There was little need for his question. Her face supplied the answer.
“Too fluently, I think. Too fluently for one who is no more than you represent yourself.”
“It is, madonna, that you are not accustomed to the exercise of pure reason. It is rare enough.”
“Pure reason!” Her scorn where his fatuity had expected wonder was like a searing iron. “And do you know, sir, what pure reason tells me?”
“I can believe anything, madonna,” he said, alluding to the tone she used with him.
“That you were sent to set a trap for me.”
He perceived exactly by what steps she had come to that conclusion. He smiled reassuringly, and shook his moist head.
“The reasoning is not pure enough. If I had been so sent, should I have been pursued and hunted? And should I not have come prepared with some trivial message, to assure you that I am the messenger you were so very ready to believe me?”
She was convinced. But still she hesitated.
“But why, concluding so much and so accurately, should you offer to serve me?”
“Say from gratitude to one who has saved perhaps my life.”
“But I did so under a misapprehension. That should compel no gratitude.”
“I like to think, madonna, that you would have shown me the same charity even if there had been no misapprehension. I am the more grateful for what you have done because I choose to believe that in any case you would have done it. Then there is this handsome suit to be paid for, and, lastly and chiefly, the desire to serve a lady in need of service, which I believe is not an altogether strange desire in a man of sensibility. It has happened aforetime.”
That was as near as he would go to the confession that she had beglamoured him. Since it was a state of mind that did not rest upon pure reason, it is one to which he would have been reluctant to confess even to himself.
She pondered him, and it seemed to him that her searching glance laid bare all that he was and all that he was likely to be.
“These are slight and unworldly reasons,” she said at last.
“I am possibly an unworldly fellow.”
“You must be, indeed, to propose knight-errantry.”
But her need, as he had already surmised and as he was later fully to understand, was great and urgent. It may almost have seemed to her, indeed, as if Providence had brought her this young man, not only for his own salvation, but for hers.
“The service may entail risk,” she warned him, “and a risk far greater than any you have run tonight.”
“Risk sweetens enterprise,” he answered, “and wit can conquer it.”
Her smile broadened, almost she laughed. “You have a high confidence in your wit, sir.”
“Whereas, you would say, the experience of the last four and twenty hours should make me humble. Its lesson, believe me, has not been lost. I am not again to be misled by appearances.”
“Well, here’s to test you, then.” And she gave him her message, which was after all a very cautious one, the betrayal of which could hardly harm her. He was to seek the Lord Barbaresco, of whom she told him nothing beyond the fact that the gentleman dwelt in a house behind the cathedral, which any townsman would point out to him. He was to inquire after his health, about which, he was to add, the absence of news was making her uneasy. As a credential to the Lord Barbaresco she gave him the broken half of a gold ducat.
“Tomorrow evening,” she concluded, “you will find the garden-gate ajar again at about the same hour, and I shall be waiting.”
VI
The Winds of Fate
You behold Messer Bellarion treading the giddy slope of high and mysterious adventure, fortuitously launched upon a course whose end he was very far from discerning, but which most certainly was not the University of Pavia, the pursuit of Greek studies, and the recovery of an unblemished faith.
Lorenzaccio da Trino has more to answer for than the acts of brigandage for which the law pursued him.
In the gloom of that September night, after the moon had set, Bellarion, in raiment which already might be taken to symbolise the altered aim and purpose of his life, whereof himself, poor straw upon the winds of Fate, he was as yet unconscious, slipped from a gateway that was no longer guarded and directed his steps towards the heart of the town.
Coming in the Cathedral Square upon a company of the watch, going the rounds with pikes and lanterns, he staggered a little in his gait and broke raucously into song to give himself the air of a belated, carefree reveller. Knowing no bawdy worldly songs proper to a man of his apparent circumstances and condition, he broke into a Gregorian chant, which he rendered in anything but the unisonous manner proper to that form of plainsong. The watch deeming him, as he computed that they would, an impudent parodist, warned him against disturbing the peace of the night, and asked who he was, whence he came, and whither he went.
Unprepared for these questions, he rose magnificently and rather incoherently to the occasion.
He knew that there was a house of Augustinian fathers in Casale. And boldly he stated that he had been supping there. Thus launched, his invention soared. The Prior’s brother was married to his sister, and he had borne messages to the Prior from that same brother who dwelt in Cigliano, and was, like himself, a
