“Devil take you, Antonio!” He caught up a hawk-lure from the table, and set himself to strip it as he talked, scattering the feathers about the room. “Curb him, you say? Curb this damned thief of Lodi? How am I to curb him? The French lances are gone back to Boucicault. The parsimonious fathers of this miserly city were in haste to dismiss them. They think of nothing but ducats, may their souls perish! They think more of ducats than of their duke.” Inconsequently, peevishly, he ranted on, reducing the hawk-lure to rags the while, and showing the crafty della Torre his opportunity.
“Vignate,” he said at last, when the Duke ceased, “can be in no great strength when all is reckoned. Facino’s own condotta should fully suffice to whip him out of Alessandria and back to Lodi.”
Gian Maria moved restlessly about the room.
“What if it should not? What if Facino should be broken by Vignate? What then? Vignate will be at the gates of Milan.”
“He might be if we could not prepare for the eventuality.”
With a sudden curious eagerness Gian Maria glared at his mentor. “Can we? In God’s name, can we? If we could …” He checked. But the sudden glow of hate and evil hope in his prominent pale eyes showed how he was rising to the bait.
Della Torre judged the moment opportune. “We can,” he answered firmly.
“How, man? How?”
“In alliance with Malatesta your highness would be strong enough to defy all comers.”
“Malatesta!” The Duke leapt as if stung. But instantly he curbed himself. The loose embryonic features tightened, reflecting the concentration of the embryonic wicked mind within. “Malatesta, eh?” His tone was musing. He let himself drop once more into his broad armchair, and sat there, cross-legged, pondering.
Della Torre moved softly to his side, and lowered his voice to an impressive note.
“Indeed, your highness should consider whether you will not in any event bring in Malatesta so soon as Facino has departed on this errand.”
The handsome, profligate Lonate, lounging, a listener by the window, cleared up all ambiguity: “And so make sure that this upstart does not return to trouble you again.”
Gian Maria’s head sank a little between his shoulders. Here was his chance to rid himself for all time of the tyrannical tutelage of that condottiero, made strong by popular support.
“You speak as if sure that Malatesta will come.”
Della Torre put his cards on the table at last. “I am. I have his word that he will accept a proposal of alliance from your highness.”
“You have his word!” The ever-ready suspicions of a weak mind were stirring.
“I took his feeling against the hour when your potency might need a friend.”
“And the price?”
Della Torre spread his hands. “Malatesta has ambitions for his daughter. If she were Duchess of Milan …”
“Is that a condition?” The Duke’s voice was sharp.
“A contingency only,” della Torre untruthfully assured him. “Yet if realised the alliance would be consolidated. It would become a family affair.”
“Give me air! Let me think.” He rose, thrusting della Torre away by a sweep of his thin arm.
Ungainly in his gaudy red and white, shuffling his feet as he went, he crossed to the window where Lonate made way for him. There he stood a moment looking out, whilst between Lonate and della Torre a look of intelligence was flashed.
Suddenly the boy swung round again, and his grotesque countenance was flushed. “By God and His Saints! What thought does it ask?” He laughed, slobberingly, at the picture in his mind of a Facino Cane ruined beyond redemption. Nor could he perceive, poor fool, that he would be but exchanging one yoke for another, probably heavier.
Still laughing, he dismissed della Torre and Lonate, and sent for Facino. When the condottiero came, he was given Filippo Maria’s letter, which he spelled out with difficulty, being little more of a scholar than the Duke.
“It is grave,” he said when he had reached the end.
“You mean that Vignate is to be feared?”
“Not so long as he is alone. But how long will he so continue? What if he should be joined by Estorre Visconti and the other malcontents? Singly they matter nothing. United they become formidable. And this bold hostility of Vignate’s may be the signal for a league.”
“What then?”
“Smash Vignate and drive him out of Alessandria before it becomes a rallying-ground for your enemies.”
“About it, then,” rasped the Duke. “You have the means.”
“With the Burgundians enlisted after Travo, my condotta stands at two thousand three hundred men. If the civic militia is added …”
“It is required for the city’s defence against Estorre and the other roving insurgents.”
Facino did not argue the matter.
“I’ll do without it, then.”
He set out next day at early morning, and by nightfall, the half of that march to Alessandria accomplished, he brought his army, wearied and exhausted by the June heat, to rest under the red walls of Pavia.
To proceed straight against the very place which Vignate had seized and held was a direct course of action in conflict with ideas which Bellarion did not hesitate to lay before the war-experienced officers composing Facino’s council. He prefaced their exposition by laying down the principle, a little didactically, that the surest way to defeat an opponent is to assault him at the weakest point. So much Facino and his officers would have conceded on the battleground itself. But Bellarion’s principle involved a wider range, including the enemy’s position before ever battle was joined so as to ensure that the battleground itself should be the enemy’s weakest point. The course he now urged entailed an adoption of the strategy employed by the Athenians against the Thebans in the Peloponnesian war, a strategy which Bellarion so much admired and was so often to apply.
In its application now, instead of attacking Alessandria behind whose walls the enemy lay in strength, he would have invaded Vignate’s own temporarily unguarded Tyranny of Lodi.
Facino laughed a little at his self-sufficiency, and, emboldened by that, Carmagnola took it upon himself to put
