“What are you implying, madonna?” cried Carmagnola, aghast. For all his hostility towards Bellarion, he was very far from ready to believe that he played a double game.
“That I have no wits,” said Bellarion, quietly scornful.
And now the impetuous Belluno, smarting under his own particular misadventure and near escape, must needs cut in.
“Madonna is implying more than that. She is implying that you’ve sold us to Theodore of Montferrat.”
“Are you implying it, too, Belluno?” His tone had changed. There was now in his voice a note that the Princess had never heard, a note that made Belluno’s blood run cold. “Speak out, man! Though I give licence for innuendo to a lady, I require clear speech from every man. So let us have this thing quite plainly.”
Belluno was brave and obstinate. He conquered his fear of Bellarion sufficiently to make a show of standing his ground.
“It is clear,” he answered sullenly, “that we have been betrayed.”
“How is it clear, you fool?” Bellarion shifted again from cold wrath with an insubordinate inferior to argument with a fellow man. “Are you so inept at the trade by which you live that you can conceive of a soldier in the Marquis Theodore’s position neglecting to throw out scouts to watch the enemy and report his movements? Are you so much a fool as that? If so, I shall have to think of replacing you in your command.”
Carmagnola interposed aggressively; and this partly to protect Belluno who was one of his own lieutenants, and partly because the sneer at the fellow’s lack of military foresight was a reflection upon Carmagnola himself.
“Do you pretend that you foresaw this action of Theodore’s?”
“I pretend that any but a fool must have foreseen it. It is precisely what any soldier in his place would do: allow you to waste time, material, and energy on building bridges, and then promptly destroy them for you.”
“Why, then, did you not say this ten days ago?”
“Why?” Bellarion’s voice sounded amused. His face they could not see. “Because I never spend myself in argument with those who learn only by experience.”
Again the Princess intervened. “Is that the best reason you can give? You allowed time, material, and energy, and now even a detachment of men to be wasted, merely that you might prove his folly to my Lord of Carmagnola? Is that what you ask us to believe?”
“He thinks us credulous, by God!” swore Carmagnola.
Bellarion kept his patience. “I had another reason, a military one with which it seems that I must shame your wits. To move the whole army from here to Carpignano would have taken me at least two days, perhaps three. A mounted detachment from Vercelli to destroy the bridge could reach Carpignano in a few hours, and once it was seen that I moved my army thither that detachment would have been instantly despatched. It was a movement I feared in any case, until your bridge-building operations here deceived Theodore into believing that I had no thought of Carpignano. That is why I allowed them to continue. Though your bridges could never serve the purpose for which you built them, they could excellently serve to disguise my own intention of crossing at Carpignano. Tomorrow, when the army begins to move thither, that detachment of Theodore’s will most certainly be sent to destroy the bridge. But it will find it held by a thousand men under Stoffel, and the probable capture of that detachment will compensate for the loss of men you have suffered tonight.”
There was a moment’s utter silence when he had done, a silence of defeat and confusion. Then came an applauding splutter of laughter from the group of men and officers who stood about.
It was cut short by a loud crash from across the stream, and, thereafter, with a groaning and rending of timbers, a gurgling of swelling, momentarily arrested, waters, and finally a noise like a thunderclap, the wrecked bridge swinging out into the stream snapped from the logs that held it to the northern shore.
“There it goes, Carmagnola,” said Bellarion. “But you no longer need bewail your labours. They have served my purpose.”
He cast his cloak more tightly about him, wished them good night almost gaily, and went striding away towards his pavilion.
Carmagnola, crestfallen, swallowing his chagrin as best he could, stood there in silence beside the equally silenced Princess.
Belluno swore softly, and vented a laugh of some little bitterness.
“He’s deep, always deep, by Saint Januarius! Never does he do the things he seems to do. Never does he aim where he looks.”
IX
Vercelli
A letter survives which the Prince of Valsassina wrote some little time after these events to Duke Filippo Maria, in which occurs the following criticism of the captains of his day: “They are stout fellows and great fighters, but rude, unlettered, and lacking culture. Their minds are fertile, vigorous soil, but unbroken by the plough of learning, so that the seeds of knowledge with which they are all too sparsely sown find little root there.”
At Carpignano, when they came there three days after breaking camp, they found that all had fallen out as Bellarion calculated. A detachment of horse one hundred strong had been sent in haste with the necessary implements to destroy the bridge. That detachment Stoffel had surrounded, captured, disarmed, and disbanded.
They crossed, and after another three days marching down the right bank of the Sesia they crossed the Cervo just above Quinto, where Bellarion took up his quarters in the little castle owned there by the Lord Girolamo Prato, who was with Theodore in Vercelli.
Here, too, were housed the Princess and her brother and the Lord of Carmagnola, the latter by now recovered from his humiliation in the matter of his bridges to a state of normal self-complacency and arrogance.
An
