“Shall I not?” she asked with a little tremulous laugh. “Shall I not?”
“Why, then, madonna, if you will accept my service, it shall be yours for as long as I endure. It shall never be another’s. Valeria! My Valeria!”
That hand upon his head, overheating its very indifferent contents, drove him now to an excessive precipitancy.
He carried the hand he held almost fiercely to his lips.
It was withdrawn, gently but firmly as was its fellow. His kiss and the bold use of her name scared her a little.
“Carmagnola, my friend …”
“Your friend, and more than your friend, madonna.”
“Why, how much more can there be than that?”
“All that a man may be to a woman, my Valeria. I am your knight. I ever have been since that day in the lists at Milan, when you bestowed the palm on me. I joy in this battle that is to be fought for you. I would joy in death for you if it were needed to prove my worship.”
“How glibly you say these things! There will have been queens in other lists in which you have borne off the palm. Have you talked so to them?”
“O cruelty!” he cried out like a man in pain. “That you should say this to me! I am swooning at your feet, Valeria, you wonder of the world!”
“My nose, sir, is too long for that!” She mocked him, but with an underlying tenderness; and tenderness there was too in her moist eyes. “You are a whirlwind in your wooing as in the lists. You are reckless, sir.”
“Is it a fault? A soldier’s fault, then. But I’ll be patient if you bid me. I’ll be whatsoever you bid me, Valeria. But when we come to Casale …”
He paused for words, and she took advantage of that pause to check him.
“It is unlucky to plan upon something not yet achieved, sir. Wait … wait until that time arrives.”
“And then?” he asked her breathlessly. “And then?”
“Have I not said that to plan is unlucky?”
Boldly he read the converse of that statement. “I’ll not tempt fortune, then. I dare not. I will be patient, Valeria.”
But he let it appear that his confidence was firm, and she added nothing now to shake it.
And so in ardent wooing whilst he waited for his bridge, Carmagnola spent most of the time that he was not engaged in directing the construction of it. Bellarion in those days sulked like Achilles in his tent, with a copy of Vegetius which he had brought from Milan in his baggage.
The bridges took, not a week, but eleven days to build. At last, however, on the eve of All Saints’, as Fra Serafino tells us, Carmagnola accompanied by Valeria and her brother bore word himself to Bellarion that the bridges were ready and that a party of fifty of his men were encamped on the peninsula between the rivers. He came to demand that Bellarion should so dispose that the army should begin to cross at dawn.
“That,” said Bellarion, “assumes that your bridges endure until dawn.”
He was standing, where he had risen to receive his visitors, in the middle of his roomy pavilion, which was lighted by a group of three lanterns hung at the height of his head on the tent-pole. The book in which he had been reading was closed upon his forefinger.
“Endure until dawn?” Carmagnola was annoyed by the suggestion. “What do you mean?”
Bellarion’s remark had been imprudent. Still more imprudent was the laugh he now uttered.
“Ask yourself who should destroy them,” he said. “In your place I should have asked myself that before I went to the trouble of building them.”
“How should Theodore know of it, shut up as he is in Vercelli, eight miles away?”
Part of his question was answered on the instant by a demoniac uproar from the strip of land across the water. Cries of rage and terror, shouts of encouragement and command, the sound of blows, and all the unmistakable din of conflict, rose fiercely upon the deepening gloom.
“He knows, it seems,” said Bellarion, and again he laughed.
Carmagnola stood a moment, clenching and unclenching his hands, his face white with rage. Then he span round where he stood and with an inarticulate cry dashed from the tent.
One withering glance Valeria flashed into Bellarion’s sardonically amused countenance, then, summoning her brother, she followed Carmagnola.
Bellarion set down his book upon the table by the tent-pole, took up a cloak, and followed them at leisure, through the screen of bare trees behind which his pavilion had been pitched, and along the high bank of the swirling river towards the head of Carmagnola’s bridge.
There, as he expected, he found them, scarcely visible in the gloom, and with them a knot of men-at-arms and a half-dozen stragglers, all that had escaped of the party that Carmagnola had sent across an hour ago. The others had been surrounded and captured. Last of all to win across, arriving just as Bellarion reached the spot, was Belluno, who had commanded them, an excitable Neapolitan who leapt up the bank from the bridge ranting by all the patrons of Naples that they had been betrayed.
Over the river came a sound of tramping feet. Dimly reflected in the water they could see the forms of men who otherwise moved invisible on the farther bank, and presently came a sound of axes on timber.
“There goes your bridge, Francesco,” said Bellarion, and for the third time he laughed.
“Do you mock me, damn you!” Carmagnola raged at him, and then raised his voice to roar for arbalesters. Three or four of the men went off vociferously, at a run, to fetch them, whilst Valeria turned suddenly upon Bellarion, whose tall cloaked figure stood beside her.
“Why do you laugh?” Her voice, sharp with disdain, resentment, and suspicion, silenced all there that they might hear his answer.
“I am human, I suppose, and, therefore, not entirely without malice.”
“Is that all your reason? Is your malice so deep that you can laugh at an enemy advantage which may wreck the
