DE MORTUIS
There are men to whom death has brought a glory that would never have
been theirs in life. An instance of that is afforded by the history of
Bellarion at this stage.
Honest, loyal, and incapable of jealousy or other kindred meanness,
Facino must have given Bellarion a due measure of credit for the victory
over Buonterzo if Bellarion had ridden back to Milan beside him. But
that he would have given him, as he did, a credit so full as to make the
achievement entirely Bellarion's, could hardly be expected of human
nature or of Facino's. A living man so extolled would completely have
eclipsed the worth of Facino himself; besides which to the man who in
achieving lays down his life, we can afford to be more generous--because
it is less costly--than to the man who survives his achievement.
Never, perhaps, in its entire history had the Ambrosian city been moved
to such a delirium of joy as that in which it now hailed the return of
the victorious condottiero who had put an end to the grim menace
overhanging a people already distracted by internal feuds.
News of the victory had preceded Facino, who reached Milan ahead of his
army two days after Buonterzo's rout.
It had uplifted the hearts of all, from the meanest scavenger to the
Duke, himself. And yet the first words Gian Maria addressed to Facino in
the audience chamber of the Broletto, before the assembled court, were
words of censure.
'You return with the work half done. You should have pursued Buonterzo
to Parma and invested the city. This was your chance to restore it to
the crown of Milan. My father would have demanded a stern account of you
for this failure to garner the fruits of victory.'
Facino flushed to the temples. His jaw was thrust forward as he looked
the Duke boldly and scathingly between the eyes.
'Your father, Lord Prince, would have been beside me on the battle-field
to direct the operations that were to preserve his crown. Had your
highness followed his illustrious example there would be no occasion now
for a reproach that must recoil upon yourself. It would better become
your highness to return thanks for a victory purchased at great
sacrifice.'
The goggle eyes looked at him balefully until their glance faltered as
usual under the dominance of the condottiero's will, the dominance which
Gian Maria so bitterly resented. Ungracefully the slender yet awkward
body sprawled in the great gilded chair, red leg thrown over white one.
It was della Torre, tall and dark at his master's side, who came to the
Duke's assistance. 'You are a bold man, Lord Count, so to address your
prince.'
'Bold, aye!' growled the Duke, encouraged by that support. 'Body of God!
Bold to recklessness. One of these days ...' He broke off, the coarse
lips curling in a sneer. 'But you spoke of sacrifices?' The cunning that
lighted his brutishness fastened upon that. It boded, he hoped, a tale
of losses that should dim the lustre of this popular idol's achievement.
Facino rendered his accounts, and it was then that he proclaimed
Bellarion's part; he related how Bellarion's wit had devised the whole
plan which had reversed the positions on the Trebbia, and he spoke
sorrowfully of how Bellarion and his hundred Swiss had laid down their
lives to make Facino's victory certain.
'I commend his memory to your highness and to the people of Milan.'
If the narrative did not deeply move Gian Maria, at least it moved the
courtiers present, and more deeply still the people of Milan when it
reached them later.
The outcome was that after a Te Deum for the victory, the city put on
mourning for the martyred hero to whom the victory was due; and Facino
commanded a Requiem to be sung in Saint Ambrose for this Salvator
Patriæ, whose name, unknown yesterday, was by now on every man's lips.
His origin, rearing, and personal endowments were the sole subjects of
discussion. The tale of the dogs was recalled by the few who had ever
heard of it and now widely diffused as an instance of miraculous powers
which disposed men almost to canonise Bellarion.
Meanwhile, however, Facino returning exacerbated from that audience was
confronted by his lady, white-faced and distraught.
'You sent him to his death!' was the furious accusation with which she
greeted him.
He checked aghast both at the words and the tone. 'I sent him to his
death!'
'You knew to what you exposed him when you sent him to hold that ford.'
'I did not send him. Himself he desired to go; himself proposed it.'
'A boy who did not know the risk he ran!'
The memory of the protest she had made against Bellarion's going rose
suddenly invested with new meaning. Roughly, violently, he caught her by
the wrist. His face suddenly inflamed was close to her own, the veins of
his brow standing out like cords.
'A boy, you say. Was that what you found him, lady?'
Scared, but defiant, she asked him: 'What else?'
'What else? Your concern suggests that you discovered he's a man. What
was Bellarion to you?'
For once he so terrified her that every sense but that of
self-preservation abandoned her on the instant.
'To me?' she faltered. 'To me?'
'Aye, to you. Answer me.' There was death in his voice, and in the
brutal crushing grip upon her wrist.
'What should he have been, Facino?' She was almost whimpering. 'What
lewdness are you dreaming?'
'I am dreaming nothing, madam. I am asking.'
White-lipped she answered him. 'He was as a son to me.' In her affright
she fell to weeping, yet could be glad of the ready tears that helped
her to play the part so suddenly assumed. 'I have no child of my own.
And so I took him to my empty mother's breast.'
The plaint, the veiled reproach, overlaid the preposterous falsehood.
After all, if she was not old enough to be Bellarion's mother, at least
she was his senior by ten years.
Facino loosed his grip, and fell back, a little abashed and ashamed.
'What else could you have supposed him to me?' she was complaining.
'Not ... not, surely, that I had taken him for my lover?'
'No,' he lied lamely. 'I was not suspecting that.'
'What then?' she insisted, playing out her part.
He stood looking at her with feverish eyes. 'I don't know,' he cried out
at last. 'You distract me, Bice!' and he stamped out.
But the suspicion was as a poison that had entered his veins, and it was
a moody, silent Facino who sat beside his lady at the State supper given
on the following night in the old Broletto Palace. It was a banquet of
welcome to the Regent of Montferrat, his nephew the Marquis Gian
Giacomo, and his niece the Princess Valeria, whose visit was the result
of certain recent machinations on the part of Gabriello Maria.
Gabriello Maria had lately been exercised by the fundamental weakness of
Gian Maria's position, and he feared lest the victor in the conflict
between Facino and Buonterzo might, in either case, become a menace to
the Duchy. No less was he exercised by the ascendancy which was being
obtained in Milan by the Guelphs under della Torre, an ascendancy so
great that already there were rumours of a possible marriage between the
Duke and the daughter of Malatesta of Rimini, who was regarded as the
leader of the Guelphic party in Italy. Now Gabriello, if weak and
amiable, was at least sincere in his desire to serve his brother as in
his desire to make secure his own position as ducal governor. For
himself and his brother he could see nothing but ultimate disaster from
too great a Guelphic ascendancy.
Therefore, had he proposed an alliance between Gian Maria and his
father's old ally and friend, the Ghibelline Prince of Montferrat. Gian
Maria's jealous fear of Facino's popularity had favourably disposed him,
and letters had been sent to Aliprandi, the Orator of Milan at Casale.
Theodore, on his side, anxious to restore to Montferrat the cities of
Vercelli and Alessandria which had been wrested from it by the
all-conquering Gian Galeazzo, and having also an eye upon the lordship
of Genoa, once an appanage of the crown of Montferrat, had conceived
that the restoration of the former should be a condition of the treaty
of alliance which might ultimately lead to the reconquest of the latter.
Accordingly he had made haste, in response, to come in person to Milan
that he might settle the terms of the treaty with the Duke. With him he
had brought his niece and the nephew on whose behalf he ruled, who were
included in Gabriello's invitation. Gabriello's aim in this last detail
was to avert the threatened Malatesta marriage. A marriage between the
Duke and the Princess of Montferrat might be made by Theodore an
absolute condition of that same treaty, if his ambition for his niece
were properly fired.
At the banquet that night, Gabriello watched his brother, who sat with
Theodore on his right and the Princess Valeria on his left, for signs
from which he might calculate the chances of bringing the secret part of
his scheme to a successful issue. And signs were not wanting to
encourage him. It was mainly to the Princess that Gian Maria addressed
himself. His glance devoured the white beauty of her face with its crown
of red-gold hair; his pale goggle eyes leered into the depths of her own
which were so dark and inscrutable, and he discoursed the while, loud
and almost incessantly, in an obvious desire to dazzle and to please.
And perhaps because the lady remained unmoved, serenely calm, a little
absent almost, and seldom condescending even to smile at his gross
sallies, he was piqued into greater efforts for her entertainment, until
at last he blundered upon a topic which obviously commanded her
attention. It was the topic of the hour.
'There sits Facino Cane, Count of Biandrate,' he informed her. 'That
square-faced fellow yonder, beside the dark lady who is his countess. An
overrated upstart, all puffed up with pride in an achievement not his
own.'
The phrase drew the attention of the Marquis Theodore.
'But if not his own, whose, then, the achievement, highness?'
'Why a fledgling's, one whom he claims for his adoptive son.' The
adjective was stressed with sarcasm. 'A fellow named Bellarion.'
'Bellarion, eh?' The Regent betrayed interest. So, too did the Princess.
For the first time she faced her odious host. Meanwhile Gian Maria ran
on, his loud voice audible even to Facino, as he no doubt intended.
'The truth is that by his rashness Facino was all but outfought, when
this Bellarion showed him a trick by which he might turn the tables on
Buonterzo.'
'A trick?' said she, in an odd voice, and Gian Maria, overjoyed to have
won at last her attention, related in detail the strategy by which
Facino's victory had been snatched.
'A trick, as your highness said,' was her comment. 'Not a deed of arms
in which there was a cause for pride.'
Gian Maria stared at her in surprise, whilst Theodore laughed aloud.
'My niece is romantic. She reads the poets, and from them conceives of
war as a joyous joust, or a game of chivalry, with equal chances and a
straightforward encounter.'
'Why, then,' laughed the Duke, 'the tale should please you, madonna, of
how with a hundred men this rascal held the ford against Buonterzo's
army for as long as the trick's success demanded.'
'He did that?' she asked, incredulous.
'He did more. He laid down his life in doing it. He and his hundred were
massacred in cold blood. That is why on Wednesday, at Saint Ambrose, a
Requiem Mass is to be sung for him who in the eyes of my people deserves
a place in the Calendar beside Saint George.'
His aim in this high praise was less to bestow laurels upon Bellarion
than to strip them from Facino. 'And I am not sure that the people are
wrong. _Vox populi, vox Dei_. This Bellarion was oddly gifted, oddly
guarded.' In illustration of this he passed on to relate that incident
which had come to be known by then in Milan as 'The Miracle of the
Dogs.' He told the tale without any shame at the part he had played,
without any apparent sense that to hunt human beings with hounds was
other than a proper sport for a prince.
As she listened, she was conscious only of horror of this monstrous boy,
so that the flesh of her arm shrank under the touch of his short,
broad-jewelled paw, from which the finger-nails had been all but
entirely gnawed. Anon, however, in the solitude of the handsome chamber
assigned to her, she came to recall and weigh the things the Duke had
said.
This Bellarion had laid down his life in the selfless service of
adoptive father and country, like a hero and a martyr. She could
understand that in one of whom her knowledge was what it was of
Bellarion as little as she could understand the miracle of the dogs.