you are perhaps not quite so aimless as you wish to appear.’
Whatever his convent education may have done for him, it does not seem—as you will long since have gathered—that it had inculcated a strict regard for exactitude. Dissimulation, I fear, was bred in the bones of him; although he would have answered any such charge by informing you that Plato had taught him to distinguish between the lie on the lips and the lie in the heart.
‘Oh, but proceed! The opinion?’ Barbaresco fiercely challenged him.
‘You’ll remember what Count Spigno said before you others checked him. The arbalester . . . You remember.’ Bellarion appeared to falter a little under the glare of those blue eyes and the fierce set of that heavy jaw. ‘So I told her highness, to raise her drooping spirits, that one of these fine days her friends in Casale might cut the Gordian knot with a crossbow shaft.’
Barbaresco suggested by his attitude a mastiff crouching for a spring.
‘Ah!’ he commented. ‘And she said?’
‘The very contrary of what I expected. Where I looked for elation, I found only distress. It was in vain I pleaded with her that thus a consummation would speedily be reached; that if such a course had not yet been determined, it was precisely the course that I should advocate.’
‘Oh! You pleaded that! And she?’
‘She bade me tell you that if such a thing were indeed in your minds, you must dismiss it. That she would be no party to it. That sooner she would herself denounce the intention to the Marquis Theodore.’
‘Body of God!’ Barbaresco came to his feet, his great face purple, the veins of his temples standing forth like cords.
Whilst appearing unmoved, Bellarion braced his muscles for action.
The attack came. But only in words. Barbaresco heaped horrible and obscene abuse upon Bellarion’s head. ‘You infamous fool! You triple ass! You chattering ape!’ With these, amongst other terms, the young man found himself bombarded. ‘Get you back to her, and tell her, you numskulled baboon, that there was never any such intention.’
‘But was there not?’ Bellarion cried with almost shrill ingenuousness of tone. ‘Yet Count Spigno . . .’
‘Devil take Count Spigno, fool. Heed me. Carry my message to her highness.’
‘I carry no lies,’ said Bellarion firmly, and rose with great dignity.
‘Lies!’ gurgled Barbaresco.
‘Lies,’ Bellarion insisted. ‘Let us have done with them. To her highness I expressed as a suspicion what in my mind was a clear conviction. The words Count Spigno used, and your anxiety to silence him, could leave no doubt in any man of wit, and I am that, I hope, my lord. If you will have this message carried, you will first show me the ends you serve by its falsehood, and let me, who am in this thing as deep as any, be the judge of whether it is justified.’
Before this firmness the wrath went out of Barbaresco. Weakly he wrung his hands a moment, then sank sagging into his chair.
‘If the others, if Cavalcanti or Casella, had known how much you had understood, you would never have left this house alive, lest you should do precisely what you have done.’
‘But if it is on her behalf—hers and her brother’s—that you plan this thing, why should you not take her feeling first? What else is right or fair?’
‘Her feeling?’ Barbaresco sneered, and Bellarion understood that the sneer was for himself. ‘God deliver me from the weariness of reasoning with a fool. Our bolt would have been shot, and none could have guessed the hands that loosed it. Now you have made it known, and you need to be told what will happen if we were mad enough to go through with it. Why, the Princess Valeria would be our instant accuser. She would come forth at once and denounce us. That is the spirit of her; wilful, headstrong, and mawkish. And I am a fool to bid you go back to her and persuade her that you were mistaken. When the blow fell, she would see that what you had first told her was the truth, and our heads would pay.’
He set his elbows on the table, took his head in his hands, and fetched a groan from his great bulk. ‘The ruin you have wrought! God! The ruin!’
‘Ruin?’ quoth Bellarion.
‘Of all our hopes,’ Barbaresco explained in petulance. ‘Can’t you see it? Can you understand nothing for yourself, animal, save the things you were better for not understanding? And can’t you see that you have ruined yourself with us? With your face and shape and already close in the Lady Valeria’s confidence as you are, there are no heights in the State to which you might not have climbed.’
‘I had not thought of it,’ said Bellarion, sighing.
‘No, nor of me, nor of any of us. Of me!’ The man’s grief became passionate. ‘At last I might have sloughed this beggary in which I live. And now . . .’ He banged the table in his sudden rage, and got to his feet again. ‘That is what you have done. That is what you have wrecked by your silly babbling.’
‘But surely, sir, by other means . . .’
‘There are no other means. Leastways, no other means at our command. Have we the money to levy troops? Oh, why do I waste my breath upon you? You’ll tell the others to-morrow what you’ve done, and they shall tell you what they think of it.’
It was a course that had its perils. But if once in the stillness of the night Bellarion’s shrewd wits counselled him to rise, dress, and begone, he stilled the coward counsel. It remained to be seen whether the other conspirators would be as easily intimidated as Barbaresco. To ascertain this, Bellarion determined to remain. The Lady Valeria’s need of him was not yet done, he thought, though why the Lady Valeria’s affairs should be the cause of his exposing himself to the chances of a blade between the ribs was perhaps more than he could satisfactorily have explained.
That the danger was very far from imaginary the next morning’s conference showed him. Scarcely had the plotters realised the nature of Bellarion’s activities than they were clamouring for his blood. Casella, the exile, breathing fire and slaughter, would have sprung upon him with dagger drawn, had not Barbaresco bodily interposed.
‘Not in my house!’ he roared. ‘Not in my house!’ his only concern being the matter of his own incrimination.
‘Nor anywhere, unless you are bent on suicide,’ Bellarion calmly warned them. He moved from behind Barbaresco, to confront them. ‘You are forgetting that in my murder the Lady Valeria will see your answer. She will denounce you, sirs, not only for this, but for the intended murder of the Regent. Slay me, and you just as surely slay yourselves.’ He permitted himself to smile as he looked upon their stricken faces. ‘It’s an interesting situation, known in chess as a stalemate.’
In their baffled fury they turned upon Count Spigno, whose indiscretion had created this situation. Enzo Spigno, sitting there with a sneer on his white face, let the storm rage. When at last it abated, he expressed himself.
‘Rather should you thank me for having tested the ground before we stand on it. For the rest, it is as I expected. It is an ill thing to be associated with a woman in these matters.’
‘We did not bring her in,’ said Barbaresco. ‘It was she who appealed to me for assistance.’
‘And now that we are ready to afford it her,’ said Casella, ‘she discovers that it is not of the sort she wishes. I say it is not hers to choose. Hopes have been raised in us, and we have laboured to fulfil them.’
How they all harped on that, thought Bellarion. How concerned was each with the profit that he hoped to wrest for himself, how enraged to see himself cheated of this profit. The Lady Valeria, the State, the boy who was being corrupted that he might be destroyed, these things were nothing to these men. Not once did he hear them mentioned now in the futile disorderly debate that followed, whilst he sat a little apart and almost forgotten.
At last it was Spigno, this Spigno whom they dubbed a fool—but