“But how came I thence?” she cried. “I must have lain in a swoon, for I remember nothing.” And then her swift mind, leaping to a reasonable conclusion; and assisted, perhaps, by the memory of the shattered catafalque which she had seen— “Did they account me dead, Lazzaro?” she asked of a sudden, her eyes dilating with a curious affright as they were turned upon my own.
“Yes, Madonna,” answered I, “you were accounted dead.” And, with that, I told her the entire story of what had befallen, saving only that I left my own part unmentioned, nor sought to explain my opportune presence in the church. When I spoke of the coming of Ramiro and his knaves she shuddered and closed her eyes in very awe. At length, when I had done, she opened them again, and again she turned them full upon me. Their brightness seemed to increase a moment, and then I saw that she was quietly weeping.
“And you were there to save me, Lazzaro?” she murmured brokenly. “Lazzaro mio, it seems that you are ever at hand when I have need of you. You are indeed my one true friend — the one true friend that never fails me.”
“Are you feeling stronger, Madonna?” I asked abruptly, roughly almost.
“Yes, I am stronger.” She stood up as if to test her strength. “Indeed little ails me saving the horror of this thing. The thought of it seems to turn me sick and dizzy.”
“Sit then and rest,” said I. “Presently, when you are more recovered, we will set out.”
“Whither shall we go?” she asked.
“Why, to the Palace, to your brother.”
“Why, yes,” she answered, as though it were the last suggestion that she had been expecting, “And to-morrow — it will be to-morrow, will it not? — comes the Lord Ignacio to claim his bride. He will owe you no mean thanks, Lazzaro.”
There was a pause. I paced the chamber, a hundred thoughts crowding my mind, but overriding them all the conjecture of how far it might be from matins, and how soon we might be discovered by the monks. Presently she spoke again.
“Lazzaro,” she inquired very gently, “what was it brought you to the church?”
“I came with the others, Madonna, to the burial service,” answered I, and fearing such questions as might follow — questions that I had been dreading ever since I had brought her to the sacristy— “If you are recovered we had best be going,” I told her gruffly.
“Nay, I am not yet enough recovered,” answered she. “And before we go, there are some points in this strange adventure that I would have you make clear to me. Meanwhile, we are very well here. If the good fathers come upon us, what shall it signify?”
I groaned inwardly, and I grew, I think, more afraid than when Ramiro and his men had broken into the church an hour ago.
“What kept you here after all were gone?”
“I remained to pray, Madonna,” I answered brusquely. “Is aught else to be done in a church?”
“To pray for me, Lazzaro?” she asked.
“Assuredly, Madonna.”
“Faithful heart,” she murmured. “And I had used you so cruelly for the deception you practised. But you merited my cruelty, did you not, Lazzaro? Say that you did, else must I perish of remorse.”
“Perhaps I deserved it, Madonna. But perhaps not so much as you bestowed, had you but understood my motives,” I said unguardedly.
“If I had understood your motives?” she mused. “Aye, there is much I do not understand. Even in this night’s transactions there are not wanting things that remain mysterious despite the explanations you have supplied me. Tell me, Lazzaro, what was it led you to suppose that I still lived?
“I did not suppose it,” I blundered like a fool, never seeing whither her question led.
“You did not?” she cried, in deep surprise; and now, when it was too late, I understood. “What was it, then, induced you to lift the coffin-lid?”
“You ask me more than I can tell you,” I answered, almost roughly. “Do you thank God, Madonna, that it was so, and never plague your mind to learn the ‘why’ of it.”
She looked at me with eyes that were singularly luminous.
“But I must know,” she insisted. “Have I not the right? Tell me now: Was it that you wished to see my face again before they gave me over to the grave?”
“Perhaps it was that, Madonna,” I answered in confusion, avoiding her glance. Then— “Shall we be going?” I suggested fiercely. But she never heeded that suggestion.
She spoke as if she had not heard, and the words she uttered seemed to turn me into stone.
“Did you love me then so much, dear Lazzaro?”
I swung round to face her now, and I know that my face was white — whiter than hers had been when I had beheld her in her coffin. My eyes seemed to burn in their sockets as they met hers. A madness overtook me and whelmed my better judgment. I had undergone so much that day through grief, and that night through a hundred emotions, that I was no longer fully master of myself. Her words robbed me, I think, of my last lingering shred of reason.
“Love you, Madonna?” I echoed, in a voice that was as unlike my own as was the mood that then possessed me. “You are the air I breathe, the sun that lights my miserable world. You are dearer to me than honour, sweeter than life. You are the guardian angel of my existence, the saint to whom I have turned morning and evening in my prayers for grace. Do I love you, Madonna — ?”
And there I paused. The thought of what I did and what the consequences must be rushed suddenly upon me. I shivered as a man shivers in awaking. I dropped on my knees before her, bowing my head and flinging wide my arms.
“Forgive, Madonna,” I cried entreatingly. “Forgive and forget. Never again will I offend.”
“Neither forgive nor forget will I,” came her voice, charged with an ineffable sweetness, and her hands descended on my bowed bead, as if she would bless and soothe me. “I am conscious of no offence that craves forgiveness, and what you have said I would not forget if I could. Whence springs this fear of yours, dear Lazzaro? Am I more than woman, or you less than man that you should tremble for the confession that in a wild moment I have dragged from you? For that wild moment I shall be thankful to my life’s end; for your words have been the sweetest ever my poor ears listened to. Once I thought that I loved the Lord Giovanni Sforza. But it was you I loved; for the deeds that earned him my affection were deeds of yours and not of his. Once I told you so in scorn. Yet since then I have come soberly to ponder it. I account you, Lazzaro, the noblest friend, the bravest gentleman and the truest lover that the world has known. Need it surprise you, then, that I love you and that mine would be a happy life if I might spend it in growing worthy of this noble love of yours?”
There was a knot in my throat and tears in my eyes — a matter at which I take no shame. Air seemed to fail me for a moment, and I almost thought that I should swoon, so overcome was I. Transport the blackest soul from among the damned of Hell, wash it white of its sins and seat it on one of the glorious thrones of Heaven, then ponder its emotions, and you may learn something of what I felt. At last, when I had mastered the exquisite torture of my joy —
“Madonna mia,” I cried, “bethink you of what you say. You are the noble lady of Santafior, and I—”
“No more of this,” she interrupted me. “You are Lazzaro Biancomonte, of patrician birth, no matter to what odd shifts a cruel fortune may have driven you. Will you take me?”
She had my face between her palms, and she forced my glance to meet her own saintly eyes.
“Will you take me, Lazaro?” she repeated.
“Holy Flower of the Quince!” was all that I could murmur, whereat she gently smiled. “Santo Fior di Cotogno!”
And then a great sadness overwhelmed me. A tide that neaped the frail bark of happiness high and dry upon the shores of black despair.
“To-morrow Madonna, comes the Lord Ignacio Borgia,” I groaned.
“I know, I know,” said she. “But I have thought of that. Paula Sforza di Santafior is dead. Requiescat! We must dispose that they will
let her rest in peace.”
CHAPTER XV. AN ILL ENCOUNTER
Speechless I stared at her a moment, so taken was I with the immensity of the thing that she suggested. Fear, amazement, and joy jostled one another for the possession of my mind.
“Why do you look so, Lazzaro?” she exclaimed at last. “What is it daunts you?
“How is the thing possible?” quoth I.
“What difficulty does it present?” she questioned back. “The Governor of Cesena has rendered very possible what I propose. We may look on him to-morrow as our best friend.”
“But Ramiro knows,” I reminded her.
“True, but do you think that he will dare to tell the world what he knows? He might be asked to say how he comes by his knowledge, and that should prove a difficult question to answer. Tell me, Lazzaro,” she continued, “if he had succeeded in carrying me away, what think you would have been said in Pesaro to-morrow when the coffin was found empty?”
“They would assume that your body had been stolen by some wizard or some daring student of anatomy.”
“Ah! And if we were quietly to quit the church and be clear of Pesaro before morning, would not the same be said?”
“Probably,” answered I.
“Then why hesitate? Is it that you do not love me enough, Lazzaro?”
I smiled, and my eyes must have told her more than any protestation could. Then I sighed. “I hesitate, Madonna, because I would not have you do now what you might come, hereafter, bitterly to repent. I would not let you be misled by the impulse of a moment into an act whose consequences must endure as long as life itself.”
“Is that the reasoning of a lover?” she asked me, very quietly. “Is this cold argument, this weighing of issues, consistent with the stormy passion you professed so lately?”
“It is,” I answered stoutly. “It is because I love you more than I love myself that I would have you reflect ere you adventure your life upon such a broken raft as mine. You are Paola Sforza di Santafior, and I—”
“Enough of that,” she interrupted me, rising. She swept towards me, and before I knew it her hands were on my shoulders, her face upturned, and her blue eyes on mine, depriving me of all will and all resistance.
“Lazzaro,” said she, and there was an intensity almost fierce in her low tones, “moments are flying and you stand here reasoning with me, and bidding me weigh what is already weighed for all time. Will you wait until escape is rendered impossible, until we are discovered, before you will decide to save me, and to grasp with both hands this happiness of ours that is not twice offered in a lifetime?”
She was so close to me that I could almost feel the beating of her heart. Some subtle perfume reaching me and combining with the dominion that her eyes seemed to have established over me completed my subjugation. I was as warm wax in her hands. Forgotten were all considerations of rank and station. We were just a man and a woman whose fates were linked irrevocably by love. I stooped suddenly, under the sway of an impulse, I could not resist, and kissed her upturned face, turning almost dizzy in the act. Then I broke from her clasp, and bracing myself for the task to which we stood committed by that kiss —
“Paola,” said I, “we must devise the means to get away. I will bear you to my mother’s home near Biancomonte, that you may dwell there at least until we are wed. But the thing that exercises my mind is how to make our unobserved escape from Pesaro.”
“I have thought of it already,” she informed me quietly.
“You have thought of it?” I cried. “And of what have you thought?”
For answer she stepped back a pace, and drew the cowl of the monk’s habit over her head until her features were lost in the shadows of it. She stood before me now, a diminutive Dominican brother. Her meaning was clear to me at once. With a cry of gladness I turned to the drawer whence I had taken the habit in which she was arrayed, and selecting another one I hastily donned it above the garments that I wore.
No sooner was it done than I caught her by the arm.
“Come, Madonna,” I bade her in an urgent voice. At the first step she stumbled. The habit was so long that it cumbered her feet. But that was a difficulty soon conquered. With my dagger I cut a piece from the skirt of it, enough to leave her freedom of movement; and, that accomplished, we set out.
We crossed the church swiftly and silently, and a moment I left her in the porch whilst I surveyed the street. All was quiet. Pesaro still slept, and it must have wanted some two hours or more to the dawn.
A fine rain was falling as we sallied out, and there was a sting in the December wind which made us draw our cowls the tighter about our face. Abandoning the main street, I led her down some narrow alleys, deserted like all the rest of the city, and not so much as a stray cat abroad in that foul weather. It was very dark, and a hundred times we stumbled, whilst in some places I almost carried her bodily to avoid the filth of the quarter we were traversing. At length we gained the space in front of the gates that open on to the northern road, known as Porta Venezia, and I would have blundered on and roused the guard to let us out, using the Borgia ring once more — that talisman whose power had grown during these years, so that it would now open me almost any door in Italy. But Paola stayed me. Wisely she counselled that we should do nothing that might draw too much attention upon ourselves, and she urged me to wait until the dawn, when the guard would be astir and the gates opened.
So we fled to the shelter of a porch, and there we waited, huddling ourselves out of the reach of the icy rain. We talked little during the time we spent there. For my own part I had overmuch food for thought, and a very natural anxiety racked me. Soon the monks would be descending to the church, and they would discover the havoc there, and spread the alarm.
Who could say but that they might even discover the abstraction of the two habits from the sacristy, and the hue and cry for two men in the sackcloth of Dominicans would be afoot — for they would infer that two men so disguised had made off with the body of Madonna Paola. The thought stirred me like a goad. I stood up. The night was growing thinner, and, suddenly, even as I rose, a light gleamed from one of the Windows of the guard-house.
“God be thanked for that fellow’s early rising,” I cried out. “Come, Madonna, let us be moving.”
And I added my newly-conceived reasons for quitting the place without further delay.
Cursing us for being so early abroad — a curse to which I responded with a sonorous “Pax Domini sit tecum” the still somnolent sentinel opened the post and let us pass. I was glad in the end that we had waited and thus avoided the necessity of showing my ring, for should inquiries be made concerning two monks, that ring of mine might have betrayed the identity of one of them. I gave thanks to Heaven that I knew the country well. A quarter of a league or so from Pesaro we quitted the high-road and took to the by-paths with which I was well acquainted.
Day came, grey and forbidding at first, but presently the rain ceased and the sun flashed out a thousand diamonds from the drenched hedge-rows.
We plodded on; and at length, towards noon, when we had gained the neighbourhood of the village of Cattolica, we halted at the hut of a peasant on a small campagna. I had divested myself of my monk’s habit, and cut away the cowl from Madonna’s. She had thereafter fashioned it by means that were mysterious to my dull man’s mind into a more feminine-looking garb.
Thus we now presented ourselves to the old man who was the sole tenant of that lonely and squalid house. A ducat opened his door as wide as it would go, and gave us free access to every cranny of his dwelling. Food he procured us — rough black bread, some pieces of roasted goat, and some goat’s milk — and on this we regaled ourselves as though it had been a ducal banquet, for hunger had set us in the mood to account anything delicious. And when we had eaten we fell to talking, the old man having left us to go about such peasant duties as claimed his attention, and our talk concerned ourselves, our future first, and later on our past. I remember that Madonna returned to the
matter of the deception that I had practised, seeking to learn what reasons had impelled me, and I answered her in all truth.
“Madonna mia, I think it must have been to win your love. When Giovanni Sforza bade me, with many a threat, to write those verses, I undertook the task with ready gladness, for in its performance I was to pour out the tale of the passion that was consuming my poor heart. It occurred to me that if those verses were worthy, you might come to love their author for their beauty, and so I strove to render them beautiful. It was the same spirit urged me to don the Lord Giovanni’s armour and fight in that splendid if futile skirmish. Even as you had come to love the author for his verses, so might you come to love the warrior for his valour. That you should account the one and the other the work of Giovanni Sforza was to me a little thing, since I was well content to think that you but loved him because you accounted his the things that I had performed. Therefore was I the one you truly loved, although you did not know it. Could you but conceive what consolation that reflection was to me, you would deal lightly with me for my deceit.”
“I can conceive it,” she answered, very gently, her eyes downcast; “and now that I know the motives that impelled you, I almost love you for that deceit itself, for it seems to me that it holds some quality well worthy of devotion.”
Such was our talk, all of a nature to help us to a better understanding of each other, and all seeming to endear us more and more by showing us how close the past had already drawn us.
Later I rose and announced my intention of adventuring into Cattolica, there to procure her garments more seemly than those she wore, in which she might journey on and come into the presence of my mother. Also, there was in Cattolica a man I knew, of whom I hoped for the loan of enough money to enable me to purchase mules, to the end that we might journey in more dignity and comfort. It was then about the twentieth hour, and I hoped to return by nightfall. I took my leave of Madonna, enjoining her to rest and to seek sleep whilst I was absent; and with that I set out.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 126
