The Cardinal Vice-Chancellor took the packet proffered him by the
fair-haired, scarlet-liveried page, and turned it over, considering it,
the gentle, finely featured, almost ascetic face very thoughtful.
“It was brought, my lord, by a man in a mask, who will give no name. He
waits below,” said the scarlet stripling.
“A man in a mask, eh? What mystery!”
The thoughtful brown eyes smiled, the fine hands broke the fragment of
wax. A gold ring fell out and rolled some little way along the black
and purple Eastern rug. The boy dived after it, and presented it to his
lordship.
The ring bore an escutcheon, and the Cardinal found graven upon this
escutcheon his own arms the Sforza lion and the flower of the quince.
Instantly those dark, thoughtful eyes of his grew keen as they flashed
upon the page.
“Did you see the device?” he asked, a hint of steel under the silkiness
of his voice.
“I saw nothing, my lord--a ring, no more. I did not even look.”
The Cardinal continued to ponder him for a long moment very searchingly.
“Go--bring this man,” he said at last; and the boy departed, soon
to reappear; holding aside the tapestry that masked the door to give
passage to a man of middle height wrapped in a black cloak, his face
under a shower of golden hair, covered from chin to brow by a black
visor.
At a sign from the Cardinal the page departed. Then the man, coming
forward, let fall his cloak, revealing a rich dress of close-fitting
violet silk, sword and dagger hanging from his jewelled girdle; he
plucked away the mask, and disclosed the handsome, weak face of Giovanni
Sforza, Lord of Pesaro and Cotignola, the discarded husband of Madonna
Lucrezia, Pope Alexander's daughter.
The Cardinal considered his nephew gravely, without surprise. He had
expected at first no more than a messenger from the owner of that
ring. But at sight of his figure and long, fair hair he had recognized
Giovanni before the latter had removed his mask.
“I have always accounted you something mad,” said the Cardinal softly.
“But never mad enough for this. What brings you to Rome?”
“Necessity, my lord,” replied the young tyrant. “The need to defend my
honour, which is about to be destroyed.”
“And your life?” wondered his uncle. “Has that ceased to be of value?”
“Without honour it is nothing.”
“A noble sentiment taught in every school. But for practical purposes--”
The Cardinal shrugged.
Giovanni, however, paid no heed.
“Did you think, my lord, that I should tamely submit to be a derided,
outcast husband, that I should take no vengeance upon, that villainous
Pope for having made me a thing of scorn, a byword throughout Italy?”
Livid hate writhed in his fair young face. “Did you think I should,
indeed, remain in Pesaro, whither I fled before their threats to my
life, and present no reckoning?”
“What is the reckoning you have in mind?” inquired his uncle, faintly
ironical. “You'll not be intending to kill the Holy Father?”
“Kill him?” Giovanni laughed shortly, scornfully. “Do the dead suffer?”
“In hell, sometimes,” said the Cardinal.
“Perhaps. But I want to be sure. I want sufferings that I can witness,
sufferings that I can employ as balsam for my own wounded honour. I
shall strike, even as he has stricken me--at his soul, not at his body.
I shall wound him where he is most sensitive.”
Ascanio Sforza, towering tall and slender in his scarlet robes, shook
his head slowly.
“All this is madness--madness! You were best away, best in Pesaro.
Indeed, you cannot safely show your face in Rome.”
“That is why I go masked. That is why I come to you, my lord, for
shelter here until--”
“Here?” The Cardinal was instantly alert. “Then you think I am as mad as
yourself. Why, man, if so much as a whisper of your presence in Rome got
abroad, this is the first place where they would look for you. If you
will have your way, if you are so set on the avenging of past wrongs
and the preventing of future ones, it is not for me, your kinsman,
to withstand you. But here in my palace you cannot stay, for your own
safety's sake. That page who brought you, now; I would not swear he did
not see the arms upon your ring. I pray that he did not. But if he did,
your presence is known here already.”
Giovanni was perturbed.
“But if not here, where, then, in Rome should I be safe?”
“Nowhere, I think,” answered the ironical Ascanio. “Though perhaps you
might count yourself safe with Pico. Your common hate of the Holy Father
should be a stout bond between you.”
Fate prompted the suggestion. Fate drove the Lord of Pesaro to act
upon it, and to seek out Antonio Maria Pico, Count of Mirandola, in his
palace by the river, where Pico, as Ascanio had foreseen, gave him a
cordial welcome.
There he abode almost in hiding until the end of May, seldom issuing
forth, and never without his mask--a matter this which excited no
comment, for masked faces were common in the streets of Rome in the
evening of the fifteenth century. In talk with Pico he set forth
his intent, elaborating what already he had told the Cardinal
Vice-Chancellor.
“He is a father--this Father of Fathers,” he said once. “A tender,
loving father whose life is in his children, who lives through them
and for them. Deprive him of them, and his life would become empty,
worthless, a living death. There is Giovanni, who is as the apple of his
eye, whom he has created Duke of Gandia, Duke of Benevento, Prince
of Sessa, Lord of Teano, and more besides. There is the Cardinal of
Valencia, there is Giuffredo, Prince of Squillace, and there is my wife,
Lucrezia, of whom he has robbed me. There is, you see, an ample heel to
our Achilles. The question is, where shall we begin?”
“And also, how,” Pico reminded him.
Fate was to answer both those questions, and that soon.
They went on June 1st--the Lord of Pesaro, with his host and his host's
daughter, Antonia--to spend the day at Pico's vineyard in Trastevere. At
the moment of setting out to return to Rome in the evening the Count was
detained by his steward, newly returned from a journey with matters to
communicate to him.
He bade his guest, with his daughter and their attendants, to ride on,
saying that he himself would follow and overtake them. But the steward
detained him longer than he had expected, so that, although the company
proceeded leisurely towards the city, Pico had not come up with them
when they reached the river. In the narrow street beyond the bridge the
little escort found itself suddenly confronted and thrust aside by a
magnificent cavalcade of ladies and gallants, hawk on wrist and followed
by a pack of hounds.
Giovanni had eyes for one only in that gay company--a tall, splendidly
handsome man in green, a Plumed bonnet on his auburn head, and a
roguish, jovial eye, which, in its turn, saw nobody in that moment but
Madonna Antonia, reclining in her litter, the leather curtains of which
she had drawn back that she might converse with Giovanni as they rode.
The Lord of Pesaro beheld the sudden kindling of his brother-in-law's
glance, for that handsome gallant was the Duke of Gandia, the Pope's
eldest son, the very apple of the Holy Father's eye. He saw the Duke's
almost unconscious check upon his reins; saw him turn in the saddle to
stare boldly at Madonna Antonia until, grown conscious of his regard,
she crimsoned under it. And when at last the litter had moved on, he
saw over his shoulder a mounted servant detach from the Duke's side to
follow them. This fellow dogged their heels all the way to the Parione
Quarter, obviously with intent to discover for his master where the
beautiful lady of the litter might be housed.
Giovanni said naught of this to Pico when he returned a little later.
He was quick to perceive the opportunity that offered, but far from sure
that Pico would suffer his daughter to be used as a decoy; far, indeed,
from sure that he dared himself so employ her. But on the morrow,
chancing to look from a window out of idle curiosity to see what horse
it was that was pacing in the street below, he beheld a man in a rich
cloak, in whom at once he recognized the Duke, and he accounted that the
dice of destiny had fallen.
Himself unseen by that horseman, Giovanni drew back quickly. On the spur
of the moment, he acted with a subtlety worthy of long premeditation.
Antonia and he were by an odd fatality alone together in that chamber of
the mezzanine. He turned to her.
“An odd fellow rides below here, tarrying as if expectant. I wonder
should you know who he is.”
Obeying his suggestion, she rose--a tall, slim child of some eighteen
years, of a delicate, pale beauty, with dark, thoughtful eyes and long,
black tresses, interwoven with jewelled strands of gold thread. She
rustled to the window and looked down upon that cavalier; and, as she
looked, scanning him intently, the Duke raised his head. Their eyes met,
and she drew back with a little cry.
“What is it?” exclaimed Giovanni.
“It is that insolent fellow who stared at me last evening in the street.
I would you had not bidden me look.”
Now, whilst she had been gazing from the window, Giovanni, moving softly
behind her, had espied a bowl of roses on the ebony table in the room's
middle. Swiftly and silently he had plucked a blossom, which he now held
behind his back. As she turned from him again, he sent it flying through
the window; and whilst in his heart he laughed with bitter hate and
scorn as he thought of Gandia snatching up that rose and treasuring it
in his bosom, aloud he laughed at her fears, derided them as idle.
That night, in his room, Giovanni practised penmanship assiduously,
armed with a model with which Antonia had innocently equipped him. He
went to bed well pleased, reflecting that as a man lives so does he die.
Giovanni Borgia, Duke of Gandia, had been ever an amiable profligate, a
heedless voluptuary obeying no spur but that of his own pleasure, which
should drive him now to his destruction. Giovanni Borgia, he considered
further, was, as he had expressed it, the very apple of his father's
eye; and since, of his own accord, the Duke had come to thrust his
foolish head into the noose, the Lord of Pesaro would make a sweet
beginning to the avenging of his wrongs by drawing it taut.
Next morning saw him at the Vatican, greatly daring, to deliver in
person his forgery to the Duke. Suspicious of his mask, they asked him
who he was and whence he came.
“Say one who desires to remain unknown with a letter for the Duke of
Gandia which his magnificence will welcome.”
Reluctantly, a chamberlain departed with his message. Anon he was
conducted above to the magnificent apartments which Gandia occupied
during his sojourn there.
He found the Duke newly risen, and with him his brother, the
auburn-headed young Cardinal of Valencia, dressed in a close-fitting
suit of black, that displayed his lithe and gracefully athletic
proportions, and a cloak of scarlet silk to give a suggestion of his
ecclesiastical rank.
Giovanni bowed low, and, thickening his voice that it might not be
recognized, announced himself and his mission in one.
“From the lady of the rose,” said he, proffering the letter.
Valencia stared a moment; then went off into a burst of laughter.
Gandia's face flamed and his eyes sparkled. He snatched the letter,
broke its seal, and consumed its contents. Then he flung away to a
table, took up a pen, and sat down to write; the tall Valencia watching
him with amused scorn a while, then crossing to his side and setting a
hand upon his shoulder.
“You will never learn,” said the more subtle Cesare. “You must forever
be leaving traces where traces are not to be desired.”
Gandia looked up into that keen, handsome young face.
“You are right,” he said; and crumpled the letter in his hand.
Then he looked at the messenger and hesitated.
“I am in Madonna's confidence,” said the man in the mask.
Gandia rose. “Then say--say that her letter has carried me to Heaven;
that I but await her commands to come in person to declare myself. But
bid her hasten, for within two weeks from now I go to Naples, and thence
I may return straight to Spain.”
“The opportunity shall be found, Magnificent. Myself I shall bring you
word of it.”
The Duke loaded him with thanks, and in his excessive gratitude pressed
upon him at parting a purse of fifty ducats, which Giovanni flung into
the Tiber some ten minutes later as he was crossing the Bridge of Sant'
Angelo on his homeward way.
The Lord of Pesaro proceeded without haste. Delay and silence he knew
would make Gandia the more sharp-set, and your sharp-set, impatient
fellow is seldom cautious. Meanwhile, Antonia had mentioned to her
father that princely stranger who had stared so offendingly one evening,
and who for an hour on the following morning had haunted the street
beneath her window. Pico mentioned it to Giovanni, whereupon Giovanni
told him frankly who it was.
“It was that libertine brother-in-law of mine, the Duke of Gandia,” he
said. “Had he persisted, I should have bidden you look to your daughter.
As it is, no doubt he has other things to think of. He is preparing
for his journey to Naples, to accompany his brother Cesare, who goes as
papal legate to crown Federigo of Aragon.”
There he left the matter, and no more was heard of it until the night of
June 14th, the very eve of the departure of the Borgia princes upon that
mission.
Cloaked and masked, Giovanni took his way to the Vatican at dusk that
evening, and desired to have himself announced to the Duke. But he was
met with the answer that the Duke was absent; that he had gone to take
leave of his mother and to sup at her villa in Trastevere. His return
was not expected until late.
At first Giovanni feared that, in leaving the consummation of his plot
until the eleventh hour, he had left it too late. In his anxiety he at
once set out on foot, as he was, for the villa of Madonna Giovanna de
Catanei. He reached it towards ten o'clock that night, to be informed
that Gandia was there, at supper. The servant went to bear word to
the Duke that a man in a mask was asking to see him, a message which
instantly flung Gandia into agitation. Excitedly he commanded that the
man be brought to him at once.
The Lord of Pesaro was conducted through the house and out into the
garden to an arbour of vine, where a rich table was spread in the
evening cool, lighted by alabaster lamps. About this table Giovanni
found a noble company of his own relations by marriage. There was
Gandia, who rose hurriedly at his approach, and came to meet him; there
was Cesare, Cardinal of Valencia, who was to go to Naples to-morrow as
papal legate, yet dressed tonight in cloth of gold, with no trace of his
churchly dignity about him; there was their younger brother Giuffredo,
Prince of Squillace, a handsome stripling, flanked by his wife, the
free-and-easy Donna Sancia of Aragon, swarthy, coarse-featured, and
fleshy, despite her youth; there was Giovanni's sometime wife; the
lovely, golden-headed Lucrezia, the innocent cause of all this hate that
festered in the Lord of Pesaro's soul; there was their mother, the nobly
handsome Giovanozza de Catanei, from whom the Borgias derived their
auburn heads; and there was their cousin, Giovanni Borgia, Cardinal of
Monreale, portly and scarlet, at Madonna's side.
All turned to glance at this masked intruder who had the power so oddly
to excite their beloved Gandia.
“From the lady of the rose,” Giovanni announced himself softly to the
Duke.
“Yes, yes,” came the answer, feverishly impatient. “Well, what is your
message?”
“To-night her father is from home. She will expect your magnificence at
midnight.”
Gandia drew a deep breath.
“By the Host! You are no more than in time. I had almost despaired,
my friend, my best of friends. To-night!” He pronounced the word
ecstatically. “Wait you here. Yourself you shall conduct me. Meanwhile,
go sup.”
And beating his hands, he summoned attendants.
Came the steward and a couple of Moorish slaves in green turbans, to
whose care the Duke commanded his masked visitor. But Giovanni neither
required nor desired their ministrations; he would not eat nor drink,
but contented himself with the patience of hatred to sit for two long
hours awaiting the pleasure of his foolish victim.
They left at last, a little before midnight the Duke, his brother
Cesare, his cousin Monreale, and a numerous attendance, his own retinue
and those of the two cardinals. Thus they rode back to Rome, the Borgias
very gay, the man in the mask plodding along beside them.
They came to the Rione de Ponte, where their ways were to separate, and
there, opposite the palace of the Cardinal Vice-Chancellor, Gandia drew
rein. He announced to the others that he went no farther with them,
summoned a single groom to attend him, and bade the remainder return to
the Vatican and await him there.
There was a last jest and a laugh from Cesare as the cavalcade went on
towards the papal palace. Then Gandia turned to the man in the mask,
bade him get up on the crupper of his horse, and so rode slowly off
in the direction of the Giudecca, the single attendant he had retained
trotting beside his stirrup.
Giovanni directed his brother-in-law, not to the main entrance of the
house, but to the garden gate, which opened upon a narrow alley. Here
they dismounted, flinging the reins to the groom, who was bidden to
wait. Giovanni produced a key, unlocked the door, and ushered the Duke
into the gloom of the garden. A stone staircase ran up to the loggia
on the mezzanine, and by this way was Gandia now conducted, treading
softly. His guide went ahead. He had provided himself with yet another
key, and so unlocked the door from the loggia which opened upon the
ante-room of Madonna Antonia. He held the door for the Duke, who
hesitated, seeing all in darkness.
“In,” Giovanni bade him. “Tread softly. Madonna waits for you.”
Recklessly, then, that unsuspecting fellow stepped into the trap.
Giovanni followed, closed the door, and locked it. The Duke, standing
with quickened pulses in that impenetrable blackness, found himself
suddenly embraced, not at all after the fond fashion he was expecting. A
wrestler's arms enlaced his body, a sinewy leg coiled itself snake-wise
about one of his own, pulling it from under him. As he crashed down
under the weight of his unseen opponent, a great voice boomed out:
“Lord of Mirandola! To me! Help! Thieves!”
Suddenly a door opened. Light flooded the gloom, and the writhing Duke
beheld a white vision of the girl whose beauty had been the lure that
had drawn him into this peril which, as yet, he scarcely understood. But
looking up into the face of the man who grappled with him, the man who
held him there supine under his weight, he began at last to understand,
or, at least, to suspect, for the face he saw, unmasked now, leering at
him with hate unspeakable through the cloud of golden hair that half
met across it, was the face of Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro, whom his
family had so cruelly wronged. Giovanni Sforza's was the voice that now
fiercely announced his doom.
“You and yours have made me a thing of scorn and laughter. Yourself have
laughed at me. Go laugh in hell!”
A blade flashed up in Giovanni's hand. Gandia threw up an arm to fend
his breast, and the blade buried itself in the muscles. He screamed with
pain and terror. The other laughed with hate and triumph, and stabbed
again, this time in the shoulder.
Antonia, from the threshold, watching in bewilderment and panic, sent
a piercing scream to ring through the house, and then the voice of
Giovanni, fierce yet exultant, called aloud:
“Pico! Pico! Lord of Mirandola! Look to your daughter!”
Came steps and voice, more light, flooding now the chamber, and through
the mists gathering before his eyes the first-born of the house of
Borgia beheld hurrying men, half dressed, with weapons in their hands.
But whether they came to kill or to save, they came too late: Ten times
Giovanni's blade had stabbed the Duke, yet, hindered by the Duke's
struggles and by the effort of holding him there, he had been unable to
find his heart, wherefore, as those others entered now, he slashed his
victim across the throat, and so made an end.
He rose, covered with blood, so ghastly and terrific that Pico, thinking
him wounded, ran to him. But Giovanni reassured him with a laugh, and
pointed with his dripping dagger.
“The blood is his--foul Borgia blood!”
At the name Pico started, and there was a movement as of fear from the
three grooms who followed him. The Count looked down at that splendid,
blood-spattered figure lying there so still, its sightless eyes
staring up at the frescoed ceiling, so brave and so pitiful in his
gold-broidered suit of white satin, with the richly jewelled girdle
carrying gloves and purse and a jewelled dagger that had been so useless
in that extremity.
“Gandia” he cried; and looked at Giovanni with round eyes of fear and
amazement. “How came he here?”
“How?”
With bloody hand Giovanni pointed to the open door of Antonia's chamber.
“That was the lure, my lord. Taking the air outside, I saw him slinking
hither, and took him for a thief, as, indeed, he was--a thief of honour,
like all his kind. I followed, and--there he lies.”
“My God!” cried Pico. And then hoarsely asked, “And Antonia?”
Giovanni dismissed the question abruptly.
“She saw, yet she knows nothing.”
And then on another note:
“Up now, Pico!” he cried. “Arouse the city, and let all men know how
Gandia died the death of a thief. Let all men know this Borgia brood for
what it is.”
“Are you mad?” cried Pico. “Will I put my neck under the knife?”
“You took him here in the night, and yours was the right to kill. You
exercised it.”
Pico looked long and searchingly into the other's face. True, all the
appearances bore out the tale, as did, too, what had gone before and
had been the cause of Antonia's complaint to him. Yet, knowing what lay
between Sforza and Borgia, it may have seemed to Pico too extraordinary
a coincidence that Giovanni should have been so ready at hand to defend
the honour of the House of Mirandola. But he asked no questions. He was
content in his philosophy to accept the event and be thankful for it on
every count. But as for Giovanni's suggestion that he should proclaim
through Rome how he had exercised his right to slay this Tarquin, the
Lord of Mirandola had no mind to adopt it.
“What is done is done,” he said shortly, in a tone that conveyed much.
“Let it suffice us all. It but remains now to be rid of this.”
“You will keep silent?” cried Giovanni, plainly vexed.
“I am not a fool,” said Pico gently.
Giovanni understood. “And these your men?”
“Are very faithful friends who will aid you now to efface all traces.”
And upon that he moved away, calling his daughter, whose absence was
intriguing him. Receiving no answer, he entered her room, to find her
in a swoon across her bed. She had fainted from sheer horror at what she
had seen.
Followed by the three servants bearing the body, Giovanni went down
across the garden very gently. Approaching the gate, he bade them wait,
saying that he went to see that the coast was clear. Then, going forward
alone, he opened the gate and called softly to the waiting groom:
“Hither to me!”
Promptly the man surged before him in the gloom, and as promptly
Giovanni sank his dagger in the fellow's breast. He deplored the
necessity for the deed, but it was unavoidable, and your cinquecentist
never shrank from anything that necessity imposed upon him. To let the
lackey live would be to have the bargelli in the house by morning.
The man sank with a half-uttered cry, and lay still.
Giovanni dragged him aside under the shelter of the wall, where the
others would not see him, then called softly to them to follow.
When the grooms emerged from Pico's garden, the Lord of Pesaro was
astride of the fine white horse on which Gandia had ridden to his death.
“Put him across the crupper,” he bade them.
And they so placed the body, the head dangling on one side, the legs on
the other. And Giovanni reflected grimly how he had reversed the order
in which Gandia and he had ridden that same horse an hour ago.
At a walk they proceeded down the lane towards the river, a groom
on each side to see that the burden on the crupper did not jolt off,
another going ahead to scout. At the alley's mouth Giovanni drew rein,
and let the man emerge upon the river-bank and look to right and left to
make sure that there was no one about.
He saw no one. Yet one there was who saw them--Giorgio, the timber
merchant, who lay aboard his boat moored to the Schiavoni, and who,
three days later, testified to what he saw. You know his testimony. It
has been repeated often--how he saw the man emerge from the alley and
look up and down, then retire, to emerge again, accompanied now by the
horseman with his burden, and the other two; how he saw them take the
body from the crupper of the horse, and, with a “one, two, and three,”
fling it into the river; how he heard the horseman ask them had they
thrown it well into the middle, and their answer of, “Yes my lord”; and
finally, when asked why he had not come earlier to report the matter,
how he had answered that he had thought nothing of it, having in his
time seen more than a hundred bodies flung into the Tiber at night.
Returned to the garden gate, Giovanni bade the men go in without
him. There was something yet that he must do. When they had gone, he
dismounted, and went to the body of the groom which he had left under
the wall. He must remove that too. He cut one of the stirrup-leathers
from the saddle, and attaching one end of it to the dead man's arm,
mounted again, and dragged him thus--ready to leave the body and ride
off at the first alarm--some little way, until he came to the Piazza
della Giudecca. Here, in the very heart of the Jewish quarters, he left
the body, and his movements hereafter are a little obscure. Perhaps he
set out to return to Pico della Mirandola's house, but becoming, as was
natural, uneasy on the way, fearing lest all traces should, after all,
not have been effaced, lest the Duke should be traced to that house, and
himself, if found there, dealt with summarily upon suspicion, he
turned about, and went off to seek sanctuary with his uncle, the
Vice-Chancellor.
The Duke's horse, which he had ridden, he turned loose in the streets,
where it was found some hours later, and first gave occasion to rumours
of foul play. The rumours growing, with the discovery of the body of
Gandia's groom, and search-parties of armed bargelli scouring Rome, and
the Giudecca in particular, in the course of the next two days, forth at
last came Giorgio, that boatman of the Schiavoni, with the tale of what
he had seen. When the stricken Pope heard it, he ordered the bed of the
river to be dragged foot by foot, with the result that the ill-starred
Duke of Gandia was brought up in one of the nets, whereupon the
heartless Sanazzaro coined his terrible epigram concerning that
successor of Saint Peter, that Fisherman of Men.
The people, looking about for him who had the greatest motive for that
deed, were quick to fasten the guilt upon Giovanni Sforza, who by that
time was far from Rome, riding hard for the shelter of his tyranny of
Pesaro; and the Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, who was also mentioned, and
who feared to be implicated, apprehensive ever lest his page should have
seen the betraying arms upon the ring of his masked visitor--fled also,
nor could be induced to return save under a safe-conduct from the Holy
Father, expressing conviction of his innocence.
Later public rumour accused others; indeed, they accused in turn every
man who could have been a possible perpetrator, attributing to some of
them the most fantastic and incredible motives. Once, prompted no doubt
by their knowledge of the libertine, pleasure-loving nature of the dead
Duke, rumour hit upon the actual circumstances of the murder so closely,
indeed, that the Count of Mirandola's house was visited by the bargelli
and subjected to an examination, at which Pico violently rebelled,
appealing boldly to the Pope against insinuations that reflected upon
the honour of his daughter.
The mystery remained impenetrable, and the culprit was never brought to
justice. We know that in slaying Gandia, Giovanni Sforza vented a hatred
whose object was not Gandia, but Gandia's father. His aim was to deal
Pope Alexander the cruellest and most lingering of wounds, and if he
lacked the avenger's satisfaction of disclosing himself, at least he
did not lack assurance that his blow had stricken home. He heard--as all
Italy heard--from that wayfarer on the bridge of Sant' Angelo, how the
Pope, in a paroxysm of grief at sight of his son's body fished from the
Tiber, had bellowed in his agony like a tortured bull, so that his
cries within the castle were heard upon the bridge. He learnt how the
handsome, vigorous Pope staggered into the consistory of the 19th of
that same month with the mien and gait of a palsied old man, and, in a
voice broken with sobs, proclaimed his bitter lament:
“Had we seven Papacies we would give them all to restore the Duke to
life.”
He might have been content. But he was not. That deep hate of his
against those who had made him a thing of scorn was not so easily to be
slaked. He waited, spying his opportunity for further hurt. It came a
year later, when Gandia's brother, the ambitious Cesare Borgia, divested
himself of his cardinalitial robes and rank, exchanging them for
temporal dignities and the title of Duke of Valentinois. Then it was
that he took up the deadly weapon of calumny, putting it secretly about
that Cesare was the murderer of his brother, spurred to it by worldly
ambition and by other motives which involved the principal members of
the family.
Men do not mount to Borgia heights without making enemies. The evil tale
was taken up in all its foul trappings, and, upon no better authority
than the public voice, it was enshrined in chronicles by every scribbler
of the day. And for four hundred years that lie has held its place in
history, the very cornerstone of all the execration that has been
heaped upon the name of Borgia. Never was vengeance more terrible,
far-reaching, and abiding. It is only in this twentieth century of ours
that dispassionate historians have nailed upon the counter of truth the
base coin of that accusation.