“And,” said Barbaresco, as he rolled forward, “near upon another five hundred refugees from Montferrat, both Guelph and Ghibelline, whom we’ve been collecting in Piedmont and Lombardy to swell the army of the great Bellarion and settle accounts with Master Theodore.”
They kissed her hands, and then her brother’s. “My Lord Marquis!” cried the fire-eating Casella, his gimlet glance appraising the lad. “You’re so well grown I should hardly have known you. We are your servants, my lord, as madonna here can tell you. For years have we laboured for you and suffered for you. But we touch the end of all that now, as do you. Theodore is brought to bay at last. We are hounds to help you pull him down.”
At no season could their coming have been more welcome or uplifting than in this hour of dark depression, when recruits to the cause of the young Marquis were so urgently required. This she told them, announcing their arrival a good omen. Servants were summoned, and despatched for wine, and whilst the newcomers drank the hot spiced beverage provided they learnt the true meaning of her words.
It sobered their exultation. This defection of Bellarion and his powerful company amounting to more than half of the entire army altered their outlook completely.
Barbaresco blew out his great cheeks, frowning darkly.
“You say that Bellarion is the agent of Theodore?” he cried.
“We have proof of it,” she sadly assured him, and told him of the letter. His amazement deepened. “Does it surprise you, then?” she asked. “Surely it should be no news to you!”
“Once it would not have been. For once I thought that I held proof of the same; that was on the night that Spigno died at his hands. Later, before that same night was out, I understood better why he killed Spigno.”
“You understood? Why he killed him?” She was white to the lips. Gian Giacomo was leaning forward across the table, his face eager. She uttered a fretful laugh. “He killed him because he was my friend, mine and my brother’s, the chief of all our friends.”
Barbaresco shook his great head. “He killed him because this Spigno whom we all trusted so completely was a spy of Theodore’s.”
“What?”
Her world reeled about her; her senses battled in a mist. The thick, droning voice of Barbaresco came to deepen her confusion.
“It is all so simple; so very clear. The facts that Spigno was dressed as we found him and in the attic where we had imprisoned Bellarion should in themselves have explained everything. How came he there? Bellarion was all but convicted of being an agent of Theodore’s. But for Spigno we should have dealt with him out of hand. Then at dead of night Spigno went to liberate him, and by that very act convicted himself in Bellarion’s eyes. And for that Bellarion stabbed him. The only flaw is how one agent of Theodore’s should have come to be under such a misapprehension about the other. Saving that the thing would have been clear at once.”
“That I can explain,” said Valeria breathlessly, “if you have sound proof of Spigno’s guilt, if it is not all based on rash assumption.”
“Assumption!” laughed Casella, and he took up the tale. “That night, when we determined upon flight, we first repaired, because of our suspicions, to Spigno’s lodging. We found there a letter addressed superscribed to Theodore, to be delivered in the event of Spigno’s death or disappearance. Within it we found a list of our names and of the part which each of us had had in the plot to kill the Regent, and the terms of that letter made it more than clear that throughout Spigno had been Theodore’s agent for the destruction of the Marquis here.”
“That letter,” said Barbaresco, “was a safeguard the scoundrel had prepared in the event of discovery. The threat of its despatch to Theodore would have been used to compel us to hold our hands. Oh, a subtle villain, your best and most loyal friend Count Spigno, and but for Bellarion …” He spread his hands and laughed.
Then Casella interposed.
“You said, madonna, that you could supply the link that’s missing in our chain.”
But she was not listening. She sat with drooping head, her hands listlessly folded in her lap.
“It was all true. All true!” Her tone seemed the utterance of a broken heart. “And I have mistrusted him, and … Oh, God!” she cried out. “When I think that by now he might have been strangled and with my consent. And now …”
“And now,” cut in her brother almost brutally considering the pain she was already bearing, “you and that swaggering fool Carmagnola have between you driven him out and perhaps set him against us.”
The swaggering fool came in at that moment with inky fingers and disordered hair. The phrase that greeted him brought him to a halt on the threshold, his attitude magnificent.
“What’s this?” he asked with immense dignity.
He was told, by Gian Giacomo, so fiercely and unsparingly that he went red and white by turns as he listened. Then, commanding himself and wrapped in his dignity as in a mantle, he came slowly forward. He even smiled, condescendingly.
“Of all this that you tell I know nothing. It may well be as you say. It is no concern of mine. What concerns me is what has happened here; the discovery that Bellarion was in correspondence with Theodore, and his avowed intention to raise this siege; add to this that he has slipped through our hands, and is now abroad to work your ruin, and consider if you are justified in using hard words to me but for whom your ruin would already have been encompassed.”
His majestic air and his display of magnanimity under their reproach imposed upon all but Valeria.
It was she who answered him:
“You are forgetting that it was only my conviction that he had been Theodore’s agent aforetime which disposed me to believe him Theodore’s agent
