From a fretted gallery above the doorway came a sound of lutes, archlutes and viols, and under cover of the music — his voice so melodious that it almost seemed to sing to it — the Duke addressed her.
‘I rejoice for you, Madonna,’ he said, ‘that here is spread no nuptial feast.’
She looked at him, and shivered slightly as she turned away again.
‘It would break my heart,’ he pursued on that murmuring, caressing note of his that lent his voice a wooing quality, ‘it would break my heart to see so much beauty delivered into the arms of foul infection. Hence do I fervently pray that Matteo Orsini comes tonight.’
‘And for no other reason?’ she asked him scornfully, stung by what seemed to her such stark hypocrisy.
He smiled, his beautiful sombre eyes enveloping her white face in their regard. ‘I confess the other,’ he admitted, ‘but I swear as I am living man and worship all things lovely, the reason that I gave weighs the heavier.’ He sighed. ‘It is to save you that I pray Matteo Orsini may come tonight.’
‘He will come,’ she answered him. ‘Have no doubt of that.’
‘He owes no less to his manhood,’ he said quietly. Then turned his attention to more immediate matter. ‘You do not eat,’ he reproved her.
‘I should choke, I think,’ she answered frankly.
‘A cup of wine at least,’ he urged, and signed to a cellarer who bore a gold vessel of soft Puglia wine. But, seeing her gesture of refusal, he put forth a hand to stay the servant’s pouring. ‘Wait,’ he said, and beckoned a page to him. ‘A moss-agate cup for Madonna Fulvia, here,’ he bade the stripling, and the page vanished upon his errand.
Madonna’s lip curled a little. ‘There is no need for the precaution,’ she said — for moss-agate cups were said to burst if poison touched them— ‘I neither suspect venom nor do I fear it.’
‘So much I might have known,’ he answered, ‘since you have displayed yourself so subtly learned in the uses of it.’
He spoke quietly and gravely, but at the words she felt herself go hot and cold at once. A scarlet wave suffused her face, then ebbed, to leave it deathly pale. His words made her perhaps realize that she had no just cause for grievance; she was a poisoner caught flagrante, and the steely treatment he meted out to her in his silken fashion was no more than her desert.
Back came the page with the gleaming moss-agate cup, which he set down before her. The waiting cellarer brimmed it at a sign from him, and his glance now inviting her she drank to steady her sudden weakness.
But the meats they placed before her continued unheeded, nor did she thereafter heed the Duke when he leaned aside to mock her still with that dread gentleness of his. Her staring eyes were set expectantly upon the doors at the room’s end. It waxed late, and her impatience mounted. Why did they not come, and thus put an end to the unbearable strain of suspense that racked her very soul?
Came pages now with silver basins, ewers, and napkins. Gallants and ladies dipped their hands and washed their fingers against the serving of the sweetmeats, and then without warning — but obeying, no doubt, the orders that the Duke had left — those portals upon which Madonna’s eyes had so long been fastened swung open, and between two men-at arms in steel she beheld her clay-faced equerry, the faithful Mario, haggard and dust-stained, returned at last.
The hum of conversation sank down and was stilled as the sturdy fellow advanced up the long room between the tables and came, still flanked by his guards, to stand immediately before the Duke. Not to the Duke, however, but to Madonna Fulvia did he address himself when at length he spoke.
‘Madonna, I have done your bidding. I have brought Ser Matteo.’
A silence followed and a pause, ended at last by Cesare’s short laugh.
‘Body of God! Did he need bringing?’
‘He did, my lord.’
The Duke’s glance swept over the noble company. ‘You hear,’ he called to them, raising his voice. ‘You perceive the lofty spirit of these Orsini. An Orsini must needs be brought to ransom his mistress and kinswoman from the fate decreed her.’ He turned to the equerry. ‘Fetch him hither,’ he said shortly, with a wave of his fine hand.
But Mario was slow to obey. Not upon the Duke but upon Madonna were his eyes set, as if awaiting her confirmation of that command. She nodded, whereupon he turned and strode down the room again upon his errand and so out.
The doors closed after him, but the silence continued. No man or woman there but felt the oppression of the impending drama, but awaited in suspense the climax and conclusion that were close at hand. The very minstrels in the gallery had ceased their music, and not a sound disturbed the general brooding hush.
Cesare leaned back in his high gilded chair, his slender fingers toying delicately with the strands of his auburn beard, his narrowed eyes glancing aslant at Madonna Fulvia. He found her manner very odd. It contained some quality that intrigued him, and eluded his miraculous penetration.
She sat there with ashen face and wide, staring eyes; so might a corpse have sat, and a corpse you might have deemed her but for the convulsive heave of her slight bosom.
And then a sound of voices beyond the door — of voices raised in sudden altercation — broke upon the general expectancy.
‘You cannot enter!’ came a gruff shout. ‘You cannot take...’
And then they heard Mario’s voice, harsh, vibrant and compelling, interrupting and overbearing the objector.
‘Did you not hear the Duke’s express commands that I should bear Matteo Orsini to him? I have Matteo Orsini here, and I but obey his potency’s commands. Out of my way, then.’
But other voices broke in upon him, all speaking together so that they made no more than a confused and bawling chorus whose purport was not to be discerned.
Suddenly Cesare rose in his place, his eyes flaming. ‘What’s this?’ he cried, ‘By the Host! am I kept waiting? Set me wide those doors!’
There was a scurry of lackeys to obey that imperious voice. The Duke sank back into his chair as the doors were violently pulled open. Beyond it a line of a half-dozen men-at-arms made a screen that concealed whatever lay behind them.
‘My lord...’ began one of these, a grizzled antient, raising his hand in appeal.
But Cesare let him get no further. His clenched hand descended violently upon the table. ‘Stand back, I say, and let him enter.’
Instantly that line of steel-clad men melted and vanished, and where it had been stood Mario now. He paused a moment on the threshold, his face set and grim. Then he stalked forward up the long room again between the tables. But no one heeded him. Every eye was fixed in amazed and uncomprehending horror upon that which followed after him.
Came four brothers of the Misericordia in black, funereal habits, their heads cowled, their eyes gleaming faintly from the eyeholes cut in their shapeless visors. Among them they carried a bier, whose trappings of black velvet edged with silver swept the ground as they solemnly advanced.
They were midway up that room before the company broke from the spell of horror which this grim spectacle had laid upon it. A loud outcry seemed to burst from every throat at once. Then the Duke leapt to his feet, and the whole company with him, and in the sudden stir and confusion none observed that Madonna Fulvia left her place at the Duke’s side.
The bearers halted and set down their ghastly burden. Mario stood slightly aside, lest his body should screen the bier from the eyes of the Duke.
‘What’s this?’ his potency demanded, anger ringing in his voice. ‘What jest is this you dare to put upon me?’ And as he spoke he swung aside to where Madonna Fulvia had been, then, finding her place now vacant, his flaming eyes swept round in quest of her, and discovered her at last standing there beside the bier.
‘No jest, Magnificent,’ she answered him, her head thrown back, a smile of bitter, tragic triumph on her white face. ‘Faithful and utter compliance with your behest — no more. You commanded that Matteo Orsini should be delivered into yo
ur hands. Provided I did that you would release me of my compact to wed your jackal Pantaleone degli Uberti. I hold you to your word, my lord. I have done my part. Matteo Orsini is here.’ And she flung an arm out and downwards to indicate the bier.
He stared at her, his eyes narrowing, oddly out of countenance for one habitually so calm, so master of every circumstance.
‘Here?’ he questioned, and added the further question— ‘Dead?’
For answer she stooped and swept the velvet pall aside, laying bare the coffin underneath. That done she faced him again, defiance in her every slender line, a ghastly smile on her pale lips.
‘Bid your guards hack off the lid that you may assure yourself ’tis he. I promise you he will offer no resistance now.’
Considering him, she took satisfaction in the perception that at last she had wiped that hateful, gently mocking smile from his face. He was scowling upon her, his eyes ablaze with such a passion as no man in all Italy would willingly have confronted. His hands, resting upon the table before him, were clenched so that the knuckles showed like knobs of marble.
The rest of them, the whole of that splendid company, was ranged against the walls as far as possible from that hideous thing below. In their minds, as in Cesare’s, there stirred a memory of what had befallen earlier that day — of that letter that had been infected and of the manner of that infection — and a suspicion of what was yet to follow began to form in the thoughts of all.
Thus for a spell of awful silence, then Cesare’s voice rasped out a question harshly — a question that voiced in part that general and terrible suspicion.’
‘How died he?’
Came like a thunderbolt her answer, shrilly delivered on a high note of fierce exaltation— ‘He died of the smallpox yesternight. Hack off the lid,’ she added. ‘Hack off the lid, and take him.’
But that last mocking invitation which she hurled at the Duke was lost in the sudden uproar in the noise of the wild stampede that followed her announcement. Mad with fear, men who had shown themselves fearless upon a field of stricken battle turned this way and that, seeking a way out. Cursing, they hurled themselves against the long windows that opened upon the little claustral garden of the Communale, and screaming, fainting women crowded after them to avail themselves of this shortest way out that was being forced open.
It would have needed more even than the presence of that terrible duke to have restrained them in their wild panic, in their mad frenzy to breathe the clean cold air, to quit this tainted atmosphere, to fly this hideous plague-spot. Nor did Cesare make any effort to delay their flight.
With shivering of glass and crashing of splintered timbers those long window-doors were swept away. Out of the room headlong, as a river that has burst its dam, surged that courtly, terror-stricken mob; into it rushed the pure, keen air of the January night.
Cesare alone, at his place beyond the board, in the flickering light of wind-blown, guttering candles, remained even after the last lackey had fled, conquered by his panic. Indomitable, the Duke stood there to face the woman who dared to bring a plague-ridden corpse to set at naught his authority and make a mock of his power.
‘Well?’ she asked him, and her laugh made him shudder, man of iron though he was. ‘Have you the courage to face Matteo Orsini now? Or do you lack it still, for all that he is dead?’
‘Living I never feared him,’ he blazed out, unworthily it must be confessed.
‘Then you will not fear him dead,’ said she, and turned fiercely upon her equerry. ‘Here, Mario, you who have had the scourge and therefore need no longer fear it, prize off this lid. Give Matteo room to strike even in death.’
But the Duke waited for no more. Panic took him, too; and he was known to confess to it thereafter, adding that it was the only occasion in all his life upon which he had been face to face with fear, he who so often had looked death in the eyes without quailing.
‘Blood of God!’ he cried, and on that fierce oath he sprang from the table, and flung through the nearest window in the wake of his vanished court. Outside they heard him shouting for his horse, and they heard too the clamour of answering voices.
Within ten minutes he and his noble company were in the saddle, scudding through the night away from Castel della Pieve and the dread plague it harboured.
As that thunder of hoofs receded, Madonna Fulvia, who had remained by the coffin with no word spoken, bade the men take up their burden once more. Laden with it they passed out of that room, all littered with the now unheeded treasures that had been assembled in the Duke’s honour. Madonna and Mario walked ahead, the coffin was borne after them. They crossed the hall and quitted the palace, none hindering, indeed all fleeing before their approach. Horses were found for herself and Mario; the bearers came on foot with their burden. Thus they took the road by the marshes back to Pievano in the dark.
When they had put a league or so between themselves and Città della Pieve, she spoke for the first time.
‘How was it with Giuberti today, Mario?’ she asked.
‘He died at noon, Madonna,’ was the answer. ‘God be praised, there is no other case of smallpox yet, and by His Grace there will be none. Our precautions were well taken, and they will be to the end. Colomba herself dug his grave and gave him burial deep in the enclosed garden. The lazar-house was in flames when I left Pievano, so that all source of infection may be destroyed, and Colomba herself will set up a tent in the enclosure and abide there until all danger of her carrying the scourge is overpast.’
‘The good Colomba shall be rewarded, Mario. We are profoundly in her debt.’
‘A faithful soul,’ Mario admitted. ‘But there was no risk to her, since like myself, she too has paid the price of immunity.’
‘That cannot lessen our gratitude,’ she said. And then she sighed. ‘Poor Giuberti! God rest his loyal soul! A faithful servant ever, he has served us even in death. Heaven has blessed us in the matter of servants, Mario. There is yourself...’
‘I? I am but a clod,’ he interrupted. ‘I had not the wit to trust you today. Had you been dependent upon my service all must have miscarried and Heaven knows what fatality had been the end of this adventure.’
‘Which reminds me,’ said she, ‘that these poor fellows are unnecessarily laden. We have no pursuit to fear, and we shall make the better speed if we ease them of their burden.’ She drew rein as she spoke, and Mario with her. ‘Enough!’ she called to those cowled figures that swung along behind her. ‘Empty it out.’
Obediently they set down the coffin, forced up the lid, tilted it over, and rolled out the load of earth and stones that it contained.
She laughed softly in the dark when this was done. But Mario shuddered, bethinking him of the risk she had taken.
‘God and His saints be thanked he did not dare to look,’ he said with fervour. ‘He has a reputation for high courage, and I feared...By the Host! how I feared!’
‘Not more than I feared, Mario,’ she confessed, ‘but I also hoped; and if the chance was a desperate one it was still the only chance.’
At Pievano some hours later she found her father so racked with anxiety by her continued absence and the circumstance that Mario had come and gone again that afternoon that he had summoned the fugitive Matteo Orsini from his hiding place to consult with him as to what measures should be taken.
Her appearance ended their travail of spirit, and the sight of them made an end of the fortitude that had so long upheld her. She flung herself upon her lover’s breast, panting and trembling.
‘You may sleep quiet now of nights, Matteo mine,’ she said. ‘He believes you dead, and fears you dead more than he could ever have feared you living.’ And on that she fainted in his arms, her strength of body and of spirit alike exhausted.
And that, so far as I can discover, is the only instance in which man or woman defeated the Duke of Valentinois in an encounter of wits; nor does it lessen my high opinion of his penetration, for it must surely be admitted that the dice
were heavily cogged against him, and that he fell a victim to a fraud rendered possible by circumstances. There is also responsible for this failure the fact that for once he did not choose his tool with that discrimination which Macchiavelli enjoins upon princes. He overlooked the significance of those excessively full lips of Pantaleone’s and left unheeded the warning Fra Serafino uttered on the score of them. Or perhaps, on the other hand...But why speculate? I have laid the facts before you, and you may draw your own inferences.
As for Pantaleone, if he still interests you, he fared on the whole perhaps better than he deserved, though that is purely a matter of the point of view from which he is to be judged. For, as the Lord Almerico’s favourite philosopher has said, a man does not choose the part he shall play in life, he simply plays the part that is allotted to him.
He was entirely overlooked when Cesare with all his following left Città della Pieve, and he was left there in the gaol into which he had been flung until it should be ascertained whether he was to be required as a bridegroom. Anon Cesare remembered him, and was about to order him to be strangled when he learnt that the fellow had developed the smallpox and had been, very properly, taken to a lazar-house. It is recorded that upon hearing this the Duke shuddered at the memory of his own escape, and was content to leave the rascal to the fate that had overtaken him — perhaps because he knew of no one who in the circumstances would undertake to strangle him.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 448