Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “ALL spoken like a prophet,” said Giovanpaolo. “It is true that you are a wild-headed lover of the Lady Beatrice. Now tell me what you would have me do? Marry you to her?”

  “Five minutes ago,” said Tizzo, “I would have stolen her with poison or swords. Now I would not lift a finger to come near her without your special permission.”

  “So?” said Giovanpaolo. “If men were like you, I should have to give up war and my old way of living; I should have to take to frankness, honesty, truth and mercy. Let me tell you this — if the time comes when I can persuade old Messer Guido, the head of our house, you shall marry Beatrice on that day. And I’ll carry you to see her this moment.”

  “You will?” exclaimed Tizzo.

  “This moment,” said Giovanpaolo, “she shall be set free from the house of the Clares and permitted to see you.” —

  “Wait!” said Tizzo. “Before I take so much from you, tell me in what way I shall be able to serve you? Tell me, quickly, before my heart bursts, that service of which you are most in need.”

  “I should have to drop you like a plummet into the sea, deeply into the heart of a man who smiles in my face but who is, I fear, my greatest enemy,” said the Baglioni.

  “Let me go to him then,” cried Tizzo, “and I shall read his mind and you shall know his present attitude.”

  “Tizzo, if you could do that, the weight of the world would be remove from me!”

  “What is his name?”

  “Jeronimo della Penna.”

  “But he is one of the chief friends of the Baglioni.”

  “So he seems,” said Giovanpaolo, “but as a matter of fact he is know. to have been kind to our enemies, of late.”

  “Would he then have been kind to me if the world did not know that you and I have been reconciled to-night?” asked Tizzo.

  “How?” asked Giovanpaolo sharply.

  “For all that is known to others,” said Tizzo, “I have been pursued through the city by your riders—”

  “There I was at fault,” said Giovanpaolo.

  “It is forgotten,” answered Tizzo. “But suppose that tomorrow you put a price on my head and proclaim me an enemy? I return to the house of my foster-father. There is an estate of this della Penna close by. If he truly hates you, and learns that I also am your enemy, will he not try at once to make me his friend?”

  Giovanpaolo laughed, suddenly and loudly.

  “Our friends are the eyes that look into the hearts of the world; the ears that listen to its mind. With two more like you, Tizzo, I should be able to conquer Italy in six months. — But wait — there is a frightful peril. You and I alone will know the truth. All of my family will hunt you down like a wild beast the moment I put the price on your head; and you know already that the Baglioni can be cruel enemies.”

  “You, and I, and the Lady Beatrice will know the truth,” said Tizzo. “That is enough for me. Nothing is gained without danger. If della Penna is your enemy, within two days I shall know the degree of his hatred. You may depend on that.”

  “It is done!” said Giovanpaolo. “Here, cloak yourself with this and pull the hood down over your head. Already it is dawn. We shall go to Beatrice now!”

  Wrapped in a length of blue velvet that muffled his body and his sword, with the hood pulled down over his face, Tizzo a moment later was passing down the halls, down the great stairs, through the tremor of life which the night lights revealed along the painted walls of the house of Grifone and so out onto the street, where he walked eastwards with Giovanpaolo towards a great, golden Venus which blazed in the green forehead of the morning sky. But the lesser stars already were withdrawing to their distances like the lights of a retreating army.

  So they came to the high, bald front of the convent of the Clares, where the porter saw the face of Giovanpaolo and bowed very lowly as though he would strike his forehead against the floor.

  TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK.

  LEADING UP TO THIS INSTALLMENT

  WHEN young Tizzo, daring adventurer and master swordsman, rode through the streets of old Perugia to keep a rendezvous with his beautiful lady, Beatrice Baglioni, after having been warned that he was heading straight for danger, little did he realize that his secret visit to the house of the powerful Baglioni would end the way it did. He learned that his attention to Beatrice had incurred the enmity of her brother, Giovanpaolo, and that a price had been set on his head. Learning that Beatrice had been taken to the Convent of Poor Clares, Tizzo made his way to her brother’s room, and after a fierce struggle, vanquishes him in a duel. Giovanpaolo pledges eternal friendship with him, and asks Tizzo to help the House of Baglioni rid itself of its insidious enemies — particularly the treacherous Jeronimo della Penna.

  Tizzo agrees to undertake the mission, realizing that if he is successful he will have the hand of his beloved Beatrice who means so much to him.

  Elia Bigi, Tizzo’s faithful minion; Luigi Falcone, Tizzo’s foster-father, and his old friend, Henry, Baron of Melrose, all help him toward the accomplishment of his task.

  CHAPTER V (Continued).

  WINE OF FRIENDSHIP.

  TIZZO, STRIDING ANXIOUSLY up and down in the reception room, looked again and again towards the shimmering bars of iron which set off the room from the little cell in which the sisters of the order might appear to converse with their friends. He had waited, he was sure, for hours, before hinges moved with a dull, grating sound, and then a candle was carried into the cell by a veiled girl with a beautiful face.

  Tizzo leaped to the bars and grasped them.

  “Beatrice!” he said.

  “Hello!” exclaimed Giovanpaolo. “Can you see her face through that veil, Tizzo?”

  The girl tossed back the hood and came to the bars.

  “This is a strange summer house for our meeting, Tizzo,” she said without emotion.

  He took one of her cool, slender hands and stared, entranced, into her brown eyes.

  She was above all a Baglioni in the immensity of calm with which she faced every crisis.

  And now, looking past Tizzo, she exclaimed, “Is that the traitor? Is that Giovanpaolo? O that I ever thought I loved you!”

  “Beatrice,” said Giovanpaolo, “Tizzo is now my sworn brother. He has forgiven my sins; will you do the same?”

  “How did you buy him, Giovanpaolo?” asked the girl.

  “With my love,” said the warrior.

  “It is something that turns as quickly as a page,” said the girl.

  “With my faith,” said Giovanpaolo.

  “I could blow away a thousand faiths like yours on one breath,” she declared.

  “With my right hand,” said Giovanpaolo.

  “Has he given you his hand?” she asked suddenly of Tizzo.

  “And have given him mine,” said Tizzo.

  Her face softened suddenly.

  She said to Giovanpaolo:— “You are as dangerous as a poisoned knife, or treachery by night; but I can still love you a little for the sake of Tizzo. Tell me what it means, though, when you bring Tizzo to see me here? Am I to suspect anything?”

  “It means that when Messer Guido gives his consent, you two will be married, if you still love this red-headed fellow.

  “But mind you, Beatrice — his brain is really on fire.”

  “I know it,” said the girl. She looked earnestly at Tizzo “Do I love you, my dear?” she asked.

  “Somewhere in your wicked heart there is something that cares for this worthless self of mine,” said Tizzo.

  “Yes,” she answered. “But last night when I walked into the trap for your sake — when I went down over the lawns trembling like a silly fool and whispering your name — I hated you for the thing that I found! Yes, how I hated you!”

  “Did you hate me, Beatrice? I came to the place honestly, as I told you I would, and before the time. And there I was!”

  “Do you know what I found there?” she asked.

  “Marozzo?”

  “Yes. My wret
ched maid had sold my secrets to him; and Giovanpaolo let him use what he had learned.”

  “I was to blame,” said Giovanpaolo.

  “Some day,” she said fiercely, “I shall pay you home for that, my handsome cousin!”

  “Hush!” said Tizzo. “I have put my mark on Marozzo.”

  “Have you?” she asked, eagerly.

  “With the point of my dagger I have drawn a cross on his forehead, that will make him a crusader the rest of his life. No doctor will ever rub that mark away.”

  “Tizzo, I love you!” said the girl.

  She threw out her arms to him through the bars, but he only took her hands and kissed them.

  “Why not my lips, Tizzo?” she cried.

  “Never,” he answered, “till I am sure that you love me — not for the shame I have done to Marozzo but for myself.”

  “Do you see?” said the girl to Giovanpaolo. “He makes bargains and draws up definitions. This comes from his study of Greek. God forgive me if I ever marry a scholar. Tizzo, when will you be sure that I love you for yourself?”

  “Only,” he answered, “when you and I have faced the devil together and plucked a few hairs from his iron beard.”

  CHAPTER VI.

  WASPS BEGIN TO HUM.

  THE MULBERRY, ORANGE and lemon trees flavored the airs that blew over the house of Luigi Falcone, and through the lawns of his garden great-headed plane trees gave shade and spear-headed cypresses marked the walks and circled the fountains. There was an artificial lake expensively produced by diverting the water from a creek among the hills and leading it here to fill an excavated hollow in the midst of the garden. The soil of the excavation had been used to create raised, flowering banks around the pool, and in the center of the lake there was a little island on which stood a summer house. Its form was that of a little Greek temple with graceful Ionic columns that threw a white glimmering reflection across the water, and the principal use of the water was that it acted as a ‘barrier across which the world could not step in order to invade the privacy of Luigi Falcone when he chose to sit here alone with his thoughts. A Venetian gondola with a gondolier lolling under its canopy, waited on the convenience of the master.

  This fellow now started up, for his name was called.

  “Olimpio! Fat-witted, lazy Olimpio!”

  “Mother of heaven!” said Olimpio. “It is my master!”

  And he leaped up to the deck and to the handle of his oar. As soon as he saw the flaming head of Tizzo under the shadows of the trees that crowned the bank, Olimpio began to lean his weight on the long oar and drive the little bark furiously forward.

  “Wait here,” said Tizzo to Elia Bigi. Before he left the town of Perugia he had said to the one-eyed servant: “Elia, I am about to leave Perugia as a proscribed man with a price on my head. You can sit here and keep my rooms, or you can ride with me and risk your neck.” And the grotesque answered: “Well, if I stay here I shall lose my appetite and the only eye that’s left to me will grow dull as an unused knife. But if I go with you, every day will have a salt and savor of its own.” So he had ridden with Tizzo, each with a shirt of the finest Spanish mail, and a steel-lined bonnet, and the pair of them got hastily from the town.

  The gondolier, bringing his boat swiftly and gracefully along the side of the little pier at the edge of the lake, held out both hands with a shout, but Tizzo leaped from the pier exactly into the center of the gondola.

  “Tizzo!” cried Olimpio. “Ah, two-footed cat. You could drop from a tree-top and never break the leaves that you landed on. Welcome home! Welcome, welcome! You have been dancing with the devil in Perugia and still he has not turned your hair gray!” Tizzo shook the greeting hands warmly and laughed: “The best day is the day of the returning. Is your master on the island?”

  “He is there with a Greek manuscript, and I hear him chanting the words and striking the lyre,” said Olimpio. “He will make it a fiesta when he knows you have come!”

  In fact, as the long, narrow gondola went swaying across the smooth water of the lake, Tizzo heard strings of music sound from the little temple, and when he stepped ashore, he recognized a chorus of Aristophanes, sung with a fine gusto to that improvised accompaniment.

  A great cry greeted this singing, and from the columns of the temple, as the gondola touched the shore, there ran out a tall, bald-headed man who threw up his hands with a shout when he saw Tizzo.

  FOR a moment it seemed to Tizzo that he was again the nameless waif of the village streets, standing agape as the “lord of the castle” went past him. And then, like the blurred flicker of many pictures, his memory touched the years when he had entered this house as the humblest of pages and grown at last to the position of foster son and heir.

  Now he had fallen into the arms of Luigi Falcone. Now he was being swept into the little summer house where the harp stood aslant against a chair and, on a table, were scattered the yellow parchments of old manuscripts.

  “What have you been doing with your Greek, Tizzo?” demanded Falcone.

  “I’ve been using it to sharpen my sword,” said Tizzo.

  “I’ve heard that you and Giovanpaolo Baglioni are like two brothers together; and a man must have a sharp sword to be a brother to Giovanpaolo. But Perugia is a city of murder.”

  “I’m a proscribed man with a price on my head,” said Tizzo. “Haven’t you heard that?”

  “Proscribed? By the Baglioni? Tizzo, what are you doing lingering here so close to Perugia? Wait! I’ll call for horses! We’ll send you as fast as hoofs can gallop—”

  “I’ve fled all this distance from Perugia and I’m tired of flight,” said Tizzo. “I’m going to stay here.”

  “They’ll come in a drove and slaughter you, lad!”

  “Perhaps they will. But the fact is that a man has to die some time, and it’s better to be struck down from in front than shot through the back. I’ll run no farther. It’s as easy to die young as it is to die old.”

  “Of course it is,” said Falcone.

  “But are you really resolved to run no more from the Baglioni?”

  “Not another step — today,” said Tizzo, and laughed.

  Falcone laughed in turn. “The same blue devil is in your eyes and the same red devil is in your hair,” he said with a smile.

  “We’ll go into the villa. I have some French wine for you. You shall tell me everything; and I’ll give orders that every man on my place shall take weapons and be prepared to fight for you!”

  “Not a stroke! Not a stroke!” said Tizzo. “I’ve made my own fortune and whatever is in the cup I’ll be ready to drink it, alone.”

  They went back in the gondola, and as he left the boat Tizzo gave some golden florins to Olimpio. “Turn them into silver,” he said, “and scatter them among all the servants. Tell them that the Baglioni want my life and that if it is known that I am here in the Villa Falcone, I’m not better than a dead man.”

  “Ah, signore,” said Olimpio, his eyes still startled by the sight of the gold, “we all are ready to die for you; not a whisper will come from one of us.”

  But as they went on towards the large house, Falcone said: “Tizzo, that is the act of a child, really! You tell them that the Baglioni are hunting you, and you ask the servants to say not a word. But how can they cease from talking? They have heard no gossip like this for many years! You have come back from Perugia with the atmosphere of a hundred duels about you.

  “So how can they keep from talking about you?”

  “Let them talk, then,” said Tizzo. “Even mute swans have to sing when they die. Let them talk.”

  “In fact,” said Falcone, suddenly stopping, “it is a part of your plan to have them talk?”

  “Perhaps it is,” agreed Tizzo. “But don’t ask me what the plan may be.”

  “I SHALL ask nothing,” said Falcone. “Even when the wasps begin to hum, I’ll try to brush them away and merely go on rejoicing myself in you, Tizzo. Tell me everything! What have you learned
in new sword-play? Are you content in Perugia? Why don’t you decide to travel across the world? There are great new things to see, in these days. But you hear everything in Perugia, because it is on a main road to Rome. Tell me all the news of the world, Tizzo! I hunger to learn it!”

  They sat in an open loggia near the top of the large house, looking over the green rolling of the Umbrian hills; the sun-flare shimmered over all. They drank white wine of Bordeaux, cooled with packings of snow.

  “I strike out at random and tell you whatever I’ve heard,” said Tizzo. “The traitor Warbeck has been executed in England.”

  “I knew that,” said Falcone.

  “The Emperor rages because the Swiss are at last free from him. But at Dornach they beat him so thoroughly that they have a right to rule their own lives. In Spain, the great Ferdinand has broken his promise and begins to burn the Moriscoes like firewood. A certain great sailor of Portugal, one Vasco da Gama, has returned after finding a way around Africa to the Indies. The Venetians groan because the Turks beat them last year at Sapienza; they swear to have their revenge soon. But Kemal-Reis is a fighting demon by sea. The Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon, is betrothed to Prince Arthur, of England, the son of that sour-faced money-changer, Henry Tudor. Louis XII is annexing Milan and bargaining with the Spaniards. That’s an unhappy day for Italy! The Diet of Augsburg is stealing some of the Emperor’s powers from him, they say. Pedro Cabral has touched the shore of a great land in the Western ocean; he has called the thing Brazil. It is south of the islands which Columbus discovered for Spain, and people begin to say that it is not the Indies which Columbus discovered. It is new land, with a new, red-skinned people living on it. There, my father, I have burst open all the latest news in one packet. I suppose you’ve heard most of it before.”