“One of your knights, my lord, broke my shoulder in the last charge.”
“I would he had broken your neck.”
“That was the intention.” Bellarion’s pale lips smiled. “But I am known as Bellarion the Fortunate.”
“Just now my lord had another name for you,” said Valeria, and Bellarion, observing the set of her lips and the scorn in her glance as it flickered over Theodore, marvelled at the power of hate in one naturally so gracious. He had had a taste of it, himself, he remembered, and perhaps she was but passing on to Theodore what rightly had belonged to him throughout. “He is a rash man,” she continued, “who will not trouble to conciliate the arbiter of his fate. My Lord Theodore has lost his guile, I think, together with the rest.”
“Aye,” said Bellarion, “we have stripped him of all save his life. Even his mask of benignity is gone.”
“You are noble!” said Theodore. “You gird at a captive! Am I to remain here to be mocked?”
“Not for me, faith,” Bellarion answered him. “I have never contemplated you with any pleasure. Take him away, Ugolino. Place him securely under guard. He shall have judgment tomorrow.”
“Dog!” said Theodore with venom, as he drew himself up to depart.
“That’s my device, as yours is the stag. Appropriate, all things considered. I had you in my mind when I adopted it.”
“I am punished for my weakness,” said Theodore. “I should have left Justice to wring your neck when you were its prisoner here in Casale.”
“I’ll repay the debt,” Bellarion answered him. “Your own neck shall remain unwrung so that you withdraw to your principality of Genoa and abide there. More of that tomorrow.”
Peremptorily he waved him away and Ugolino hustled him out. As the door closed again, Bellarion, relaxing the reins of his will, sank forward in a swoon.
XV
The Last Fight
When he recovered, he was lying on his sound side on a couch under the window, across which the curtains of painted and gilded leather had been drawn.
An elderly, bearded man in black was observing him, and someone whom he could not see was bathing his brow with a cool aromatic liquid. As he fetched a sigh that filled his lungs and quickened his senses into full consciousness, the man smiled.
“There! It will be well with him now. But he should be put to bed.”
“It shall be done,” said the woman who was bathing his brow, and her voice, soft and subdued, was the voice of the Princess Valeria. “His servants will be below by now. Send them to me as you go.”
The man bowed and went out. Slowly Bellarion turned his head, and looked up in wonder at the Princess with whom he was now alone. Her eyes, more liquid than their wont, smiled wistfully down upon him.
“Madonna!” he exclaimed. “Do you serve me as a handmaid? That is not …”
“You are thinking it an insufficient return for your service to me. But you must give me time, sir, this is only a beginning.”
“I am not thinking that at all.”
“Then you are not thinking as you should. You are weak. Your wits work slowly. Else you might remember that for five years, in which you have been my loyal, noble, unswerving friend, I, immured in my stupidity, have been your enemy.”
“Ah!” he smiled. “I knew I should convince you in the end. Such knowledge gives us patience. A man may contain his soul for anything that is assured. It is the doubtful only that makes him fret and fume.”
“And you never doubted?” she asked him, wondering.
“I am too sure of myself,” he answered.
“And God knows you have cause to be, more cause than any man of whom ever I heard tell. Do you know, Lord Prince, that in these five years there is no evil I have not believed of you? I even deemed you a coward, on the word of that vain boaster Carmagnola.”
“He was none so wrong, by his own lights. I am not a fighter of his pattern. I have ever been careful of myself.”
“Your condition now proves that.”
“Oh, this, today … That was different. Too much depended on the issue. It was the last throw. I had to take a hand, much though I dislike a rough-and-tumble. So that we won through, it would not much have mattered if the vamplate of that fellow’s lance had brought up against my throat. There are no more fights for me, so what matter if I left my life in the last one?”
“The last one, Lord Prince!”
“And that is not my title any more. I am a prince no longer. I leave the rank behind with all the other vanities of the world.”
“You leave it behind?” She found him obscure.
“When I go back to Cigliano, which will be as soon as I can move.”
“What do you go to do at Cigliano?”
“What? Why, what the other brethren do. Pax multa in cella. The old abbot was right. There is yonder a peace for which I am craving now that my one task here is safely ended. In the world there is nothing for me.”
“Nothing!” She was amazed. “And in five years you have won so much!”
“Nothing that I covet,” he answered gently. “It is all vanity, all madness, greed, and bloodlust. I was not made for worldliness, and but for you I should never have known it. Now I have done.”
“And your dominions, Gavi and Valsassina?”
“I’ll bestow them upon you, madonna, if you will deign to accept a parting gift from these hands.”
There was a long pause. She had drawn back a little. He could not see her face. “You have the fever, I think,” she said presently in an odd voice. “It is your hurt.”
He sighed. “Aye, you would think so. It is difficult for one reared in the world to understand that a man’s eyes should remain undazzled by its glitter. Yet, believe me,
