To a most elaborately penned invitation the Borgia responded by half a
dozen words scrawled by his secretary. He would be in the March at such
and such a time, and would spend such and such a day in Nona.
He had heard from Amilcare; he replied to Molly. The insult was glaring,
even to her.
"Is this tolerable, my lord?" said the meek beauty, incensed at last.
Amilcare shrugged. "It may not have to be borne very long," said he.
"For my part I am accustomed to reckon a gift by its use to me, not by
the sacking round about it." He was now beyond his wife's depth: she
neither followed nor tried to follow him.
In these days she saw but little of her lord, and could have wished it
less. He, who in action was as cheerful a soul as you could wish to
serve, was harassed by the long expectances of diplomacy, and in the
routine work of governing most grim. The Nonesi had come to hate him a
good deal, but to fear him more. Expenses were incalculable, the taxes
grew; there were riots. Savage snaps of speech in the Council did harm;
imprisonments followed, then some unaccountable sudden deaths. High and
low alike, none knew where the blow might fall, but all flinched at it.
In these distresses Molly served him well, for she at least was
universally loved. If the Duke had a man stabbed, the Duchess took such
sweet consolation to the widow that none could murmur long. To watch her
warm tears flow was in itself a solace; to feel her arms, to win her
kissing mouth, quickened those doubtful poor souls.
Furtively also, Grifone was on her side; a neat phrase here and there
made her position plain to the most infidel in the city. It is true that
while he helped her there he tortured her otherwhere inexpressibly. He
hardly ever left her now, and her heart bled to see him go in fear of
her; she prayed night and day that he might have strength to shake off
this biting, cruel love. It never entered her head that she could
console him by perfidy to a perfidious husband; it had entered Grifone's
head a hundred times, but he always put it out. He could afford to wait
for what, after all, he only valued as a concession to vulgar opinion.
In thought she had been his for a year; and in the mind he lived most
deliciously. It was, no doubt, his full intent to make her his in all
the grossness of the fact, but not until he had got rid of Amilcare, or
induced Amilcare to get rid of himself. This was what the stiffnecked
Condottiere was now doing as fast as his best enemies could have wished.
His people hated him so bitterly that he would certainly have worn
mail--had not Molly been his mail. They spared him because they loved
her, and believed that he still had her heart. "Amilcar, uxoris gratia,
Dux," was now the fact. Grifone could have destroyed belief and him
together by a lift of the eyebrow; but he wanted more than that, so
waited on.
The little fellow was really extraordinary. Luxurious as he was to the
root, and effeminate; hating as he did cold water, cold food, the cold
shoulder; one and all of these shuddering things he had schooled himself
to bear without a blink. He grew even to take a stern pleasure in the
bitterness they cost him, as he turned them to his uses and reckoned up
his balance at the bank. Amilcare snarled at him, cut his words out of
his mouth, struck him, kicked him once like a yard-dog. Grifone added it
all to his store.
But as the day for Duke Cesare's visit drew near, Molly began to be much
again in her husband's thoughts--how far she would go in this maturer
time. She had charmed the man once before, at Foligno; she had charmed
everybody. But then she had been charmed herself. Subsequently she had
charmed Bentivoglio, not so happily but that she endangered her own
spell. That was the present trouble, for hitherto her charm had lain
precisely in herself, in the little everyday acts which were her own
nature. Bentivoglio had reasonably wanted more: so would Borgia want
very much more. Could Molly be brought, not to surrender all he wanted,
but to make him want? Amilcare, growing tense between his difficulties,
felt that explanations must be given and received, felt also that they
must come from himself--in fact, Grifone had declined them--and felt
that he was not strong in such work. Direction he could give, but not
explanation. However, he must try.
On a vivid morning of early summer, when the lemon-trees in the
_cortile_ looked as if they had been cut out of metal, and the planes
and very poplars were unwinking in the thick blue air, Amilcare came
into his wife's room. She had not expected him; he found her lying
dishevelled and unbusked, with all her glossy hair tumbled loose. Very
much a maiden still, notwithstanding her year and a half of troublous
marriage, she jumped up directly she saw him, and, blushful, covered her
neck. Amilcare, finding her and the act adorable together, took her in
his arms and kissed her; then he led her back by the hand to the
window-cushions and made her sit upon his knee. He began to play with
her hair.
"What a silken mesh, my Molly! What a snare for a man in this lovely
cloud! How fragrant of roses! Ah, most beautiful wife, you could lead
all Italy by a strand of this miraculous hair."
She was pleased with his praises, touched and grateful; she kissed him
for them. So they grew more friendly than they had been ever since the
Bentivoglio had shocked her modesty and faith in him at once. Amilcare
rattled on; love-talk comes easily to the Italian tongue, whose very
vocables are caresses.
Gradually he drew in and in to the Borgia, centre of all his spinning
thought.
"There is a lover of yours, for instance!" he said, comically aghast;
and Molly laughed.
"Why, Amilcare, you make all the world to be my lover, all the world to
look at me through your eyes. Believe it, they see me truer than you do.
I am a very simple person."
Amilcare began to count upon his fingers, one hand meeting the other
round Molly's caught waist.
"The Borgia, the Count of Cavalcalupo, Oreste Colonna, Negroponte, three
Bishops at Sesto, Bianca Maria, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, Ordelaffi,
Benti----"