The friar opened his arms, wide and invitingly:
“Let me not depart from my vows of humility in the heat of my own defence. I will say nothing. Do you, sir, make search upon me for the gear which this man says I have stolen, though all his evidence is that it chanced to be in a room in which for a little while I rested.”
“To accuse a priest!” said someone in a tone of indignation, and a murmur arose at once in sympathy.
It moved the young officer to mirth. He half swung on his heel so as to confront those mutterers.
“A priest!” he jeered. Then, his keen eyes flashed once more upon the friar. “When did you last say Mass?”
Before that simple question Fra Sulpizio seemed to lose some of his assurance. Without even giving him time to answer, the officer fired another question. “What is your name?”
“My name?” The friar was looking at him from eyes that seemed to have grown beadier than ever in that white, pitted face. “I’ll not expose myself to ribald unbelief. You shall have written proof of my name. Behold.” And from his gown he fetched a parchment, which he thrust under the soldier’s nose.
The officer conned it a moment, then his eyes went over the edge of it back to the face of the man that held it.
“How can I read it upside down?”
The friar’s hands, which shook a little, made haste to turn the sheet. As he did so Bellarion perceived two things; that the sheet had been correctly held at first; and that it was his own lost letter. He had a glimpse of the Abbot’s seal as the parchment was turned.
He was momentarily bewildered by a discovery that was really threefold: first, the friar was indeed the thief who had rifled his scrip; second, he must be in a more desperate case than Bellarion suspected, to seek to cloak himself under a false identity; and, third, the pretence that the document proffered upside down was a test to discover whether the fellow could read, a trap into which the knave had tumbled headlong.
The officer laughed aloud, well pleased with his own cleverness. “I knew you were no clerk,” he mocked him. “I have more than a suspicion who you really are. Though you may have stolen a friar’s habit, it would need more than that to cover your ugly, pockmarked face and that scar on your neck. You are Lorenzaccio da Trino, my friend; and there’s a halter waiting for you.”
The mention of that name made a stir in the tavern, and brought its tenants a step nearer to the group about that table in the window recess. It was a name known probably to every man present with the single exception of Bellarion, the name of a bandit of evil fame throughout Montferrat and Savoy. Something of the kind Bellarion may have guessed. But at that moment the recovery of the Abbot’s letter was his chief concern.
“That parchment’s mine!” he cried. “It was stolen from me this morning by this false friar.”
The interpolation diverted attention to himself. After a moment’s blank stare the officer laughed again. Bellarion began actively to dislike that laugh of his. He was too readily moved to it.
“Why, here’s Paul disowning Peter. Oh, to be sure, the associate becomes the victim when the master rogue is taken. It’s a stale trick, young cockerel. It won’t serve in Casale.”
Bellarion bristled. He assumed a great dignity. “Young sir, you may come to regret your words. I am the man named in that parchment, as the Abbot of the Grazie of Cigliano can testify.”
“No need to plague Messer the Abbot,” the officer mocked him. “A taste of the cord, my lad, a hoist or two, and you’ll vomit all the truth.”
“The hoist!” Bellarion felt the skin roughening along his spine.
Was it to be taken for granted that he was a rogue, simply from his association with this spurious friar; and were his bones to be broken by the torturers to make him accuse himself? Was this how justice was dispensed?
He was bewildered, and, as he afterwards confessed, he grew suddenly afraid. And then there was a cry from the peasant, and things happened quickly and unexpectedly.
Whilst the officer’s attention had been on Bellarion, the false friar had moved very soft and stealthily nearer to the window. The peasant it was who detected the movement and realised its import.
“Lay hands on him!” he cried, in sudden alarm lest his florins and the rest should take flight again, and, that alarm spurring him, himself he leapt to seize Lorenzaccio by arm and shoulder. Fury blazed from the bandit’s beady eyes; his yellow fangs were bared in a grin of rage; something flashed in his right hand, and then his knife sank into the stomach of his assailant. It was a wicked, vicious, upward, ripping thrust, like the stroke of a boar’s tusk, and the very movement that delivered it flung the peasant off, so that he hurtled into the arms of the two soldiers, and momentarily hampered their advance. That moment was all that Lorenzaccio needed. He swung aside, and with a vigour and agility to execute, as remarkable as the rapidity of the conception itself, he hoisted himself to the sill of the narrow, open window, crouched there a second, measuring his outward leap, and was gone.
He left a raging confusion behind him, and an exclamatory din above which rang fierce and futile commands from the Podestà’s young officer. One of the men-at-arms supported the swooning body of the peasant, whilst his fellow vainly and stupidly sought to follow by the way Lorenzaccio had gone, but failed because he lacked the bandit’s vigour.
Bellarion, horror-stricken and half stupefied, stood staring at the wretched peasant whose hurt he judged to be mortal. He was roused by a gentle tugging at his sleeve. He half turned to find himself looking into the
