“When you have bridges of your own here, you need not care. But I have a notion that it will be longer than you think before you have these bridges, and that we may have to go by way of Carpignano in the end.”
“I shall have my bridges in a week,” said Carmagnola.
Bellarion smiled. “When you have them, and when you have put two thousand men across to hold them, I’ll bid Stoffel return from Carpignano.”
“But in the meantime …”
Bellarion interrupted him, and suddenly he was very stern.
“In the meantime you will remember that I command. Though I may choose to humour you and her highness, as the shortest way to convince you of error, yet I do not undertake to obey you against my better judgment.”
“By God, Bellarion!” Carmagnola swore at him, “I’ll not have you gay with me. You’ll measure your words, or else you’ll eat them.”
Very coldly Bellarion looked at him, and observed Valeria’s white restraining hand which again was upon Carmagnola’s sleeve.
“At the moment I have a task in hand to which I belong entirely. While it is doing if you forget that I command, I shall remove you from the army.”
He left the swaggerer fuming.
“Only my regard for you, madonna, restrains me,” he assured the Princess. “He takes that tone when he should remember that, if it came to blows between us, the majority of the men here would be upon my side, now that he has sent nearly all his own away.” He clenched his hands in anger. “Yet for your sake, lady, I must suffer it. There can be no quarrel between his men and mine until we have placed you and your brother in possession of Montferrat.”
These and other such professions of staunch selfless loyalty touched her deeply; and in the days that followed, whilst the troopers, toiling like woodmen, were felling trees and building the bridges above the junction of the rivers, Carmagnola and Valeria were constantly together.
She was driven now to the discomfort of living under canvas, sharing the camp life of these rude men of war, and Carmagnola did all in his power to mitigate for her the hardships it entailed, hardships which she bore with a high gay courage. She would go with him daily to watch the half-naked labourers in the river, bundling together whole trees as if they were mere twigs, to serve as pontoons. And daily he gave her cause to admire his skill, his ingenuity, and his military capacity. That Bellarion should have sneered at this was but another proof of Bellarion’s worthlessness. Either he could not understand it, or else of treacherous intent he desired to deprive her of its fruits.
Meanwhile Carmagnola beglamoured her with talk of actions past, in all of which he played ever the heroic part. The eyes of her mind were dazzled by the pictures his words drew for her. Now she beheld him leading a knightly charge that shattered an enemy host into shards; now she saw him at the head of an escalade, indomitably climbing enemy walls under a hail of stones and scalding pitch; now she saw him in council, wisely planning the means by which victory might be snatched from overwhelming opposition.
One day when he spoke of these things, as they sat alone watching the men who swarmed like ants about the building of his bridge, he touched a closer note.
“Yet of all the enterprises to which I have set these rude, soldier hands, none has so warmed me as this, for none has been worthier a man’s endeavour. It will be a glorious day for me when we set you in your palace at Casale. A glorious day, and yet a bitter.”
“A bitter?” Her great dark eyes turned on him in question.
His countenance clouded, his own glance fell away. “Will it not be bitter for me to know this service is at an end; to know that I must go my ways; resume a mercenary’s life, and do for hire that which I now do out of … enthusiasm and love?”
She shifted her own glance, embarrassed a little.
“Surely you do yourself less than justice. There is great honour and fame in store for you, my lord.”
“Honour and fame!” He laughed. “I would gladly leave those to tricksters like Bellarion, who rise to them so easily because no scruples ever deter them. Honour and fame! Let who will have those, so that I may serve where my heart bids me.”
Boldly now his hand sought hers. She let it lie in his. Above those pensive, mysterious eyes her line brows were knit.
“Aye,” she breathed, “that is the great service of life! That is the only worthy service—as the heart bids.”
His second hand came to recruit the first. Lying almost at her feet, he swung round on his side upon the green earth, looking up at her in a sort of ecstasy. “You think that, too! You help me to self-contempt, madonna.”
“To self-contempt? It is the only contempt that you will ever know. But why should you know that?”
“Because all my life, until this moment, I have served for hire. Because, if this adventure had not come to me by God’s grace, in such worthless endeavours would my life continue. Now—now that I know the opinion in which you must hold such service—it is over and done for me. When I shall have served you to your goal, I shall have performed my last.”
There fell a long pause between them. At last: “When my brother is crowned in Casale, he will need a servant such as you, Messer Carmagnola.”
“Aye, but shall you, madonna? Shall you?”
She looked at him wistfully, smiling a little. He was very handsome, very splendid and very brave, a knight to win a lady’s trust, and she was a very lonely, friendless lady in sore need of a stout arm and a gallant heart to help her through the trials of this life.
The tapering fingers of her disengaged hand descended gently upon
