“Facino’s adoptive son should soon be standing in nearer relationship to him,” he said. “He will be discovering presently that his wife has become by Messer Bellarion’s wizardry his adoptive daughter.”
So pleased was his highness with that poor conceit that he repeated it upon several occasions. It became a theme upon which his courtiers played innumerable variations. Yet, as commonly happens, none of these reached the ears of Facino. If any had reached them, it would have been bad only for him who uttered it. For Facino’s attachment to his quite unworthy lady amounted to worship. His trust in her was unassailable. Judging the honesty of others after his own, he took it for granted that Beatrice’s attitude towards his adoptive son was as motherly as became the wife of an adoptive father.
This, indeed, was his assumption even when the Countess supplied what any other man must have accounted grounds for suspicion.
The occasion came on an evening of early April. Bellarion had received a message by a groom to wait upon Facino. He repaired to the Count’s apartments, to find him not yet returned, whereupon with a manuscript of Alighieri’s Comedy to keep him company he went to wait in the loggia, overlooking the inner quadrangle of the Broletto, which was laid out as a garden, very green in those first days of April.
Thither, a little to his chagrin, for the austere music of Dante’s Tuscan lines was engrossing him, came the Countess, sheathed in a gown of white samite, with great sapphires glowing against the glossy black of her hair to match the dark mysterious blue of her languid eyes.
She came alone, and brought with her a little lute, an instrument which she played with some expertness. And she was gifted, too, in the making of little songs, which of late had been excessively concerned with unrequited love, despair, and death.
The Count, she informed Bellarion, had gone to the Castle, by which she meant, of course, the great fortress of Porta Giovia built and commonly inhabited by the late Duke. But he would be returning soon. And meanwhile, to beguile the tedium of his waiting, she would sing to him.
Singing to him Facino found her, and he was not to guess with what reluctance Bellarion had suffered her voice to substitute the voice of Dante Alighieri. Nor, in any case, was he at all concerned with that.
He came abruptly into the room from which the loggia opened, his manner a little pressed and feverish. And the suddenness of his entrance, acting upon a conscience not altogether at rest, cropped her song in mid-flight. The eyes she raised to his flushed and frowning face were startled and uneasy. Bellarion, who sat dreaming, holding the vellum-bound manuscript which was closed upon his forefinger, sprang up, with something in his manner of that confusion usually discernible in one suddenly recalled from dreams to his surroundings.
Facino strode out to the loggia, and there loosed his news at once.
“Buonterzo is moving. He left Parma at dawn yesterday, and is advancing towards Piacenza with an army fully four thousand strong.”
“Four thousand!” cried Bellarion. “Then he is in greater strength than you even now.”
“Thanks to the French contingent and the communal militia, the odds do not perturb me. Buonterzo is welcome to the advantage. He’ll need a greater when we meet. That will be in two days’ time, in three at latest. For we march at midnight. All is in readiness. The men are resting between this and then. You had best do the same, Bellarion.”
Thus, with a complete change from his usual good-tempered, easygoing manner, already the commander rapping out his orders without waste of words, Facino delivered himself.
But now his Countess, who had risen when he announced the imminence of action, expressed her concern.
“Bellarion?” she cried. Her face was white to the lips, her rounded bosom heaving under its close-fitting sheath; there was dread in her eyes. “Bellarion goes with you?”
Facino looked at her, and the lines between his brows grew deeper. It wounded him sharply that in this hour concern for another should so completely override concern for himself. Beyond that, however, his resentment did not go. He could think no evil where his Bice was concerned, and, indeed, Bellarion’s eager interposition would have supplied the antidote had it been necessary.
“Why, madonna, you would not have me left behind! You would not have me miss such an occasion!” His cheeks were aglow; his eyes sparkled.
Facino laughed. “You hear the lad? Would you be so cruel as to deny him?”
She recaptured betimes the wits which surprise had scattered, and prudently dissembled her dismay. On a more temperate note, from which all passion was excluded, she replied:
“He’s such a child to be going to the wars!”
“A child! Pooh! Who would become master should begin early. At his age I was leader of a troop.”
He laughed again. But he was not to laugh later, when he recalled this trivial incident.
VII
Manoeuvres
Shortly before midnight they rode out from the Palace of the old Broletto: Facino, attended by Bellarion for his esquire, a page bestriding a mule that was laden with his armour, and a half-dozen men-at-arms.
Facino was silent and pensive. His lady’s farewells had lacked the tenderness he craved, and the Duke whose battles he went to fight had not even been present to speed him. He had left the palace to go forth upon this campaign, slinking away like a discharged lackey. The Duke, he had been told, was absent, and for all that he was well aware of the Duke’s detestable pernoctations, he preferred to believe that this was merely another expression of that ill will which, despite all that he had done and all that it lay in his power to do, the Duke never failed to display towards him.
But as the little company rode in the bright moonlight down the borgo of Porta Giovia,
