Don Alberto did not care to tell how he had been wounded, and kept the
matter between himself, his doctor, and his own man, giving out that he
had been thrown from his horse and had broken one of the bones of his
forearm, a story which quite accounted for his wearing his arm in a
sling when he appeared after keeping his room during five days. It was
natural, too, that Stradella and Ortensia, who had recognised him by the
light of the lantern, should say nothing about the matter, and the Bravi
did not know who the young man was; so there was a possibility that the
whole affair might remain a secret.
Trombin, however, was anxious to discover the name of the adversary he
had wounded, and Gambardella was not unwilling to help him, though he
considered him quite mad where Ortensia was concerned.
'You have no imagination,' Trombin objected, in answer to this charge.
'Can you not understand the peculiar charm of being in love with a lady
of whom I have agreed to make an angel at the first convenient
opportunity, and whom I have further promised to deliver safe, sound,
and alive to her uncle in Venice?'
'I wish you joy of your puzzles,' answered Gambardella discontentedly.
'I derive much solace from the pleasures of imagination,' Trombin
observed, following his own train of thought. 'In me a great romancer
has been lost to our age, another Bandello, perhaps a second Boccaccio!
An English gentleman of taste once told me that my features resemble
those of a dramatist of his country, whose first name was William--I
forget the second, which I could not learn to pronounce--but that my
cheeks are even rounder than his were, and my mouth smaller. Under other
circumstances, who knows but that I might have been the William
Something of Italy? My English friend added that the painted bust of the
dramatist on his tomb was quite the most hideous object he had ever
seen, so I do not tell you the story out of mere vanity, as you might
suppose. My misfortune is that I am generally driven by a sort of
familiar spirit to do the things I imagine, instead of writing them
down.'
'And pray what do you imagine you are going to do next?' inquired
Gambardella.
'It has occurred to me that I might carry off the lady myself,' Trombin
answered in a thoughtful tone.
'And leave me to manage the rest?'
'You will have no trouble. I shall take the road to Venice, of course,
and after a month or two I will hand the lady over to Pignaver, for I
dare say she will soon tire of my company. As for you, you will only
have to follow her husband, for he will go after his wife as fast as he
can, of his own accord, and when you both reach Venice together, I shall
be waiting and we will lead him into a trap and give him up to his
pretty adorer! The rest will be as I said. She will not be able to keep
him a prisoner very long, and when he leaves her house we can settle
the business.'
'And of course you will expect me to help you in carrying the young
woman off?'
'Naturally! Should you feel any scruples about it?'
'No,' Gambardella answered, in an indifferent tone, but he changed the
subject and went back to the question of the rival serenader's identity.
'It might be as well to think of more practical matters,' he said. 'The
excellent Tommaso has not found out anything about the man you wounded
last night, though he has already ascertained exactly where the ex-Queen
of Sweden keeps her jewels!'
'Intelligent creature! He really has a good store of general
information! I dare say he will take them some day and leave us without
giving notice.'
'It must be very convenient to be born so low in the world as to be able
to steal without disgrace,' observed Gambardella thoughtfully. 'I
suppose such fellows have no sense of honour.'
'None whatever,' said Trombin, with equal gravity. 'As you say, it must
make many things easy when one has no money.'
This conversation had taken place under the great colonnade before Saint
Peter's, late in the afternoon, when the air was pleasantly cool.
Bernini's colonnade was new then, and some of the poorer Romans,
dwelling in the desolate regions between the Lateran and Santa Maria
Maggiore, had not even seen it. It might have been expected that it was
to become the resort of loungers, gossips, foreigners, dealers in
images and rosaries, barbers, fortune-tellers, and money-changers, as
the ancient portico had been that used to form a straight covered way
from the Basilica to the Bridge of Sant' Angelo; but for some
inexplicable reason this never happened, and it was always, as it is
now, a deserted place.
The Bravi, who were men of taste, according to their times, admired the
architecture extremely, and often walked there for half an hour before
it was time to hear the Benediction music in the church, which was
always good and sometimes magnificent.
This afternoon they were strolling not far from the bronze gate that
gives access to the Vatican; a dozen paces or more behind them, within
call but out of hearing of their conversation, walked the excellent
Tommaso, otherwise known as Grattacacio, the ex-highway robber, about
whom they had just been talking. The last words had barely passed
Trombin's lips when they heard the man's footsteps approaching them
rapidly from behind. They stopped to learn what was the matter.
'A young gentleman on a mule is coming, with several servants,' Tommaso
said quickly. 'He has his right arm in a sling. Perhaps he is your man.'
The two friends nodded carelessly, but drew their hats a little lower
over their eyes as they turned and walked back, skirting the inner side
of the colonnade so as to watch the party that was coming straight
across the Piazza in the sun from the direction of Porta Santo Spirito.
As soon as they saw the face of the young man who rode the mule they
recognised Trombin's adversary, who wore his broad-brimmed hat far down
on the left to screen him from the sun, thus exposing the right side of
his face to their view. They went on quietly, as if they had hardly
noticed him, and he paid no attention to them. When he and his three
servants had almost reached the bronzed gates, the Bravi despatched
their man after him to find out his name from the groom who would hold
his mule, while they themselves remained where they were, walking slowly
up and down, a dozen steps each way.
'I see a golden opportunity rising in the distance,' said Trombin. 'It
illuminates my imagination and lights up my understanding.'
'It will probably dazzle mine, so that I shall see nothing at all,'
observed Gambardella with his usual sourness.
'Possibly,' Trombin answered pleasantly. 'I shall therefore hide my
light under a bushel, as it were, and thus spare your mental eyes a
shock that might be fatal to them. For my present inspiration is of such
a tremendous nature that an ordinary intelligence might be unsettled by
it.'
'Could you not communicate the nature of it in small doses, as it were?'
asked Gambardella, mimicking him a little. 'One can get accustomed even
to poisons in that way, as Mithridates did.'
'To oblige you, I will attempt it, my friend, but I shall endeavour to
lead you to guess the truth yourself by asking questions, instead of
presenting it to you in disjointed fragments. Now consider that youth
whom I ran through the arm the other night, and answer me. Do you
suppose that he was serenading Pina, the serving-woman, or Ortensia her
mistress?'
'What a question! It was Ortensia, of course.'
'But was he serenading the Lady Ortensia out of ill-feeling towards her,
or out of good-feeling?'
'Out of good-feeling.'
'What is the good-feeling of a handsome young man towards a beautiful
young woman usually called, my friend?'
'Love, I suppose. What nonsense is this?'
'It is the Socratic method, as recorded by Plato. I learned something of
it when I was a student at Padua. Now, you have told me that the young
man feels love for the young woman, and you appear to be right; but what
do you think he hopes to get from her in return, love or dislike?'
'Her love, no doubt.'
'You answer well, my friend. Now tell me this also. Will he get her love
without the consent of her husband, or with it?'
'Without, if he gets it at all! I am tired of this fooling. It bores me
excessively.'
'You will not be bored long,' answered Trombin with confidence. 'Answer
me one question more. Do you suppose that the young man will have any
success with the Lady Ortensia, unless he can separate her from
Stradella by some stratagem?'
Gambardella looked sharply at his wordy companion.
'I begin to take your meaning,' he said.
'You have a good mind,' Trombin answered, 'but it works slowly. You are
on the verge of guessing what my inspiration is. Let us, for a large
consideration, be the means of carrying off the Lady Ortensia for this
rich young man, and when we have done so and received his money, let us
execute the plan we have already made. For it will be easy for us to
persuade her to do anything we suggest, because both she and her husband
are under the greatest obligations to us, whereas the young man would
have to employ violence and make a great scandal. But here comes that
excellent Tommaso.'
'You are certainly a great man,' said Gambardella, looking at Trombin
with admiration.
It was clear from Tommaso's face that the intelligence he brought was
important, and as he stood hat in hand before his masters he looked up
and down the colonnade to see if there were any one in sight and near
enough to listen.
'The gentleman is Don Alberto Altieri,' he said, almost in a whisper.
Trombin at once puffed out his pink cheeks, pursed his lips, and
whistled very softly, for he was much surprised; but Gambardella seemed
quite unmoved, and merely nodded to Tommaso as if well satisfied with
the latter's service. Then the two strolled on again, and their
cut-throat servant followed them, just out of hearing of their
conversation, as before; for he was much too wise to try any common
trick of eavesdropping on a pair of men who would just as soon wring his
neck and throw him into a well as look at him. His highest ambition
really was to be promoted to help them in one of those outrageous deeds
that had made them the most famous Bravi of the whole century, who had
received pardons from popes and kings, from the Emperor Leopold, and
from the Venetian Republic itself, under which passports they travelled
and lived where they pleased, still untouched by the law.
'This is a delicate business,' observed Gambardella, for both had heard
the gossip about Don Alberto and Queen Christina.
'It will be the more amusing,' answered Trombin. 'When I reflect upon
the primitive simplicity of the business we undertook for Pignaver, and
compare it with the plan we have now conceived and shall certainly
execute in a few days, I cannot but congratulate myself on the fertility
of my imagination, or, as I might say, upon the resemblance between my
mind and that of the novelist Boccaccio. But I feel the superiority of
my lot over his in the fact that I am generally the chief actor in my
own stories.'
'The Queen will be useful,' said Gambardella.
'Bless her for an admirably amusing woman!' cried Trombin fervently.
'She has the mane of the lion and the heart of the hare!'
'The mane happens to be a wig, my friend,' sneered the other.
'In more senses than one,' retorted Trombin, 'but the hare's heart is
genuine. She was afraid of poor Monaldeschi. You knew it, I knew it, and
Luigi Santinelli knew it. She ordered us to kill him because she
believed he was selling her secrets to the Spanish, and was going to
poison her in their interests. She is always fancying that some one
wants to poison her. Oh, yes, my friend, a most diverting character, for
she thinks of nothing but herself, and her Self is a selfish,
hysterical, cruel, cowardly woman!'[1]
'I detest her for that business at Fontainebleau,' answered Gambardella.
'Precisely. So do I, though she amuses me. To strangle a superfluous
woman is sometimes unavoidable, and there are occasions when it is
wisdom to stab an unnecessary male in the back. But to put an unarmed
gentleman to the wall, so to say, in broad daylight and deliberately
skewer him, being three to one as we were that day, is a thing I shall
decline to do again for all the gold in India, Mexico, and Brazil!'
'Unless it be paid in cash,' suggested Gambardella.
'Cash,' answered Trombin enigmatically, 'is one of the forces of
nature.'
[Footnote 1: For Trombin's view of Christina's character and
Monaldeschi's murder, I am indebted to the admirable and trustworthy
work of Baron de Bildt, a distinguished Swedish diplomatist, entitled
_Christine de Suede et le Cardinal Azzolino_ (Paris, 1899). The writer
points out the singular ignorance of the truth about Monaldeschi
displayed by Browning and the elder Dumas.]