“You but repeat yourself.”
Bellarion looked at him, and smiled. “Never, do I believe, did a Prince find a bride more richly dowered.”
“A bride?” The youth was startled, terrified almost. “A bride?”
“Would less content your highness? Would you be satisfied to receive the assistance of the Countess’s possessions, when you may make them your own and wield them at your pleasure?”
He stared, his jaw fallen. Then slowly he brought his lips together again, and licked them thoughtfully, screwing up his mean eyes.
“You are proposing that I should take to wife Facino’s widow, who is twice my age?” He asked the question very slowly, as if pondering each word of it.
Bellarion laughed. “Not proposing it, highness. It is not for me to make such proposals. I do not even know what the lady will say. But if she is willing to become Duchess of Milan, she can provide the means to make you Duke.”
Filippo Maria sat down suddenly. The sweat broke from his pale brow. He mopped it with his hand, disturbing the black fringe that disfigured it. Then, lost in thought, he stroked the loose folds of his enormous chin, and gradually his eyes kindled.
At long length he put forth his hand again to the bell. This time Bellarion did not interfere. He perceived in the act the young Prince’s surrender to the forces of greed and lust which Bellarion himself had loosed against him.
He took his leave, and went out with the sad knowledge that greed and wantonness would make of the woman, too, a ready prey.
His work was done. She should have the thing she coveted, and find in it her punishment …
VII
Prince of Valsassina
As Bellarion had calculated and disposed, so things fell out, and Filippo Maria Visconti in the twenty-second year of his age led to the altar the widowed Countess of Biandrate who was thirty-nine. As a young girl, she had married, at the bidding of ambition, a man who was twenty years her senior; as a middle-aged woman now, and for the same reason, she married one who was almost as much her junior. She had not the foresight to perceive that the grievance on the score of disparity of years which she had nursed against Facino would be nursed against herself to her ultimate destruction by this sly, furtive, and cruel Prince to whom now she gave herself and her vast possessions. That, however, is no part of the story I have set myself to tell.
Estorre Visconti defended in vain his usurped dominion against Gian Maria’s legitimate successor. Filippo Maria, with Carmagnola in command of some seven thousand men, laid siege to Milan, whilst Bellarion went north to make an end of the Bergamo resistance. Because in haste to have done, he granted Malatesta easy terms of surrender, permitting him to ride out of the city with the honours of war, lance on thigh. Thereafter, having restored order in Bergamo and left there a strong garrison under an officer of trust, he marched with the main army to join Filippo Maria who was conducting operations from the mills on Monte Lupario, three miles from Milan. Some four weeks already had he spent there, with little progress made. Estorre had enrolled and constrained to the defence of the city almost every man of an age to bear arms. It was necessary to make an end, and Bellarion himself with a few followers entered the Castle of Porta Giovia which was being held against Estorre by Vimercati, the castellan. From its walls, having attracted the people by trumpet-blast, he published Filippo Maria’s proclamation, wherein the Prince solemnly undertook that if the city were at once surrendered to him it should have nothing to fear; that there should be no pillage, executions, or other measures punitive of this resistance to the State’s legitimate lord.
The news flew in every direction, with the result that before nightfall all those whom Estorre had constrained to follow him had fallen away, and he was left with only his mercenaries. With these, next morning, he hacked a way out through the Comasina Gate as the people were throwing open to the new Duke the gates of the city on the other side.
Filippo Maria entered with a comparatively small following and in the wake of a train of bread-carts sent ahead to relieve the famine which already was beginning to press upon the inhabitants. The acclamations of “Live the Duke!” quieted his natural timidity as he rode through the streets to shut himself up in the Castle of Porta Giovia, which remained ever afterwards his residence. Not for Filippo Maria the Palace of the Old Broletto or the gaiety of courts. His dark, scheming, yet pusillanimous nature craved the security of a stronghold.
For assisting him to the ducal throne, and no doubt to ensure their continued support, he rewarded his captains generously, and none more generously than Bellarion to whom he considered that he owed everything. Bellarion was not only confirmed in the lordship of Valsassina in feud, for himself and his heirs forever, but the Duke raised the fief into a principality.
Bellarion remained the Duke’s marshal in chief and military adviser, and it was by the dispositions which he made during that summer and autumn of 1412 that the lands of the duchy were finally cleared of the insurgent brigands who had renewed their depredations.
Peace being restored at home, and industry being liberated at last from the trammels that had lain upon it since the death of Gian Galeazzo, prosperity flowed swiftly back to the State of Milan, and the people heaped blessings upon the shy, furtive ruler of whom they saw so little.
It is possible that Filippo Maria would have been content to rest for the present upon what was done, to leave the frontiers of the duchy
