Mombelli’s livid lips moved frantically, but no words came. He reeled where he stood until he found the wall to steady him, and Bellarion watched him with those dreadful, searching eyes.
“To what end did he torture you? What did he desire of you?”
“I have not said he tortured me. It is not true.”
“You have not said it. No. But your condition says it. You have not said it, because you dare not. Why did he do this? And why did he desist?” Bellarion gripped him by the shoulders. “Answer me. To what did the torments undergone suffice to constrain you? Will you answer me?”
“O God!” groaned the physician, sagging limply against the wall, and looking as if he would faint.
But there was no pity in Bellarion’s face. “Come with me,” he said, and it was almost by main force that he dragged the wretched doctor across that hall out to the gallery, and down the wide steps to the great court. Here under the arcade some men-at-arms of Facino’s bodyguard were idling. Into their hands Bellarion delivered Mombelli.
“To the question chamber,” he said shortly.
Mombelli, shattered in nerve and sapped of manhood by his sufferings, cried out, piteously inarticulate. Pitilessly Bellarion waved him away, and the soldiers bore him off, screaming, to the stone chamber under the northeastern tower. There, in the middle of the uneven stone floor, stood the dread framework of the rack.
Bellarion, who had followed, ordered them to strip him. The men were reluctant to do the office of executioners, but under the eyes of Bellarion, standing as implacable as the god of wrath, they set about it, nevertheless, and all the while the broken man’s cries for mercy filled that vaulted place with an ever-mounting horror. At the last, half-naked, he broke from the men’s hands and flung himself at Bellarion’s feet.
“In the name of the sweet Christ, my lord, take pity on me! I can bear no more. Hang me if you will, but do not let me be tortured again.”
Bellarion looked down on the grovelling, slobbering wretch with an infinite compassion in his soul. But there was no sign of it on his countenance or in his voice.
“You have but to answer my question, sir, and you shall have your wish. You shall be hanged without further suffering. Why did the Duke torture you, and why did the torture cease when it did? To what importunities did you yield?”
“Already you have guessed it, my lord. That is why you use me so! But it is not just. As God’s my witness, it is not just. What am I but a poor man caught in the toils of the evil desires of others? As long as God gave me the strength to resist, I resisted. But I could bear no more. There was no price at which I would not have purchased respite from that horror. Death I could have borne had that been all they threatened. But I had reached the end of my endurance of pain. Oh, my lord, if I were a villain there would have been no torture to endure. They offered me bribes, bribes great enough to dazzle a poor man, that would have left me rich for the remainder of my days. When I refused, they threatened me with death unless I did their infamous will. Those threats I defied. Then they subjected me to this protracted agony which the Duke impiously calls his Lent. They drew my teeth, brutally with unutterable violence, two each day until all were gone. Broken and most starved as I was, distracted by pain, which for a fortnight had been unceasing, they began upon my fingernails. But when they tore the nail from my left thumb, I could bear no more. I yielded to their infamy.”
Bellarion made a sign to the men, and they pulled Mombelli to his feet. But his eyes dared not meet the terrible glance of Bellarion.
“You yielded to their demands that, under the pretence of curing him, you should poison my Lord Facino. That is the thing to which you yielded. But when you say ‘they’ whom do you mean?”
“The Duke Gian Maria and Antonio della Torre.”
Bellarion remembered Venegono’s warning—“He is a thing of venom, like the emblem of his house.”
“Poor wretch!” said Bellarion. “You deserve some mercy, and you shall have it, provided you can undo what you have done.”
“Alas, my lord!” Mombelli groaned, wringing his hands in a passion of despair. “Alas! There is no antidote to that poison. It works slowly gradually corroding the intestines. Hang me, my lord, and have done. Had I been less of a coward, I would have hanged myself before I did this thing. But the Duke threatened that if I failed him the torture should be resumed and continued until I died of sheer exhaustion. Also he swore that my refusal would not save my Lord Facino, whom he would find other means of despatching.”
Bellarion stood between loathing and compassion. But there was no thought in his mind of hanging this poor wretch, who had been the victim of that malignant Duke.
He uttered an order in cold, level tones: “Restore him his garments and place him in confinement until I send for him again.”
On that he departed from that underground chamber, and slowly, thoughtfully made his way above.
By the time he reached the courtyard his resolve was taken, though his neck should pay for it: Gian Maria should not escape. For the first and only time in those adventurous years of his did he swerve from the purpose by which he laid his course, and turn his hand to a task that was not more or less directly concerned with its ultimate fulfilment.
And so, without pausing for rest or food, you behold him once more in the saddle, riding hard for Milan on that Monday afternoon.
He conceived that he bore thither the first news of Facino’s moribund condition.
But rumour
