The Lady Dionara shook her head. “If it was your brother’s ruin the Marquis Theodore plotted, this surely frustrates his own ends. If it were as you say, Messer Bellarion would have spoken out boldly in court, and told his tale. Why, being what you suppose him, should he keep silent, when by speaking he could best serve the Regent’s purposes?”
“I do not know,” the Princess confessed, “nor does any ever know the Regent’s purposes. He works quietly, craftily, slowly, and he will never strike until he is sure that the blow must be final. This rogue’s conduct was an obedience to the Regent’s commands. Did you not see the looks that passed between them? Did you not see that when Messer Aliprandi intervened it was after a whisper from my uncle?”
“But if this man were not what he says he is, what can the intervention avail in the end?”
Madonna Valeria was wholly scornful now. “He may be what he claims and yet at the same time what I know him to be. Why not? Where is the contradiction? Yet I dare to prophesy. This Messer Bellarion will not again be brought to trial. The means will be afforded him of breaking prison.”
XIV
Evasion
Bellarion was returned to the common gaol, which was perched high upon the city’s red wall, to herd once more with the vile pariahs there incarcerated. But not for long. Within an hour came an order for his removal to a diminutive stone chamber whose barred, unglazed window looked out upon a fertile green plain through which the broad, silvery ribbon of the river Po coiled its way towards Lombardy.
Thither a little later in the afternoon came the Marquis Theodore to visit him, in quest of the true facts. Bellarion lied to him as fluently as he had lied earlier to the Podestà. But no longer with the same falsehoods.
His tale now went very near the truth. He had come under the suspicion of the conspirators last night as a result of his visit to court. Explanations had been demanded, and he had afforded them, as he exactly stated. But conscience making cowards of the conspirators, they bound him and locked him in a room until from Cigliano they should have confirmation of his tale. Count Spigno, fearing that his life might be in danger, came in the night to set him free.
“Which leads me to suspect,” said Bellarion, “that Count Spigno, too, was an agent of your potency’s. No matter. I keep to the events.”
The conspirators, he continued, were more watchful than Spigno suspected. They came upon the twain just as Bellarion’s bonds had been cut, and Spigno had, fortunately, thrust a dagger into his hand. They fell upon Spigno, and one of them—the confusion at the moment did not permit him to say which—stabbed the unfortunate count. Bellarion would have shared his fate but that he hacked right and left with fist and dagger, wounding Barbaresco and certainly one other, possibly two others. Thus he broke through them, flung down the stairs, locked himself in the room on the mezzanine, and climbed out of the window into the arms of the watch.
“If your highness had not desired me to go to court, this would not have happened. But at least the conspirators are fled and the conspiracy is stifled in panic. Your highness is now safe.”
“Safe!” His highness laughed hard and cruelly. There was now in his mien none of that benignity which Montferrat was wont to admire in it. The pale blue eyes were hard as steel, a furrow at the base of his aquiline nose rendered sinister and predatory the whole expression of his countenance.
“Your blundering has destroyed the evidence by which I might have made myself safe.”
“My blundering! Here’s justice! Besides, if I were to give the evidence I withheld from the Podestà, if I were to give a true account of what happened at Barbaresco’s …”
“If you did that!” The Regent interrupted angrily. “How would it look, do you suppose? A vagrant rogue, the associate of a bandit was closeted yesterday with me, and so far received my countenance that he was bidden to court. It would disclose a plot, indeed. It would be said that I plotted to fashion evidence against my nephew. Do you think that I have no enemies here in Casale and elsewhere in Montferrat besides Barbaresco and his plotters? If Spigno had lived, it would have been different, or even if we had Barbaresco and the others and could now wring the truth from them under torment. But Spigno is dead and the others gone.”
Bellarion deemed him bewildered by his own excessive subtleties.
“Does Barbaresco’s flight give no colour to my tale?” he asked quietly.
“Only until some other tale is told, as told it would be. Then what of the word of a rascal like yourself? And what of me who depend upon the word of so pitiful a knave?”
“Your highness starts at shadows.” Bellarion was almost contemptuous. “In the end it may be necessary to tell my tale if I am to save my neck.”
The Regent’s look and tone made Bellarion feel cold.
“Your neck? Why, what does your neck matter?”
“Something to me, however little to your highness.”
The Regent sneered, and the hard eyes grew harder still. “You become inconvenient, my friend.”
Bellarion perceived it. The Regent feared lest investigation should reveal that he had actually fostered the conspiracy for purposes of his own, using first Count Spigno and then Bellarion as his agents.
“Aye, you become inconvenient,” he repeated. “Duke Gian Galeazzo would never have boggled over dealing with you. He would have wrung this precious neck by which you lay such store. Do you thank God that I am not Gian Galeazzo.”
He took the cloak from his left arm. From within its folds he let fall at Bellarion’s feet a coil of rope; from his breast he drew two stout files which he
