You behold Messer Bellarion treading the giddy slope of high and mysterious adventure, fortuitously launched upon a course whose end he was very far from discerning, but which most certainly was not the University of Pavia, the pursuit of Greek studies, and the recovery of an unblemished faith.
Lorenzaccio da Trino has more to answer for than the acts of brigandage for which the law pursued him.
In the gloom of that September night, after the moon had set, Bellarion, in raiment which already might be taken to symbolise the altered aim and purpose of his life, whereof himself, poor straw upon the winds of Fate, he was as yet unconscious, slipped from a gateway that was no longer guarded and directed his steps towards the heart of the town.
Coming in the Cathedral Square upon a company of the watch, going the rounds with pikes and lanterns, he staggered a little in his gait and broke raucously into song to give himself the air of a belated, carefree reveller. Knowing no bawdy worldly songs proper to a man of his apparent circumstances and condition, he broke into a Gregorian chant, which he rendered in anything but the unisonous manner proper to that form of plain-song. The watch deeming him, as he computed that they would, an impudent parodist, warned him against disturbing the peace of the night, and asked who he was, whence he came, and whither he went.
Unprepared for these questions, he rose magnificently and rather incoherently to the occasion.
He knew that there was a house of Augustinian fathers in Casale. And boldly he stated that he had been supping there. Thus launched, his invention soared. The Prior's brother was married to his sister, and he had borne messages to the Prior from that same brother who dwelt in Cigliano, and was, like himself, a subject of the Duke of Savoy. He was lodged with his cousin-german, the Lord Barbaresco, whose house, having arrived but that day in Casale, he was experiencing some difficulty in finding.
'Body of Bacchus! Is that the reason?' quoth the leader of the patrol to the infinite amusement of his men.
They were as convinced as he himself was appalled by the fluency of his lying. Perhaps from that sympathy which men in his supposed state so commonly command, perhaps from the hope of reward, they volunteered to escort him to his cousin's dwelling.
To the narrow street behind the cathedral of which the Lord Barbaresco's was the most imposing house, they now conducted him, and loudly they battered on his lordship's iron-studded door, until from a window overhead a quavering voice desired to know who knocked.
'His lordship's cousin returning home,' replied the officer of the watch. 'Make haste to open.'
There was a mutter of voices in the dark overhead, and Bellarion awaited fearfully the repudiation that he knew must come.
'What cousin?' roared another, deeper voice. 'I am expecting no cousin at this hour.'
'He is angry with me,' Bellarion explained. 'I had promised to return to sup with him.' He threw back his head, called up into the night in a voice momentarily clear. 'Although the hour is late, I pray you, cousin, do not leave me standing here. Admit me and all, all, shall be explained.' He stressed the verb, which for the Lord Barbaresco should have one meaning and for the too pertinacious watch another. And then he added certain mystic words to clinch the matter: 'And bring a ducat to reward these good fellows. I have promised them a ducat, and have upon me only half a ducat. The half of a ducat,' he repeated, as if with drunken insistence. 'And what is half a ducat? No more than a broken coin.'
The soldiers grinned at his drunken whimsicality. There was a long moment's pause. Then the deep voice above said, 'Wait!' and a casement slammed.
Soon came a rasping of bolts, and the heavy door swung inwards, revealing a stout man in a purple bedgown, who shaded a candle-flame with his hand. The light was thrown up into a red fleshly face that was boldly humorous, with a hooked nose and alert blue eyes under arched black brows.
Bellarion was quick to supply the cue. 'Dear cousin, my excuses. I should have returned sooner. These good fellows have been most kind to me in this strange town.'
Standing a little in front of the unsuspecting members of the watch, he met the Lord Barbaresco's searching glance by a grimace of warning.
'Give them the ducat for their pains, cousin, and let them go with God.'
His lordship came prepared, it seemed.
'I thank you, sir,' he said to the antient, 'for your care of my cousin, a stranger here.' And he dropped a gold coin into the readily projected palm. He stood aside, his hand upon the edge of the door. 'Come you in, cousin.'
But once alone with his enforced visitor in the stone passage, dimly lighted by that single candle, his lordship's manner changed.
'Who the devil are you, and what the devil do you seek?'
Bellarion showed his fine teeth in a broad smile, all sign of his intoxication vanished. 'If you had not already answered those questions for yourself, you would neither have admitted me nor parted with your ducat, sir. I am what you were quick to suppose me. To the watch, I am your cousin, lodging with you on a visit to Casale. Lest you should repudiate me, I mentioned the half-ducat as a password.'
'It was resourceful of you,' Barbaresco grunted. 'Who sent you?'
'Lord! The unnecessary questions that you ask! Why, the Lady Valeria, of course. Behold!' Under the eyes of Messer Barbaresco he flashed the broken half of a ducat.
His lordship took the golden fragment, and holding it near the candle-flame read the half of the date inscribed upon it, then returned it to Bellarion, inviting him at last to come above-stairs.
They went up, Barbaresco leading, to a long, low-ceilinged chamber of the mezzanine, the walls of which were hung with soiled and shabby tapestries, the floor of which had been unswept for weeks. His lordship lighted a cluster of candles in a leaden candle-branch, and their golden light further revealed the bareness of the place, its sparse and hard-worn furnishings heavy with dust. He drew an armchair to the table where writing-implements and scattered papers made an untidy litter. He waved his guest to a seat, and asked his name.
'Bellarion.'
'I never heard of the family.'
'I never heard of it myself. But that's no matter. It's a name that serves as well as another.'
'Ah!' Barbaresco accepted the name as assumed. He brushed the matter aside by a gesture. 'Your message?'
'I bring no message. I come for one. Her highness is distracted by the lack of news from you, and by the fact that, although she has waited daily for a fortnight, in all that time Messer Giuffredo has not been near her.'
Bellarion was still far from surmising who this Messer Giuffredo might be or what. But he knew that mention of the name must confirm him in Barbaresco's eyes, and perhaps lead to a discovery touching the identity of its owner. Because of the interest which the tawny-headed, sombre-eyed princess inspired in him, Bellarion was resolved to go beyond the precise extent of his mission as defined by her.
'Giuffre took fright. A weak-stomached knave. He fancied himself observed when last he came from the palace garden, and nothing would induce him to go again.'
So that whatever the intrigue, Bellarion now perceived, it was not amorous. Giuffredo clearly was a messenger and nothing more. Barbaresco himself, with his corpulence and his fifty years, or so, was incredible as a lover.
'Could not another have been sent in his place?'
'A messenger, my friend, is not readily found. Besides, nothing has transpired in the last two weeks of which it was urgently necessary to inform her highness.'
'Surely, it was urgently necessary to inform her highness of just that, so as to allay her natural anxiety?'
Leaning back in his chair, his plump hands, which were red like all the rest of him that was visible, grasping the ends of its arms, the gentleman of Casale pondered Bellarion gravely.
'You assume a deal of authority, young sir. Who and what are you to be so deeply in the confidence of her highness?'
Bellarion was prepared for the question. 'I am an amanuensis of the palace, whose duties happen to have brought me closely into touch with the Princess.'
It was a bold lie, but one which he could support at least and at need by proofs of scholarliness.
Barbaresco nodded slowly.
'And your precise interest in her highness?'
Bellarion's smile was a little deprecating.
'Now, what should you suppose it?'
'I am not supposing. I am asking.'
'Shall we say ... the desire to serve her?' and Bellarion's smile became at once vague and eloquent. This, taken in conjunction with his reticence, might seem to imply a romantic attachment. Barbaresco, however, translated it otherwise.
'You have ambitions! So. That is as it should be. Interest is ever the best spur to endeavour.'
And he, too, now smiled; a smile so oily and cynical that Bellarion set him down at once for a man without ideals, and mistrusted him from that moment. But he was strategist enough to conceal it, even to reflect something of that same cynicism in his own expression, so that Barbaresco, believing him a kindred spirit, should expand the more freely. And meanwhile he drew a bow at a venture.
'That which her highness looks to me to obtain is some explanation of your ... inaction.'
He chose the most non-committal word; but it roused the Lord Barbaresco almost to anger.
'Inaction!' He choked, and his plethoric countenance deepened to purple. To prove the injustice of the charge, he urged his past activities of which he thus rendered an account. Luring him thence, by skilful question, assertion, and contradiction, along the apparent path of argument upon matters of which he must assume the young man already fully informed, gradually Bellarion drew from him a full disclosure of what was afoot. He learnt also a good deal of history of which hitherto he had been in ignorance, and he increased considerably his not very elevating acquaintance with the ways of men.
It was an evil enough thing which the Princess Valeria had set herself to combat with the assistance of some dispossessed Guelphic gentlemen of Montferrat, the chief of whom was this Lord Barbaresco; and it magnified her in the eyes of Bellarion that she should evince the high courage necessary for the combat.
The extensive and powerful State of Montferrat was ruled at this time by the Marquis Theodore as regent during the minority of his nephew Gian Giacomo, son of that great Ottone who had been slain in the Neapolitan wars against the House of Brunswick.
These rulers of Montferrat, from Guglielmo, the great crusader, onwards, had ever been a warlike race, and Montferrat itself a school of arms. Nor had their proud belligerent nature been diluted by the blood of the Paleologi when on the death without male issue of Giovanni the Just a hundred years before, these dominions had passed to Theodore I, the younger son of Giovanni's sister Violante, who was married to the Emperor of the East, Andronicus Comnenus Paleologus.
The present Regent Theodore, however, combined with the soldierly character proper to his house certain qualities of craft and intrigue rarely found in knightly natures. The fact is, the Marquis Theodore had been ill-schooled. He had been reared at the splendid court of his cousin the Duke of Milan, that Gian Galeazzo whom Francesco da Carrara had dubbed 'the Great Viper,' in allusion as much to the man's nature as to the colubrine emblem of his house. Theodore had observed and no doubt admired the subtle methods by which Gian Galeazzo went to work against those whom he would destroy. If he lacked the godlike power of rendering them mad, at least he possessed the devilish craft of rendering them by their own acts detestable, so that in the end it was their own kin or their own subjects who pulled them down.
Witness the manner in which he had so poisoned the mind of Alberto of Este as to goad him into the brutal murder of almost all his relatives. It was his aim thus to render him odious to his Ferrarese subjects that by his extinction Ferrara might ultimately come under the crown of Milan. Witness how he forged love letters, which he pretended had passed between the wife and the secretary of his dear friend Francesco Gonzaga, Lord of Mantua, whereby he infuriated Gonzaga into murdering that innocent lady—who was Galeazzo's own cousin and sister-in-law—and tearing the secretary limb from limb upon the rack, so that Mantua rose against this human wolf who governed there. Witness all those other Lombard princes whom by fraud and misrepresentation, ever in the guise of a solicitous and loving friend, he lured into crimes which utterly discredited them with their subjects. This was an easier and less costly method of conquest than the equipping of great armies, and also it was more effective, because an invader who imposes himself by force can never hope to be so secure or esteemed as one whom the people have invited to become their ruler.
All this the Marquis Theodore had observed and marked, and he had seen Gian Galeazzo constantly widening his dominions by these means, ever increasing in power and consequence until in the end he certainly would have made of all Northern Italy a kingdom for his footstool had not the plague pursued him into the Castle of Melegnano, where he had shut himself up to avoid it, and there slain him in the year of grace 1402.
Trained in that school, the Marquis Theodore had observed and understood many things that would have remained hidden from an intelligence less acute.
He understood, for instance, that to rise by the pleasure of the people is the only way of reaching stable eminence, and that to accomplish this, noble qualities must be exhibited. For whilst men singly may be swayed by vicious appeals, collectively they will respond only to appeals of virtue.
Upon this elementary truth, according to Barbaresco, the Marquis Theodore was founding the dark policy which, from a merely temporary regent during the minority of his nephew, should render him the absolute sovereign of Montferrat. By the lavish display of public and private virtues, by affability towards great and humble, by endowments of beneficences, by the careful tempering of justice with mercy where this was publicly desired, he was rendering himself beloved and respected throughout the state. And step by step with this he was secretly labouring to procure contempt for his nephew, to whom in the ordinary course of events he would presently be compelled to relinquish the reins of government.
Nature, unfortunately, had rendered the boy weak. It was a weakness which training could mend as easily as increase. But to increase it were directed all the efforts which Theodore took care should be applied. Corsario the tutor, a Milanese, was a venal scoundrel, unhealthily ambitious. He kept the boy ignorant of all those arts that mature and grace the intellect, and confined instruction to matters calculated to corrupt his mind, his nature, and his morals. Castruccio, Lord of Fenestrella, the boy's first gentleman-in-waiting, was a vicious and depraved Savoyard, who had gamed away his patrimony almost before he had entered upon the enjoyment of it. It was easy to perceive the purpose for which the Regent had made him the boy's constant and intimate companion.
Here Bellarion, with that assumption of knowledge which had served to draw Barbaresco into explanations, ventured to interpose a doubt. 'In that matter, I am persuaded that the Regent overreaches himself. The people know that he permits Castruccio to remain; and when they settle accounts with Castruccio they will also present a reckoning to the Regent.'
Barbaresco laughed the argument to scorn.
'Either you do not realise Theodore's cunning, or you are insufficiently observant. Have not representations been made already to the Regent that Castruccio is no fit companion for the future Lord of Montferrat, or indeed for any boy? It merely enables Messer Theodore to parade his own paternal virtues, his gentleness of character, the boy's wilfulness, and the fact that he is, after all, no more than Regent of Montferrat. He would dismiss, he protests, Messer Castruccio, but the Prince is so devoted and attached to him that he would never be forgiven. And, after all, is that not true?'
'Aye, I suppose it is,' Bellarion confessed.
Barbaresco was impatient of his dullness. 'Of course it is. This Castruccio has known how to conquer the boy's love and wonder, by pretended qualities that fire youth's imagination. The whole world could hardly have yielded a better tool for the Regent or a worse companion for the little Prince.'
Thus were the aims of the Marquis Theodore revealed to Bellarion, and the justifications for the movement that was afoot to thwart him. Of this movement for the salvation of her brother, the Princess Valeria was the heart and Barbaresco the brain. Its object was to overthrow the Marquis Theodore and place the government in the hands of a council of regency during the remainder of Gian Giacomo's minority. Of this council Barbaresco assumed that he would be the president.
Sorrowfully Bellarion expressed a doubt.
'The mischief is that the Marquis Theodore is already so well established in the respect and affection of the people.'
Barbaresco reared his head and threw out his chest. 'Heaven will befriend a cause so righteous.'
'My doubt concerns not the supernatural, but the natural means at our command.'
It was a sobering reminder. Barbaresco left the transcendental and attempted to be practical. Also a subtle change was observable in his manner. He was no longer glibly frank. He became reserved and vague. They were going to work, he said, by laying bare the Regent's true policy. Already they had at least a dozen nobles on their side, and these were labouring to diffuse the truth. Once it were sufficiently diffused the rest would follow as inevitably as water runs downhill.
And this assurance was all the message that Bellarion was invited to take back to the Princess. But Bellarion was determined to probe deeper.
'That, sir, adds nothing to what the Lady Valeria already knows. It cannot allay the anxiety in which she waits. She requires something more definite.'
Barbaresco was annoyed. Her highness should learn patience, and should learn to trust them. But Bellarion was so calmly insistent that at last Barbaresco angrily promised to summon his chief associates on the morrow, so that Bellarion might seek from them the further details he desired on the Lady Valeria's behalf.
Content, Bellarion begged a bed for the night, and was conducted to a mean, poverty-stricken chamber in that great empty house. On a hard and unclean couch he lay pondering the sad story of a wicked regent, a foolish boy, and a great-hearted lady, who, too finely reckless to count the cost of the ill-founded if noble enterprise to which she gave her countenance, would probably end by destroying herself together with her empty brother.