"Paola," said I, "we must devise the means to get away. I will bear you to my mother"s home near Biancomonte, that you may dwell there at least until we are wed. But the thing that exercises my mind is how to make our un.o.bserved escape from Pesaro."
"I have thought of it already," she informed me quietly.
"You have thought of it?" I cried. "And of what have you thought?"
For answer she stepped back a pace, and drew the cowl of the monk"s habit over her head until her features were lost in the shadows of it.
She stood before me now, a diminutive Dominican brother. Her meaning was clear to me at once. With a cry of gladness I turned to the drawer whence I had taken the habit in which she was arrayed, and selecting another one I hastily donned it above the garments that I wore.
No sooner was it done than I caught her by the arm.
"Come, Madonna," I bade her in an urgent voice. At the first step she stumbled. The habit was so long that it c.u.mbered her feet. But that was a difficulty soon conquered. With my dagger I cut a piece from the skirt of it, enough to leave her freedom of movement; and, that accomplished, we set out.
We crossed the church swiftly and silently, and a moment I left her in the porch whilst I surveyed the street. All was quiet. Pesaro still slept, and it must have wanted some two hours or more to the dawn.
A fine rain was falling as we sallied out, and there was a sting in the December wind which made us draw our cowls the tighter about our face.
Abandoning the main street, I led her down some narrow alleys, deserted like all the rest of the city, and not so much as a stray cat abroad in that foul weather. It was very dark, and a hundred times we stumbled, whilst in some places I almost carried her bodily to avoid the filth of the quarter we were traversing. At length we gained the s.p.a.ce in front of the gates that open on to the northern road, known as Porta Venezia, and I would have blundered on and roused the guard to let us out, using the Borgia ring once more--that talisman whose power had grown during these years, so that it would now open me almost any door in Italy. But Paola stayed me. Wisely she counselled that we should do nothing that might draw too much attention upon ourselves, and she urged me to wait until the dawn, when the guard would be astir and the gates opened.
So we fled to the shelter of a porch, and there we waited, huddling ourselves out of the reach of the icy rain. We talked little during the time we spent there. For my own part I had overmuch food for thought, and a very natural anxiety racked me. Soon the monks would be descending to the church, and they would discover the havoc there, and spread the alarm.
Who could say but that they might even discover the abstraction of the two habits from the sacristy, and the hue and cry for two men in the sackcloth of Dominicans would be afoot--for they would infer that two men so disguised had made off with the body of Madonna Paola.
The thought stirred me like a goad. I stood up. The night was growing thinner, and, suddenly, even as I rose, a light gleamed from one of the Windows of the guard-house.
"G.o.d be thanked for that fellow"s early rising," I cried out. "Come, Madonna, let us be moving."
And I added my newly-conceived reasons for quitting the place without further delay.
Cursing us for being so early abroad--a curse to which I responded with a sonorous "Pax Domini sit tec.u.m" the still somnolent sentinel opened the post and let us pa.s.s. I was glad in the end that we had waited and thus avoided the necessity of showing my ring, for should inquiries be made concerning two monks, that ring of mine might have betrayed the ident.i.ty of one of them. I gave thanks to Heaven that I knew the country well. A quarter of a league or so from Pesaro we quitted the high-road and took to the by-paths with which I was well acquainted.
Day came, grey and forbidding at first, but presently the rain ceased and the sun flashed out a thousand diamonds from the drenched hedge-rows.
We plodded on; and at length, towards noon, when we had gained the neighbourhood of the village of Cattolica, we halted at the hut of a peasant on a small campagna. I had divested myself of my monk"s habit, and cut away the cowl from Madonna"s. She had thereafter fashioned it by means that were mysterious to my dull man"s mind into a more feminine-looking garb.
Thus we now presented ourselves to the old man who was the sole tenant of that lonely and squalid house. A ducat opened his door as wide as it would go, and gave us free access to every cranny of his dwelling. Food he procured us--rough black bread, some pieces of roasted goat, and some goat"s milk--and on this we regaled ourselves as though it had been a ducal banquet, for hunger had set us in the mood to account anything delicious. And when we had eaten we fell to talking, the old man having left us to go about such peasant duties as claimed his attention, and our talk concerned ourselves, our future first, and later on our past. I remember that Madonna returned to the matter of the deception that I had practised, seeking to learn what reasons had impelled me, and I answered her in all truth.
"Madonna mia, I think it must have been to win your love. When Giovanni Sforza bade me, with many a threat, to write those verses, I undertook the task with ready gladness, for in its performance I was to pour out the tale of the pa.s.sion that was consuming my poor heart. It occurred to me that if those verses were worthy, you might come to love their author for their beauty, and so I strove to render them beautiful. It was the same spirit urged me to don the Lord Giovanni"s armour and fight in that splendid if futile skirmish. Even as you had come to love the author for his verses, so might you come to love the warrior for his valour. That you should account the one and the other the work of Giovanni Sforza was to me a little thing, since I was well content to think that you but loved him because you accounted his the things that I had performed.
Therefore was I the one you truly loved, although you did not know it.
Could you but conceive what consolation that reflection was to me, you would deal lightly with me for my deceit."
"I can conceive it," she answered, very gently, her eyes downcast; "and now that I know the motives that impelled you, I almost love you for that deceit itself, for it seems to me that it holds some quality well worthy of devotion."
Such was our talk, all of a nature to help us to a better understanding of each other, and all seeming to endear us more and more by showing us how close the past had already drawn us.
Later I rose and announced my intention of adventuring into Cattolica, there to procure her garments more seemly than those she wore, in which she might journey on and come into the presence of my mother. Also, there was in Cattolica a man I knew, of whom I hoped for the loan of enough money to enable me to purchase mules, to the end that we might journey in more dignity and comfort. It was then about the twentieth hour, and I hoped to return by nightfall. I took my leave of Madonna, enjoining her to rest and to seek sleep whilst I was absent; and with that I set out.
Cattolica was no more than a half-league distant, and I looked to reach it in a half-hour or so. I fell into thought as I trudged along, and I was building plans for the sunlit future that was to be ours. I was a man transformed that day, and I could have sung in spite of the chill December wind that buffeted me, so full of joy and gladness was my heart.
At Biancomonte I was likely to spend my days as little better than a peasant, but surely a peasant"s estate with such a companion as was to be mine was preferable to an emperor"s throne without her.
The bleak landscape seemed to me invested with a beauty that at no other time I should have noticed. G.o.d was good. I swore a thousand times, the world was a good world--so good that Heaven could scarce be better.
I had come, perhaps, the better half of the distance I had to travel, and I was giving full rein to my joyous fancy, when suddenly I espied ahead a company of hors.e.m.e.n. They were approaching me at a brisk pace, but I took no thought of them, accounting myself secure from any molestation. If it so happened that it was a search party from Pesaro, seeking two men disguised as monks who had ravished the coffin of Madonna Paola di Santafior, what should they want of Lazzaro Biancomonte? And so, in my confidence, I advanced even as they trotted quickly towards me.
Not until they were within a matter of a hundred paces did I raise my eyes to take their measure; and then I halted on my step, smitten of a sudden by an unreasoning and unreasonable fear, to see at their head the bulky form of the Governor of Cesena. He saw me, too, and, what was worse, he recognised me on the instant, for he clapped spurs to his horse and came at me as if he would ride me down. Within three paces of me he drew up his steed. Whether the memory of the other two occasions on which I had thwarted him arose now in his mind and made him wonder had not some fatality brought me across his path again to send awry his pretty schemes concerning Madonna Paula, I cannot say for certain; yet some suspicion of it occurred to me and filled me with apprehension.
"Body of Bacchus!" he roared. "Is it truly you, Boccadoro?"
"They call me Biancomonte now, Magnificent," I answered him. But my tone was respectful, for it could profit me nothing to incense him.
"A fig for what they call you," he snapped contemptuously. "Whence are you?"
"From Pesaro," I answered truthfully.
"From Pesaro? But you are travelling towards it."
"True. I was making for Cattolica, but I missed my way in seeking to shorten it. I am now returning by the high-road."
The explanation satisfied him on that point, and being satisfied, he asked me when I had left Pesaro. A moment I hesitated.
"Late last night," said I at last. He looked, at me, my foolish hesitation having perhaps unslipped a suspicion that was straining at its leash.
"In that case," said he, "you can scarcely have heard the strange story that is being told there?"
I looked at him, as if puzzled, for a second. "If you mean the story of Madonna Paoia"s end, I heard it yesterday."
"Why, what story was that?" quoth he in some surprise, his beetling brows coming together in one broad line of fur.
I shrugged my shoulders. "Men said that she had been poisoned."
"Oh, that," he cried indifferently. "But men say to-day that her body was stolen from the Church of San Domenico where it lay. An odd happening, is it not?" And his eyes covered me in a fierce scrutiny that again suggested to me those suspicions of his that I might be the man who had antic.i.p.ated him. I was soon to learn that he had more grounds than at first I thought for those same suspicions.
"Odd, indeed," I answered calmly, for all that I felt my pulses quickening with apprehension. "But is it true?" I added.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Rumour"s habit is to lie," he answered.
"Yet for such a lie as that, so monstrous an imagination would be needed that, rather, am I inclined to account it truth. There are no more poets in Pesaro since you left. But at what hour was it that you quitted the city?"
To hesitate again were to betray myself; it were to suggest that I was seeking an answer that should sort well with the rest of my story.
Besides, what could the hour signify?
"It would be about the first hour of night," I said. He looked at me with increasing strangeness.
"You must indeed have wandered from your road to have got no farther than this in all that time. Perhaps you were hampered by some heavy burden?" He leered evilly, and I turned cold.
"I was burdened with nothing heavier than this body of mine and a rather uneasy conscience."
"Where, then, have you tarried?"
At this I thought it time to rebel. Were I too meekly to submit to this examination, my very meekness might afford him fresh grounds for doubts.
"Once have I told you," I answered wearily, "that I lost my way. And, however much it may flatter me to have your Excellency evincing such an interest in my concerns, I am at a loss to find a reason for it."