There are men to whom death has brought a glory that would never have been theirs in life. An instance of that is afforded by the history of Bellarion at this stage.
Honest, loyal, and incapable of jealousy or other kindred meanness, Facino must have given Bellarion a due measure of credit for the victory over Buonterzo if Bellarion had ridden back to Milan beside him. But that he would have given him, as he did, a credit so full as to make the achievement entirely Bellarion's, could hardly be expected of human nature or of Facino's. A living man so extolled would completely have eclipsed the worth of Facino himself; besides which to the man who in achieving lays down his life, we can afford to be more generous—because it is less costly—than to the man who survives his achievement.
Never, perhaps, in its entire history had the Ambrosian city been moved to such a delirium of joy as that in which it now hailed the return of the victorious condottiero who had put an end to the grim menace overhanging a people already distracted by internal feuds.
News of the victory had preceded Facino, who reached Milan ahead of his army two days after Buonterzo's rout.
It had uplifted the hearts of all, from the meanest scavenger to the Duke, himself. And yet the first words Gian Maria addressed to Facino in the audience chamber of the Broletto, before the assembled court, were words of censure.
'You return with the work half done. You should have pursued Buonterzo to Parma and invested the city. This was your chance to restore it to the crown of Milan. My father would have demanded a stern account of you for this failure to garner the fruits of victory.'
Facino flushed to the temples. His jaw was thrust forward as he looked the Duke boldly and scathingly between the eyes.
'Your father, Lord Prince, would have been beside me on the battle-field to direct the operations that were to preserve his crown. Had your highness followed his illustrious example there would be no occasion now for a reproach that must recoil upon yourself. It would better become your highness to return thanks for a victory purchased at great sacrifice.'
The goggle eyes looked at him balefully until their glance faltered as usual under the dominance of the condottiero's will, the dominance which Gian Maria so bitterly resented. Ungracefully the slender yet awkward body sprawled in the great gilded chair, red leg thrown over white one.
It was della Torre, tall and dark at his master's side, who came to the Duke's assistance. 'You are a bold man, Lord Count, so to address your prince.'
'Bold, aye!' growled the Duke, encouraged by that support. 'Body of God! Bold to recklessness. One of these days ...' He broke off, the coarse lips curling in a sneer. 'But you spoke of sacrifices?' The cunning that lighted his brutishness fastened upon that. It boded, he hoped, a tale of losses that should dim the lustre of this popular idol's achievement.
Facino rendered his accounts, and it was then that he proclaimed Bellarion's part; he related how Bellarion's wit had devised the whole plan which had reversed the positions on the Trebbia, and he spoke sorrowfully of how Bellarion and his hundred Swiss had laid down their lives to make Facino's victory certain.
'I commend his memory to your highness and to the people of Milan.'
If the narrative did not deeply move Gian Maria, at least it moved the courtiers present, and more deeply still the people of Milan when it reached them later.
The outcome was that after a Te Deum for the victory, the city put on mourning for the martyred hero to whom the victory was due; and Facino commanded a Requiem to be sung in Saint Ambrose for this Salvator Patriæ, whose name, unknown yesterday, was by now on every man's lips. His origin, rearing, and personal endowments were the sole subjects of discussion. The tale of the dogs was recalled by the few who had ever heard of it and now widely diffused as an instance of miraculous powers which disposed men almost to canonise Bellarion.
Meanwhile, however, Facino returning exacerbated from that audience was confronted by his lady, white-faced and distraught.
'You sent him to his death!' was the furious accusation with which she greeted him.
He checked aghast both at the words and the tone. 'I sent him to his death!'
'You knew to what you exposed him when you sent him to hold that ford.'
'I did not send him. Himself he desired to go; himself proposed it.'
'A boy who did not know the risk he ran!'
The memory of the protest she had made against Bellarion's going rose suddenly invested with new meaning. Roughly, violently, he caught her by the wrist. His face suddenly inflamed was close to her own, the veins of his brow standing out like cords.
'A boy, you say. Was that what you found him, lady?'
Scared, but defiant, she asked him: 'What else?'
'What else? Your concern suggests that you discovered he's a man. What was Bellarion to you?'
For once he so terrified her that every sense but that of self-preservation abandoned her on the instant.
'To me?' she faltered. 'To me?'
'Aye, to you. Answer me.' There was death in his voice, and in the brutal crushing grip upon her wrist.
'What should he have been, Facino?' She was almost whimpering. 'What lewdness are you dreaming?'
'I am dreaming nothing, madam. I am asking.'
White-lipped she answered him. 'He was as a son to me.' In her affright she fell to weeping, yet could be glad of the ready tears that helped her to play the part so suddenly assumed. 'I have no child of my own. And so I took him to my empty mother's breast.'
The plaint, the veiled reproach, overlaid the preposterous falsehood. After all, if she was not old enough to be Bellarion's mother, at least she was his senior by ten years.
Facino loosed his grip, and fell back, a little abashed and ashamed.
'What else could you have supposed him to me?' she was complaining. 'Not ... not, surely, that I had taken him for my lover?'
'No,' he lied lamely. 'I was not suspecting that.'
'What then?' she insisted, playing out her part.
He stood looking at her with feverish eyes. 'I don't know,' he cried out at last. 'You distract me, Bice!' and he stamped out.
But the suspicion was as a poison that had entered his veins, and it was a moody, silent Facino who sat beside his lady at the State supper given on the following night in the old Broletto Palace. It was a banquet of welcome to the Regent of Montferrat, his nephew the Marquis Gian Giacomo, and his niece the Princess Valeria, whose visit was the result of certain recent machinations on the part of Gabriello Maria.
Gabriello Maria had lately been exercised by the fundamental weakness of Gian Maria's position, and he feared lest the victor in the conflict between Facino and Buonterzo might, in either case, become a menace to the Duchy. No less was he exercised by the ascendancy which was being obtained in Milan by the Guelphs under della Torre, an ascendancy so great that already there were rumours of a possible marriage between the Duke and the daughter of Malatesta of Rimini, who was regarded as the leader of the Guelphic party in Italy. Now Gabriello, if weak and amiable, was at least sincere in his desire to serve his brother as in his desire to make secure his own position as ducal governor. For himself and his brother he could see nothing but ultimate disaster from too great a Guelphic ascendancy.
Therefore, had he proposed an alliance between Gian Maria and his father's old ally and friend, the Ghibelline Prince of Montferrat. Gian Maria's jealous fear of Facino's popularity had favourably disposed him, and letters had been sent to Aliprandi, the Orator of Milan at Casale.
Theodore, on his side, anxious to restore to Montferrat the cities of Vercelli and Alessandria which had been wrested from it by the all-conquering Gian Galeazzo, and having also an eye upon the lordship of Genoa, once an appanage of the crown of Montferrat, had conceived that the restoration of the former should be a condition of the treaty of alliance which might ultimately lead to the reconquest of the latter.
Accordingly he had made haste, in response, to come in person to Milan that he might settle the terms of the treaty with the Duke. With him he had brought his niece and the nephew on whose behalf he ruled, who were included in Gabriello's invitation. Gabriello's aim in this last detail was to avert the threatened Malatesta marriage. A marriage between the Duke and the Princess of Montferrat might be made by Theodore an absolute condition of that same treaty, if his ambition for his niece were properly fired.
At the banquet that night, Gabriello watched his brother, who sat with Theodore on his right and the Princess Valeria on his left, for signs from which he might calculate the chances of bringing the secret part of his scheme to a successful issue. And signs were not wanting to encourage him. It was mainly to the Princess that Gian Maria addressed himself. His glance devoured the white beauty of her face with its crown of red-gold hair; his pale goggle eyes leered into the depths of her own which were so dark and inscrutable, and he discoursed the while, loud and almost incessantly, in an obvious desire to dazzle and to please.
And perhaps because the lady remained unmoved, serenely calm, a little absent almost, and seldom condescending even to smile at his gross sallies, he was piqued into greater efforts for her entertainment, until at last he blundered upon a topic which obviously commanded her attention. It was the topic of the hour.
'There sits Facino Cane, Count of Biandrate,' he informed her. 'That square-faced fellow yonder, beside the dark lady who is his countess. An overrated upstart, all puffed up with pride in an achievement not his own.'
The phrase drew the attention of the Marquis Theodore.
'But if not his own, whose, then, the achievement, highness?'
'Why a fledgling's, one whom he claims for his adoptive son.' The adjective was stressed with sarcasm. 'A fellow named Bellarion.'
'Bellarion, eh?' The Regent betrayed interest. So, too did the Princess. For the first time she faced her odious host. Meanwhile Gian Maria ran on, his loud voice audible even to Facino, as he no doubt intended.
'The truth is that by his rashness Facino was all but outfought, when this Bellarion showed him a trick by which he might turn the tables on Buonterzo.'
'A trick?' said she, in an odd voice, and Gian Maria, overjoyed to have won at last her attention, related in detail the strategy by which Facino's victory had been snatched.
'A trick, as your highness said,' was her comment. 'Not a deed of arms in which there was a cause for pride.'
Gian Maria stared at her in surprise, whilst Theodore laughed aloud.
'My niece is romantic. She reads the poets, and from them conceives of war as a joyous joust, or a game of chivalry, with equal chances and a straightforward encounter.'
'Why, then,' laughed the Duke, 'the tale should please you, madonna, of how with a hundred men this rascal held the ford against Buonterzo's army for as long as the trick's success demanded.'
'He did that?' she asked, incredulous.
'He did more. He laid down his life in doing it. He and his hundred were massacred in cold blood. That is why on Wednesday, at Saint Ambrose, a Requiem Mass is to be sung for him who in the eyes of my people deserves a place in the Calendar beside Saint George.'
His aim in this high praise was less to bestow laurels upon Bellarion than to strip them from Facino. 'And I am not sure that the people are wrong. Vox populi, vox Dei. This Bellarion was oddly gifted, oddly guarded.' In illustration of this he passed on to relate that incident which had come to be known by then in Milan as 'The Miracle of the Dogs.' He told the tale without any shame at the part he had played, without any apparent sense that to hunt human beings with hounds was other than a proper sport for a prince.
As she listened, she was conscious only of horror of this monstrous boy, so that the flesh of her arm shrank under the touch of his short, broad-jewelled paw, from which the finger-nails had been all but entirely gnawed. Anon, however, in the solitude of the handsome chamber assigned to her, she came to recall and weigh the things the Duke had said.
This Bellarion had laid down his life in the selfless service of adoptive father and country, like a hero and a martyr. She could understand that in one of whom her knowledge was what it was of Bellarion as little as she could understand the miracle of the dogs.