In the Duke’s own mind some fear began to stir. Whether of God or devil, only supernatural intervention could explain this portent.
He spurred forward, his followers moving with him, and Bellarion, as he looked upon the awestricken countenances of that ducal company, was moved to laughter. Reaction from his palsy of terror had come in a mental exaltation, like the glow that follows upon immersion in cold water. He was contemptuous of these fellows, and particularly of Squarcia and his grooms who, whilst presumably learned in the ways of dogs, were yet incapable of any surmise by which this miracle might be naturally explained. Mockery crept into that laugh of his, a laugh that brought the scowl still lower upon the countenance of the Duke.
“What spells do you weave, rascal? By what artifice do you do this?”
“Spells?” Bellarion stood boldly before him. He chose to be mysterious, to feed their superstition. He answered with a proverb that made play upon the name he had assumed. “Did I not tell you that I am Cane? Dog will not eat dog. That is all the magic you have here.”
“An evasion,” said Lonate, like one who thinks aloud.
The Duke flashed him a sidelong glance of irritation. “Do I need to be told?” Then to Bellarion: “This is a trick, rogue. God’s Blood! I am not to be fooled. What have you done to my dogs?”
“Deserved their love,” said Bellarion, waving a hand to the great beasts that still gambolled about him.
“Aye, aye, but how?”
“How? Does anyone know how love is deserved of man or beast? Loose the rest of your pack. There’s not a dog in it will do more than lick my hands. Dogs,” he added, again with a hint of mysteries, “have perceptions oft denied to men.”
“Perceptions, eh? But what do they perceive?”
And Bellarion yielding to his singular exaltation laughed again as he answered: “Ah! Who shall say?”
The Duke empurpled. “Do you mock me, filth?”
Lonate, who was afraid of wizardry, laid a hand upon his arm. But the Duke shook off that admonitory grasp. “You shall yield me your secret. You shall so, by the Host!” He turned to the gaping Squarcia. “Call off the dogs, and make the knave fast. Fetch him along.”
On that the Duke rode off with his gentlemen, leaving the grooms to carry out his orders. They stood off reluctantly, despite Squarcia’s commands, so that in the end for all his repugnance the kennel-master was constrained, himself, to take the task in hand. He whistled the dogs to heel, and left one of his knaves to leash them again. Then he approached Bellarion almost timidly.
“You heard the orders of his highness,” he said in the resigned voice of one who does a thing because he must.
Bellarion proffered his wrists in silence. The Duke and his following had almost reached the wood, and were out of earshot.
“It is the Duke who does this,” that black-browed scoundrel excused himself. “I am but the instrument of the Duke.” And cringing a little he proceeded to do the pinioning, but lightly so that the thong should not hurt the prisoner, a tenderness exercised probably for the first time in his career as the villainous servant of a villainous master. His hands trembled at the task, which again was a thing that had never happened yet. The truth is that Squarcia was inspired by another fear as great as his dread of the supernatural. On both counts he desired to stand well with this young man.
He cast a glance over his shoulder to satisfy himself that the grooms were out of earshot.
“Be sure,” he muttered in his dense black beard, “that his excellency the Count of Biandrate shall know of your presence within an hour of our arrival in Milan.”
II
Facino Cane
On the ground that they had far to travel, but in reality to spare this unwelcome prisoner, Bellarion was mounted on the crupper of Squarcia’s great horse, his lightly pinioned wrists permitting him to hang on by the kennel-master’s belt.
Thus he made his first entrance into the fair city of Milan as dusk was descending. Some impression of the size and strength of it Bellarion gathered when, a couple of miles away, they made a momentary halt on a slight eminence in the plain. And though instruction had prepared him for an imposing spectacle, it had not prepared for what he actually beheld. He gazed in wonder on the great spread of those massive red walls reflected in a broad navigable moat, which was a continuation of the Ticinello, and, soaring above these, the spires of a half-dozen churches, among which he was able from what he had read to identify the slender belfry of Sant’ Eustorgio and the octagonal brick and marble tower, surmounted by its headless gilded angel, belonging to the church of Saint Gotthard, built in honour of the sainted protector of the gouty by the gout-ridden Azzo Visconti a hundred years ago.
They entered the city by the Porta Nuova, a vast gateway, some of whose stonework went back to Roman times, having survived Barbarossa’s vindictive demolition nearly three centuries ago. Over the drawbridge and through the great archway they came upon a guardhouse that was in itself a fortress, before whose portals lounged a group of brawny-bearded mercenaries, who talked loudly amongst themselves in the guttural German of the Cantons. Then along Borgo Nuovo, a long street in which palace stood shoulder to shoulder with hovel, and which, though really narrow by comparison with other streets of Milan, appeared generously broad to Bellarion. The people moving in this thoroughfare were as oddly assorted as the dwellings that flanked it. Sedately well-nourished, opulent men of the merchant class, glittering nobles attended by armed lackeys with blazons on their breasts, some mounted, but more on foot, were mingled
