Love-at-arms being a narrative excerpted from the chronicles of Urbino, during the dominion of the high and mighty Messer Guidobaldo da Montefeltro
For a second Francesco's eyes rested on the courtier's face, and saw the
fear written there for all to read. The shadow of a smile quivered on
his lips as his glance moved on to meet the eyes of Valentina, sparkling
as sparkles frost beneath the sun.
“Why, let them come!” she exclaimed, almost in exultation. “This ducal
oaf shall find me very ready for him. We are armed at all points. We
have victuals to last us three months, if need be, and we have no lack
of weapons. Let Gian Maria come, and he will find Valentina della Rovere
none so easy to reduce. To you, sir,” she continued, with more calm, “to
you on whom I have no claim, I am more than grateful for your chivalrous
act in riding here to warn me.”
Francesco sighed; a look of regret crossed his face.
“Alas!” he said. “When I rode hither, Madonna, I had hoped to serve you
to a better purpose. I had advice to offer and assistance if you should
need it; but the sight of those men-at-arms of yours makes me fear that
it is not advice upon which it would be wise to act. For the plan I had
in mind, it would be of the first importance that your soldiers should
be trustworthy, and this, I fear me, they are not.”
“Nevertheless,” put in Gonzaga feverishly, clinging to a slender hope,
“let us hear it.”
“I beg that you will,” said Valentina.
Thus enjoined, Francesco pondered a moment.
“Are you acquainted with the politics of Babbiano?” he inquired.
“I know something of them.”
“I will make the position quite clear to you, Madonna,” he rejoined. And
with that he told her of the threatened descent of Caesar Borgia upon
Gian Maria's duchy, and hence, of the little time at her suitor's
disposal; so that if he could but be held in check before the walls of
Roccaleone for a little while, all might be well. “But seeing in
what haste he is,” he ended, “his methods are likely to be rough and
desperate, and I had thought that meanwhile you need not remain here,
Madonna.”
“Not remain?” she cried, scorn of the notion in her voice. “Not remain?”
quoth Gonzaga timorously, hope sounding in his.
“Precisely, Madonna. I would have proposed that you leave Gian Maria
an empty nest, so that even if the castle should fall into his hands he
would gain nothing.”
“You would advise me to fly?” she demanded.
“I came prepared to do so, but the sight of your men restrains me. They
are not trustworthy, and to save their dirty skins they might throw
Roccaleone open to the besiegers, and thus your flight would be
discovered, while yet there might be time to render it futile.”
Before she could frame an answer there was Gonzaga feverishly urging her
to act upon so wise and timely a suggestion, and seek safety in flight
from a place that Gian Maria would tear stone from stone. His words
pattered quickly and piteously in entreaty, till in the end, facing him
squarely:
“Are you afraid, Gonzaga?” she asked him.
“I am--afraid for you, Madonna,” he answered readily.
“Then let your fears have peace. For whether I stay or whether I go, one
thing is certain: Gian Maria never shall set hands upon me.” She turned
again to Francesco. “I see a certain wisdom in the counsel of flight
you would have offered me, no less than in what I take to be your advice
that I should remain. Did I but consult my humour I should stay and
deliver battle when this tyrant shows himself. But prudence, too, must
be consulted, and I will give the matter thought.” And now she thanked
him with a generous charm for having come to her with this news and
proffered his assistance, asking what motives brought him.
“Such motives as must ever impel a knight to serve a lady in distress,”
said he, “and perhaps, too, the memory of the charity with which you
tended my wounds that day at Acquasparta.”
For a second their glances met, quivered in the meeting, and fell apart
again, an odd confusion in the breast of each, all of which Gonzaga,
sunk in moody rumination, observed not. To lighten the awkward silence
that was fallen, she asked him how it had transpired so soon that it was
to Roccaleone she had fled.
“Do you not know?” he cried. “Has not Peppe told you?”
“I have had no speech with him. He but reached the castle, himself, late
last night, and I first saw him this morning when he came to announce
your presence.”
And then, before more could be said, there arose a din of shouting from
without. The door was pushed suddenly open, and Peppe darted into the
room.
“Your man, Ser Francesco,” he cried, his face white with excitement.
“Come quickly, or they will kill him.”
CHAPTER XIV. FORTEMANI DRINKS WATER
The thing had begun with the lowering glances that Francesco had
observed, and had grown to gibes and insults after he had disappeared.
But Lanciotto had preserved an unruffled front, being a man schooled in
the Count of Aquila's service to silence and a wondrous patience. This
insensibility those hinds translated into cowardice, and emboldened
by it--like the mongrels that they were--their offensiveness grew more
direct and gradually more threatening. Lanciotto's patience was slowly
oozing away, and indeed, it was no longer anything but the fear of
provoking his master's anger that restrained him. At length one burly
ruffian, who had bidden him remove his head-piece in the company of
gentlemen, and whose request had been by Lanciotto as disregarded as
the rest, advanced menacingly towards him and caught him by the leg, as
Ercole had caught his master. Exasperated at that, Lanciotto had swung
his leg free, and caught the rash fellow a vicious kick in the face that
had felled him, stunned and bleeding.
The roar from the man's companions told Lanciotto what to expect. In an
instant they were upon him, clamouring for his blood. He sought to draw
his master's sword, which together with the Count's other armour was
slung across his saddle-bow; but before he could extricate it, he was
seized by a dozen hands, and cropped, fighting, from the saddle. On the
ground they overpowered him, and a mailed hand was set upon his mouth,
crushing back into his throat the cry for help he would have raised.
On the west side of the courtyard a fountain issuing from the wall
had once poured its water through a lion's head into a vast tank of
moss-grown granite. But it had been disused for some time, and the pipe
in the lion's mouth was dry. The tank, however, was more than half full
of water, which, during the late untenanting of the castle, had turned
foul and stagnant. To drown Lanciotto in this was the amiable suggestion
that emanated from Fortemani himself--a suggestion uproariously received
by his knaves, who set themselves to act upon it. They roughly dragged
the bleeding and frantically struggling Lanciotto across the yard and
gained the border of the tank, intending fully to sink him into it and
hold him under, to drown there like a rat.
But in that instant a something burst upon him like a bolt from out of
Heaven. In one or two, and presently in more, the cruel laughter turned
to sudden howls of pain as a lash of bullock-hide caught them about head
and face and shoulders.
“Back there, you beasts, you animals, back!” roared a voice of thunder,
and back they went unquestioning before that pitiless lash, like the
pack of craven hounds they were.
It was Francesco, who, single-handed, and armed with no more than a
whip, was scattering them from about his maltreated servant, as the hawk
scatters a flight of noisy sparrows. And now between him and Lanciotto
there stood no more than the broad bulk of Ercole Fortemani, his back to
the Count; for, as yet, he had not realised the interruption.
Francesco dropped his whip, and setting one hand at the captain's
girdle, and the other at his dirty neck, he hoisted him up with a
strength incredible, and hurled him from his path and into the slimy
water of the tank.
There was a mighty roar drowned in a mightier splash as Fortemani,
spread-eagle, struck the surface and sank from sight, whilst with the
flying spray there came a fetid odour to tell of the unsavouriness of
that unexpected bath.
Without pausing to see the completion of his work, Francesco stooped
over his prostrate servant.
“Have the beasts hurt you, Lanciotto?” he questioned. But before the
fellow could reply, one of those hinds had sprung upon the stooping
Count, and struck him with a dagger between the shoulder-blades.
A woman's alarmed cry rang out, for Valentina was watching the affray
from the steps of the hall, with Gonzaga at her elbow.
But Francesco's quilted brigandine had stood the test of steel, and the
point of that assassin's dagger glanced harmlessly aside, doing no worse
hurt than a rent in the silk surface of the garment. A second later
the fellow found himself caught as in a bond of steel. The dagger was
wrenched from his grasp, and the point of it laid against his breast
even as the Count forced him down upon his knees.
In a flash was the thing done, yet to the wretched man who saw himself
upon the threshold of Eternity, and who--like a true son of the
Church--had a wholesome fear of hell, it seemed an hour whilst, with
livid cheeks and eyes starting from his head, he waited for that poniard
to sink into his heart, as it was aimed. But not in his heart did the
blow fall. With a sudden snort of angry amusement, the Count pitched the
dagger from him and brought down his clenched fist with a crushing force
into the ruffian's face. The fellow sank unconscious beneath that mighty
blow, and Francesco, regaining the whip that lay almost at his feet,
rose up to confront what others there might be.
From the tank, standing breast-deep in that stinking water, his head
and face grotesquely masked in a vile green slime of putrid vegetation,
Ercole Fortemani bellowed with horrid blasphemy that he would have his
aggressor's blood, but stirred never a foot to take it. Not that he was
by nature wholly a coward; but inspired by a wholesome fear of the
man who could perform such a miracle of strength, he remained out of
Francesco's reach, well in the middle of that square basin, and lustily
roared orders to his men to tear the fellow to pieces. But his men
had seen enough of the Count's methods, and made no advance upon that
stalwart, dauntless figure that stood waiting for them with a whip
which several had already tasted. Huddled together, more like a flock of
frightened sheep than a body of men of war, they stood near the entrance
tower, the mock of Peppe, who from the stone-gallery above--much to
the amusement of Valentina's ladies and two pert pages that were with
him--applauded in high-flown terms their wondrous valour.
They stirred at last, but it was at Valentina's bidding. She had
been conferring with Gonzaga, who--giving it for his reason that she,
herself, might need protection--had remained beside her, well out of the
fray. She had been urging him to do something, and at last he had obeyed
her, and moved down the short flight of steps into the court; but so
reluctantly and slowly, that with an exclamation of impatience, she
suddenly brushed past him, herself to do the task she had begged of him.
Past Francesco she went, with a word of such commendation of his valour
and a look of such deep admiration, that the blood sprang, responsive,
to his cheek. She paused with a solicitous inquiry for the now risen but
sorely bruised Lanciotto. She flashed an angry look and an angry command
of silence at the great Ercole, still bellowing from his tank, and then,
within ten paces of his followers, she halted, and with wrathful mien,
and hand outstretched towards their captain, she bade them arrest him.
That sudden, unexpected order struck dumb the vociferous Fortemani. He
ceased, and gaped at his men, who eyed one another now in doubt; but the