“For which mercy may Heaven be praised!” I burst out.
He scowled at me; then he laughed evilly.
“My men have returned — all save three. Captain Lucagnolo with two of his followers, has undertaken to go beyond the area I appointed for the search, and to proceed to the village of Cattolica. While he is pursuing his inquiries there, I have resolved to pursue my own here. I now call upon you, Boccadoro, to tell us what you know of Madonna Paola’s whereabouts.”
“I know nothing,” I answered stoutly. “I am prepared to take oath that I know nothing of her whereabouts.”
“Tell me, then, at least,” said he, “where you bestowed her.”
I shook my head, pressing my lips tight.
“Do you think that I would tell you if I had the knowledge?” was the scornful question with which I answered him. “You may pursue your inquiries as you will and where you will, but I pray God they may all prove as futile as must those that you would pursue here and upon my own person.”
This was how I fenced with him, this was the manner in which I followed Mariani’s sound advice that I should temporise! Oh! I know that my words were the words of a fool, yet no fear that Ramiro would inspire me could have restrained them.
There was a murmur at the table, and his fellows turned their eyes on Ramiro to see how he would receive this bearding. He smiled quietly, and raising his hand he made a sign to the executioners.
Rude hands seized me from behind, and the doublet was torn from my back by fingers that never paused to untruss my points.
They turned me about, and hurried me along until I stood under the pulleys of the torture, and one of the men held me securely whilst the other passed the cords about my wrists. Then both the executioners stepped back, to be ready to hoist me at the Governor’s signal.
He delayed it, much as an epicure delays the consumption of a delectable morsel, heightening by suspense the keen desire of his palate. He watched me closely, and had my lips quivered or my eyelids fluttered, he would have hailed with joy such signs of weakness. But I take pride in truthfully writing that I stood bold and impassively before him, and if I was pale I thank Heaven that pallor was the habit of my countenance, so that from that he could gather no satisfaction. And standing there, I gave him back look for look, and waited.
“For the last time, Boccadoro,” he said slowly, attempting by words to shake a demeanour that was proof against the impending facts of the cord, “I ask you to remember what must be the consequences of this stubbornness. If not at the first hoist, why then at the second or the third, the torture will compel you to disclose what you may know. Would you not be better advised to speak at once, while your limbs are soundly planted in their sockets, rather than let yourself be maimed, perhaps for life, ere you will do so?”
There was a stir of hoofs without. They thundered on the planks of the drawbridge and clattered on the stones of the courtyard. The thought of Cesare Borgia rose to my mind. But never did drowning man clutch at a more illusory straw. Cold reason quenched my hope at once. If the greatest imaginable success attended Mariani’s journey, the Duke could not reach Cesena before midnight, and to that it wanted some ten hours at least. Moreover, the company that came was small to judge by the sound — a half-dozen horses at the most.
But Ramiro’s attention had been diverted from me by the noise. Half-turning in his chair, he called to one of the men-at-arms to ascertain who came. Before the fellow could do his bidding, the door was thrust open and Lucagnolo appeared on the threshold, jaded and worn with hard riding.
A certain excitement arose in me at sight of him, despite my confidence that he must be returning empty-handed.
Ramiro rose, pushed back his chair and advanced towards the new-comer.
“Well?” he demanded. “What news?”
“Excellency, the girl is here.”
That answer seemed to turn me into stone, so great was the shock of this sudden shattering of the confidence that had sustained me.
“My search in the country failing,” pursued the captain, as he came forward, “I made bold to exceed your orders by pushing my inquiries as far as the village of Cattolica. There I found her after some little labour.”
Surely I dreamt. Surely, I told myself, this was not possible. There was some mistake. Lucagnolo had drought some wench whom he believed to be Madonna Paola.
But even as I was assuring myself of this, the door opened again, and between two men-at-arms, white as death, her garments stained with mud and all but reduced to rags, and her eyes wild with a great fear, came my beloved Paola.
With a sound that was as a grunt of satisfaction, Ramiro strode forward to meet her. But her eyes travelled past him and rested upon me, standing there between the leather-clad executioners with the cords of the torture pinioning my wrists, and I saw the anguish deepen in their blue depths.
CHAPTER XIX. DOOMED
Across the length of that hall our eyes met — hers and mine — and held each other’s glances. To me the room and all within it formed an indistinct and misty picture, from out of which there clearly gleamed my Paola’s sweet, white face.
All at the table had risen with Ramiro, and now, copying their leader, they bared their heads in outward token of such respect as certainly would have been felt by any men less abandoned than were they before so much saintly beauty and distress.
Lucagnolo had stepped aside, and Ramiro was now bowing low and ceremoniously before Madonna. His face I could not see, since his back was towards me, but his tones, as they floated across the hall to where I stood, came laden with subservience.
“Madonna, I give praise and thanks to Heaven for this,” said he. “I was afflicted by the gravest misgivings for your safety, and I am more than thankful to behold you safe and sound.”
There was a hypocritical flavour of courtliness about his words, and a mincing of his tones that suggested the efforts of a bull-calf to imitate the warbling of a throstle.
Madonna paid him no heed; indeed, she appeared not to have heard him, for her eyes continued to look past him and at me. At last her lips parted, and although she scarcely seemed to raise her voice above a whisper, the word uttered reached my ears across the stillness of the great room, and the word was “Lazzaro!”
At mention of my name, and at the tone in which it was uttered — a tone that betrayed same measure of what was in her heart — Ramiro wheeled sharply in my direction, his brows wrinkling. A certain craftiness he had, for all that I ever accounted him the dullest-witted clod that ever rose to his degree of honour. He must have realised how expedient it was that in all he did he should present himself to Madonna in a favourite light.
“Release him,” he bade the executioners that held me, and in an instant I was set free. The order given, he turned again to Madonna.
“You have been torturing him,” she cried, and her words were hard and fierce, her eyes blazing. “You shall repent it, Ser Ramiro. The Lord Cesare Borgia shall hear of it.”
Her anger betrayed her more and more, and however hidden it may have been to her, to me it was exceeding clear that she was encompassing my destruction. Ramiro laughed easily.
“Madonna, you are at fault. We have not been torturing him, though I confess that we were on the point of putting him to the question. But your timely arrival has saved his limbs, for the question we were asking him concerned your whereabouts!”
I would have shouted to her to be wary how she answered him, for some premonition how he was about to trick her entered my mind. But realising the futility of such a course, I held my peace and waited agonisedly.
“You had tortured him in vain then,” she answered scornfully. “For Lazzaro Biancomonte would never have betrayed me. Nor could he have betrayed me if he would, for after your men had searched the hut in which I was hidden, I walked to Cattolica thinking foolishly that I should be safer there.”
Lackaday! She had told him the very thing he had sought to know. Yet to make doubly sure he pursued th
e scent a little farther.
“Indeed it seems to me that had I tortured him I had given him no more than he deserved for having abandoned you in that hut. Madonna, I tremble to think of the harm that might have come to you through that knave’s desertion.” And he scowled across at me, much as the Pharisee might have scowled upon the publican.
“He is no knave,” she answered, and I could have groaned to hear her working my undoing, though not by so much as a sign might I inspire her with caution, for that sign must have been seen by others. “Nor did he abandon me. He left me only to go in quest of the necessaries for our journey. If harm has come to me the blame of it must not rest on him.”
“Of what harm do you speak, Madonna?” he cried, in a voice laden with concern.
“Of what harm,” she echoed, eyeing him with a scorn that would have slain him had he any manhood left. “Of what harm? Mother of Mercy, defend me! Do you ask the question? What greater harm could have come to me than to have fallen into the hands of Ramiro del’ Orca and his brigands?”
He stood looking at her, and I doubt not that his face was a very picture of simulated consternation.
“Surely, Madonna, you do not understand that we are your friends, that you can so abuse us. But you will be faint, Madonna,” he cried, with a fresh and deep solicitude. “A cup of wine.” And he waved his hand towards the table.
“It would poison me, I think,” she answered coldly.
“You are cruel, and — alas! — mistrustful,” said he. “Can you guess nothing of the anxiety that has been mine these two days, of the fears that have haunted me as I thought of you and your wanderings?”
Her lip curled, and her face took on some slight vestige of colour. Her spirit was a thing for which I might then have come to love her had it not been that already I loved her to distraction.
“Yes,” said she, “I can guess something of your dismay when you found your schemes frustrated; when you found that you had come too late to San Domenico.”
“Will you not forgive me that shift to which my adoration drove me?” he implored, in a honeyed voice — and a more fearful thing than Ramiro the butcher was Ramiro the lover.
At that scarcely covert avowal of his passion she recoiled a step as she might before a thing unclean. The little colour faded from her cheek, the scorn departed from her lip, and a sickly, deadly fear overspread her lovely face. God! that I should stand there and witness this insult to the woman I adored and worshipped with a fervour that the Church seeks to instil into us for those about the throne of Heaven. It might not be. A blind access of fury took me. Of the consequences I thought nothing. Reason left me utterly, and the slight hope that might lie in temporising was disregarded.
Before those about me could guess my purpose, or those others, too engrossed in the scene at the far end of the hall, could intervene, I had sprung from between the executioners and dashed across the space that separated me from the Governor of Cesena. One well-aimed blow, and there should be an end to Messer Ramiro. That was the only thought that found room in my disordered mind.
One or two there were who cried out as I sped past them, swift as the hound when it speeds after the fleeing hare. But I was upon Ramiro ere any could have sufficiently mastered his surprise to interfere.
By the nape of his great neck I caught him from behind, and setting my knee at his spine I wrenched him backward, and so flung him over on the floor. Down I went with him, my hand reaching for the dagger at his jewelled girdle, and I had found and drawn it in that swift action of mine ere he had bethought him of his hands. Up it flashed and down. I sank it through the crimson velvet of his rich doublets straight at the spot where his heart should be — if he were so human as to have a heart. The next instant I turned cold and sick. My desperate effort had been all for nothing. In my hand I was left with the bronze hilt of his great poniard; the blade had broken off against the mesh of steel the coward wore beneath his finery.
There was a rush of feet about us, a piercing scream from Madonna Paola, and it was to her that I owed my life in that grim moment. A dozen blades were naked and would have transfixed me as I lay, but that she covered my body with her own and bade them strike at me through her.
A moment later and the powerful hands of the Governor of Cesena were at my throat. I was lifted and tossed aside, as though I had been a hound and he the bull I had beset. And as he swung me over and crushed me to the ground, he knelt above me and grinned horribly into my purpling face.
A second we stayed so, and I thought indeed that my hour was come, when suddenly I felt the blood in my head released once more. He had taken his hands from my throat. He seized me now by the collar and dragged me rudely to my feet.
“Take this knave and lock him in his chamber,” he bade a couple of his bravi. “I may have need of him ere he dies.”
“Messer Ramiro,” came the interceding voice of Madonna Paola, “what he did, he did for me. You will not let him die for it?”
There was a pause during which he looked at her, whilst the men were roughly dragging me across the hall.
“Who knows, Madonna?” he said, with a bow and an infernal smile. “If you were to beg his life, it might even come to pass that I might spare it.”
He did not wait for her answer, but stepping after me he called to the men that led me. In obedience they halted, and he came forward. We were now at the foot of the staircase.
“Boccadoro,” said he, planting himself before me, and eyeing me with eyes that were very full of malice, “you will recall the punishment I promised you if I came to discover it was you had thwarted me in Pesaro. It is the second time you have fooled Ramiro del’ Orca. There does not live the man who can boast that he did it thrice, nor will I risk it that you be that man. Make your peace with Heaven, for at sunset — in an hour’s time — you hang. There is one little thing that might save you even yet, and if you find life sweet, you would do well to pray that that little thing may come to pass.”
I answered him nothing, but I bowed my head in token that I had heard and he signed to the men to proceed with me, whilst turning on his heel he stepped down the hall again to where Madonna Paola, overcome with weakness, had sunk upon a stool.
As I was leaving the gallery I had a last glimpse of her, sitting there with drawn face and haggard eyes that followed me as I passed from her sight, whilst Ramiro del’ Orca stood beside her murmuring words that did not reach me. His so-called courtiers and his men-at-arms were trooping out of the room, no doubt in obedience to his dismissal.
CHAPTER XX. THE SUNSET
I have heard tell of the calm that comes upon brave men when hope is dead and their doom has been pronounced. Uncertainty may have tortured and made cowards of them; but once that uncertainty is dissolved and suspense is at an end, resignation enters their soul, and, possessing it, gives to their bearing a noble and dignified peace. By the mercy of Heaven they are made, maybe, to see how poor and evanescent a thing is life; and they come to realise that since to die is a necessity there is no avoiding, as well might it betide to-day as ten years hence.
Such a mood, however, came not to soothe that last hour of mine, and yet I account myself no coward. It was an hour of such torture and anguish as never before I had experienced — much though I had undergone — and the source of all my suffering lay in the fact that Madonna Paola was in the hands of the ogre of Cesena. Had it not been for that most untoward circumstance I almost believe that while I waited for the sun to set on that December afternoon, my mood had not only been calm but even in some measure joyous, for it must have comforted my last moments to reflect that for all that Messer Ramiro was about to hang me, yet had I sown the seeds of his own destruction ere he had brought me to this pass.
I did, indeed, reflect upon it, and it may even be that, in spite of all, I culled some grain of comfort from the reflection. But let that be. My narrative would drag wearily were I to digress that I might tell you at length the ugly course of my thoughts whilst the sands of my la
st hour were running swiftly out. For, after all, my concern and yours is with the story of Lazzaro Biancomonte, sometime known as Boccadoro the Fool, and not with his philosophies — philosophies so unprofitable that it can benefit no man that I should set them down.
My windows faced west, and so I was able to watch the fall of the sun, and measure by its shortening distance from the horizon the ebbing of my poor life. At last the nether rim of that round, fiery orb was on the point of touching the line of distant hills, and it was casting a crimson glow along the white, snow-sheeted landscape that was singularly suggestive of a tide of blood — a very fitting tide to flow and ebb about the walls of the Castle of Cesena.
One little thing there was might save me, Ramiro had said. But I had shut the thought out of my mind to keep me from utter distraction. The only little thing in which I held that my salvation could lie would be in the miraculous arrival of Cesare Borgia, and of that not the faintest hope existed. If the greatest luck attended Mariani’s errand and the greatest speed were made by the Duke once he received the letter, he could not reach Cesena in less than another eight hours. And another eight minutes, to reckon by the swift sinking of the sun would see the time appointed for my hanging. I thought of Joshua in that grim hour, and in a mood that approached the whimsical I envied him his gift. If I could have stayed the setting of the sun, and held it where it was till midnight, all might yet be well if Mariani had been diligent and Cesare swift.
The key grating in the lock put an end to my vague musings, and reminded me of the fact that I had neglected to employ that last hour as would have become a good son of Mother Church. For an instant I believe that my heart turned me to thoughts of God, and sent up a prayer for mercy for my poor sinful soul. Then the door swung wide. Two halberdiers and a carnifex in his odious leathern apron stood before me. Clearly Ramiro sought to be exact, and to have me hanging the instant the sun should vanish.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 131
