'What is left of it.'
He was answered with a leap and rush. The mob at that point staggered,
and bellowed, and fell away from the hoofs of a furious assailant.
Carlo, pre-admonished, was already on the boy's flank. 'Stop, little
lunatic!' he shouted, sweating and spurring to intervene. He had no
concern for the feet he trampled or the ribs he bruised. He stooped and
snatched at the struggling horse's bridle. 'It is the Duke's vengeance!'
he panted. 'See him there above! Art mad?'
A face, flushed as the face of Him who scourged the hucksters from the
temple, was turned upon him.
'Art thou? Strike for retaliation by love, or get behind!'
'Know'st nothing of his deserts,' cried Carlo. 'Be advised!'
'By love,' cried the boy. 'He is worthy of it--a good man--I carry a
letter to him from my father. Fall back, I say.'
He drove in his heels, and the horse plunged and started, tearing the
rein from Lanti's grasp. It was true that Bembo bore this letter, among
others, in his pouch. The Abbot of San Zeno was so long out of the world
as to have miscalculated the durations of court favour. Cola had been an
influence in _his_ time.
'Devil take him!' growled Carlo; but he followed, scowling and slashing,
in his wake. The mob, authorised of its worst humour, took his
truculence ill. That reduced him to a very devilish sobriety. He began
to strike with an eye to details, 'blazing' his passage through the
throng. The method justified itself in the opening out of a human lane,
at the end of which he saw Bembo spring upon the stage.
The executioner was cutting deliberately, monotonously on, and as
monotonously the voice went moaning. Messer Jacopo, standing at iron
ease beside, took no thought, it seemed, of anything--least of all of
interference with the Duke's will. It must have been, therefore, no
less than an amazing shock to that functionary to find himself all in an
instant stung and staggered by a bolt from the blue. He may have been,
like some phlegmatic serpent, conscious of a hornet winging his way; but
that the insect should have had it in its mind to pounce on _him_!