succeeded,” said Bellarion coldly, “all would be well. Your uncle would have no more than his deserts, and you and your brother would be rid of an evil incubus. The notion does not shock me at all. What shocks me is that I see no chance of success for a plot conducted by such men with such inadequate resources. By joining them you can but advance the Regent’s aims, which you believe to be the destruction of your brother. Let the attempt be made, and fail, or even let evidence be forthcoming of the conspiracy’s existence and true purpose, and your brother is at the Regent’s mercy. The people themselves might demand his outlawry or even his death for an attempt upon the life of a prince who has known how to make himself beloved.” + 

“But my brother is not in this,” she protested. “He knows nothing of it.” + 

Bellarion smiled compassionately. “Cui bono fuerit? That is the first question which the law will ask. Be warned, madonna! Dissociate yourself from these men while it is time or you may enable the Regent at a single stride to reach his ultimate ambition.” + 

The pallor of her face, the heave of her breast, were witnesses to her agitation. “You would frighten me if I did not know how false is your main assumption: that they plot murder. They would never dare to do this thing without my sanction, and this they have never sought.” + 

“Because they intend to confront you with an accomplished fact. Oh, you may believe me, madonna. In the last twenty-four hours and chiefly from these men I have learnt much of the history of Montferrat. And I have learnt a deal of their own histories too. There is not one amongst them who is not reduced in circumstances, whose state has not been diminished by lack of fortune or lack of worth.” + 

But for this she had an answer, and she delivered it with a slow, wistful smile. + 

“You talk, sir, as if you contained all knowledge, and yet you have not learnt that the fortunate desire no change, but labour to uphold the state whence their prosperity is derived. Is it surprising, then, that I depend upon the unfortunate?” + 

“Say also the venal, those greedy of power and of possessions, whose only spur is interest; desperate gamblers who set their heads upon the board and your own and your brother’s head with theirs. Almost they divided among themselves in their talk the offices of State. Barbaresco promised me that the ambition he perceived in me should be fully gratified. He assumed that I, too, had no aim but self-aggrandisement, simply because he could assume no other reason why a man should expose himself to risks. That told me all of him that I required to know.” + 

“Barbaresco is poor,” she answered. “He has suffered wrongs. Once, in my father’s time he was almost the greatest man in the State. My uncle has stripped him of his honours and almost of his possessions.” + 

“That is the best thing I have heard of the Marquis Theodore yet.” + 

She did not heed him, but went on: “Can I desert him now? Can I⁠ ⁠…” She checked and stiffened, seeming to grow taller. “What am I saying? What am I thinking?” She laughed, and there was scorn of self in her laugh. “What arts do you employ, you, an unknown man, a self-confessed starveling student, base and nameless, that upon no better warrant than your word I should even ask such a question?” + 

“What arts?” said he, and smiled in his turn, though without scorn. “The art of pure reason based on truth. It is not to be resisted.” + 

“Not if based on truth. But yours is based on prejudice.” + 

“Is it prejudice that they are plotting murder?” + 

“They have been misled by their devotion⁠ ⁠…” + 

“By their cupidity, madonna.” + 

“I will not suffer you to say that.” Anger flared up again in her, loyal anger on behalf of those she deemed her only friends in her great need. She checked it instantly, “Sir, I perceive your interest, and I am grateful. If you would still do me a service, go, tell Messer Barbaresco from me that this plot of assassination must go no further. Impose it upon him as my absolute command. Tell him that I must be obeyed and that, rather than be a party to such an act, I would disclose the intention to the Marquis Theodore.” + 

“That is something, madonna. But if when you have slept upon it⁠ ⁠…” + 

She interrupted him. “Upon whatever course I may determine I shall find means to convey the same to my Lord Barbaresco. There will not be the need to trouble you again. For what you have done, sir, I shall remain grateful. So, go with God, Messer Bellarion.” + 

She was turning away when he arrested her. + 

“It is a little personal matter this. I am in need of five ducats.” + 

He saw the momentary frown, chased away by the beginnings of a smile. + 

“You are consistent in that you misunderstand me, though I have once reminded you that if I needed money for myself I could sell my information to the Regent. The five ducats are for Gobbo who lent me this smock and these tools of my pretended trade.” And he told her the exact circumstances. + 

She considered him more gently. “You do not lack resource, sir?” + 

“It goes with intelligence, madonna,” he reminded her as an argument in favour of what he said. But she ignored it. + 

“And I am sorry that I⁠ ⁠… You shall have ten ducats, unless your pride is above⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Do you see pride in me?” + 

She looked him over with a certain haughty amusement. “A monstrous pride, an overweening vanity in your acuteness.” + 

“I’ll take ten ducats to convince you of my humility. I may yet need the other five in the service of your highness.” + 

“That service, sir, is at an end, or will be when you have conveyed my message to the Lord Barbaresco.” + 

Bellarion accepted his dismissal in the settled conviction that her highness was mistaken and would presently be glad to admit it. + 

She was right, you see, touching that vanity of his. + 

VIII + 

Stalemate + 

Bellarion and Barbaresco sat at supper, waited upon by an untidy and unclean old man who afforded all the service of that decayed establishment. The fare was frugal, more frugal far than the Convent of Cigliano had afforded out of Lent, and the wine was thin and sharp. + 

When the repast was done and the old servant, having lighted candles, had retired, Bellarion startled his host by the portentous gravity of his tone. + 

“My lord, you and I must talk. I told you that her highness sends no answer to your message, which is the truth, and all that you could expect, since there was no message and consequently could be no answer. I did not tell you, however, that she sends you a message which is in some sense an answer to certain suspicions that I voiced to her.” + 

Barbaresco’s mouth fell open, and the stare of his blue eyes grew fixed. Clearly he was startled, and clearly paused to command himself before asking: + 

“Why did you not tell me this before?” + 

“I preferred to wait so as to make sure of not going supperless. It may, of course, offend you that I should have communicated my suspicions to her highness. But the poor lady was so downcast by your inaction, that to cheer her I ventured the opinion that you are perhaps not quite so aimless as you wish to appear.” + 

Whatever his convent education may have done for him, it does not seem⁠—as you will long since have gathered⁠—that it had inculcated a strict regard for exactitude. Dissimulation, I fear, was bred in the bones of him; although he would have answered any such charge by informing you that Plato had taught him to distinguish between the lie on the lips and the lie in the heart. + 

“Oh, but proceed! The opinion?” Barbaresco fiercely challenged him. + 

“You’ll remember what Count Spigno said before you others checked him. The arbalester⁠ ⁠… You remember.” Bellarion appeared to falter a little under the glare of those blue eyes and the fierce set of that heavy jaw. “So I told her highness, to raise her drooping spirits, that one of these fine days her friends in Casale might cut the Gordian knot with a crossbow shaft.” + 

Barbaresco suggested by his attitude a mastiff crouching for a spring. + 

“Ah!” he commented. “And she said?” + 

“The very contrary of what I expected. Where I looked for elation, I found only distress. It was in vain I pleaded with her that thus a consummation would speedily be reached; that if such a course had not yet been determined, it was precisely the course that I should advocate.” + 

“Oh! You pleaded that! And she?” + 

“She bade me tell you that if such a thing were indeed in your minds, you must dismiss it. That she would be no party to it. That sooner she would herself denounce the intention to the Marquis Theodore.” + 

“Body of God!” Barbaresco came to his feet, his great face purple, the veins of his temples standing forth like cords. Whilst appearing unmoved, Bellarion braced his muscles for action. + 

The attack came. But only in words. Barbaresco heaped horrible and obscene abuse upon Bellarion’s head. “You infamous fool! You triple ass! You chattering ape!” With these, amongst other terms, the young man found himself bombarded. “Get you back to her, and tell her, you numskulled baboon, that there was never any such intention.” + 

“But was there not?” Bellarion cried with almost shrill ingenuousness of tone. “Yet Count Spigno⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Devil take Count Spigno, fool. Heed me. Carry my message to her highness.” + 

“I carry no lies,” said Bellarion firmly, and rose with great dignity. + 

“Lies!” gurgled Barbaresco. + 

“Lies,” Bellarion insisted. “Let us have done with them. To her highness I expressed as a suspicion what in my mind was a clear conviction. The words Count Spigno used, and your anxiety to silence him, could leave no doubt in any man of wit, and I am that, I hope, my lord. If you will have this message carried, you will first show me the ends you serve by its falsehood, and let me, who am in this thing as deep as any, be the judge of whether it is justified.” + 

Before this firmness the wrath went out of Barbaresco. Weakly he wrung his hands a moment, then sank sagging into his chair. + 

“If the others, if Cavalcanti or Casella, had known how much you had understood, you would never have left this house alive, lest you should do precisely what you have done.” + 

“But if it is on her behalf⁠—hers and her brother’s⁠—that you plan this thing, why should you not take her feeling first? What else is right or fair?” + 

“Her feeling?” Barbaresco sneered, and Bellarion understood that the sneer was for himself. “God deliver me from the weariness of reasoning with a fool. Our bolt would have been shot, and none could have guessed the hands that loosed it. Now you have made it known, and you need to be told what will happen if we were mad enough to go through with it. Why, the Princess Valeria would be our instant accuser. She would come forth at once and denounce us. That is the spirit of her; wilful, headstrong, and mawkish. And I am a fool to bid you go back to her and persuade her that you were mistaken. When the blow fell, she would see that what you had first told her was the truth, and our heads would pay.” + 

He set his elbows on the table, took his head in his hands, and fetched a groan from his great bulk. “The ruin you have wrought! God! The ruin!” + 

“Ruin?” quoth Bellarion. + 

“Of all our hopes,” Barbaresco explained in petulance. + 

“Can’t you see it? Can you understand nothing for yourself, animal, save the things you were better for not understanding? And can’t you see that you have ruined yourself with us? With your face and shape and already close in the Lady Valeria’s confidence as you are, there are no heights in the State to which you might not have climbed.” + 

“I had not thought of it,” said Bellarion, sighing. + 

“No, nor of me, nor of any of us. Of me!” The man’s grief became passionate. “At last I might have sloughed this beggary in which I live. And now⁠ ⁠…” He banged the table in his sudden rage, and got to his feet again. “That is what you have done. That is what you have wrecked by your silly babbling.” + 

“But surely, sir, by other means⁠ ⁠…” + 

“There are no other means. Leastways, no other means at our command. Have we the money to levy troops? Oh, why do I waste my breath upon you? You’ll tell the others tomorrow what you’ve done, and they shall tell you what they think of it.” + 

It was a course that had its perils. But if once in the stillness of the night Bellarion’s shrewd wits counselled him to rise, dress, and begone, he stilled the coward counsel. It remained to be seen whether the other conspirators would be as easily intimidated as Barbaresco. To ascertain this, Bellarion determined to remain. The Lady Valeria’s need of him was not yet done, he thought, though why the Lady Valeria’s affairs should be the cause of his exposing himself to the chances of a blade between the ribs was perhaps more than he could satisfactorily have explained. + 

That the danger was very far from imaginary the next morning’s conference showed him. Scarcely had the plotters realised the nature of Bellarion’s activities than they were clamouring for his blood. Casella, the exile, breathing fire and slaughter, would have sprung upon him with dagger drawn, had not Barbaresco bodily interposed. + 

“Not in my house!” he roared. “Not in my house!” his only concern being the matter of his own incrimination. + 

“Nor anywhere, unless you are bent on suicide,” Bellarion calmly warned them. He moved from behind Barbaresco, to confront them. “You are forgetting that in my murder the Lady Valeria will see your answer. She will denounce you, sirs, not only for this, but for the intended murder of the Regent. Slay me, and you just as surely slay yourselves.” He permitted himself to smile as he looked upon their stricken faces. “It’s an interesting situation, known in chess as a stalemate.” + 

In their baffled fury they turned upon Count Spigno, whose indiscretion had created this situation. Enzo Spigno, sitting there with a sneer on his white face, let the storm rage. When at last it abated, he expressed himself. + 

“Rather should you thank me for having tested the ground before we stand on it. For the rest, it is as I expected. It is an ill thing to be associated with a woman in these matters.” + 

“We did not bring her in,” said Barbaresco. “It was she who appealed to me for assistance.” + 

“And now that we are ready to afford it her,” said Casella, “she discovers that it is not of the sort she wishes. I say it is not hers to choose. Hopes have been raised in us, and we have laboured to fulfil them.” + 

How they all harped on that, thought Bellarion. How concerned was each with the profit that he hoped to wrest for himself, how enraged to see himself cheated of this profit. The Lady Valeria, the State, the boy who was being corrupted that he might be destroyed, these things were nothing to these men. Not once did he hear them mentioned now in the futile disorderly debate that followed, whilst he sat a little apart and almost forgotten. + 

At last it was Spigno, this Spigno whom they dubbed a fool⁠—but who, after all, had more wit than all of them together⁠—who discovered and made the countermove. + 

“You there, Master Bellarion!” he called. “Here is what you are to tell your lady in answer to her threat: We who have set our hands to this task of ridding the State of the Regent’s thraldom will not draw back. We go forward with this thing as seems best to us, and we are not to be daunted by threats. Make it clear to this arrogant lady that she cannot betray us without at the same time betraying herself; that whatever fate she invokes upon us will certainly overtake her as well.” + 

“It may be that she has already perceived and weighed that danger,” said Bellarion. + 

“Aye, as a danger; but perhaps not as a certainty. And tell her also that she as certainly dooms her brother. Make her understand that it is not so easy to play with the souls of men as she supposes, and that here she has evoked forces which it is not within her power to lay again.” He turned to his associates. “Be sure that when she perceives precisely where she stands, she will cease to trouble us with her qualms either now or when the thing is done.” + 

Bellarion had mockingly pronounced the situation interesting when by a shrewd presentment of it he had given pause to the murderous rage of the conspirators. Considering it later that day as he took the air along the river-brink, he was forced to confess it more disturbingly interesting even than he had shown it to be. + 

He had not been blind to that weakness in the Lady Valeria’s position. But he had been foolishly complacent, like the skilful chess-player who, perceiving a strong move possible to his opponent, takes it for granted that the opponent himself will not perceive it. + 

It seemed to him that nothing remained but to resume his interrupted pilgrimage to Pavia, leaving the State of Montferrat and the Lady Valeria to settle their own affairs. But in that case, her own ruin must inevitably follow, precipitated by the action of those ruffians with whom she was allied, whether that action succeeded or failed. + 

Then he asked himself what to him were the affairs of Montferrat and its princess, that he should risk his life upon them. + 

He fetched a sigh. The Abbot had been right. There is no peace in this world outside a convent wall. Certainly there was no peace in Montferrat. Let him shake the dust of that place of unrest from his feet, and push on towards Pavia and the study of Greek. + 

And so, by olive grove and vineyard, he wandered on, assuring himself that it was towards Pavia that he now went, and repeating to himself that he would reach the Sesia before nightfall and seek shelter in some hamlet thereabouts. + 

Yet dusk saw him reentering Casale by the Lombard Gate which faces eastwards. And this because he realised that the service he had shouldered was a burden not so lightly to be cast aside: if he forsook her now, the vision of her tawny head and wistful eyes would go with him to distract him with reproach. + 

IX + 

The Marquis Theodore + 

The High and Mighty Marquis Theodore Paleologo, Regent of Montferrat, gave audience as was his gracious custom each Saturday to all who sought it, and received petitions from all who proffered them. + 

A fine man, this Marquis Theodore, standing fully six feet tall, of a good shape and soldierly carriage, despite his fifty years. His countenance was amiable and open with boldly chiselled features and healthily tanned skin. Affable of manner, accessible of person, he nowise suggested the schemer. The privilege of audience which he granted so freely was never abused, so that on the Saturday of this week with which we are dealing the attendance in the audience chamber was as usual of modest proportions. His highness came, attended by his Chancellor and his Captain of Justice, and followed by two secretaries; he made a leisurely progress through the chamber, pausing at every other step to receive this one, or to say a word to that one; and at the end of an hour departed again, one of his secretaries bearing away the single petition that had been proffered, and this by a tall, dark-haired young man who was vividly dressed in scarlet. + 

Within five minutes of the Regent’s withdrawal, that same secretary returned in quest of the tall young man in red. + 

“Are you named Cane, sir?” + 

The tall young man bowed acknowledgment, and was ushered into a small, pleasant chamber, whose windows overlooked the gardens with which Bellarion had already made acquaintance. The secretary closed the door, and Bellarion found himself under the scrutiny of a pair of close-set pale eyes whose glance was crafty and penetrating. Cross-legged, the parti-coloured hose revealed by the fall of the rich gown of mulberry velvet, the Regent sat in a high-backed chair of leather wrought with stags’ heads in red and gold, his left elbow resting upon a carved writing-pulpit. + 

Between hands that were long and fine, he held a parchment cylinder, in which Bellarion recognised the pretended petition he had proffered. + 

“Who are you, sir?” The voice was calm and level; the voice of a man who does not permit his accents to advertise his thoughts. + 

“My name is Bellarion Cane. I am the adoptive son of Bonifacio Cane, Count of Biandrate.” + 

Since he had found it necessary for his present purposes to adopt a father, Bellarion had thought it best to adopt one whose name must carry weight and at need afford protection. Therefore he had conferred this honour of paternity upon that great soldier, Facino Cane, who was ducal governor of Milan. + 

There was a flash of surprise from the eyes that conned him. + 

“You are Facino’s son! You come from Milan, then?” + 

“No, my lord. From the Augustinian Convent at Cigliano, where my adoptive father left me some years ago whilst he was still in the service of Montferrat. It was hoped that I might take the habit. But a restlessness of spirit has urged me to prefer the world.” Thus he married pure truth to the single falsehood he had used, the extent of which was to clothe the obscure soldier who had befriended him with the identity of the famous soldier he had named. + 

“But why the world of Montferrat?” + 

“Chance determined that. I bore letters from my abbot to help me on my way. It was thus I made the acquaintance of the Lord Barbaresco, and his lordship becoming interested in me, and no doubt requiring me for certain services, desired me to remain. He urged that here was a path already open to my ambition, which if steadily pursued might lead to eminence.” + 

There was no falsehood in the statement. It was merely truth untruly told, truth unassailable under test, yet calculated to convey a false impression. + 

A thin smile parted the Prince’s shaven lips. “And when you had learnt sufficient, you found that a surer path to advancement might lie in the betrayal of these poor conspirators?” + 

“That, highness, is to set the unworthiest interpretation upon my motives.” Bellarion made a certain show in his tone and manner of offended dignity, such as might become the venal rascal he desired to be considered. + 

“You will not dispute that the course you have taken argues more intelligence than honesty or loyalty.” + 

“Your highness reproaches me with lack of loyalty to traitors?” + 

“What was their treason to you? What loyalty do you owe to me? You have but looked to see where lies your profit. Well, well, you are worthy to be the son, adoptive or natural, of that rascal Facino. You follow closely in his footsteps, and if you survive the perils of the journey you may go as far.” + 

“Highness! I came to serve you⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Silence!” The pleasant voice was scarcely raised. “I am speaking. I understand your service perfectly. I know something of men, and if I choose to use you, it is because your hope of profit may keep you loyal, and because I shall know how to detect disloyalty and how to punish it. You engage, sir, in a service full of perils.” The Regent seemed faintly to sneer. “But you have thrust yourself willingly into it. It will test you sternly and at every step. If you survive the tests, if you conquer the natural baseness and dishonesty of your nature, you shall have no cause to complain of my generosity.” + 

Bellarion flushed despite himself under the cold contempt of that level voice and the amused contempt of those calm, pale eyes. + 

“The quality of my service should lead your highness to amend your judgment.” + 

“Is it at fault? Will you tell me, then, whence springs the regard out of which you betray to me the aims and names of these men who have befriended you?” + 

Bellarion threw back his head and in his bold dark eyes was kindled a flame of indignation. Inwardly he was a little uneasy to find the Regent accepting his word so readily and upon such slight examination. + 

“Your highness,” he choked, “will give me leave to go.” + 

But his highness smiled, savouring his power to torture souls where lesser tyrants could torture only bodies. + 

“When I have done with you. You came at your own pleasure. You abide at mine. Now tell me, sir: Besides the names you have here set down of these men who seek my life, do you know of any others who work in concert with them?” + 

“I know that there are others whom they are labouring to seduce. Who these others are I cannot say, nor, with submission, need it matter to your highness. These are the leaders. Once these are crushed, the others will be without direction.” + 

“A seven-headed hydra, of which these are the heads. If I lop off these heads⁠ ⁠…” He paused. “Yes, yes. But have you heard none others named in these councils?” He leaned forward a little, his eyes intent upon Bellarion’s face. “None who are nearer to me? Think well, Master Bellarion, and be not afraid to name names, however great.” + 

Bellarion perceived here, almost by instinct, the peril of too great a reticence. + 

“Since they profess to labour on behalf of the Marquis Gian Giacomo, it is natural they should name him. But I have never heard it asserted that he has knowledge of their plot.” + 

“Nor any other?” The Marquis was singularly insistent. “Nor any other?” he repeated. + 

Bellarion showed a blank face. “Why? What other?” + 

“Nay, sir, I am asking you.” + 

“No, highness,” he slowly answered. “I recall the mention of no other.” + 

The Prince sank back into his chair, his searching eyes never quitting the young man’s face. Then he committed what in a man so subtle was a monstrous indiscretion, giving Bellarion the explanation that he lacked. + 

“You are not deep enough in their confidence yet. Return to their councils, and keep me informed of all that transpires in them. Be diligent, and you shall find me generous.” + 

Bellarion was genuinely aghast. “Your highness will delay to strike when by delay you may imperil⁠ ⁠… ?” + 

He was sternly silenced. “Is your counsel sought? You understand what I require of you. You have leave to go.” + 

“But, highness! To return amongst them now, after openly coming here to you, will not be without its danger.” + 

The regent did not share his alarm. He smiled again. + 

“You have chosen a path of peril as I told you. But I will help you. I discover that I have letters from Facino humbly soliciting my protection for his adoptive son whilst in Casale. It is a petition I cannot disregard. Facino is a great lord in Milan these days. My court shall be advised of it, and it will not be considered strange that I make you free of the palace. You will persuade your confederates that you avail yourself of my hospitality so that you may abuse it in their interests. That should satisfy them, and I shall look to see you here this evening. Now go with God.” + 

Bellarion stumbled out distracted. Nothing had gone as he intended after that too promising beginning. Perhaps had he not disclosed himself as Facino Cane’s adoptive son, he would not have supplied the Regent with a pretence that should render plausible his comings and goings. But the necessity for that disclosure was undeniable. His conduct had been dictated by the conviction that he could do for the Lady Valeria what she could not without self-betrayal do for herself. Confidently he had counted upon instant action of the Regent to crush the conspirators, and so make the Princess safe from the net in which their crazy ambitions would entangle her. Instead he had made the discovery⁠—from the single indiscretion of the Regent⁠—that the Marquis Theodore was already fully aware of the existence of the conspiracy and of the identity of some, if not all, of the chief conspirators. That was why he had so readily accepted Bellarion’s tale. The disclosure agreed so completely with the Regent’s knowledge that he had no cause to doubt Bellarion’s veracity. And finding him true in these most intimate details, he readily believed true the rest of his story and the specious account of his own intervention in the affair. Possibly Bellarion’s name was already known to him as that of one of the plotters who met at Barbaresco’s house. + 

Far, then, from achieving his real purpose, all that Bellarion had accomplished was to offer himself as another and apparently singularly apt instrument for the Regent’s dark purposes. + 

It was a perturbed Bellarion, a Bellarion who perceived in what dangerous waters he was swimming, who came back that noontide to Barbaresco’s house. + 

X + 

The Warning + 

They were very gay that night at the hospitable court of the Marquis Theodore. A comedy was performed early in the evening, a comedy which Fra Serafino in his chronicle describes as lascivious, by which he may mean no more than playful. Thereafter there was some dancing in the long hall, of which the Regent himself set the example, leading forth the ugly but graceful young Princess of Morea. + 

His nephew, the Marquis Gian Giacomo, followed with the Countess of Ronsecco, who would have declined the honour if she had dared, for the boy’s cheeks were flushed, his eyes glazed, his step uncertain, and his speech noisy and incoherent. And there were few who smiled as they observed the drunken antics of their future prince. Once, indeed, the Regent paused, grave and concerned of countenance, to whisper an admonition. The boy answered him with a bray of insolent laughter, and flung away, dragging the pretty countess with him. It was plain to all that the gentle, knightly Regent found it beyond his power to control his unruly, degenerate nephew. + 

Amongst the few who dared to smile was Messer Castruccio da Fenestrella, radiant in a suit of cloth of gold, who stood watching the mischief he had made. For it was he who had first secretly challenged Gian Giacomo to a drinking-bout during supper, and afterwards urged him to dance with the pretty wife of stiff-necked Ronsecco. + 

Awhile he stood looking on. Then, wearying of the entertainment, he sauntered off to join a group apart of which the Lady Valeria was the centre. Her ladies, Dionara and Isotta, were with her, the pedant Corsario, looking even less pedantic than his habit, and a half-dozen gallants who among them made all the chatter. Her highness was pale, and there was a frown between her eyes that so wistfully followed her unseemly brother, inattentive of those about her, some of whom from the kindliest motives sought to distract her attention. Her cheeks warmed a little at the approach of Castruccio, who moved into the group with easy, insolent grace. + 

“My lord is gay tonight,” he informed them lightly. None answered him. He looked at them with his flickering, shifty eyes, a sneering smile on his lips. “So are not you,” he informed them. “You need enlivening.” He thrust forward to the Princess, and bowed. “Will your highness dance?” + 

She did not look at him. Her eyes were fixed, and their glance went beyond him and was of such intensity that Messer Castruccio turned to seek the object of that curious contemplation. + 

Down the hall came striding Messer Aliprandi, the Orator of Milan, and with him a tall, black-haired young man, in a suit of red that was more conspicuous than suitable of fashion to the place or the occasion. Into the group about the Princess they came, whilst the exquisite Castruccio eyed this unfashionable young man with frank contempt, bearing his pomander-ball to his nostrils, as if to protect his olfactory organs from possible offence. + 

Messer Aliprandi, trimly bearded, elegant in his furred gown, and suavely mannered, bowed low before the Lady Valeria. + 

“Permit me, highness, to present Messer Bellarion Cane, the son of my good friend Facino Cane of Biandrate.” + 

It was the Marquis Theodore, who had requested the Orator of Milan⁠—as was proper, seeing that by reason of his paternity Bellarion was to be regarded as Milanese⁠—to present his assumed compatriot to her highness. + 

Bellarion, modelling himself upon Aliprandi, executed his bow with grace. + 

As Fra Serafino truthfully says of him: “He learnt manners and customs and all things so quickly that he might aptly be termed a fluid in the jug of any circumstance.” + 

The Lady Valeria inclined her head with no more trace of recognition in her face than there was in Bellarion’s own. + 

“You are welcome, sir,” she said with formal graciousness, and then turned to Aliprandi. “I did not know that the Count of Biandrate had a son.” + 

“Nor did I, madonna, until this moment. It was the Marquis Theodore who made him known to me.” She fancied in Aliprandi’s tone something that seemed to disclaim responsibility. But she turned affably to the newcomer, and Bellarion marvelled at the ease with which she dissembled. + 

“I knew the Count of Biandrate well when I was a child, and I hold his memory very dear. He was in my father’s service once, as you will know. I rejoice in the greatness he has since achieved. It should make a brave tale.” + 

“Per aspera ad astra is ever a brave tale,” Bellarion answered soberly. “Too often it is per astra ad aspera, if I may judge by what I have read.” + 

“You shall tell me of your father, sir. I have often wished to hear the story of his advancement.” + 

“To command, highness.” He bowed again. + 

The others drew closer, expecting entertainment. But Bellarion, who had no such entertainment to bestow, nor knew of Facino’s life more than a fragment of what was known to all the world, extricated himself as adroitly as he could. + 

“I am no practised troubadour or story-singer. And this tale of a journey to the stars should be told under the stars.” + 

“Why, so it shall, then. They shine brightly enough. You shall show me Facino’s and perhaps your own.” She rose and commanded her ladies to attend her. + 

Castruccio fetched a sigh of relief. + 

“Give thanks,” he said audibly to those about him, “for Heaven’s mercy which has spared you this weariness.” + 

The door at the end of the hall stood open to the terrace and the moonlight. Thither the Princess conducted Bellarion, her ladies in close attendance. + 

Approaching the threshold they came upon the Marquis Gian Giacomo, reeling clumsily beside the Countess of Ronsecco, who was almost on the point of tears. He paused in his caperings that he might ogle his sister. + 

“Where do you go, Valeria? And who’s this long-shanks?” + 

She approached him. “You are tired, Giannino, and the Countess, too, is tired. You would be better resting awhile.” + 

“Indeed, highness!” cried the young Countess, eagerly thankful. + 

But the Marquis was not at all of his sister’s wise opinion. + 

“Tired? Resting! You’re childish, Valeria. Always childish. Childish and meddlesome. Poking your long nose into everything. Some day you’ll poke it into something that’ll sting it. And what will it look like when it’s stung? Have you thought of that?” He laughed derisively, and caught the Countess by the arm. “Let’s leave long-nose and long-shanks. Ha! Ha!” His idiotic laughter shrilled up. He was ravished by his own humour. He let his voice ring out that all might hear and share the enjoyment of his comical conceit. “Long-nose and long-shanks! Long-nose and long-shanks! + 

“Said she to him, your long-shanks I adore. + 

Said he to her, your long-nose I deplore.” + 

Screaming with laughter he plunged forward to resume the dance, trod upon one of his trailing, exaggerated sleeves, tripped himself, and went sprawling on the tessellated floor, his laughter louder and more idiotic than ever. A dozen ran to lift him. + 

The Princess tapped Bellarion sharply on the arm with her fan of ostrich-plumes. Her face was like graven stone. + 

“Come,” she commanded, and passed out ahead of him. + 

On the terrace she signed to her ladies to fall behind whilst with her companion she moved beyond earshot along the marble balustrade, whose moonlit pallor was here and there splashed by the black tide of trailing plants. + 

“Now, sir,” she invited in a voice of ice, “will you explain this new identity and your presence here?” + 

He answered in calm, level tones: “My presence explains itself when I tell you that my identity is accepted by his highness the Regent. The son of Facino Cane is not to be denied the hospitality of the Court of Montferrat.” + 

“Then why did you lie to me when⁠ ⁠…” + 

“No, no. This is the lie. This false identity was as necessary to gain admission here as was the painter’s smock I wore yesterday: another lie.” + 

“You ask me to believe that you⁠ ⁠…” Indignation choked her. “My senses tell me what you are; an agent sent to work my ruin.” + 

“Your senses tell you either more or less, or else you would not now be here.” + 

And then it was as if the bonds of her self-control were suddenly snapped by the strain they sought to bear. “Oh, God!” she cried out. “I am near distraction. My brother⁠ ⁠…” She broke off on something akin to a sob. + 

Outwardly Bellarion remained calm. “Shall we take one thing at a time? Else we shall never be done. And I should not remain here too long with you.” + 

“Why not? You have the sanction of my dear uncle, who sends you.” + 

“Even so.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “It is your uncle is my dupe, not you.” + 

“That is what I expected you to say.” + 

“You had best leave inference until you have heard me out. Inference, highness, as I have shown you once already, is not your strength.” + 

If she resented his words and the tone he took, she gave no expression to it. Standing rigidly against the marble balustrade, she looked away from him and down that moonlit garden with its inky shadows and tall yew hedges that were sharp black silhouettes against the faintly irradiated sky. + 

Briefly, swiftly, lucidly, Bellarion told her how her message had been received by the conspirators. + 

“You thought to checkmate them. But they perceived the move you have overlooked, whereby they checkmate you. This proves what already I have told you: that they serve none but themselves. You and your brother are but the instruments with which they go to work. There was only one way to frustrate them; one only way to serve and save you. That way I sought.” + 

She interrupted him there. “You sought? You sought?” Her voice held bewilderment, unbelief, and even some anger. “Why should you desire to save or serve me? If I could believe you, I must account you impertinent. You were a messenger, no more.” + 

“Was I no more when I disclosed to you the true aims of these men and the perils of your association with them?” + 

“Aye, you were more,” she said bitterly. “But what were you?” + 

“Your servant, madonna,” he answered simply. + 

“Ah, yes. I had forgotten. My servant. Sent by Providence, was it not?” + 

“You are bitter, lady,” said Bellarion. + 

“Am I?” She turned at last to look at him. But his face was no more than a faint white blur. “Perhaps I find you too sweet to be real.” + 

He sighed. “The rest of my tale will hardly change that opinion. Is it worth while continuing?” He spoke without any heat, a little wistfully. + 

“It should be entertaining if not convincing.” + 

“For your entertainment, then: what you could not do without destroying yourself was easily possible to me.” And he told her of his pretended petition, giving the Regent the names of those who plotted against his life. + 

He saw her clutch her breast, caught the gasp of dread and dismay that broke from her lips. + 

“You betrayed them!” + 

“Was it not what you announced that you would do if they did not abandon their plan of murder? I was your deputy, no more. When I presented myself as Facino Cane’s adopted son I was readily believed⁠—because the Regent cared little whether it were true or not, since in me he perceived the very agent that he needed.” + 

“Ah, now at last we have something that does not strain belief.” + 

“Will it strain belief that the Regent was already fully informed of this conspiracy?” + 

“What!” + 

“Why else should he have trusted or believed me? Of his own knowledge he knew that what I told him was true.” + 

“He knew and he held his hand?” Again the question was made scornful by unbelief. + 

“Because he lacked evidence that you, and, through you, your brother, were parties to the plot. What to him are Barbaresco’s shabby crew? It is the Marquis Gian Giacomo who must be removed in such a manner as not to impair the Lord Regent’s credit. To gather evidence am I now sent.” + 

She tore an ostrich-plume from her fan in her momentary passion. + 

“You do not hesitate to confess how you betray each in turn; Barbaresco to the Regent; the Regent to me; and now, no doubt, me to the Regent.” + 

“As for the last, madonna, to betray you I need not now be here. I could have supplied the Regent with all the evidence he needs against you at the same time that I supplied the evidence against the others.” + 

She was silent, turning it over in her mind. And because her mind was acute, she saw the proof his words afforded. But because afraid, she mistrusted proof. + 

“It may be part of the trap,” she complained. “If it were not, why should you remain after denouncing my friends? The aims you pretend would have been fully served by that.” + 

His answer was prompt and complete. + 

“If I had departed, you would never have known the answer of those men whom you trust, nor would you have known that there is a Judas amongst them already. It was necessary to warn you.” + 

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I see, I think.” And then in sudden revolt against the conviction he was forcing upon her, and in tones which if low were vehement to the point of fierceness: “Necessary!” she cried, echoing the word he had used. “Necessary! How was it necessary? Whence this necessity of yours? A week ago you did not know me. Yet for me, who am nothing to you, whose service carries no reward, you pretend yourself prepared to labour and to take risks involving even your very life. That is what you ask me to believe. You suppose me mad, I think.” + 

As she faced him now, she fancied that a smile broke upon that face so indistinctly seen. His voice, as he answered her, was very soft. + 

“It is not mad to believe in madness. Madness exists, madonna. Set me down as suffering from it. The air of the world is proving too strong and heady, perhaps, for one bred in cloisters. It has intoxicated me, I think.” + 

She laughed chillingly. “For once you offer an explanation that goes a little lame. Your invention is failing, sir.” + 

“Nay, lady; my understanding,” he answered sadly. + 

She set a hand upon his arm. He felt it quivering there, which surprised him almost as much as the change in her voice, now suddenly halting and unsteady. + 

“Messer Bellarion, if my suspicions wound you, set them down to my distraction. It is so easy, so dangerously easy, to believe what we desire to believe.” + 

“I know,” he said gently. “Yet when you’ve slept on what I’ve said, you’ll find that your safety lies in trusting me.” + 

“Safety! Am I concerned with safety only? Tonight you saw my brother⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I saw. If that is Messer Castruccio’s work⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Castruccio is but a tool. Come, sir. We talk in vain.” She began to move along the terrace towards her waiting ladies. Suddenly she paused. “I must trust you, Ser Bellarion. I must or I shall go mad in this ugly tangle. I’ll take the risk. If you are not true, if you win my trust only to abuse it and work the evil will of the Regent, then God will surely punish you.” + 

“I think so, too,” he breathed. + 

“Tell me now,” she questioned, “what shall you say to my uncle?” + 

“Why, that I have talked with you fruitlessly; that either you have no knowledge of Barbaresco or else you withheld it from me.” + 

“Shall you come again?” + 

“If you desire it. The way is open now. But what remains to do?” + 

“You may discover that.” Thus she conveyed that, having resolved to give him her trust, she gave it without stint. + 

They came back into the hall, where stiff and formally Bellarion made his valedictory bow, then went to take his leave of the Regent. + 

The Regent disengaged himself from the group of which he was the centre, and, taking Bellarion by the arm, drew him apart a little. + 

“I have made a sounding,” Bellarion informed him. “Either she mistrusts me, or else she knows nothing of Barbaresco.” + 

“Be sure of the former, sir,” said the Regent softly. “Procure credentials from Barbaresco, and try again. It should be easy, so.” + 

XI + 

Under Suspicion + 

At Barbaresco’s a surprise awaited Messer Bellarion. The whole company of plotters swarmed about him as he entered the long dusty room of the mezzanine, and he found himself gripped at once between the fierce Casella and the reckless Spigno. He did not like their looks, nor those of any man present. Least of all did he like the looks of Barbaresco who confronted him, oily and falsely suave of manner. + 

“Where have you been, Master Bellarion?” + 

He realised that he had need of his wits. + 

He looked round with surprise and contempt in his stare. + 

“Oh, yes, you’re conspirators to the life,” he told them. “You see a spy in every neighbour, a betrayal in every act. Oh, you have eyes; but no wit to inform your vision. God help those who trust you! God help you all!” He wrenched at the arms that held him. “Let me go, fools.” + 

Barbaresco licked his lips. His right hand was held behind his back. Stealthily almost he came a step nearer, so that he was very close. + 

“Not until you tell us where you have been. Not then, unless you tell us more.” + 

Bellarion’s sneer became more marked; but no fear showed in his glance. “Where I have been, you know. Hence these tragical airs. I’ve been to court.” + 

“To what end, Bellarion?” Barbaresco softly questioned. The others preserved a frozen, watchful silence. + 

“To betray you, of course.” He was boldly ironical. “Having done so, I return so that you may slit my throat.” + 

Spigno laughed, and released the arm he held. + 

“I for one am answered. I told you from the first I did not believe it.” + 

Casella, however, hung on fiercely. “I’ll need a clear answer before I⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Give me air, man,” cried Bellarion impatiently, and wrenched his arm free. “No need to maul me. I’ll not run. There are seven of you to prevent me, and reflection may cool your humours. Reflect, for instance, that, if I were for running, I should not have come back.” + 

“You tell us what you would not or did not do. We ask you what you did,” Barbaresco insisted. + 

“I’ll tell you yet another thing I would not have done if my aim had been betrayal. I should not have gone openly to court so that you might hear of my presence there.” + 

“The very argument I employed,” Spigno reminded them, with something of Bellarion’s own scorn in his manner now. “Let the boy tell his tale.” + 

They muttered among themselves. Bellarion crossed the room under their black looks, moving with the fearless air of a man strong in the sense of his own integrity. He slid into a chair. + 

“There is nothing to tell that is not self-evident already. I went to carry your message to the Princess Valeria; to point out to her the position of checkmate in which you hold her; to make her realize that being committed to this enterprise, she cannot now either draw back or dictate to us the means by which our aims are to be reached. All this, I rejoice to tell you, I have happily accomplished.” + 

Again it was Barbaresco who was their spokesman. “All this we may believe when you tell us why you chose to go to court to do it, and how, being what you represent yourself to be, you succeeded in gaining admission.” + 

“God give me patience with you, dear Saint Thomas!” said Bellarion, sighing. “I went to court because the argument I foresaw with the Princess was hardly one to be conducted furtively behind a hedge. It threatened to be protracted. Besides, for furtive dealing, sirs, bold and open approaches are best when they are possible. They were possible to me. It happens, sirs, that I am indeed the adoptive son of Facino Cane, and I perceived how I might use that identity to present myself at court and there move freely.” + 

A dozen questions rained upon him. He answered them all in a phrase. + 

“The Ambassador of Milan, Messer Aliprandi, was there to sponsor me.” + 

There was a silence, broken at last by Barbaresco. “Aliprandi may have been your sponsor there. He cannot be your sponsor here, and you know it.” + 

“Aye,” growled white-haired Lungo. “An impudent tale!” + 

“And a lame one,” added Casella. “If you had this means of going to court, why did you wait so long to seize it?” + 

“Other ways were open on former occasions. You forget that Madonna Valeria was not expecting me; the garden-gate would not be ajar. And I could not this time go as a painter, which was the disguise I adopted on the last occasion. Besides, it is too expensive. It cost me five ducats.” + 

Again their questions came together, for it was the first they had heard of the disguise which he had used. He told them at last the story. And he saw that it pleased them. + 

“Why did you not tell us this before?” quoth one. + 

Bellarion shrugged. “Is it important? So that I was your Mercury, did it matter in what shape I went? Why should I trouble you with trivial things? Besides, let me remind you⁠—since you can’t perceive it for yourselves⁠—that if I had betrayed you to the Marquis Theodore, the Captain of Justice would now be here in my place.” + 

“That, at least, is not to be denied,” said Spigno, and in his vehemence carried two or three others with him. + 

But the fierce Casella was not of those, nor Lungo, nor Barbaresco. + 

The latter least of all, for a sudden memory had stirred in him. His blue eyes narrowed until they were almost hidden in his great red cheeks. + 

“How does it happen that none at court recognized in you the palace amanuensis?” + 

Bellarion perceived his danger, and learnt the lesson that a lie may become a clumsy obstacle to trip a man. But of the apprehension he suddenly felt, no trace revealed itself upon his countenance. + 

“It is possible some did. What then? Neither identity contradicts the other. And remember, pray, that Messer Aliprandi was there to avouch me.” + 

“But he cannot avouch you here,” Barbaresco said again, and sternly asked: “Who can?” + 

Bellarion looked at him, and from him to the others who seemed to await almost in breathlessness his answer. + 

“Do you demand of me proof that I am the adoptive son of Facino Cane?” he asked. + 

“So much do we demand it that unless you can afford it your sands are run, my cockerel,” Casella answered him, his fingers on his dagger as he spoke. + 

It was a case for bold measures if he would gain time. Given this, he knew that all things may become possible, and there was one particular thing his shrewd calculations accounted probable here if only he could induce them to postpone until tomorrow the slitting of his throat. + 

“So be it. From here to Cigliano it is no more than a day’s ride on a good horse. Let one of you go ask the Abbot of the Grazie the name of him Facino left in the convent’s care.” + 

“A name?” cried Casella, sneering. “Is that all the proof?” + 

“All if the man who goes is a fool. If not he may obtain from the Abbot a minute description of this Bellarion. If more is needed I’ll give you a note of the clothes I wore and the gear and money with which I left the Grazie that you may obtain confirmation of that, too.” + 

But Barbaresco was impatient. “Even so, what shall all this prove? It cannot prove you true. It cannot prove that you are not a spy sent hither to betray and sell us.” + 

“No,” Bellarion agreed. “But it will prove that the identity on which I won to court is what I represent it, and that will be something as a beginning. The rest⁠—if there is more⁠—can surely wait.” + 

“And meanwhile⁠ ⁠… ?” Casella was beginning. + 

“Meanwhile I am in your hands. You’re never so bloodthirsty that you cannot postpone murdering me until you’ve verified my tale?” + 

That was what they fell to discussing among themselves there in his very presence, affording him all the excitement of watching the ball of his fate tossed this way and that among the disputants. + 

In the end the game might have gone against him but for Count Spigno, who laboured Bellarion’s own argument that if he had betrayed them he would never have incurred the risk of returning amongst them. + 

In the end they deprived Bellarion of the dagger which was his only weapon, and then Barbaresco, Casella, and Spigno jointly conducted him above-stairs to a shabby chamber under the roof. It had no windows, whence an evasion might be attempted, and was lighted by a glazed oblong some ten feet overhead at the highest part of the sharply sloping ceiling. It contained no furniture, nor indeed anything beyond some straw and sacking in a corner which he was bidden to regard as his bed for that night and probably for the next. + 

They pinioned his wrists behind him for greater safety, and Casella bade him be thankful that the cord was not being tightened about his neck instead. Upon that they went out, taking the light with them, locking the door, and leaving him a prisoner in the dark. + 

He stood listening to their footsteps receding down the stairs, then he looked up at the oblong of moonlight in his ceiling. If the glass were removed, there would be room for a man to pass through and gain the roof. But considering the slope of it, the passage might as easily lead to a broken neck as to liberty, and in any case he had neither the power nor the means to reach it. + 

He squatted upon the meagre bedding, with his chin almost upon his knees, in an attitude of extreme discomfort, making something in the nature of an assessment of his mental and emotional equipment. Seen now from the point of view of cold reason to which danger had sharply brought him, his career since leaving the peace of the Grazie a week ago seemed fantastic and incredible. Destiny had made sport with him. Sentimentality had led him by the nose. He had mixed himself in the affairs of a state through which he was no more than a wayfarer, because moved to interest in the fortunes of a young woman of exalted station who would probably dismiss his memory with a sigh when she came to learn how his throat had been cut by the self-seeking fools with whom so recklessly she had associated herself. It was, he supposed, a manifestation of that romantic and unreasonable phenomenon known as chivalry. If he extricated himself alive from this predicament, he would see to it that whatever follies he committed in the future, chivalry would certainly not be found amongst them. Experience had cured him of any leanings in that direction. It had also inspired doubts of the infallibility of his syllogism on the subject of evil. He suspected a flaw in it somewhere. For evil most certainly existed. His respect for the value of experience was rapidly increasing. + 

He shifted his position, stretched himself out, and lay on his side, contemplating the patch of moonlight on the floor, and speculating upon his chances of winning out of this deathtrap. Of these he took an optimistic view. The assistance upon which Bellarion chiefly counted was that of the traitor amongst the conspirators, whom he strove vainly to identify in the light of their behaviour that evening. Spigno had been the only one who by advocating Bellarion’s cause had procured him this respite. Yet Spigno was one of the first to spring upon him dagger in hand, on his return from court. But the traitor, whoever he might be, would probably report the event to the Marquis Theodore, and the Marquis should take steps directly or indirectly to procure the release of one whom he must now regard as a valuable agent. + 

That, thought Bellarion, was the probability. Meanwhile he would remember that probabilities are by no means certainties, and he would be watchful for an opportunity to help himself. + 

On these reflections he must have fallen asleep, and he must have slept for some time, for, when suddenly he awakened, the patch of moonlight was gone from the floor. That was his first conscious observation; his second what that something was stirring near at hand. He raised himself on his elbow, an operation by no means easy with pinioned wrists, and turned his head in the direction of the sound, to perceive a faint but increasing rhomb of light from the direction of the doorway, and to understand with the next heartbeat that the door was being slowly and stealthily pushed open. + 

That was, he afterwards confessed, his first real acquaintance with the emotion of fear; fear that roughened his skin and chilled his spine; fear inspired by the instantaneous conviction that here came someone to murder him as he lay there bound and helpless. + 

The suspense was but of seconds, yet in those seconds Bellarion seemed to live an age as he watched that slowly widening gap and the faint light which increased in area but hardly in illumination. Then the shadowy form of a man slipped through, darkly discernible in the faint glow from the veiled light he carried. + 

Very softly came his voice: “Sh! Quiet! Make no sound!” + 

The note of warning partially calmed the tumult of Bellarion’s heart, which was thudding in his throat as if to suffocate him. + 

As quietly as it had been opened the door was closed again, a thin and partially translucent mantle was pulled from the lantern it had been muffling, and the light beating through the horn panes was reflected from the floor and walls upon the lean, aquiline features of Count Spigno. + 

Bellarion uttered something that sounded like a chuckle. + 

“I was expecting you,” said he. + 

XII + 

Count Spigno + 

Spigno set the lantern on the floor, and came forward. “No need to talk,” he muttered. “Roll over so that I can free your hands.” He drew his dagger and with it cut Bellarion’s bonds. + 

“Take off your shoes. Make haste.” + 

Bellarion squatted upon his bedding, and with blundering fingers, still numb from the thong, he removed his footgear. His wits worked briskly, and it was not at all upon the subject of his escape that they were busy. Despite his late resolves, and although still far from being out of peril, with the chance of salvation no more than in sight, he was already at his knight-errantry again. + 

He stood up at last, and Spigno was whispering urgently. + 

“Wait! We must not go together. Give me five minutes to win clear; then follow.” + 

Bellarion considered him, and his eyes were very grave. + 

“But when my evasion is discovered⁠ ⁠…” he was beginning. + 

Spigno impatiently broke in, explaining hurriedly. + 

“I am the last they will suspect. The others are all here tonight. But I pleaded urgent reasons why I could not remain. I made a pretence of departing; then hid below until all were asleep. They will be at each other’s throats in the morning over this.” He smiled darkly in satisfaction of his cunning. “I’ll take the light. You know your way about this house better than I do. Tread softly when you come.” + 

He was turning to take up the lantern when Bellarion arrested him. + 

“You’ll wait for me outside?” + 

“To what end? Nay, now. There is no purpose in that.” + 

“Let me come with you, then. If I should stumble in the dark they’ll be upon me.” + 

“Take care that you do not.” + 

“At least leave me your dagger since you take the light.” + 

“Here, then.” Spigno unsheathed and surrendered the weapon to him. + 

Bellarion gripped the hilt. With very sombre eyes he considered the Count. Then the latter turned aside again for the lantern. + 

“A moment,” said Bellarion. + 

“What now?” + 

Impatiently Spigno faced once more the queer glance of those dark eyes, and in that moment Bellarion stabbed him. + 

It was a swift, hard-driven, merciful stroke that found the unfortunate man’s heart and quenched his life before he had time to realise that it was threatened. + 

Without a sound he reeled back under the blow. Bellarion’s left arm went round his shoulders to ease him to the ground. But Spigno’s limbs sagged under him. He sank through Bellarion’s embrace like an empty sack, and then rolled over sideways. + 

The murderer choked back a sob. His legs were trembling like empty hose with which the wind makes sport. His face was leaden-hued and his sight was blurred by tears. He went down on his knees beside the dead count, turned him on his back, straightened out the twitching limbs, and folded the arms across the breast. Nor did he rise when this was done. + 

In slaying Count Spigno, he had performed a necessary act; necessary in the service to which he had dedicated himself. Thus at a blow he had shattered the instrument upon which the Marquis Theodore was depending to encompass his nephew’s ruin; and the discovery tomorrow of Spigno’s death and Bellarion’s own evasion, in circumstances of unfathomable mystery, must strike such terror into the hearts of the conspirators that there would probably be an end to the plotting which served no purpose but to advance the Regent’s schemes. + 

Yet, despite these heartening reflections, Bellarion could not shake off his horror. He had done murder, and he had done it in cold blood, deliberate and calculatingly. Worse than all⁠—his convent rearing asserting itself here⁠—he had sent a man unshriven to confront his Maker. He hoped that the unexpectedness with which Spigno’s doom had overtaken him would be weighed in the balance against the sins which death had surprised upon him. + 

That is why he remained on his knees and with joined hands prayed fervently and passionately for the repose of the soul which he had despatched to judgment. So intent was he that he took no heed of the precious time that was meanwhile speeding. For perhaps a quarter of an hour he continued there in prayer, then crossing himself he rose at last and gave thought to his own escape. + 

Thrusting his shoes into his belt and muffling the lantern as Spigno had muffled it, he set out, the naked dagger in his right hand. + 

A stair creaked under his step and then another, and each time he checked and caught his breath, listening intently. Once he fancied that he heard a movement below, and the sound so alarmed him that it was some moments before he could proceed. + 

He gained the floor below in safety, and rounding the balusters continued his cautious descent towards the mezzanine, where, as he knew, Barbaresco slept. Midway down he heard that sound again, this time unmistakably the sound of someone moving in the passage to the right, in the direction of Barbaresco’s room. He stopped abruptly, and thrust the muffled lantern behind him, so that the faint glow of it might not beat downwards upon the gloom to betray him. He was conscious of pulses drumming in his temples, for shaken by the night’s events he was now become an easy prey to fear. + 

Suddenly to his increasing horror, another, stronger light fell along the passage. It grew steadily as he watched it, and with it came a sound of softly shod feet, a mutter in a voice that he knew for Barbaresco’s, and an answering mutter in the high-pitched voice of Barbaresco’s old servant. + 

His first impulse was to turn and flee upwards, back the way he had come. But thus he would be rushing into a trap, which would be closed by Barbaresco’s guests, who slept most probably above. + 

Then, bracing himself for whatever fate might send, he bounded boldly and swiftly forward, no longer troubling to tread lightly. His aim was to round the stairs and thereafter trust to speed to complete the descent and gain the street. But the noise he made brought Barbaresco hurrying forward, and at the foot of that flight they confronted each other, Bellarion’s way barred by the gentleman of Casale who loosed at sight of him a roar that roused the house. + 

Barbaresco was in bedgown and slippers, a candle in one hand; his servant following at his heels. He was unarmed. But not on that account could he shirk the necessity of tackling and holding this fugitive, whose flight itself was an abundant advertisement of his treachery, and whose evasion now might be attended by direst results. + 

He passed the candle to his servant, and flung himself bodily upon Bellarion, pinning the young man’s arms to his sides, and roaring lustily the while. Bellarion struggled silently and grimly in that embrace which was like the hug of a bear, for despite his corpulence Barbaresco was as strong as he was heavy. But the grip he had taken, whilst having the advantage of pinning down the hand that held the dagger, was one that it is impossible long to maintain upon an opponent of any vigour; and before he could sufficiently bend him to receive his weight, Bellarion had broken loose. Old Andrea, the servant, having set the candle upon the floor, was running in now to seize Bellarion’s legs. He knocked Andrea over, winded by a well-directed kick in the stomach, then swung aloft his dagger as Barbaresco rushed at him again. It was in his mind, as he afterwards declared, that he did not desire another murder on his soul that night. But if another murder there must be, he preferred that it should not be his own. So he struck without pity. Barbaresco swerved, throwing up his right arm to parry the blow, and received the long blade to the hilt in his fleshy forearm. + 

He fell back, clapping his hand to the bubbling wound and roaring like a bull in pain, just as Casella, almost naked, but sword in hand, came bounding down the stairs with Lungo and yet another following. + 

For a second it seemed to Bellarion that he had struck too late. If he attempted now to regain the staircase he must inevitably be cut off, and how could he hope with a dagger to meet Casella’s sword? Then, on a new thought, he darted forward, and plunged into the long room of that mezzanine. He slammed the door, and shot home the bolts, before Casella and Lungo brought up against it on the other side. + 

He uncovered at last his lantern and set it down. He dragged the heavy table across the door, so as to reinforce it against their straining shoulders. Then snatching up the cloak in which the lantern had been muffled he made for the window, and threw it open. + 

He paused to put on his shoes, what time the baffled conspirators were battering and straining at the door. Then he forced the naked dagger as far as it would go into the empty sheath that dangled from his own belt, and tied a corner of the cloak securely to one of the stone mullions so that some five or six feet of it dangled below the sill. Onto this sill he climbed, turned, knelt, and laid hold of the cloak with both hands. + 

He had but to let himself down hand over hand for the length of cloth, and then only an easy drop of a few feet would lie between himself and safety. + 

But even as he addressed himself to this, the house-door below was opened with a clatter, and out into the street sprang two of the conspirators. + 

He groaned as he looked down upon them from his precarious position. Whilst they, in their shirts, capering fantastically as it seemed to him in the shaft of light that cut athwart the gloom from the open door, brandished their glittering blades and waited. + 

Since there could be no salvation in climbing back, he realised that he was at the end of the wild career he had run since leaving the peace of the Grazie a week ago. A week! He had lived a lifetime in that week, and he had looked more than once in the face of death. He thought of the Abbot’s valedictory words: “Pax multa in cella, foris autem plurima bella.” What would he not give now to be back in the peace of that convent cell! + 

As he hung there, between two deaths, he sought to compose his mind to prayer, to prepare his soul for judgment, by an act of contrition for his sins. Nor could he in that supreme hour take comfort in his old heresy that sin is a human fiction. + 

And then, even as his despair of body and spirit touched its nadir, he caught a sound that instantly heartened him: the approach of regularly tramping feet. + 

Those below heard it, too. The watch was on its rounds. The murderous twain took counsel for a moment. Then, fearing to be surprised there, they darted through the doorway, and closed the door again, just as the patrol with lanterns swinging from their halberds came round the corner not a dozen yards away. + 

With nothing to fear from these, Bellarion now let himself swiftly down the length of the cloak and dropped lightly to the ground. + 

He was breathing easily and oddly disposed to laugh when the officer came up with him, and the patrol of six made a half-circle round him. + 

“What’s this?” he was challenged. “Why do you prefer a window to a door, my friend?” + 

Bellarion was still seeking a plausible answer when the officer’s face came nearer to his own upon which the light was beating down. Recognition was mutual. It was that same officer who had hunted him from the tavern of the Stag to the Palace gardens. + 

“By the Blood!” cried Messer Bernabó. “It is Lorenzaccio’s fleet young friend. Well met, my cockerel! I’ve been seeking you this week. You shall tell me where you’ve been hiding.” + 

XIII + 

The Trial + 

The court of the Podestà of Casale was commonly well attended, and often some of the attendance would be distinguished. The Princess Valeria, for instance, would sometimes sit with the ladies in the little minstrels’ gallery of what had once been the banqueting-hall of the Communal Palace, and by her presence attest her interest in all that concerned the welfare of the people of Montferrat. Occasionally, too, as became a prince who desired to be regarded as a father of his people, the Marquis Theodore would come to observe for himself how justice was administered in his name, or in the name of the boy whose deputy he was. + 

On the morning after that affray at Messer Barbaresco’s house, both the Regent and his niece were to be seen in that hall of justice, the latter aloft in the gallery, the former in a chair placed on the dais alongside of the Podestà’s seat of state. The Regent’s countenance was grave, his brow thoughtful. This was proper to the occasion, but hardly due to the causes supposed by the spectators. Disclosures now inevitable might win him an increase of the public sympathy he enjoyed. But because premature they temporarily wrecked his real aims, wrecked in any case by the death of his agent Spigno. + 

There were other notabilities present. Messer Aliprandi⁠—who had expressly postponed his departure for Milan⁠—was seated beside the Regent. Behind them against the grey stone wall lounged a glittering group of courtiers, in which Castruccio da Fenestrella was conspicuous. + 

In the body of the court seethed a crowd composed of citizens of almost every degree, rigidly kept clear of the wide space before the dais by a dozen men-at-arms forming a square with partisans held horizontally. + 

On the left of the Podestà, who was clothed in a scarlet robe and wore a flat round scarlet cap that was edged with miniver, sat his two assessors in black, and below these two scriveners. The Podestà himself, Angelo de’ Ferraris, a handsome, bearded man of fifty, was a Genoese, to comply with the universal rule throughout Italy that the high office of justiciary should ever be held by one who was a foreigner to the State, so as to ensure the disinterestedness and purity of the justice he dispensed. + 

Some minor cases had briefly been heard and judged, and the court now awaited the introduction of that prisoner who was responsible for this concourse above the average in numbers and quality. + 

He came in at last, between guards, tall, comely, with thick glossy black hair that fell to the nape of his neck, his brave red suit considerably disordered and the worse for wear. He was pale from lack of sleep, for he had spent what was left of the night in the town gaol among the vermin-infested scourings of Casale, where he had deemed it prudent to maintain himself awake. Perhaps because of this, too, he suffered a moment’s loss of his admirable self-command when upon first entering there he found himself scanned by eyes so numerous and so varied. For an instant he paused, disconcerted, experiencing something of that shyness which is a mixture of mistrust and resentment, peculiar to wild creatures. But the emotion was transient. Before it could be remarked, he had recovered his normal poise, and advanced to the place assigned him on the broad stone flags, bowed to the Regent and the Podestà, then waited, his head high, his glance steady. + 

On the hush that fell came the Podestà’s voice, sternly calm. + 

“Your name?” + 

“Bellarion Cane.” Since that was the name he had given himself when he had sought the Regent, the lie must be maintained. It was dangerous, of course. But dangers hemmed him in on every side. + 

“Your father’s name?” + 

“Facino Cane is my adoptive father’s name. The name of my carnal parents I do not know.” + 

Desired to explain himself, he did so, and his explanation was a model of brevity and lucidity. It bore witness to a calm which argued to his listeners an easy conscience. But the Podestà was to deal with certain facts rather than uncertain personal impressions. + 

“You came hither a week ago in the company of one Lorenzaccio da Trino, a bandit with a price on his head. To this one of my officers who is present bears witness. Do you deny it?” + 

“I do not. It is possible for an honest man to travel in the company of a rogue.” + 

“You were with him at a house in the district of Casale where a theft was committed and the owner of which was subsequently murdered here in the hostelry of the Stag by this same Lorenzaccio whilst in your company. The murdered man recognised you before he died. Do you confess to this?” + 

“Confession implies sin and the seeking of forgiveness. I admit the facts freely. They nowise contradict my previous statement. But that is not a confession.” + 

“Yet if you were innocent of evil why did you run away from my officer? Why did you not remain, and state then what you have stated now?” + 

“Because the appearances were against me. I acted upon impulse, and foolishly as men act when they do not pause first to reflect.” + 

“You found shelter in the house of the Lord Annibale Barbaresco. No doubt you told him your story, represented yourself as an innocent man betrayed by appearances, and so moved his compassion.” + 

The Podestà paused. Bellarion did not answer. He let the statement pass. He knew the source of it. Last night when the officer had roused the house and announced to Barbaresco his prisoner’s supposed association with Lorenzaccio, Barbaresco had fastened upon it to explain the events. + 

“Last night you attempted to rob him, and being caught in the act by Count Spigno, you slew the Count and afterwards wounded the Lord Barbaresco himself. You were in the act of escaping from the house by one of its windows when the watch supervened and caught you. Do you admit all this?” + 

“I do not. Nor will the circumstances. I am a robber, it is said. I spend a week in Messer Barbaresco’s house. On any night of that week I was alone with him, save only for his decrepit old servant. Yet it is pretended that I chose as the occasion for robbing him a night on which seven able-bodied friends are with him. Your potency must see that the facts are mocked by likelihood.” + 

His potency saw this, as did all present. They saw more. This young man’s speech and manner were those of the scholar he proclaimed himself rather than of the robber he was represented. + 

The justiciary leaned forward, combing his short pointed beard. + 

“What, then, do you say took place? Let us hear you.” + 

“Is it not within the forms of law that we should first hear my accuser⁠—this Messer Barbaresco?” Bellarion’s bold dark eyes raked the court, seeking the stout person of his late host. + 

The Podestà smiled a little, and his smile was not quite nice. + 

“Ah, you know the law? Trust a rogue to know the law.” + 

“Which is to make a rogue of every lawyer in the land,” said Bellarion, and was rewarded by a titter from the crowd, pleased with a sarcasm that contained more truth than he suspected. “I know the law as I know divinity and rhetoric and other things. Because I have studied it.” + 

“Maybe,” said the Podestà grimly. “But not as closely as you are to study it now.” Messer de’ Ferraris, too, could deal in sarcasm. + 

An officer with excitement spread upon his face came bustling into the court. But paused upon perceiving that the justiciary was speaking. + 

“Your accuser,” said Messer de’ Ferraris, “you have heard already, or at least his accusation, which I have pronounced to you. That accusation you are now required to answer.” + 

“Required?” said Bellarion, and all marvelled at the calm of this man who knew no fear of persons. “By what am I so required? Not by the law, which prescribes that an accused shall hear his accuser in person and be given leave to question him upon his accusations. Your excellency should not be impatient that I stand upon the rights of an accused. Let Messer Barbaresco come forth, and out of his own mouth he shall destroy his falsehood.” + 

His manner might impress the general, but it did not conciliate his judge. + 

“Why, rogue, do you command here?” + 

“The law does,” said Bellarion, “and I voice the law.” + 

“You voice the law!” The Podestà smiled upon him. “Well, well! I will be patient as you bid me in your impudence. Messer Barbaresco shall be heard.” There was an infinite threat in his tone. He leaned back, and looked round the court. “Let Messer Barbaresco stand forth.” + 

There was a rustle and mutter of expectation through the court; for this stiff-necked young cockerel promised to give good entertainment. Then the excited officer who had lately entered thrust forward into the open space. + 

“Excellency, Messer Barbaresco is gone. He left Casale at sunrise, as soon as the gates were opened, and with him went the six whose names were on Messer Bernabó’s list. The captain of the Lombard Gate is here to speak to it.” + 

Bellarion laughed, and was sternly bidden to remember where he stood and to observe the decencies. + 

The captain of the Lombard Gate stood forth to confirm the other’s tale. A party of eight had ridden out of the town soon after sunrise, taking the road to Lombardy. One who rode with his arm in a sling he had certainly recognised for my Lord Barbaresco, and he had recognised three others whom he named and a fourth whom he knew for Barbaresco’s servant. + 

The Regent stroked his chin and turned to the Podestà, who was clearly taken aback. + 

“Why was this permitted?” he asked sternly. + 

The Podestà was ill-at-ease. “I had no news of this man’s arrest until long after sunrise. But in any case it is not usual to detain accusers.” + 

“To detain them, no. But to take certain precautions where the features are so peculiar.” + 

“Their peculiarity, highness, with submission, becomes apparent only in this flight.” + 

The Regent sank back in his chair, and his pale blue eyes were veiled behind lowered lids. “Well, well! I interrupt the course of justice. The prisoner waits.” + 

A little bewildered, not only by the turn of events, but by the Regent’s attitude, the Podestà addressed Bellarion with a little less judicial sternness. + 

“You have heard, sir, that your accuser is not here to speak in person.” + 

Again Bellarion laughed. “I have heard that he has spoken. His flight is an eloquent testimony to the falsehood of his charge.” + 

“Sir, sir,” the Podestà admonished him. “You are to satisfy this court. You are to afford us your own version of what took place that the ends of justice may be served.” + 

Now here was a change of tone, thought Bellarion, and he was no longer addressed contemptuously as “rogue.” He took full advantage of it. + 

“I am to testify? Why, so I will.” He looked at the Regent, and found the Regent’s eyes upon him, stern and commanding in a face that was set. He read its message. + 

“But there is little to which I can speak, for I do not know the cause of the quarrel that broke out between Count Spigno and Messer Barbaresco. I was not present at the beginnings. I was drawn to it by the uproar, and when I arrived, Count Spigno was already dead. At sight of me, perhaps because I was a witness and might inform against them, I was set upon by Messer Barbaresco and his friends. I wounded Barbaresco, and so got away, locking myself in a room. I was escaping thence by a window when the watch came up. That is all I can say.” + 

It was a tale, he thought, that must convey to the Regent the full explanation. But whatever it may have done in that quarter, it did not satisfy the Podestà. + 

“I could credit this more easily,” said the latter, “but for the circumstance that Count Spigno and yourself were fully dressed, whilst Messer Barbaresco and the others were in their shirts. That in itself suggests who were the aggressors, who the attacked.” + 

“It might but for the flight of Messer Barbaresco and the others. Innocent men do not run away.” + 

“Out of your own mouth you have pronounced it,” thundered the Podestà. “You profess innocence of association with Lorenzaccio. Yet you ran away on that occasion.” + 

“Oh, but the difference⁠ ⁠… The appearances against a single man unknown in these parts⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Can you explain how you and the dead count came to be dressed and the others not?” It was more than a question. It was a challenge. + 

Bellarion looked at the Regent. But the Regent made no sign. He continued to eye Bellarion coldly and sternly. Ready enough to tell the full lie he had prepared, yet he had the wit to perceive that the Regent, whilst not suspecting its untruth, might find the disclosure inconvenient, in which case he would certainly be lost. As a spy, he reasoned, he could only be of value to the Regent as long as this fact remained undiscovered. So he took his resolve. + 

“Why Count Spigno was dressed, I cannot say. My own condition was the result of accident. I had been to court last night. I returned late, and I was tired. I fell asleep in a chair, and slept until the uproar aroused me.” + 

Bellarion fancied that the Regent’s glance approved him. But the Podestà slowly shook his head. + 

“A convenient tale,” he sneered, “but lame. Can you do no better?” + 

“Can any man do better than the truth?” demanded Bellarion firmly, and in the circumstances impudently. “You ask me to explain things that are outside my knowledge.” + 

“We shall see.” The tone was a threat. “The hoist has often been known to stimulate a man’s memory and to make it accurate.” + 

“The hoist?” Bellarion’s spirit trembled, for all that his mien preserved its boldness. He looked again at the Regent, this time for succour. The Regent was whispering to Messer Aliprandi, and almost at once the Orator of Milan leaned forward to address the Podestà. + 

“My I speak a word in your court, my lord?” + 

The Podestà turned to him in some surprise. It was not often that an ambassador intervened in the trial of a rogue accused of theft and murder. + 

“At your good pleasure, my lord.” + 

“With submission, then, may I beg that, considering the identity claimed by this prisoner and the relationship urged with his magnificence the Count of Biandrate, the proceedings against him be suspended until this identity shall have been tested by ordinary means?” + 

The ambassador paused. The Podestà, supreme autocrat of justice, had thrown up his head, resentful of such very definite interference. But before he could answer, the Regent was adding the weight of his support to the Orator’s request. + 

“However unusual this may be, Messer de’ Ferraris,” he said, in his quiet, cultured voice, “you will realise with me that if the prisoner’s identity prove to be as he says, and if his present position should be the result of a chain of unfortunate circumstances, we should by proceeding to extremes merely provoke against Montferrat the resentment of our exalted friend the Count of Biandrate.” + 

Thus was it demonstrated to Bellarion how much may hang upon a man’s wise choice of a parent. + 

The Podestà bowed his head. There was a moment’s silence before he spoke. + 

“By what means is it proposed that the accused’s pretended identity shall be tested?” + 

It was Bellarion who spoke. “I had a letter from the Abbot of the Grazie of Cigliano, which this Lorenzaccio stole from me, but which the officer⁠ ⁠…” + 

“We have that letter,” the Podestà interrupted, his voice harsh. “It says nothing of your paternity, and for the rest it can prove nothing until you prove how it was acquired!” + 

“He claims,” Aliprandi interposed again, “to come from the Convent of the Grazie of Cigliano, where Messer Facino Cane placed him some years ago. It should not be difficult, nor greatly delay the satisfaction of justice, to seek at the convent confirmation of his tale. If it is confirmed, let one of the fathers who knows him attend here to say whether this is the same man.” + 

The Podestà combed his beard in silence. “And if so?” he inquired at last. + 

“Why, then, sir, your mind will be delivered at least of the prejudice created by this young man’s association with a bandit. And you will be in better case to judge his share in last night’s events.” + 

There, to the general disappointment, ended for the moment the odd affair of Bellarion Cane, which in the disclosures it foreshadowed had promised such unusual entertainment. + 

The Regent remained in court after Bellarion’s removal, lest it be supposed that his interest in the administration of justice had been confined to that case alone. But Messer Aliprandi withdrew, as did most of those others who came from the palace, and amongst them, pale and troubled, went the Princess Valeria. To Dionara she vented something of her dismay and anger. + 

“A thief, a spy, a murderer,” she said. “And I trusted him that he might ruin all my hopes. I have the wages of a fool.” + 

“But if he were what he claims to be?” Monna Dionara asked her. + 

“Would that make him any less what he is? He was sent to spy on me, that he might discover what was plotting. My heart told me so. Yet to the end I heeded rather his own false tongue.” + 

“But if he were a spy, why should he have urged you to break off relations with these plotters?” + 

“So that he might draw from me a fuller revelation of my intentions. It was he who murdered Spigno; Spigno the shrewdest, the most loyal and trustworthy of them all. Spigno upon whom I depended to curb their recklessness and yet to give them audacity in season. And this vile creature of my uncle’s has murdered him.” Her eyes were heavy with unshed tears. + 

“But if so, why was he arrested?” + 

“An accident. That was not in the reckoning. I went to see how they would deal with that. And I saw.” + 

Madonna Dionara’s vision, however, was less clear, or else clearer. + 

“Yet I do not understand why he should murder the Count.” + 

“Do you not?” The Princess laughed a little, quite mirthlessly. “It is not difficult to reconstruct the happening. Spigno was dressed, and so was he. Spigno suspected him, and followed him last night to watch him. The scoundrel’s bold appearance at court was his one mistake, his inexplicable imprudence. Spigno taxed him with it on his return, pressed him, perhaps, with questions that unmasked him, and so to save his own skin this Bellarion slew the Count. Why else are the others all fled? Because they know themselves detected. Is it not all crystal clear?” + 

The Lady Dionara shook her head. “If it was your brother’s ruin the Marquis Theodore plotted, this surely frustrates his own ends. If it were as you say, Messer Bellarion would have spoken out boldly in court, and told his tale. Why, being what you suppose him, should he keep silent, when by speaking he could best serve the Regent’s purposes?” + 

“I do not know,” the Princess confessed, “nor does any ever know the Regent’s purposes. He works quietly, craftily, slowly, and he will never strike until he is sure that the blow must be final. This rogue’s conduct was an obedience to the Regent’s commands. Did you not see the looks that passed between them? Did you not see that when Messer Aliprandi intervened it was after a whisper from my uncle?” + 

“But if this man were not what he says he is, what can the intervention avail in the end?” + 

Madonna Valeria was wholly scornful now. “He may be what he claims and yet at the same time what I know him to be. Why not? Where is the contradiction? Yet I dare to prophesy. This Messer Bellarion will not again be brought to trial. The means will be afforded him of breaking prison.” + 

XIV + 

Evasion + 

Bellarion was returned to the common gaol, which was perched high upon the city’s red wall, to herd once more with the vile pariahs there incarcerated. But not for long. Within an hour came an order for his removal to a diminutive stone chamber whose barred, unglazed window looked out upon a fertile green plain through which the broad, silvery ribbon of the river Po coiled its way towards Lombardy. + 

Thither a little later in the afternoon came the Marquis Theodore to visit him, in quest of the true facts. Bellarion lied to him as fluently as he had lied earlier to the Podestà. But no longer with the same falsehoods. + 

His tale now went very near the truth. He had come under the suspicion of the conspirators last night as a result of his visit to court. Explanations had been demanded, and he had afforded them, as he exactly stated. But conscience making cowards of the conspirators, they bound him and locked him in a room until from Cigliano they should have confirmation of his tale. Count Spigno, fearing that his life might be in danger, came in the night to set him free. + 

“Which leads me to suspect,” said Bellarion, “that Count Spigno, too, was an agent of your potency’s. No matter. I keep to the events.” + 

The conspirators, he continued, were more watchful than Spigno suspected. They came upon the twain just as Bellarion’s bonds had been cut, and Spigno had, fortunately, thrust a dagger into his hand. They fell upon Spigno, and one of them⁠—the confusion at the moment did not permit him to say which⁠—stabbed the unfortunate count. Bellarion would have shared his fate but that he hacked right and left with fist and dagger, wounding Barbaresco and certainly one other, possibly two others. Thus he broke through them, flung down the stairs, locked himself in the room on the mezzanine, and climbed out of the window into the arms of the watch. + 

“If your highness had not desired me to go to court, this would not have happened. But at least the conspirators are fled and the conspiracy is stifled in panic. Your highness is now safe.” + 

“Safe!” His highness laughed hard and cruelly. There was now in his mien none of that benignity which Montferrat was wont to admire in it. The pale blue eyes were hard as steel, a furrow at the base of his aquiline nose rendered sinister and predatory the whole expression of his countenance. + 

“Your blundering has destroyed the evidence by which I might have made myself safe.” + 

“My blundering! Here’s justice! Besides, if I were to give the evidence I withheld from the Podestà, if I were to give a true account of what happened at Barbaresco’s⁠ ⁠…” + 

“If you did that!” The Regent interrupted angrily. “How would it look, do you suppose? A vagrant rogue, the associate of a bandit was closeted yesterday with me, and so far received my countenance that he was bidden to court. It would disclose a plot, indeed. It would be said that I plotted to fashion evidence against my nephew. Do you think that I have no enemies here in Casale and elsewhere in Montferrat besides Barbaresco and his plotters? If Spigno had lived, it would have been different, or even if we had Barbaresco and the others and could now wring the truth from them under torment. But Spigno is dead and the others gone.” + 

Bellarion deemed him bewildered by his own excessive subtleties. + 

“Does Barbaresco’s flight give no colour to my tale?” he asked quietly. + 

“Only until some other tale is told, as told it would be. Then what of the word of a rascal like yourself? And what of me who depend upon the word of so pitiful a knave?” + 

“Your highness starts at shadows.” Bellarion was almost contemptuous. “In the end it may be necessary to tell my tale if I am to save my neck.” + 

The Regent’s look and tone made Bellarion feel cold. + 

“Your neck? Why, what does your neck matter?” + 

“Something to me, however little to your highness.” + 

The Regent sneered, and the hard eyes grew harder still. “You become inconvenient, my friend.” + 

Bellarion perceived it. The Regent feared lest investigation should reveal that he had actually fostered the conspiracy for purposes of his own, using first Count Spigno and then Bellarion as his agents. + 

“Aye, you become inconvenient,” he repeated. “Duke Gian Galeazzo would never have boggled over dealing with you. He would have wrung this precious neck by which you lay such store. Do you thank God that I am not Gian Galeazzo.” + 

He took the cloak from his left arm. From within its folds he let fall at Bellarion’s feet a coil of rope; from his breast he drew two stout files which he placed upon Bellarion’s stool. + 

“If you remove one of those bars, that should give you passage. Attach the rope to another, and descend by it at dusk. When you touch ground, you will be outside the walls. Go your ways and never cross the frontiers of Montferrat again. If you do, my friend, I promise you that you shall be hanged out of hand for having broken prison.” + 

“I should deserve it,” said Bellarion. “Your highness need have no anxiety.” + 

“Anxiety, you dog!” The Regent measured him with that cold glance a moment, then swung on his heel and left him. + 

Next morning, when it was learnt that the prisoner had escaped, wild and varied were the speculations in Casale to explain it, and stern, searching, and fruitless the inquiry conducted by the governor of the prison. None was known to have visited Bellarion save only the Marquis Theodore, and only one person was so mad as to suppose that the Regent had made possible the evasion. + 

“You see,” said the Princess Valeria to her faithful Dionara. “Has my prophecy been fulfilled? Was I not right in my reading of this sordid page?” But in her dark eyes there was none of the exultation that verified conjecture so often brings. + 

And at about the same time, Bellarion, having found a fisherman to put him across the Po beyond Frassinetto, was trudging mechanically along, safe now in the territory of Milan. But his thoughts went back to Montferrat and the Princess Valeria. + 

“In her eyes I am a rogue, a spy, a trickster, and perhaps worse, which matters nothing, for in her eyes I never could have been anything that signifies. Nor does it really matter that she should know why Spigno died. Let her think what she will. I have made her and her brother safe for the present.” + 

That night he lay at an inn at Candia, and reflected that he lay there at the Princess Valeria’s charges, for he still possessed three of the five ducats she had given him for his needs. + 

“Some day,” he said, “I shall repay that loan.” + 

Next morning he was up betimes to resume at last in earnest his sorely interrupted journey to Pavia. But he found that the Muses no longer beckoned him as alluringly as hitherto. He had in the last few days tasted stronger waters than those of Castalia’s limpid spring. He had also made the discovery that in fundamental matters all his past learning had but served to lead him astray. He questioned now his heresy on the score of sin. It was possible that, after all, the theologians might be right. Whether sin and evil were convertible terms he could not be sure. But not only was he quite sure that there was no lack of evil in the world; he actually began to wonder if evil were not the positive force that fashions the destinies of men, whilst good is but a form of resistance which, however strong, remains passive, or else, when active, commonly operates through evil that it may ultimately prevail. + 

So much for his syllogism which had seemed irrefragable. It had fallen to dust at the first touch of worldly experience. Yet, for all his apprehension of the world’s wickedness it was with a sigh of regret that he turned his back upon it. The school of living, striving men called him now with a voice far stronger than that of Pavia and the learned Chrysolaras, and reminded him that he was pledged to a service which he could not yet consider fully rendered. + 