Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  V

  The manner adopted by Messer Pantaleone in which to do the thing he had been sent to do was startling and yet precisely such as was to have been looked for in a man of his temper.

  He had been that day — the day following upon the affair of the lost amulet — down into the borgo of Pievano for the first time since his coming to the castle. As a pretext for this he had urged the need to mend the leg of one of his boots which had become torn during his search last night. (Himself he had ripped it with his dagger.)

  He had made his way in the first place to a cobbler, with whom perforce he remained until the required repairs had been effected. From the cobbler’s he went to the Osteria del Orso, ostensibly to refresh himself, actually to issue his orders to his knaves through the one he had posted there. It resulted from these movements of his that as dusk was falling his tenesbirri wandered singly and unchallenged over the drawbridge into the empty courtyard of the castle. No guards were kept at Pievano, as we know, and so this furtive and piecemeal invasion was neither hindered nor yet so much as observed.

  When he had assured himself that these knaves of his were at hand, Messer Pantaleone, armed, booted, spurred, cap in hand, and wrapped in his ample red cloak — obviously ready to take the road forthwith — strode into the hall of the rocca, that noble chamber where a week ago he had been so charitably received. Now, as then, he found the Lord Almerico engrossed in a volume of manuscript, and Madonna Fulvia with him.

  They looked up sharply, inexplicably startled by the manner of his advent. There was a subtle change in his air. It was more arrogant and self-assertive than usual; here was no longer the guest with just so much swagger as was inseparable from a soldier of fortune, but one who seemed to come mantled in authority. He did not long intrigue them.

  ‘My lord,’ he announced bluntly, ‘I have a duty to perform and ten stout fellows below to help me against the need of help. Will you summon your nephew Matteo Orsini who is hiding here?’

  They stared at him in utter silence, whilst for as long as it would take a man to say a paternoster. They were like people stupefied. Then at last the girl spoke, her brows contracted, her eyes flashing like sombre jewels in her white face.

  ‘What is your purpose with Matteo?’

  ‘The lord Cesare Borgia’s purpose,’ he answered brutally. The mask of guile having served its turn was now discarded, and there was no tinge of shame upon the uncovered face of his real self which he now showed them. ‘I was sent hither to arrest Ser Matteo by order of the Duke.’

  Again there fell a pause, what time those four eyes searched his bold countenance. The lord Almerico closed his book upon his forefinger, and a faint yet intensely scornful smile broke upon the grey old face.

  ‘Then,’ said Madonna Fulvia, ‘all this time we...we have been your dupes. You lied to us. Your faintness, the persecution of which you were the victim, was all so much pretence?’ There was a note of incredulity in her voice.

  ‘Necessity,’ he reminded her, ‘knows no law.’ And although he was neither shamed nor daunted by their steadfast scornful stare, yet he grew weary of it. ‘Come,’ he added roughly. ‘You have had your fill of looking at me. Let us get to business. Send for this traitor you are harbouring.’

  Madonna Fulvia drew herself stiffly up. ‘My God!’ she exclaimed. ‘A base Judas, a dirty spy! And I have sat at table with you. We have housed you here as an equal.’ Her voice soared upwards, from the low note of horror and disgust upon which she had spoken. ‘O vile, O pitiful dog!’ she cried. ‘Was this your errand? Was this...’

  Her father’s hand fell gently upon her arm, and silenced her by its mute command. The stoic in him was equal even to so bitter an occasion. It was not for nothing that he had assimilated the wisdom of the ancients.

  ‘Hush, child, self-respect forbids that you should address so base a creature even to upbraid it.’ His voice was calm and level. ‘What is it to you that he is vile and treacherous, a shameless thing of shame? Does that hurt you? Does it hurt any but himself?’

  It did not seem to her to be a time for stoicisms. She swung upon her father in a blaze of passion.

  ‘Aye, does it hurt me,’ she cried. ‘It hurts me and it hurts Matteo.’

  ‘Can it really hurt a man to die?’ wondered Almerico. ‘Matteo being dead, shall yet live. But that poor thing being living is yet dead.’

  ‘Shall we come to business?’ quoth Pantaleone, breaking in upon what promised to develop into an eloquent discourse upon life and death, chiefly derived from Seneca. ‘Will you send for Matteo Orsini, or shall I bid my men drag him from the lazar-home where he skulks. It is idle to resist, futile to delay. My knaves have hemmed the place about, and none goes in or out save at my pleasure.’

  He saw a change of expression sweep across both faces. The girl’s eyes dilated — with fear, as he supposed; the old man uttered a short, sharp laugh — of stoicism he opined.

  ‘Why, sir,’ said Almerico, ‘since you are so well informed, you had best yourself complete your task of infamy.’

  Pantaleone looked at him a moment, and then shrugged.

  ‘Be it so,’ he said shortly, and swung upon his heel to go about it. ‘No, no!’ It was Madonna Fulvia who arrested him with that cry, sharp with a new anxiety. ‘Wait, sir! Wait!’

  He paused obediently, and half-turned. He beheld her standing tense and straight, one hand pressed upon her bosom as if to quell its tumult, the other held out to him in a gesture of supplication.

  ‘Give me leave to speak with my father alone, ere...ere we decide,’ she panted.

  Pantaleone sniffed, and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Decide?’ quoth he. ‘What remains to be decided?’

  She wrung her hands in a pathetic intensity of mental stress. ‘We...we may have a proposal to make to you, sir.’

  ‘A proposal?’ He said, and scowled. Did they seek to bribe him? ‘By the Host...’ he began hotly, and there checked. The cupidity of his nature leapt up instantly, aroused and alert. After all, he bethought him, there would be no harm in hearing this proposal. The man is a fool who neglects to learn anything from which he may cull personal advantage. He considered further. After all, none save himself was aware of Matteo Orsini’s presence at Pievano, and if the price were high enough — who knew? — he might be induced to keep that knowledge to himself. But the price must needs be high to compensate him not only for the loss of the thousand ducats offered by the Duke but for the hurt his vanity would suffer in the admission of failure.

  Seeing him silent, and conceiving that he hesitated, Madonna renewed her prayer.

  ‘What harm can it do to grant me this?’ she asked. ‘Have you not said yourself that the place is hemmed about by your men? Are you not therefore master of the situation?’

  He bowed stiffly.

  ‘I will concede it you,’ he said. ‘I shall await your pleasure in the ante-chamber.’ And upon that he went out, his spurs jingling musically.

  Left alone father and daughter looked long at each other.

  ‘Why did you hinder him?’ asked the lord of Pievano at length. ‘Surely you were not moved by any thought of pity for such a man?’

  Her lip curled in a scornful smile. ‘You cannot think that — not in your heart,’ she said.

  ‘It is because I cannot think it that I ask. I am all bewildered.’

  ‘Had we allowed him to go, consider what in his vengeance he might have done. He might have summoned these men of his, and ransacked the rocca until he discovered Matteo indeed.’

  ‘But surely that must inevitably follow now. How can we prevent it?’

  She leaned towards him. ‘To what purpose do you study so deeply the lore of human nature if in practice you cannot probe the shallow murky depth of such a nature as this dog’s?’

  He shrank back, staring at her, feeling that his philosophy had taught him nothing indeed if in an extremity such as the present one, this child could show him how it should be handled.

 
‘Do you not know — does it not say so in any of those pages — that who betrays once, will betray again and yet again? Do you not see that a man so vile as to have played that knave’s part will be vile enough to sell his own master, will be true to naught save his own base interests?’

  ‘You mean that we should bribe him?’

  She drew herself up and uttered a short laugh. ‘I mean that we should seem to bribe him. Oh!’ She pressed her hands to her white brow. ‘I have a vision of something that lies before us here. It is as if a door had been opened, a weapon thrust into my hand by means of which I can smite and at a blow avenge all the wrongs of the Orsini.’

  ‘Pish, you are fevered, child! Here is no work for a weak maid...’

  ‘Not for a weak maid — no; but for a strong one,’ she broke in impetuously; ‘work for a woman of the Orsini. Listen.’ She leaned towards him again, lowering her voice instinctively because of the secret thing she had to communicate. Speaking quickly now she expounded the whole plan that had flashed into her ready witted mind, a plan complete in its every detail, a chain whose every link was soundly forged.

  He listened, hunched in his chair, and the farther she proceeded the more hunched he became, like one who instinctively gathers himself together against a blow that is about to fall.

  ‘My God!’ he gasped when she had done, and his old eyes stared at her between amazement and dismay. ‘My God! And your pure virgin mind has conceived this horror! In all these years I have not known you, Fulvia. I have deemed you a child, and you...’ Words eluded him. Limply he waved his old transparent hands. The stoic in him had succumbed to the parent.

  He would have dissuaded her out of his deep concern for her, his only child. But she was not to be dissuaded. She argued on, gathering enthusiasm as she dwelt upon the means by which she would at a single blow strike down this base betrayer and his master the Duke of Valentinois. She urged that there was no safety for her or him or any Orsini in her refraining from this step upon which she was resolved. She reminded him that as long as Cesare Borgia lived no single Orsini would be safe, and she concluded by announcing that she believed her mission inspired by Heaven itself, that she a maid and the weakest of the Orsini should avenge the wrongs of their house and stay its further ruin.

  At last his shocked, bruised mind became infected by something of her ardour; enough at least to wring from him a grudging fearful consent to let her have her way.

  ‘Leave me,’ she said, ‘to deal with Cesare Borgia and his lackey, and do you pray for the souls of both.’

  Upon that she kissed him, and swept out to the impatient Pantaleone waiting in the sparsely furnished ante-chamber.

  He was seated in a high-backed chair by a carved table that bore a cluster of candles in a silver branch. He rose as she entered, marking her pallor and obvious agitation. To the stately beauty of her, her slim height and the fine poise of her lovely head, he remained indifferent.

  She came to lean against the table, facing him across it, considering him with a glance that was steady despite the tremors agitating all the rest of her.

  Pantaleone was shrewd and crafty as we know, but his craft was a shallow business when compared with her own; his shrewdness was mere low cunning when contrasted with the agile wits which her frail exterior dissembled.

  In the moment in which he had revealed himself for what he was she had judged him, and she had judged him to the weight of a hair of his vile head. Upon that judgement she now went to work. ‘Consider me well, Ser Pantaleone,’ she invited him, her voice level and calm.

  He did so, wondering whither this might lead.

  ‘Tell me now, do you not find me fair to see, and am I not shapely?’

  He bowed, his face almost sardonic. ‘Fair as an angel, assuredly, Madonna. The Duke’s own sister, Madonna Lucrezia, would suffer by comparison. But what has this to do with...?’

  ‘In short, sir, do you account me desirable?’

  The question robbed him of breath, so amazing was it. It was a moment ere he found an answer, and by then the sardonic smile had passed entirely from his face. His pulses were quickened under her steady glance and her no less steady invitation to appraise her. He pondered her now, and discovered a thousand graces in her to which he had hitherto been blind. He may even have realized that her chaste frail beauty held a subtler appeal than the grosser femininity to which his senses more usually responded.

  ‘Desirable as Paradise,’ said he at last, dropping his voice.

  ‘And to render me so, there is not merely this perishable beauty that is mine. I am well dowered.’

  ‘It is fitting that so noble a jewel should be nobly set.’ In his mind stirred now some inkling of whither she was leading him, and his pulses throbbed the faster.

  ‘A matter of ten thousand ducats goes with me to the man I wed,’ she informed him, and turned him giddy by the mention of so vast a sum.

  ‘Ten thousand ducats?’ he repeated slowly, awe-stricken.

  ‘To the man who weds me,’ she insisted, and added quietly— ‘Will you be that man?’

  ‘Will I...?’ He checked. No, no. The thing was incredible. The shock of that question almost stunned him. He gaped at her, and his handsome face turned pale under its tan.

  ‘Upon the condition, of course,’ she pursued, ‘that you abandon this quest for Ser Matteo, and bear word to your master that he is not to be found.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ he mumbled foolishly. Then he reassembled his scattered wits and set them to read him this riddle. She was Matteo’s betrothed. She loved Matteo. And yet...Or could it be that her love was of that great self-sacrificing kind of which he had heard — but in which he had never believed — that will surrender all for the sake of the beloved? He could not swallow that. It was not in his nature to be so credulous. And then he threw up his head, his nostrils quivering. Suddenly he scented danger. A trap was being baited for him. Bluntly he said so, laughing short and scornfully.

  But her reply disarmed his last suspicion.

  ‘Take your own measures,’ she invited him serenely. ‘I understand your fears. But we are honourable folk, and if I swear to you that Matteo Orsini shall not stir him hence until this matter is done beyond recalling, so shall it be. Yet take your measures. You have the men and the power. Let them remain at their post surrounding that garden. Do that tonight, and tomorrow I will ride with you to Castel della Pieve to become your wife.’

  Slowly he licked his lips, and his bold eyes narrowed as they surveyed her greedily. Yet still he was suspicious. Still he could not believe in so much good fortune.

  ‘Why at Castel della Pieve?’ he asked. ‘Why not here?’

  ‘Because I must be sure that you will keep faith. Castel della Pieve is the nearest place — yet far enough to leave Matteo a clear road of flight.’

  ‘I understand,’ he said slowly.

  ‘And you agree?’

  His keen black eyes stabbed into her calm white face as though they would pierce to her very soul and probe its secrets. It was incredible. To have fortune thrust upon him thus, fortune and a wife, and such a wife; for in his eyes she was growing more desirable moment by moment as he considered her. Had not Fra Serafino warned the Duke that this man would be as wax in the hands of a woman?

  What greater profit — what profit one-tenth as great could he look for in taking Ser Matteo, in keeping faith with Valentinois? He made, you see, no attempt to struggle with the temptation. He did not give so much as a thought to a young woman in the Bolognese — one Leocadia by name — who kept a wine-shop at Laveno, who had borne him a son and whom he had promised to marry. But all that had happened before he had risen to the rank of a condottiero and earned the regard and trust of Cesare Borgia; and of late in his new-found importance it had shrunk into a dim and distant background. It did not trouble him now. If he hesitated, it was only because the thing proposed him was beyond belief. It bewildered him; a fog settled down upon his wits. By the Host! How she must love this fellow
Matteo! Or was it — was it perhaps that he himself...

  Now here was a possibility hitherto unregarded; here something that might explain her singular attitude towards him. In saving Matteo she performed a duty, and by the very manner of it placed a barrier between herself and a lover of whom she had wearied.

  Thus his vanity to complete the rout of his perspicuity, to convince him where cold reason failed.

  ‘Agree?’ he cried after that long pause. ‘Agree? By the Eyes of God? Am I a wooden image, or a purblind fool to refuse? I’ll set a seal forthwith upon that contract.’ And with arms flung wide he swooped down upon her like a hawk upon a dove, and caught her to him.

  She suffered it, stiff and cold with sudden terror and repressed loathing. He held her close and muttered foolish fondnesses. Then the awakened passion mounting, it became suffused with tenderness, and he told her of a future in which he should be the slave of her slightest whim, her devout and worshipping lover always.

  At length she released herself from those lithe arms, and drew away from him, a hectic spot on either cheek, deep shame in her soul and a sense of defilement pervading all her being. He watched her, abashed a little, mistrustful even.

  But when she had gained the door she paused, and there for an instant her iciness melted. Her laugh trilled softly across the chamber to him.

  ‘Tomorrow!’ she flung at him, and vanished leaving him distracted.

  VI

  Perplexed, yet true to his adventurer’s character, determined to follow his fortunes and accept such chances as there might be, Pantaleone took his measures against possible treachery, posted his men for the night so as to make quite certain that his prey did not escape until Madonna Fulvia and himself should be on their way to the nuptials, and that done went to bed to dream of a roseate future ennobled by ten thousand ducats.

  It is the test of your true adventurer in all ages and of all kinds that ducats are with him the sole standard of nobility. A man may pawn his honour, pledge his proper pride and sell his immortal soul, so that he drives a good bargain in the matter of ducats. Thus it was with Pantaleone. Unless you are yourself one of those who measure worth — your own or another’s — by ducats, you will pity a little this man who set such store by profit. For the thousand ducats offered him by the Duke he had consented to act the part of a Judas and a traitor. For the ten thousand ducats now dangled before his eyes he was ready to betray the hand that had hired him; and the sad part of it all is that he was convinced he did a shrewd and clever thing. That is why I invite your pity for him. He needs it both in this and in what is to follow out of it. Had he realized his baseness, he would have been just a villain. But far from it, since his baseness brought him profit he accounted himself a clever and deserving man. He was a true product of his age, and yet his kind has existed multitudinously in all ages.