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.
Cattolica was no more than a half-league distant, and I looked to reach
it in a half-hour or so. I fell into thought as I trudged along, and I
was building plans for the sunlit future that was to be ours. I was a
man transformed that day, and I could have sung in spite of the chill
December wind that buffeted me, so full of joy and gladness was my
heart.
At Biancomonte I was likely to spend my days as little better than a
peasant, but surely a peasant’s estate with such a companion as was to
be mine was preferable to an emperor’s throne without her.
The bleak landscape seemed to me invested with a beauty that at no
other time I should have noticed. God was good. I swore a thousand
times, the world was a good world—so good that Heaven could scarce be
better.
I had come, perhaps, the better half of the distance I had to travel,
and I was giving full rein to my joyous fancy, when suddenly I espied
ahead a company of horsemen. They were approaching me at a brisk pace,
but I took no thought of them, accounting myself secure from any
molestation. If it so happened that it was a search party from Pesaro,
seeking two men disguised as monks who had ravished the coffin of
Madonna Paola di Santafior, what should they want of Lazzaro
Biancomonte? And so, in my confidence, I advanced even as they trotted
quickly towards me.
Not until they were within a matter of a hundred paces did I raise my
eyes to take their measure; and then I halted on my step, smitten of a
sudden by an unreasoning and unreasonable fear, to see at their head
the bulky form of the Governor of Cesena. He saw me, too, and, what was
worse, he recognised me on the instant, for he clapped spurs to his
horse and came at me as if he would ride me down. Within three paces of
me he drew up his steed. Whether the memory of the other two occasions
on which I had thwarted him arose now in his mind and made him wonder
had not some fatality brought me across his path again to send awry his
pretty schemes concerning Madonna Paula, I cannot say for certain; yet
some suspicion of it occurred to me and filled me with apprehension.
“Body of Bacchus!” he roared. “Is it truly you, Boccadoro?”
“They call me Biancomonte now, Magnificent,” I answered him. But my
tone was respectful, for it could profit me nothing to incense him.
“A fig for what they call you,” he snapped contemptuously. “Whence are
you?”
“From Pesaro,” I answered truthfully.
“From Pesaro? But you are travelling towards it.”
“True. I was making for Cattolica, but I missed my way in seeking to
shorten it. I am now returning by the high-road.”
The explanation satisfied him on that point, and being satisfied, he
asked me when I had left Pesaro. A moment I hesitated.
“Late last night,” said I at last. He looked, at me, my foolish
hesitation having perhaps unslipped a suspicion that was straining at
its leash.
“In that case,” said he, “you can scarcely have heard the strange story
that is being told there?”
I looked at him, as if puzzled, for a second. “If you mean the story of
Madonna Paoia’s end, I heard it yesterday.”
“Why, what story was that?” quoth he in some surprise, his beetling
brows coming together in one broad line of fur.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Men said that she had been poisoned.”
“Oh, that,” he cried indifferently. “But men say to-day that her body
was stolen from the Church of San Domenico where it lay. An odd
happening, is it not?” And his eyes covered me in a fierce scrutiny
that again suggested to me those suspicions of his that I might be the
man who had anticipated him. I was soon to learn that he had more
grounds than at first I thought for those same suspicions.
“Odd, indeed,” I answered calmly, for all that I felt my pulses
quickening with apprehension. “But is it true?” I added.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Rumour’s habit is to lie,” he answered.
“Yet for such a lie as that, so monstrous an imagination would be
needed that, rather, am I inclined to account it truth. There are no
more poets in Pesaro since you left. But at what hour was it that you
quitted the city?”
To hesitate again were to betray myself; it were to suggest that I was
seeking an answer that should sort well with the rest of my story.
Besides, what could the hour signify?
“It would be about the first hour of night,” I said. He looked at me
with increasing strangeness.
“You must indeed have wandered from your road to have got no farther
than this in all that time. Perhaps you were hampered by some heavy
burden?” He leered evilly, and I turned cold.
“I was burdened with nothing heavier than this body of mine and a
rather uneasy conscience.”
“Where, then, have you tarried?”
At this I thought it time to rebel. Were I too meekly to submit to this
examination, my very meekness might afford him fresh grounds for
doubts.
“Once have I told you,” I answered wearily, “that I lost my way. And,
however much it may flatter me to have your Excellency evincing such an
interest in my concerns, I am at a loss to find a reason for it.”
He leered prodigiously once more, and his eyebrows shot up to the level
of his cap.
“I will tell you, brute beast,” he answered me. “I question you because
I suspect that you are hiding something from me.”
“What should I hide from your Excellency?”
He dared not enlighten me on that point, for should his suspicions
prove unfounded he would have uselessly betrayed himself.
“If you are honest, why do you lie?”
“I?” I ejaculated. “In what have I lied?”
“In that you have told me that you left Pesaro at the first hour of
night. At the third hour you were still in the Church of San Domenico,
whither you followed Madonna Paola’s bier.”
It was my turn to knit my brows. “Was I indeed?” quoth I. “Why, yes, it
may well be. But what of that? Is the hour in which I quitted Pesaro a
matter of such moment as to be worth lying over? If I said that I left
about the first hour, it is because I was under the impression that it
was so. But I was so distraught by grief at Madonna’s death that I may
have been careless in my account of time.”
“More lies,” he blazed with sudden passion. “It may have been the third
hour, you say. Fool, the gates of Pesaro close at the second hour of
night. Where are your wits?”
Outwardly calm, but inwardly in a panic—more for Madonna’s sake than
for my own—I promptly held out the hand on which I wore the Borgia
ring. In a flash of inspiration did that counter suggest itself to me.
“There is a key that will open any gate in Romagna at any hour.”
He looked at the ring, and of what passed in his mind I can but offer a
surmise. He may have remembered that once before I had fooled him with
the help of that gold circlet; or he may have thought that I was
secretly in the service of the Borgias, and that, acting in their
interests, I had carried off Madonna Paola. Be that as it may, the
sight of the ring threw him into a fury. He turned on his horse.
“Lucagnolo!” he called, and a man of officer’s rank detached himself
from the score of men-at-arms and rode forward. “Let six men escort me
home to Cesena. Take you the remainder and beat up the country for
three leagues about this spot. Do not leave a house outside Cattolica
unsearched. You know what we are seeking?”
The man inclined his head.
“If it is within the circle you have appointed, we will find it,” he
answered confidently.
“Set about it,” was the surly command, and Ramiro turned again to me.
“You have gone a little pale, good Messer Boccadoro,” he sneered. “We
shall soon learn whether you have sought to fool me. Woe betide you,
should it be so. We bear a name for swift justice at Cesena.”
“So be it then,” I answered as calmly as I might. “Meanwhile, perhaps
you will now suffer me to go my ways.”
“The readier since your way must lie with ours.”
“Not so, Magnificent, I am for Cattolica.”
“Not so, animal,” he mimicked me with elephantine grace, “you are for
Cesena, and you had best go with a good will. Our manner of
constraining men is reputed rude.” He turned again. “Ercole, take you
this man behind you. Assist him, Stefano.”
And so it was done, and a few minutes later I was riding, strapped to
the steel-clad Ercole, away from Paola at every stride. Thus at every
stride the anguish that possessed me increased, as the fear that they
must find her rose ever higher.