She swept forward to the table, and came straight to business.
“And now, sir, your message?”
His fingers stood arrested on the buckle, and his solemn dark eyes opened wide as they searched her pale face.
“Message?” quoth he slowly.
“Message, yes.” Her tone betrayed the least impatience. “What has happened? What has become of Ser Giuffredo? Why has he not been near me this fortnight? What did the Lord Barbaresco bid you tell me? Come, come, sir. You need not hesitate. Surely you know that I am the Princess Valeria of Montferrat?”
All that he understood of this was that he stood in a princely presence, before the august sister of the sovereign Marquis of Montferrat. Had he been reared in the world he might have been awestricken by the circumstances. But he knew princes and princesses only from books written by chroniclers and historians, who treat them familiarly enough. If anything about her commanded his respect, it was her slim grace and her rather elusive beauty, a beauty that is not merely of colour and of features, but of the soul and mind alive in these.
His hands fell limply away from the buckle, which he had made fast at length. His lively countenance looked almost foolish as dimly seen in the yellow light of the lantern.
“Madonna, I do not understand. I am no messenger. I …”
“You are no messenger?” Her tawny head was thrust forward, her dark eyes glowed. “Were you not sent to me? Answer, man! Were you not sent?”
“Not other than by an inscrutable Providence, which may desire to preserve me for better things than a rope.”
The whimsical note of the answer may have checked her stirring anger. There was a long pause in which she pondered him with eyes that were become unfathomable. Mechanically she loosed the long black cloak that covered her low-cut sheathing gown of sapphire blue.
“Why, then, did you come? Was it to spy … No, no. You are not that. A spy would have gone differently to work. What are you, then?”
“Just a poor scholar on his travels, studying life at first hand and a trifle more rapidly than he can digest it. As for how I came into your garden, let me tell you.”
And he told her with admirable succinctness the sorry tale of that day’s events. It drove the last vestige of wrath from her face, and drew the ghost of a smile to the corners of a mouth that could be as tender as imperious. Observing it, he realised that whilst she had given him sanctuary under a misapprehension, yet she was not likely to visit her obvious disappointment too harshly upon him.
“And I thought …” She broke off and trilled a little laugh, between mirth and bitterness. “It was a lucky chance for you, master fugitive.” She considered him again, and it may be that his stalwart young male beauty had a hand unconsciously in shaping her resolves concerning him. “What am I to do with you?” she asked him.
He answered simply and directly, speaking not as a poor nameless scholar to a highborn princess, but as equal to equal, as a young man to a young woman.
“If you are what your face tells me, madonna, you will let me profit by an error that entails no less for yourself beyond that of these garments, which, if you wish it …”
She waved the proposal aside before it was uttered. “Pooh, the garments. What are they?” She frowned thoughtfully. “But I named names to you.”
“Did you? I have forgotten them.” And in answer to the hard incredulity of her stare, he explained himself. “A good memory, madonna, lies as much in an ability to forget as in a capacity to remember. And I have an excellent memory. By the time I shall have stepped out of this garden I shall have no recollection that I was ever in it.”
Slowly she spoke after a pause. “If I were sure that I can trust you …” She left it there.
Bellarion smiled. “Unless you are certain that you can, you had better call the guard. But then, how could you be sure that in that case I should not recall the names you named, which are now forgotten?”
“Ah! You threaten!”
The sharp tone, the catch in her breath, the sudden movement of her hand to her breast showed him that his inference was right.
This lady was engaged in secret practices. And the inference itself displayed the swift activity of his wits; just as his answer displayed them.
“Nay, lady. I show you only that trust me you must, since if you mistrust me you can no more order my arrest than you can set me free.”
“My faith, sir, you are shrewd, for one who’s convent-bred.”
“There’s a deal of shrewdness, lady, to be learned in convents.” And then, whether the beauty and charm of her so wrought upon him as to breed in him the desire to serve her, or whether he merely offered a bargain, a return for value received and to be received, it is probable that he did not know himself. But he made his proposal. “If you would trust me, madonna, you might even use me, and so repay yourself.”
“Use you?”
“As a messenger. In the place of him whom you expected. That is, if you have messages to send, as I think you should have.”
“You think it?”
“From what you have said.”
“I said so little.” She was clearly suspicious.
“But I inferred so much. Too much, perhaps. Let me expose my reasoning.” The truth is he was a little vain of it. “You expected a messenger from one Lord Barbaresco. You left the garden-gate ajar to facilitate his entrance when he came, and you were on the watch for him, and alone. Your ladies, one of whom at least is in your confidence, were beguiling the gentlemen and keeping them in
