From a window of the Palace of Babbiano the Lord of Aquila watched the
amazing bustle in the courtyard below, and at his side stood Fanfulla
degli Arcipreti, whom he had summoned from Perugia with assurances that,
Masuccio being dead, no peril now menaced him.
It was a week after that interview at which Gian Maria had made known
his intentions to his cousin, and his Highness was now upon the point
of setting out for Urbino, to perform the comedy of wooing the Lady
Valentina. This was the explanation of that scurrying of servitors and
pages, that parading of men-at-arms, and that stamping of horses and
mules in the quadrangle below. Francesco watched the scene with a smile
of some bitterness, his companion with one of supreme satisfaction.
“Praised be Heaven for having brought his Highness at last to a sense of
his duty,” remarked the courtier.
“It has often happened to me,” said Francesco, disregarding his
companion's words, “to malign the Fates for having brought me into the
world a count. But in the future I shall give them thanks, for I see how
much worse it might have been--I might have been born a prince, with
a duchy to rule over. I might have been as that poor man, my cousin, a
creature whose life is all pomp and no real dignity, all merrymaking
and no real mirth--loveless, isolated and vain.”
“But,” cried the amazed Fanfulla, “assuredly there are compensations?”
“You see that bustle. You know what it portends. What compensation can
there be for that?”
“It is a question you should be the last to ask, my lord. You have seen
the niece of Guidobaldo, and having seen her, can you still ask what
compensation does this marriage offer Gian Maria?”
“Do you, then, not understand?” returned Aquila, with a wan smile. “Do
you not see the tragedy of it? Is it nothing that two States, having
found that this marriage would be mutually advantageous, have determined
that it shall take place? That meanwhile the chief actors--the
victims, I might almost call them--have no opportunity of selecting for
themselves. Gian Maria goes about it resignedly. He will tell you that
he has always known that some day he must wed and do his best to beget
a son. He held out long enough against this alliance, but now that
necessity is driving him at last, he goes about it much as he would go
about any other State affair--a coronation, a banquet, or a ball. Can
you wonder now that I would not accept the throne of Babbiano when
it was offered me? I tell you, Fanfulla, that were I at present in my
cousin's shoes, I would cast crown and purple at whomsoever had a fancy
for them ere they crushed the life out of me and left me a poor puppet.
Sooner than endure that hollow mockery of a life I would become a
peasant or a vassal; I would delve the earth and lead a humble life, but
lead it in my own way, and thank God for the freedom of it; choose my
own comrades; live as I list, where I list; love as I list, where I
list, and die when God pleases with the knowledge that my life had not
been altogether barren. And that poor girl, Fanfulla! Think of her. She
is to be joined in loveless union to such a gross, unfeeling clod as
Gian Maria. Have you no pity for her?”
Fanfulla sighed, his brow clouded.
“I am not so dull but that I can see why you should reason thus to-day,”
said he. “These thoughts have come to you since you have seen her.”
Franceseo sighed deeply.
“Who knows?” he made answer wistfully. “In the few moments that we
talked together, in the little time that I beheld her, it may be that
she dealt me a wound far deeper than the one to which she so mercifully
sought to minister.”
Now for all that in what the Lord of Aquila said touching the projected
union there was a deal of justice, yet when he asserted that the chief
actors were to have no opportunity of selecting for themselves, he said
too much. That opportunity they were to have. It occurred three days
later at Urbino, when the Duke and Valentina were brought together
at the banquet of welcome given by Guidobaldo to his intended
nephew-in-law. The sight of her resplendent beauty came as a joyful
shock to Gian Maria, and filled him with as much impatience to possess
her as did his own gross ugliness render him offensive in her eyes.
Averse had she been to this wedding from the moment that it had been
broached to her. The sight of Gian Maria completed her loathing of the
part assigned her, and in her heart she registered a vow that sooner
than become the Duchess of Babbiano, she would return to her Convent of
Santa Sofia and take the veil.
Gian Maria sat beside her at the banquet, and in the intervals of
eating--which absorbed him mightily--he whispered compliments at which
she shuddered and turned pale. The more strenuously did he strive to
please, in his gross and clumsy fashion, the more did he succeed
in repelling and disgusting her, until, in the end, with all his
fatuousness, he came to deem her oddly cold. Of this, anon, he made
complaint to that magnificent prince, her uncle. But Guidobaldo scoffed
at his qualms.
“Do you account my niece a peasant girl?” he asked. “Would you have her
smirk and squirm at every piece of flattery you utter? So that she weds
your Highness what shall the rest signify?”
“I would she loved me a little,” complained Gian Maria foolishly.
Guidobaldo looked him over with an eye that smiled inscrutably, and it
may have crossed his mind that this coarse, white-faced Duke was too
ambitious.
“I doubt not that she will,” he answered, in tones as inscrutable as
his glance. “So that you woo with grace and ardour, what woman could
withstand your Highness? Be not put off by such modesty as becomes a
maid.”
Those words of Guidobaldo's breathed new courage into him. Nor ever
after could he think that her coldness was other than a cloak, a sort of
maidenly garment behind which modesty bade her conceal the inclinations
of her heart. Reasoning thus, and having in support of it his wondrous
fatuity, it so befell that the more she shunned and avoided him, the
more did he gather conviction of the intensity of her affection; the
more loathing she betrayed, the more proof did it afford him of the
consuming quality of her passion. In the end, he went even so far as to
applaud and esteem in her this very maidenly conduct.
There were hunting-parties, hawking-parties, water-parties, banquets,
comedies, balls, and revels of every description, and for a week all
went well at Urbino. Then, as suddenly as if a cannon had been fired
upon the Palace, the festivities were interrupted. The news that an
envoy of Caesar Borgia's was at Babbiano with a message from his master
came like a cold douche upon Gian Maria. It was borne to him in a letter
from Fabrizio da Lodi, imploring his immediate return to treat with this
plenipotentiary of Valentino's.
No longer did he disregard the peril that threatened him from the
all-conquering Borgia, no longer deem exaggerated by his advisers the
cause for fear. This sudden presence of Valentino's messenger, coming,
too, at a time when it would almost seem as if the impending union
with Urbino had spurred the Borgia to act before the alliance was
established, filled him with apprehension.
In one of the princely chambers that had been set aside for his use
during his visit to Urbino he discussed the tragic news with the two
nobles who had accompanied him--Alvaro de Alvari and Gismondo Santi--and
both of them, whilst urging him to take the advice of Lodi and return at
once, urged him, too, to establish his betrothal ere he left.
“Bring the matter to an issue at once, your Highness,” said Santi,
“and thus you will go back to Babbiano well-armed to meet the Duca
Valentino's messenger.”
Readily accepting this advice, Gian Maria went in quest of Guidobaldo,
and laid before him his proposals, together with the news which
had arrived and which was the cause of the haste he now manifested.
Guidobaldo listened gravely. In its way the news affected him as well,
for he feared the might of Caesar Borgia as much as any man in Italy,
and he was, by virtue of it, the readier to hasten forward an alliance
which should bring another of the neighbouring states into the powerful
coalition he was forming.
“It shall be as you wish,” answered him the gracious Lord of Urbino,
“and the betrothal shall be proclaimed to-day, so that you can bear news
of it to Valentino's messenger. When you have heard this envoy, deliver
him an answer of such defiance or such caution as you please. Then
return in ten days' time to Urbino, and all shall be ready for the
nuptials. But, first of all, go you and tell Monna Valentina.”
Confident of success, Gian Maria obeyed his host, and went in quest of
the lady. He gained her ante-chamber, and thence he despatched an idling
page to request of her the honour of an audience.
As the youth passed through the door that led to the room beyond, Gian
Maria caught for a moment the accents of an exquisite male voice singing
a love-song to the accompaniment of a lute.
“Una donna più bella assai che 'l sole...”
came the words of Petrarch, and he heard them still, though muffled, for
a moment or two after the boy had gone. Then it ceased abruptly, and
a pause followed, at the end of which the page returned. Raising the
portière of blue and gold, he invited Gian Maria to enter.
It was a room that spoke with eloquence of the wealth and refinement
of Montefeltro, from the gilding and ultramarine of the vaulted ceiling
with its carved frieze of delicately inlaid woodwork, to the priceless
tapestries beneath it. Above a crimson prie-dieu hung a silver crucifix,
the exquisite workmanship of the famous Anichino of Ferrara. Yonder
stood an inlaid cabinet, surmounted by a crystal mirror and some wonders
of Murano glass. There was a picture by Mantegna, some costly cameos and
delicate enamels, an abundance of books, a dulcimer which a fair-haired
page was examining with inquisitive eyes, and by a window on the right
stood a very handsome harp that Guidobaldo had bought his niece in
Venice.
In that choice apartment of hers the Duke found Valentina surrounded
by her ladies, Peppe the fool, a couple of pages, and a half-dozen
gentlemen of her uncle's court. One of these--that same Gonzaga who had
escorted her from the Convent of Santa Sofia--most splendidly arrayed in
white taby, his vest and doublet rich with gold, sat upon a low stool,
idly fingering the lute in his lap, from which Gian Maria inferred that
his had been the voice that had reached him in the ante-chamber.
At the Duke's advent they all rose saving Valentina and received him
with a ceremony that somewhat chilled his ardour. He advanced; then
halted clumsily, and in a clumsy manner framed a request that he might
speak with her alone. In a tired, long-suffering way she dismissed that
court of hers, and Gian Maria stood waiting until the last of them had
passed out through the tall windows that abutted on to a delightful
terrace, where, in the midst of a green square, a marble fountain
flashed and glimmered in the sunlight.
“Lady,” he said, when they were at last alone, “I have news from
Babbiano that demands my instant return.” And he approached her by
another step.
In truth he was a dull-witted fellow or else too blinded by fatuity
to see and interpret aright the sudden sparkle in her eye, the sudden,
unmistakable expression of relief that spread itself upon her face.
“My lord,” she answered, in a low, collected voice, “we shall grieve at
your departure.”
Fool of a Duke that he was! Blind, crass and most fatuous of wooers! Had
he been bred in courts and his ears attuned to words that meant nothing,
that were but the empty echoes of what should have been meant; was he so
new to courtesies in which the heart had no share, that those words of
Valentina's must bring him down upon his knees beside her, to take
her dainty fingers in his fat hands, and to become transformed into a
boorish lover of the most outrageous type?
“Shall you so?” he lisped, his glance growing mighty amorous. “Shall you
indeed grieve?”
She rose abruptly to her feet.
“I beg that your Highness will rise,” she enjoined him coldly, a
coldness which changed swiftly to alarm as her endeavours to release her
hand proved vain. For despite her struggles he held on stoutly. This was
mere coyness, he assured himself, mere maidenly artifice which he must
bear with until he had overcome it for all time.
“My lord, I implore you!” she continued. “Bethink you of where you
are--of who you are.”
“Here will I stay until the crack of doom,” he answered, with an odd
mixture of humour, ardour and ferocity, “unless you consent to listen to
me.”
“I am ready to listen, my lord,” she answered, without veiling a
repugnance that he lacked the wit to see. “But it is not necessary that
you should hold my hand, nor fitting that you should kneel.”
“Not fitting?” he exclaimed. “Lady, you do not apprehend me rightly.
Is it not fitting that all of us--be we princes or vassals--shall kneel
sometimes?”
“At your prayers, my lord, yes, most fitting.”
“And is not a man at his prayers when he woos? What fitter shrine in all
the world than his mistress's feet?”
“Release me,” she commanded, still struggling. “Your Highness grows
tiresome and ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous?”
His great, sensual mouth fell open. His white cheeks grew mottled, and
his little eyes looked up with a mighty evil gleam in their cruel blue.
A moment he stayed so, then he rose up. He released her hands as she had
bidden him, but he clutched her arms instead, which was yet worse.
“Valentina,” he said, in a voice that was far from steady, “why do you
use me thus unkindly?”
“But I do not,” she protested wearily, drawing back with a shudder from
the white face that was so near her own, inspiring her with a loathing
she could not repress. “I would not have your Highness look foolish, and
you cannot conceive how----”
“Can you conceive how deeply, how passionately I love you?” he broke in,
his grasp tightening.
“My lord, you are hurting me!”
“And are you not hurting me?” he snarled. “What is a pinched arm when
compared with such wounds as your eyes are dealing me? Are you not----”
She had twisted from his grasp, and in a bound she had reached the
window-door through which her attendants had passed.
“Valentina!” he cried, as he sprang after her, and it was more like the
growl of a beast than the cry of a lover. He caught her, and with scant
ceremony he dragged her back into the room.
At this, her latent loathing, contempt and indignation rose up in arms.
Never had she heard tell of a woman of her rank being used in this
fashion. She abhorred him, yet she had spared him the humiliation of
hearing it from her lips, intending to fight for her liberty with
her uncle. But now, since he handled her as though she had been a
serving-wench; since he appeared to know nothing of the deference due
to her, nothing of the delicacies of people well-born and well-bred,
she would endure his odious love-making no further. Since he elected
to pursue his wooing like a clown, the high-spirited daughter of Urbino
promised herself that in like fashion would she deal with him.
Swinging herself free from his grasp a second time, she caught him a
stinging buffet on the ducal cheek which--so greatly did it take him by
surprise--all but sent him sprawling.
“Madonna!” he panted. “This indignity to me!”
“And what indignities have not I suffered at your hands?” she retorted,
with a fierceness of glance before which he recoiled. And as she now
towered before him, a beautiful embodiment of wrath, he knew not whether
he loved her more than he feared her, yet the desire to possess her and
to tame her was strong within him.
“Am I a baggage of your camps,” she questioned furiously, “to be so
handled by you? Do you forget that I am the niece of Guidobaldo, a lady
of the house of Rovere, and that from my cradle I have known naught but
the respect of all men, be they born never so high? That to such by my
birth I have the right? Must I tell you in plain words, sir, that though
born to a throne, your manners are those of a groom? And must I tell
you, ere you will realise it, that no man to whom with my own lips I
have not given the right, shall set hands upon me as you have done?”
Her eyes flashed, her voice rose, and higher raged the storm; and Gian
Maria was so tossed and shattered by it that he could but humbly sue for
pardon.
“What shall it signify that I am a Duke,” he pleaded timidly, “since
I am become a lover? What is a Duke then? He is but a man, and as the
meanest of his subjects his love must take expression. For what does
love know of rank?”
She was moving towards the window again, and for all that he dared not a
second time arrest her by force, he sought by words to do so.
“Madonna,” he exclaimed, “I implore you to hear me. In another hour I
shall be in the saddle, on my way to Babbiano.”
“That, sir,” she answered him, “is the best news I have heard since your
coming.” And without waiting for his reply, she stepped through the open
window on to the terrace.
For a second he hesitated, a sense of angry humiliation oppressing his
wits. Then he started to follow her; but as he reached the window the
little crook-backed figure of Ser Peppe stood suddenly before him with a
tinkle of bells, and a mocking grin illumining his face.
“Out of the way, fool,” growled the angry Duke. But the odd figure in
its motley of red and black continued where it stood.
“If it is Madonna Valentina you seek,” said he, “behold her yonder.”
And Gian Maria, following the indication of Peppe's lean finger, saw
that she had rejoined her ladies and that thus his opportunity of
speaking with her was at an end. He turned his shoulder upon the jester,
and moved ponderously towards the door by which he had originally
entered the room. It had been well for Ser Peppe had he let him go. But
the fool, who loved his mistress dearly, and had many of the instincts
of the faithful dog, loving where she loved and hating where she hated,
could not repress the desire to send a gibe after the retreating figure,
and inflict another wound in that much wounded spirit.
“You find it a hard road to Madonna's heart, Magnificent,” he called
after him. “Where your wisdom is blind be aided by the keen eyes of
folly.”
The Duke stood still. A man more dignified would have left that
treacherous tongue unheeded. But Dignity and Gian Maria were strangers.
He turned, and eyed the figure that now followed him into the room.
“You have knowledge to sell,” he guessed contemptuously.
“Knowledge I have--a vast store--but none for sale, Lord Duke. Such as
imports you I will bestow if you ask me, for no more than the joy of
beholding you smile.”
“Say on,” the Duke bade him, without relaxing the grimness that
tightened his flabby face.
Peppe bowed.
“It were an easy thing, most High and Mighty, to win the love of Madonna
if----” He paused dramatically.
“Yes, yes. E dunque! If----?”
“If you had the noble countenance, the splendid height, the shapely
limbs, the courtly speech and princely manner of one I wot of.”
“Are you deriding me?” the Duke questioned, unbelieving.
“Ah, no, Highness! I do but tell you how it were possible that my lady
might come to love you. Had you those glorious attributes of him I speak
of, and of whom she dreams, it might be easy. But since God fashioned
you such as you are--gross of countenance, fat and stunted of shape,
boorish of----”
With a roar the infuriated Duke was upon him. But the fool, as nimble of
legs as he was of tongue, eluded the vicious grasp of those fat hands,
and leaping through the window, ran to the shelter of his mistress's
petticoats.