Love-at-arms being a narrative excerpted from the chronicles of Urbino, during the dominion of the high and mighty Messer Guidobaldo da Montefeltro
the Count ceased, he gave vent to a subdued laugh, bitter with mockery.
“Make you my gonfalonier?” he muttered, in consummate amusement. “And
since when has Babbiano been a republic--or is it your aim to make it
one, and establish yourself as its chief magistrate?”
“If you misapprehend me so----” began Francesco, but his cousin
interrupted him with heightening scorn.
“Misapprehend you, Messer Franceschino? No, no. I understand you but
too well.” He rose suddenly from his interrupted meal, and came a step
nearer his cousin. “I hear rumours of this growing love my people are
manifesting for the Count of Aquila, and I have let them go unheeded.
That rogue Masuccio warned me ere he died, and I answered him with
my whip across his face. But I am by no means sure that I have been
proceeding wisely. I had a dream two nights ago---- But let that be!
When it so happens that in any State there is a man whom the people
prefer to him who rules them, and when it so happens that this man is of
as good blood and high birth as are you, he becomes a danger to him
that sits the throne. I need scarce remind you,” he added, with a horrid
grin, “of how the Borgias deal with such individuals, nor need I add
that a Sforza may see fit to emulate those very conclusive measures of
precaution. The family of Sforza has bred as yet no fools, nor shall I
prove myself the first by placing in another's hands the power to make
himself my master. You see, my gentle cousin, how transparent your
aims become under my eyes. I am keen of vision, Franceschino, keen of
vision!” He tapped his nose and chuckled a malicious appreciation of his
own acute perceptions.
Francesco regarded him with an eye of stony scorn. He might have
answered, had he been so disposed, that the Duchy of Babbiano was his to
take whenever he pleased. He might have told him that, and defied him.
But he went more slowly than did this man of a family that bred no
fools.
“Do you know me, then, so little, Gian Maria,” said he, not without
bitterness, “that you think I hunger for so empty a thing as this ducal
pomp you clutch so fearfully? I tell you, man, that I prefer my liberty
to an imperial throne. But I waste breath with you. Yet, some day, when
your crown shall have passed from you and your power have been engulfed
in the Borgia's rapacious maw, remember my offer which might have saved
you and which with insults you disregarded, as you disregarded the
advice your older counsellors gave you.”
Gian Maria shrugged his fat shoulders.
“If by that other advice you mean the counsel that I should take
Guidobaldo's niece to wife, you may give ease unto your patriotic soul.
I have consented to enter into this alliance. And now,” he ended, with
another of his infernal chuckles, “you see how little I need dread this
terrible son of Pope Alexander. Allied with Urbino and the other States
that are its friends, I can defy the might of Caesar Borgia. I shall
sleep tranquil of nights beside my beauteous bride, secure in the
protection her uncle's armies will afford me, and never needing so much
as my valiant cousin's aid as my gonfalonier.”
The Count of Aquila changed colour despite himself, and the Duke's
suspicious eyes were as quick to observe it as was his mind to
misinterpret its meaning. He registered a vow to set a watch on this
solicitous cousin who offered so readily to bear his gonfalon.
“I felicitate you, at least,” said Francesco gravely, “upon the wisdom
of that step. Had I known of it I had not troubled you with other
proposals for the safety of your State. But, may I ask you, Gian
Maria, what influences led you to a course which, hitherto, you have so
obstinately refused to follow?”
The Duke shrugged his shoulders.
“They plagued me so,” he lamented, with a grimace, “that in the end I
consented. I could withstand Lodi and the others, but when my mother
joined them with her prayers--I should say, her commands--and pointed
out again my peril to me, I gave way. After all a man must wed. And
since in my station he need not let his marriage weigh too much upon
him, I resolved on it for the sake of security and peace.”
Since it was the salvation of Babbiano that he aimed at, the Count of
Aquila should have rejoiced at Gian Maria's wise resolve, and no other
consideration should have tempered so encompassing a thing as that joy
of his should have been. Yet, when later he left his cousin's presence,
the only feeling that he carried with him was a deep and bitter
resentment against the Fate that willed such things, blent with a
sorrowing pity for the girl that was to wed his cousin and a growing
hatred for the cousin who made him pity her.
CHAPTER VI. THE AMOROUS DUKE
From a window of the Palace of Babbiano the Lord of Aquila watched the
amazing bustle in the courtyard below, and at his side stood Fanfulla
degli Arcipreti, whom he had summoned from Perugia with assurances that,
Masuccio being dead, no peril now menaced him.
It was a week after that interview at which Gian Maria had made known
his intentions to his cousin, and his Highness was now upon the point
of setting out for Urbino, to perform the comedy of wooing the Lady
Valentina. This was the explanation of that scurrying of servitors and
pages, that parading of men-at-arms, and that stamping of horses and
mules in the quadrangle below. Francesco watched the scene with a smile
of some bitterness, his companion with one of supreme satisfaction.
“Praised be Heaven for having brought his Highness at last to a sense of
his duty,” remarked the courtier.
“It has often happened to me,” said Francesco, disregarding his
companion's words, “to malign the Fates for having brought me into the
world a count. But in the future I shall give them thanks, for I see how
much worse it might have been--I might have been born a prince, with
a duchy to rule over. I might have been as that poor man, my cousin, a
creature whose life is all pomp and no real dignity, all merrymaking
and no real mirth--loveless, isolated and vain.”
“But,” cried the amazed Fanfulla, “assuredly there are compensations?”
“You see that bustle. You know what it portends. What compensation can
there be for that?”
“It is a question you should be the last to ask, my lord. You have seen
the niece of Guidobaldo, and having seen her, can you still ask what
compensation does this marriage offer Gian Maria?”
“Do you, then, not understand?” returned Aquila, with a wan smile. “Do
you not see the tragedy of it? Is it nothing that two States, having
found that this marriage would be mutually advantageous, have determined
that it shall take place? That meanwhile the chief actors--the
victims, I might almost call them--have no opportunity of selecting for
themselves. Gian Maria goes about it resignedly. He will tell you that
he has always known that some day he must wed and do his best to beget
a son. He held out long enough against this alliance, but now that
necessity is driving him at last, he goes about it much as he would go
about any other State affair--a coronation, a banquet, or a ball. Can
you wonder now that I would not accept the throne of Babbiano when
it was offered me? I tell you, Fanfulla, that were I at present in my
cousin's shoes, I would cast crown and purple at whomsoever had a fancy
for them ere they crushed the life out of me and left me a poor puppet.
Sooner than endure that hollow mockery of a life I would become a
peasant or a vassal; I would delve the earth and lead a humble life, but
lead it in my own way, and thank God for the freedom of it; choose my
own comrades; live as I list, where I list; love as I list, where I
list, and die when God pleases with the knowledge that my life had not
been altogether barren. And that poor girl, Fanfulla! Think of her. She
is to be joined in loveless union to such a gross, unfeeling clod as
Gian Maria. Have you no pity for her?”
Fanfulla sighed, his brow clouded.
“I am not so dull but that I can see why you should reason thus to-day,”
said he. “These thoughts have come to you since you have seen her.”
Franceseo sighed deeply.
“Who knows?” he made answer wistfully. “In the few moments that we
talked together, in the little time that I beheld her, it may be that
she dealt me a wound far deeper than the one to which she so mercifully
sought to minister.”
Now for all that in what the Lord of Aquila said touching the projected
union there was a deal of justice, yet when he asserted that the chief
actors were to have no opportunity of selecting for themselves, he said
too much. That opportunity they were to have. It occurred three days
later at Urbino, when the Duke and Valentina were brought together
at the banquet of welcome given by Guidobaldo to his intended
nephew-in-law. The sight of her resplendent beauty came as a joyful
shock to Gian Maria, and filled him with as much impatience to possess
her as did his own gross ugliness render him offensive in her eyes.
Averse had she been to this wedding from the moment that it had been
broached to her. The sight of Gian Maria completed her loathing of the
part assigned her, and in her heart she registered a vow that sooner
than become the Duchess of Babbiano, she would return to her Convent of
Santa Sofia and take the veil.
Gian Maria sat beside her at the banquet, and in the intervals of
eating--which absorbed him mightily--he whispered compliments at which
she shuddered and turned pale. The more strenuously did he strive to
please, in his gross and clumsy fashion, the more did he succeed
in repelling and disgusting her, until, in the end, with all his
fatuousness, he came to deem her oddly cold. Of this, anon, he made
complaint to that magnificent prince, her uncle. But Guidobaldo scoffed
at his qualms.
“Do you account my niece a peasant girl?” he asked. “Would you have her
smirk and squirm at every piece of flattery you utter? So that she weds
your Highness what shall the rest signify?”
“I would she loved me a little,” complained Gian Maria foolishly.
Guidobaldo looked him over with an eye that smiled inscrutably, and it
may have crossed his mind that this coarse, white-faced Duke was too
ambitious.
“I doubt not that she will,” he answered, in tones as inscrutable as
his glance. “So that you woo with grace and ardour, what woman could
withstand your Highness? Be not put off by such modesty as becomes a
maid.”
Those words of Guidobaldo's breathed new courage into him. Nor ever
after could he think that her coldness was other than a cloak, a sort of
maidenly garment behind which modesty bade her conceal the inclinations
of her heart. Reasoning thus, and having in support of it his wondrous
fatuity, it so befell that the more she shunned and avoided him, the
more did he gather conviction of the intensity of her affection; the
more loathing she betrayed, the more proof did it afford him of the
consuming quality of her passion. In the end, he went even so far as to
applaud and esteem in her this very maidenly conduct.
There were hunting-parties, hawking-parties, water-parties, banquets,
comedies, balls, and revels of every description, and for a week all
went well at Urbino. Then, as suddenly as if a cannon had been fired
upon the Palace, the festivities were interrupted. The news that an
envoy of Caesar Borgia's was at Babbiano with a message from his master
came like a cold douche upon Gian Maria. It was borne to him in a letter
from Fabrizio da Lodi, imploring his immediate return to treat with this
plenipotentiary of Valentino's.
No longer did he disregard the peril that threatened him from the
all-conquering Borgia, no longer deem exaggerated by his advisers the
cause for fear. This sudden presence of Valentino's messenger, coming,