“You are wrong, captain. There are military laws …”
“I say this is no trial. If Bellarion is to be tried, you’ll send him before the Duke.”
“And at the same time,” put in Bellarion, “you’ll send your single witness; this clown who brought that letter. Your refusal to produce him here before me now in itself shows the malice by which you’re moved.”
Carmagnola flushed under that charge, and scowlingly considered the prisoner. “If the form of trial you’ve received does not content you, and since you charge me with personal feeling, there is another I am ready to afford.” He drew himself up, and flung back his handsome head. “Trial by battle, Lord Prince.”
Over Bellarion’s white face a sneer was spread.
“And what shall it prove if you ride me down? Shall it prove more than that you have the heavier weight of brawn, that you are more practised in the lists and have the stronger thews? Does it need trial by battle to prove that?”
“God will defend the right,” said Carmagnola.
“Will he so?” Bellarion laughed. “I am glad to have your word for it. But you forget that the right to challenge lies with me, the accused. In your blundering stupidity you overlook essentials always. Your very dullness acquits you of hypocrisy. Shall I exercise that right upon the person in whose service I am carrying arms, upon the body of the Marquis Gian Giacomo of Montferrat?”
The frail boy named started, and looked up with dilating eyes. His sister cried out in very real alarm. But Carmagnola covered them with his answer.
“I am your accuser, sir: not he.”
“You are his deputy, no more,” Bellarion answered, and now the boy came to his feet, white and tense.
“He is in the right,” he announced. “I cannot refuse him.”
Smiling, Bellarion looked at Carmagnola, confused and awkward.
“Always you overreach yourself,” he mocked him. He turned to Gian Giacomo. “You could not refuse me if I asked it. But I do not ask it. I only desired to show the value of Carmagnola’s offer.”
“You have some decency still,” Carmagnola told him.
“Whilst you cannot lay claim even to that. God made you a fool, and that’s the end of the matter.”
“Take him away.”
Already it seemed they had their orders. They laid hands upon him, and, submitting without further words, he suffered them to lead him out.
As the door closed upon him, Stoffel exploded. He raged and stormed. He pleaded, argued, and vituperated them, even the Princess herself, for fools and dolts, and finally threatened to raise the army against them, or at least to do his utmost with his Swiss to prevent them from carrying out their evil intentions.
“Listen!” Carmagnola commanded sternly, and in the silence they heard from the hall below a storm of angry outcries. “That is the voice of the army, answering you: the voice of those who were maimed last night as a result of his betrayal. Saving yourself, there is not a captain in the army, and saving your own Swiss, hardly a man who is not this morning clamouring for Bellarion’s death.”
“You are confessing that you published the matter even before Bellarion was examined here! My God, you villain, you hell-kite, you swaggering ape, who give a free rein to the base jealousy in which you have ever held Bellarion. Your mean spite may drive you now to the lengths of murder. But look to yourself thereafter. You’ll lose your empty head over this, Carmagnola!”
They silenced him and bore him out, whereafter they sat down to seal Bellarion’s fate.
XI
The Pledge
Unanimously the captains voted for Bellarion’s death. The only dissentients were the Marquis and his sister. The latter was appalled by the swiftness with which this thing had come upon them, and shrank from being in any sense a party to the slaying of a man, however guilty. Also not only was she touched by Bellarion’s forbearance in the matter of trial by battle against her brother, but his conduct in that connection sowed in her mind the first real doubt of his guilt. Urgently she pleaded that he should be sent for trial before the Duke.
Carmagnola, in refusing, conveyed the impression of a great soul wrestling with circumstances, a noble knight placing duty above inclination. It was a part that well became his splendid person.
“Because you ask it, madonna, for one reason, because of the imputations of malice against me for another, I would give years of my life to wash my hands of him and send him to Duke Filippo Maria. But out of other considerations, in which your own and your brother’s future are concerned, I dare not. Saving perhaps Stoffel and his Swiss, the whole army demands his death. The matter has gone too far.”
The captains one and all proved him right by their own present insistence.
“Yet I do not believe him guilty,” the young Marquis startled them, “and I will be no party to the death of an innocent man.”
“Would any of us?” Carmagnola asked him. “Is there any room for doubt? The letter …”
“The letter,” the boy interrupted hotly, “is, as Bellarion says, a trick of my uncle’s to remove the one enemy he fears.”
That touched Carmagnola’s vanity with wounding effect. He dissembled the hurt. But it served to strengthen his purpose.
“That vain boaster has seduced you with his argument, eh?”
“No; not with his argument, but with his conduct. He could have challenged me to trial by combat, as he showed. What am I to stand against him? A thing of straw. Yet he declined. Was that the action of a trickster?”
“It was,” Carmagnola answered emphatically. “It was a trick to win you over. For he knew, as we all know, that a sovereign prince does not lie under that law of chivalry. He knew that if he had demanded it, you would have been within your right in appointing a deputy.”
“Why, then, did you not say so at the time?” the Princess asked him.
“Because he
