“Now, rogue,” the Duke shrilled at him, “let us see you run.” He swung to Squarcia. “Two dogs,” he commanded.
Squarcia detached two hounds from a pack of six which a groom held in leash. Holding each by its collar, he went down on one knee between them, awaiting the Duke’s command for their release.
Bellarion meanwhile had not moved. In fascinated horror he watched these preparations, almost incredulous of their obvious purport. He was not to know that the love of the chase which had led Bernabó Visconti to frame game laws of incredible barbarity, had been transmitted to his grandson in a form that was loathsomely depraved. The deer and the wild boar which had satisfied the hunting instincts of the terrible Bernabó were inadequate for the horrible lusts of Gian Maria; the sport their agonies yielded could not compare in his eyes with the sport to be drawn from the chase of human quarries, to which his bloodhounds were trained by being fed on human flesh.
“You are wasting time,” the Duke admonished him. “In a moment I shall loose the dogs. Be off while you may, and if you are fleet enough, your heels may save your throat.” But he laughed slobberingly over the words, which were merely intended to befool the wretched victim with a false hope that should stimulate him to afford amusement.
Bellarion, white-faced, with such a terror in his soul as he had never known and should never know again in whatever guise he should find death confronting him, turned at last, and broke wildly, instinctively, into a run towards the wood. The Duke’s bestial laughter went after him, before he had covered twenty yards and before the dogs had been loosed. His manhood, his human dignity, rose in revolt, conquering momentarily even his blind terror. He checked and swung round. Not another yard would he run to give sport to that pink-and-silver monster.
The Duke, seeing himself thus in danger of being cheated, swore at him foully.
“He’ll run fast enough, highness, when I loose the dogs,” growled Squarcia.
“Let go, then.”
As Bellarion stood there, the breeze ruffling the hair about his neck, the hounds bounded forward. His senses swam, a physical nausea possessed him. Yet, through swooning reason, he resolved to offer no resistance so that this horror might be the sooner ended. They would leap for his throat, he knew, and so that he let them have their way, it would speedily be done.
He closed his eyes. He groaned. “Jesus!” And then his lips began to shape a prayer, the first that occurred to him, mechanically almost: “In manus tuas, Domine …”
The dogs had reached him. But there was no impact. The eager, furious leaps with which they started had fallen to a sedate and hesitating approach. They sniffed the air, and, at close quarters now, they crouched down, nosing him, their bellies trailing in the grass, their heavy tails thumping the ground, in an attitude of fawning submission.
There were cries of amazement from the ducal party. Amazement filled the soul of Bellarion as he looked down upon those submissive dogs, and he sought to read the riddle of their behaviour, thought, indeed, of divine intervention, such as that by which the saints of God had at times been spared from the inhumanities of men.
And this, too, was the thought of more than one of the spectators. It was the thought of the brutal Squarcia, who, rising from the half-kneeling attitude in which he had remained, now crossed himself mechanically.
“Miracle!” he cried in a voice that was shaken by supernatural fears.
But the Duke, looking on with a scowl on his shallow brow, raged forth at that. The Visconti may never have feared man; but most of them had feared God. Gian Maria was not even of these.
“We’ll test this miracle, by God!” he cried. “Loose me two more dogs, you fool.”
“Highness …” Squarcia was beginning a protest.
“Loose two more dogs, or I’ll perform a miracle on you.”
Squarcia’s fear of the Duke was even greater than his fear of the supernatural. With fumbling, trembling fingers he did as he was bidden. Two more dogs were launched against Bellarion, incited by the Duke himself with his strident voice and a cut of his whip across their haunches.
But they behaved even as the first had behaved, to the increasing awe of the beholders, but no longer to Bellarion’s awe or mystification. His wits recovered from their palsy, and found a physical explanation for the sudden docility of those ferocious beasts. Right or wrong, his conclusions satisfied him, and it was without dread that he heard the Duke raging anew. So long as they sent only dogs against him, he had no cause for fear.
“Loose Messalina,” the Duke was screaming in a frenzy now that thickened his articulation and brought froth and bubbles to his purple lips.
Squarcia was protesting, as were, more moderately, some of the members of his retinue. The handsome young man with the falcon opined that here might be witchcraft, and admonished his highness to use caution.
“Loose Messalina!” his highness repeated, more furiously insistent.
“On your highness’s head the consequences!” cried Squarcia, as he released that ferocious bitch, the fiercest of all the pack.
But whilst she came loping towards him, Bellarion, grown audacious in his continued immunity, was patting the heads and flanks of the dogs already about him and speaking to them coaxingly, in response to which the Duke beheld them leaping and barking in friendliness about him. When presently the terrible Messalina was seen to behave in the same fashion, the excitement in the Duke’s following shed its last vestige of restraint.
