A certain excitement arose in me at sight of him, despite my confidence that he must be returning empty-handed.
Ramiro rose, pushed back his chair and advanced towards the new-comer.
"Well?" he demanded. "What news?"
"Excellency, the girl is here."
That answer seemed to turn me into stone, so great was the shock of this sudden shattering of the confidence that had sustained me.
"My search in the country failing," pursued the captain, as he came forward, "I made bold to exceed your orders by pushing my inquiries as far as the village of Cattolica. There I found her after some little labour."
Surely I dreamt. Surely, I told myself, this was not possible. There was some mistake. Lucagnolo had drought some wench whom he believed to be Madonna Paola.
But even as I was a.s.suring myself of this, the door opened again, and between two men-at-arms, white as death, her garments stained with mud and all but reduced to rags, and her eyes wild with a great fear, came my beloved Paola.
With a sound that was as a grunt of satisfaction, Ramiro strode forward to meet her. But her eyes travelled past him and rested upon me, standing there between the leather-clad executioners with the cords of the torture pinioning my wrists, and I saw the anguish deepen in their blue depths.
CHAPTER XIX. DOOMED
Across the length of that hall our eyes met--hers and mine--and held each other"s glances. To me the room and all within it formed an indistinct and misty picture, from out of which there clearly gleamed my Paola"s sweet, white face.
All at the table had risen with Ramiro, and now, copying their leader, they bared their heads in outward token of such respect as certainly would have been felt by any men less abandoned than were they before so much saintly beauty and distress.
Lucagnolo had stepped aside, and Ramiro was now bowing low and ceremoniously before Madonna. His face I could not see, since his back was towards me, but his tones, as they floated across the hall to where I stood, came laden with subservience.
"Madonna, I give praise and thanks to Heaven for this," said he. "I was afflicted by the gravest misgivings for your safety, and I am more than thankful to behold you safe and sound."
There was a hypocritical flavour of courtliness about his words, and a mincing of his tones that suggested the efforts of a bull-calf to imitate the warbling of a throstle.
Madonna paid him no heed; indeed, she appeared not to have heard him, for her eyes continued to look past him and at me. At last her lips parted, and although she scarcely seemed to raise her voice above a whisper, the word uttered reached my ears across the stillness of the great room, and the word was "Lazzaro!"
At mention of my name, and at the tone in which it was uttered--a tone that betrayed same measure of what was in her heart--Ramiro wheeled sharply in my direction, his brows wrinkling. A certain craftiness he had, for all that I ever accounted him the dullest-witted clod that ever rose to his degree of honour. He must have realised how expedient it was that in all he did he should present himself to Madonna in a favourite light.
"Release him," he bade the executioners that held me, and in an instant I was set free. The order given, he turned again to Madonna.
"You have been torturing him," she cried, and her words were hard and fierce, her eyes blazing. "You shall repent it, Ser Ramiro. The Lord Cesare Borgia shall hear of it."
Her anger betrayed her more and more, and however hidden it may have been to her, to me it was exceeding clear that she was encompa.s.sing my destruction. Ramiro laughed easily.
"Madonna, you are at fault. We have not been torturing him, though I confess that we were on the point of putting him to the question. But your timely arrival has saved his limbs, for the question we were asking him concerned your whereabouts!"
I would have shouted to her to be wary how she answered him, for some premonition how he was about to trick her entered my mind. But realising the futility of such a course, I held my peace and waited agonisedly.
"You had tortured him in vain then," she answered scornfully. "For Lazzaro Biancomonte would never have betrayed me. Nor could he have betrayed me if he would, for after your men had searched the hut in which I was hidden, I walked to Cattolica thinking foolishly that I should be safer there."
Lackaday! She had told him the very thing he had sought to know. Yet to make doubly sure he pursued the scent a little farther.
"Indeed it seems to me that had I tortured him I had given him no more than he deserved for having abandoned you in that hut. Madonna, I tremble to think of the harm that might have come to you through that knave"s desertion." And he scowled across at me, much as the Pharisee might have scowled upon the publican.
"He is no knave," she answered, and I could have groaned to hear her working my undoing, though not by so much as a sign might I inspire her with caution, for that sign must have been seen by others. "Nor did he abandon me. He left me only to go in quest of the necessaries for our journey. If harm has come to me the blame of it must not rest on him."
"Of what harm do you speak, Madonna?" he cried, in a voice laden with concern.
"Of what harm," she echoed, eyeing him with a scorn that would have slain him had he any manhood left. "Of what harm? Mother of Mercy, defend me! Do you ask the question? What greater harm could have come to me than to have fallen into the hands of Ramiro del" Orca and his brigands?"
He stood looking at her, and I doubt not that his face was a very picture of simulated consternation.
"Surely, Madonna, you do not understand that we are your friends, that you can so abuse us. But you will be faint, Madonna," he cried, with a fresh and deep solicitude. "A cup of wine." And he waved his hand towards the table.
"It would poison me, I think," she answered coldly.
"You are cruel, and--alas!--mistrustful," said he. "Can you guess nothing of the anxiety that has been mine these two days, of the fears that have haunted me as I thought of you and your wanderings?"
Her lip curled, and her face took on some slight vestige of colour. Her spirit was a thing for which I might then have come to love her had it not been that already I loved her to distraction.
"Yes," said she, "I can guess something of your dismay when you found your schemes frustrated; when you found that you had come too late to San Domenico."
"Will you not forgive me that shift to which my adoration drove me?" he implored, in a honeyed voice--and a more fearful thing than Ramiro the butcher was Ramiro the lover.
At that scarcely covert avowal of his pa.s.sion she recoiled a step as she might before a thing unclean. The little colour faded from her cheek, the scorn departed from her lip, and a sickly, deadly fear overspread her lovely face. G.o.d! that I should stand there and witness this insult to the woman I adored and worshipped with a fervour that the Church seeks to instil into us for those about the throne of Heaven. It might not be. A blind access of fury took me. Of the consequences I thought nothing. Reason left me utterly, and the slight hope that might lie in temporising was disregarded.
Before those about me could guess my purpose, or those others, too engrossed in the scene at the far end of the hall, could intervene, I had sprung from between the executioners and dashed across the s.p.a.ce that separated me from the Governor of Cesena. One well-aimed blow, and there should be an end to Messer Ramiro. That was the only thought that found room in my disordered mind.
One or two there were who cried out as I sped past them, swift as the hound when it speeds after the fleeing hare. But I was upon Ramiro ere any could have sufficiently mastered his surprise to interfere.
By the nape of his great neck I caught him from behind, and setting my knee at his spine I wrenched him backward, and so flung him over on the floor. Down I went with him, my hand reaching for the dagger at his jewelled girdle, and I had found and drawn it in that swift action of mine ere he had bethought him of his hands. Up it flashed and down. I sank it through the crimson velvet of his rich doublets straight at the spot where his heart should be--if he were so human as to have a heart.
The next instant I turned cold and sick. My desperate effort had been all for nothing. In my hand I was left with the bronze hilt of his great poniard; the blade had broken off against the mesh of steel the coward wore beneath his finery.
There was a rush of feet about us, a piercing scream from Madonna Paola, and it was to her that I owed my life in that grim moment. A dozen blades were naked and would have transfixed me as I lay, but that she covered my body with her own and bade them strike at me through her.
A moment later and the powerful hands of the Governor of Cesena were at my throat. I was lifted and tossed aside, as though I had been a hound and he the bull I had beset. And as he swung me over and crushed me to the ground, he knelt above me and grinned horribly into my purpling face.
A second we stayed so, and I thought indeed that my hour was come, when suddenly I felt the blood in my head released once more. He had taken his hands from my throat. He seized me now by the collar and dragged me rudely to my feet.
"Take this knave and lock him in his chamber," he bade a couple of his bravi. "I may have need of him ere he dies."
"Messer Ramiro," came the interceding voice of Madonna Paola, "what he did, he did for me. You will not let him die for it?"
There was a pause during which he looked at her, whilst the men were roughly dragging me across the hall.
"Who knows, Madonna?" he said, with a bow and an infernal smile. "If you were to beg his life, it might even come to pa.s.s that I might spare it."
He did not wait for her answer, but stepping after me he called to the men that led me. In obedience they halted, and he came forward. We were now at the foot of the staircase.
"Boccadoro," said he, planting himself before me, and eyeing me with eyes that were very full of malice, "you will recall the punishment I promised you if I came to discover it was you had thwarted me in Pesaro.
It is the second time you have fooled Ramiro del" Orca. There does not live the man who can boast that he did it thrice, nor will I risk it that you be that man. Make your peace with Heaven, for at sunset--in an hour"s time--you hang. There is one little thing that might save you even yet, and if you find life sweet, you would do well to pray that that little thing may come to pa.s.s."