“That is the truth, Bellarion?”
He was a little bewildered to see so much emotion evoked so lightly. It testified, he thought, to a consuming vanity. “The truth,” he said shortly and simply.
She sighed and smiled again. “I am glad, so glad to have you think well of me. It is what I have desired of you, Bellarion. But I have been afraid. Afraid that your Princess of Montferrat might … supply an obstacle.”
“Could any supply an obstacle? I scarcely understand. All that I have and am I owe to my Lord Count. Am I an ingrate that I could be less than your slave, yours and my Lord Count’s?”
She looked at him again, and now she was oddly white, and there was a hard brightness in her eyes which a moment ago had been so soft and melting.
“Oh! You talk of gratitude!” she said.
“Of what else?”
“Of what else, indeed? It is a great virtue, gratitude; and a rare. But you have all the virtues. Have you not, Bellarion?”
He fancied that she sneered.
They passed from the failing sunlight into the shadows of the wood. But the chill that fell between them was due to deeper causes.
IV
The Champion
Facino Cane took his ease at Abbiategrasso in those declining days of 1407 and zestfully devoted himself to the training and education of Bellarion. It was the first rest the great soldier had known in ten years, a rest he would never have taken but for the novel occupation which Bellarion provided him. For Facino was of those who find no peace in utter idleness. He was of a restless, active mind, and being no scholar found no outlet for his energy save in physical directions. Here at Abbiategrasso, away from turbulence, and able for the first time since Gian Galeazzo’s death to live without being perpetually on guard, he confessed himself happier than he could remember to have been.
“If this were life,” he said to Bellarion one evening as they sauntered through the parklands where the red deer grazed, “a man might be content.”
“Content,” said Bellarion, “is stagnation. And man was not made for that. I am coming to perceive it. The peace of the convent is as the peace of the pasture to the ox.”
Facino smiled. “Your education progresses.”
“I have left school,” said Bellarion. “You relish this lull in your activities, as a tired man relishes sleep. But no man would be glad to sleep his life away.”
“Dear philosopher, you should write a book of such sayings for man’s entertainment and information.”
“I think I’ll wait until I am a little older. I may change my mind again.”
It was not destined that the rest by which Facino was setting such store should endure much longer. Rumours of trouble in Milan began to reach them daily, and in the week before Christmas, on a morning when a snowstorm kept them within doors about a great hissing fire in the main hall, Facino wondered whether he should not be returning.
The bare suggestion seemed to anger his countess, who sat brooding in a chair of brown walnut set at one of the corners of the hearth.
“I thought you said we should remain here until spring.” Her tone revealed the petulance that was ever just under the surface of her nature.
“I was not to know,” he answered her, “that in the meantime the duchy would go to pieces.”
“Why should you care? It is not your duchy. Though a man might have made it so by this.”
“To make you a duchess, eh?” Facino smiled. His tone was quiet, but it bore the least strain of bitterness. This was an old argument between them, though Bellarion heard it now for the first time. “There are obstacles supplied by honour. Shall I enumerate them?”
“I know them by heart, your obstacles of honour.” She thrust out a lip that was very full and red, suggesting the strong life within her. “They did not suffice to curb Pandolfo or Buonterzo, and they are at least as wellborn as you.”
“We will leave my birth out of the discussion, madonna.”
“Your reluctance to be reminded of it is natural enough,” she insisted with malice.
He turned away, and moved across to one of the tall mullioned windows, trailing his feet through the pine-needles and slim boughs of evergreens with which the floor was strewn in place of rushes, unprocurable at this season of the year. His thumbs were thrust into the golden girdle that cinctured his trailing houppelande of crimson velvet edged with lynx fur.
He stood a moment in silence, his broad square shoulders to the room, looking out upon the wintry landscape.
“The snow is falling more heavily,” he said at last.
But even upon that her malice fastened. “It will be falling still more heavily in the hills about Bergamo where Pandolfo rules …”
He span round to interrupt her, and his voice rasped with sarcasm.
“And not quite so heavily in the plain about Piacenza, where Ottone Buonterzo is tyrant. If you please, madonna, we will change the subject.”
“I do not please.”
“But I do.” His voice beat upwards to the tones that had reduced whole squadrons to instant obedience.
The lady laughed, and none too tunefully. She drew her rich cloak of ermine more closely about her shapely figure.
“And of course what you please is ever to be the law. We come when you please, and we depart again as soon as you are tired of country solitude.”
He stared at her frowning, a little puzzled. “Why, Bice,” he said slowly, “I never before knew you attached to Abbiategrasso. You have ever made a lament of being brought hither, and you deafened me with your complaints three months ago when we left Milan.”
“Which, nevertheless, did not restrain you from forcing me to come.”
“That does not answer me.”
