"Where is the girl?" he asked abruptly.
"Girl?" quoth I. "What girl? Am I a mother-abbess, that you should set me such a question?"
Two dark lines showed between his brows. His voice quivered with pa.s.sion.
"I ask you again--where is the girl?"
I laughed like one who is a little wearied by the entertainment provided for him.
"Here be no girls, Messer del" Orca," I answered him in the same tone.
"Nor can I think what this babble of girls portends."
My seeming innocence, and the a.s.surance with which I maintained the expression of it, whispered a doubt into his mind. He released me, and turned upon his men, a baffled look in his eyes.
"Was not this the party?" he inquired ferociously. "Have you misled me, beasts?
"It seemed the party, Ill.u.s.trious," answered one of them.
"Do you dare tell me that "it seemed"?" he roared, seeking to father upon them the blunder he was beginning to fear that he had made.
"But--What is the livery of these knaves?
"They wear none," someone answered him, and at that answer he seemed to turn limp and lose his fierce a.s.surance.
Then he bridled afresh.
"Yet the party, I"ll swear, is this!" he insisted; and turning once more to me: "Explain, animal!" he bade me in terrifying tones. "Explain, or, by the Host! be you ignorant or not, I"ll have you hanged."
I accounted it high time to take another tone with him. Hanging was a discomfort I was never less minded to suffer.
"Draw nearer, fool," said I contemptuously, and at the epithet, so greatly did my audacity amaze him, he mildly did my bidding.
"I know not what doubts are battling in your thick head, sir captain,"
I pursued. "But this I know--that if you persist in hindering me, or commit the egregious folly of offering me violence, you will answer for it, hereafter, to the Lord Cardinal of Valencia.
"I am going upon a secret mission"--and here I sank my voice to a whisper for his ears alone--"in the service of the house that hires you, as for yourself you might easily have inferred. Behold." And I revealed my ring. "Detain me longer at your peril."
He must have had some notion of the fact that I was journeying in Cesare Borgia"s service, and this coupled with the sight of that talisman effected in his manner a swift and wholesome change. Had I, arrayed in the panoply of Mother Church, defied the devil, my victory could not have been more complete.
He looked about him like a man whose wits have been scattered suddenly to the four winds of Heaven.
"But this litter," he mumbled, riveting his dazed eyes upon me, "and these four knaves--?"
"Tell me," I questioned, with sudden earnestness, "are you in quest of just such a party?"
"Aye that I am," he answered sharply, intelligence returning to his glance, inquiry burning in it.
"And would the men, peradventure, be wearing the livery of the House of Santafior?"
His quick a.s.sent came almost choked in a company of oaths.
"Why then, if that be your quarry, you are but wasting time. Such a party pa.s.sed us at the gallop about an hour ago. It would be an hour, would it not, Giacopo?"
"I should say an hour," answered the lacquey dully.
"In what direction?" came Ramiro"s frenzied question. He doubted me no longer.
"In the direction of Fabriano I should say," I answered. "Although it may well be that they were making for Sinigaglia. The road branches farther on."
He waited for no more. Without word of thanks for the priceless information I had given him, he wheeled his horse, and shouted a hoa.r.s.e command to his followers. A moment later and they were cantering past us, the snow flying beneath their hoofs; within five minutes the last of them had vanished round an angle of the road, and the only indication of the halt they had made was the broad path of dirty brown where their horses had crushed the snow.
I have been an actor in few more entertaining comedies than the cozening of Ser Ramiro, and a witness of nothing that afforded me at once so much relief and relish as his abrupt departure. I sank back on the cushions of my litter, and gave myself over to a burst of full-souled laughter which was interrupted ere it was half done by Giacopo, who had dismounted and approached me.
"You have fooled us finely," said he, with venom.
I quenched my laughter to regard him. Of what did he babble? Was he, and were his fellows, too, so ungrateful as to bear a grudge against the man who had saved them?
"You have fooled us finely," he insisted in a louder voice.
"That, knave, is my trade," said I. "But it rather seems to me that it was Messer Ramiro del" Orca whom I fooled."
"Aye," he answered querulously. "But what when he discerns how you have played upon him? What when he discovers the trick by which you have thrown him off the scent? What when he returns?"
"Spare me," I begged, "I am but indifferently skilful at conjecture."
"Nay, but you shall answer me," he cried, livid with a pa.s.sion that my bantering tone had quickened.
"Can it be that you are indeed curious to know what will befall when he returns?" I questioned meekly.
"I am," he snorted, with an angry twist of the lips.
"It should be easy to gratify the morbid spirit of curiosity that actuates you. Remain here, and await his return. Thus shall you learn."
"That will not I," he vowed.
"Nor I, nor I, nor I!" chorused his followers.
"Then, why plague me with unprofitable questions? What concern is it of ours how Messer del" Orca shall vent his wrath when he is disillusioned.
Your duty now is to rejoin your mistress. Ride hard for Cagli. Seek her at the sign of "The Full Moon," and then away for Pesaro. If you are brisk you will gain the shelter of the Lord Giovanni Sforza"s fortress long before Messer del" Orca again picks up the scent, if, indeed, he ever does so."
Giacopo laughed derisively till his fat body shook with the scornful mirth of him.
"By my faith, I"m done with the business," he cried, and the other three expressed a very hearty agreement with that att.i.tude.
"How done with it?" I asked.
"I shall make my way back across the hills and so retrace my steps to Rome. I"ll risk my head no more for any lady or any Fool."
"If you should ever chance to risk it for yourself," said I, with unmeasured scorn, "you"ll risk it for the greatest fool and the cowardliest rogue that ever shamed the name of man. And your mistress?
Is she to wait at Cagli until doomsday? If anywhere within the bulk of that elephant"s body there lurks the heart of a rabbit, you"ll get you to horse and ride to the help of that poor lady."