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 the 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.