In the vast park of Pavia the trees stood leafless and black against the white shroud of snow that covered the chilled earth. The river Ticino gurgled and swirled about the hundred granite pillars which carried the great roofed bridge, five hundred feet in length, spanning its grey and turgid waters. Beyond this, Pavia the Learned reared above white roofs her hundred snow-capped towers to the grey December sky, and beyond the city, isolated, within the girdle of a moat that was both wide and deep, stood the massive square castle, pink as coral, strong as iron, at once impregnable fortress and unrivalled palace, one of the great monuments of Viscontian power and splendour, described by Petrarch as the princeliest pile in Italy.
The pride of the place was the library, a spacious square chamber in one of the rectangular towers that rose at each of the four corners of the castle. The floor was of coloured mosaics, figuring birds and beasts, the ceiling of ultramarine star-flecked in gold, and along the walls was ranged a collection of some nine hundred manuscript parchment volumes bound in velvet and damask, or in gold and silver brocades. Their contents contained all that was known of theology, astrology, medicine, music, geometry, rhetoric, and the other sciences. This room was the favourite haunt of the lonely, morose, and studious boy, the great Gian Galeazzo's younger son, Filippo Maria Visconti, Count of Pavia.
He sat there now, by the log fire that hissed and spluttered and flamed on the cavernous hearth, diffusing warmth and a fragrance of pine throughout the chamber. And with him at chess sat the Lord Bellarion Cane, Count of Gavi, one of the new-found friends who had invaded his loneliness, and broken through the savage shyness which solitude and friendlessness had set about him like a shell.
The others, the dark and handsome Countess of Biandrate, the fair and now almost ethereal Princess of Montferrat, and that sturdier counterpart of herself, her brother, were in the background by one of the two-light windows with trefoil arches springing from slender monials.
The Princess was bending low over a frame, embroidering in red and gold and blue an altar-cloth for San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro. The Countess was yawning over a beautifully illuminated copy of Petrarch's 'Trionfo d'Amore.' The boy sat idle and listless between them, watching his sister's white tapering fingers as they flashed to and fro.
Presently he rose, sauntered across to the players, drew up a stool, and sat down to watch the game over which they brooded silently.
A crutch lay beside Bellarion, and his right leg was thrust out stiff and unbending, to explain why he sat here on this day of late December playing chess, whilst the campaign against Malatesta continued to rage in the hills of Bergamo. He was suffering the penalty of the pioneer. Having already demonstrated to his contemporaries that infantry, when properly organised and manœuvred, can hold its own in the field against cavalry, he had been turning his attention to artillery. Two months ago he had mounted a park of guns under the walls of Bergamo with the intention of breaching them. But at the outset of his operations a bombard had burst, killing two of his bombardiers and breaking his thigh, thus proving Facino's contention that artillery was a danger only to those who employed it.
The physician Mombelli, who still continued in Facino's train, had set the bone, whereafter Bellarion had been carefully packed into a mule litter, and by roads, which torrential rains had reduced to quagmires, he had been despatched to Pavia to get himself mended. His removal from the army was regretted by everybody with two exceptions: Carmagnola, glad to be relieved of a brother captain by comparison with whose military methods his own were constantly suffering in the general esteem; and Filippo Maria, when he discovered in Bellarion a chess-player who was not only his equal but his master, and who in other ways won the esteem of that very friendless boy. The Princess Valeria was dismayed that this man, who out of unconquerable prejudice she continued to scorn and mistrust, should become for a season her fellow inquiline. And it was in vain that Gian Giacomo, who in the course of his reformation had come to conceive a certain regard for Bellarion, sought to combat his sister's deep-rooted prejudice.
When he insisted that it was by Bellarion's contriving that he had been removed from his uncle's control, she had been moved to vehement scorn of his credulity.
'That is what the trickster would have us think. He no more than carried out the orders of the Count of Biandrate. His whole life bears witness to his false nature.'
'Nay, now, Valeria, nay. You'll not deny that he is what all Italy now proclaims him: one of the greatest captains of his time.'
'And how has he made himself that? Is it by knightly qualities, by soldierly virtues? All the world knows that he prevails by guile and trickery.'
'You've been listening to Carmagnola,' said her brother. 'He would give an eye for Bellarion's skill.'
'You're but a boy,' she reminded him with some asperity.
'And Carmagnola, of course, is a handsome man.'
She crimsoned at the sly tone. On odd visits to Pavia, Carmagnola had been very attentive to the Princess, employing all a peacock's arts of self-display to dazzle her.
'He is an honest gentleman,' she countered hotly. 'It is better to trust an upright, honest soldier than a sly schemer whose falsehood has been proven to us.'
'If he schemes my ruin for my uncle's profit, he goes about it oddly, neglecting opportunities.'
She looked at him with compassion. 'Bellarion never aims where he looks. It is the world says that of him, not I.'
'And at what do you suspect that he is aiming now?'
Her deep eyes grew thoughtful. 'What if he serves our uncle to destroy us, only so that in the end he may destroy our uncle to his own advantage? What if he should aim at a throne?'
Gian Giacomo thought the notion fantastic, the fruit of too much ill-ordered brooding. He said so, laughing.
'If you had studied his methods, Giannino, you would not say that. See how he has wrought his own advancement. In four short years this son of nobody, without so much as a name of his own has become the Knight Bellarion, the Lord Bellarion of the Company of the White Dog, and now the Lord Count of Gavi holding the rich lands of Gavi in feud.'
One there was who might have told her things which would have corrected her judgment, and that was Facino's Countess. For the Lady Beatrice knew the truth of those events in Montferrat which were at the root of the Princess Valeria's bitter prejudice, of which also she was aware.
'You hate him very bitterly,' the Countess told her once when Bellarion had been the subject of their talk.
'Would not you, if you were in my place?'
And the Countess, looking at her with those long indolent eyes of hers, an inscrutable smile on her red lips, had answered with languorous slowness: 'In your place it is possible that I should.'
The tone and the smile had intrigued the Princess for many a day thereafter. But either she was too proud to ask what the Countess had meant, or else afraid.
When after some eight weeks abed, Bellarion had begun to hobble about the castle, and it was impossible for the Princess entirely to avoid him, she was careful never to be alone where he might so surprise her, using him when they met in the company of others with a distant, frigid courtesy, which is perhaps the most piercing of all hostility.
If it wounded Bellarion, he gave no sign. He was—and therein lay half the secret of his strength—a very patient man. He was content to wait for the day when by his contriving the reckoning should be presented to the Marquis Theodore, and she should know at last whose servant he really was. Meanwhile, he modelled his demeanour upon her own. He did not seek her company, nor indeed that of any in the castle save Filippo Maria, with whom he would spend long hours at chess or instructing him out of his own deep learning supported by one or another of the treatises in that fine library.
Until the coming of Bellarion, the Count of Pavia had believed himself a strong chess-player. Bellarion had made him realise that his knowledge of the game was elementary. Where against former opponents he had swept to easy triumphs, he now groaned and puffed and sweated over the board to lessen the ignominy of his inevitable defeats.
To-day, however, he was groaning less than usual. He had piled up a well-supported attack on Bellarion's flank, and for the first time in weeks—for these games had begun whilst Bellarion was still abed—he saw victory ahead. With a broad smile he brought up a bishop further to strengthen the mass of his attack. He saw his way to give check in three and checkmate in four moves.
Although only in his twentieth year, he was of a hog-like bulk. Of no more than middle height, he looked tall when seated, for all the length of him was in his flabby, paunchy body. His limbs were short and shapeless. His face was as round as the full moon and as pale. A great dewlap spread beneath his chin, and his neck behind hung in loose fat folds upon his collar, so that the back of his head, which was flat, seemed to slope inwards towards the crown. His short black hair was smooth and sleek as a velvet cap, and a fringe of it across his forehead descended almost to the heavy black eyebrows, thus masking the intellectual depth of the only noble feature of that ignoble countenance. Of his father all that he had inherited physically was the hooked, predatory nose. His mouth was coarsely shaped and its lines confirmed the impression of cruelty you gathered from the dark eyes which were small and lack-lustre as a snake's. And the impression was a true one, for the soul of this shy, morose young Prince was not without its share of that sadic cruelty which marked all the men of his race.
To meet the bishop's move, Bellarion advanced a knight. The Prince's laugh rang through the silent room. It was a shrill almost womanish laugh, and it was seldom heard. High-pitched, too, was the voice that followed.
'You but delay the inevitable, Bellarion,' he said, and took the knight.
But the move of the knight, which had appeared purely defensive to the Prince in his intentness upon his own attack, had served to uncover the file of Bellarion's queen. Supports had been previously and just as cunningly provided. Bellarion advanced his hand, a long beautiful hand upon which glowed a great carved sapphire set in brilliants—the blue and white that were his colours. Forth flashed his queen across the board.
'Checkmate, Lord Prince,' said Bellarion quietly, and sank back smiling into the brocaded chair.
Filippo Maria stared unbelieving at the board. The lines of his mouth drooped, and his great pendulous cheeks trembled. Almost he seemed on the point of tears.
'God rot you, Bellarion! Always, always is it the same! I plan and build and whilst you seem to do no more than defend, you are preparing a death-stroke in an unexpected quarter.' Between jest and earnest he added: 'You slippery rogue! Always you defeat me by a trick.'
The Princess Valeria looked up from her embroidery on the word. Bellarion caught the movement and the glance in his direction. He knew the thought behind, and it was that thought he answered.
'In the field, my opponents use the same word to decry me. But those who are with me applaud my skill.' He laughed. 'Truth is an elusive thing, highness, as Pontius Pilate knew. The aspect of a fact depends upon the angle from which you view it.'
Filippo Maria sat back, his great chin sunk to his breast, his podgy white hands gripping the arms of his chair, his humour sullen.
'I'll play no more to-day,' he said.
The Countess rose and crossed the room with a rustle of stiff brocade of black and gold.
'Let me remove the board,' she said. 'A vile, dull game. I wonder that you can waste such hours upon it.'
Filippo Maria raised his beady eyes. They kindled as they observed her, raking her generous yet supple lines from head to foot. It was not the first time that the watchful Bellarion had seen him look so at Facino's lady, nor the first time that he had seen her wantonly display herself to provoke that unmistakable regard. She bent now to the board, and Filippo's smouldering glance was upon the warm ivory beauty of her neck, and the swell of her breast revealed by the low-cut gown.
'It is human to despise what we do not understand,' Bellarion was answering her.
'You would defend the game, of course, since you excel in it. That is what you love, Bellarion; to excel; to wield mastery.'
'Do we not all? Do not you, yourself, madonna, glory in the power your beauty gives you?'
She looked at Filippo. Her heavy eyelids drooped. 'Behold him turned courtier, my lord. He perceives beauty in me.'
'He would be blind else,' said the fat youth, greatly daring. And the next moment in a reaction of shyness a mottled flush was staining his unhealthy pallor.
Lower drooped the lady's eyelids, until a line of black lashes lay upon her cheek.
'The game,' Gian Giacomo interposed, 'is a very proper one for princes. Messer Bellarion told me so.'
'He means, child,' Filippo answered him, 'that it teaches them a bitter moral: that whilst a State depends upon the Prince—the Prince himself is entirely dependent upon others, being capable in his own person of little more than his meanest pawn.'
'To teach that lesson to a despot,' said Bellarion, 'was the game invented by an Eastern philosopher.'
'And the most potent piece upon the board, as in the State, is the queen, symbolising woman.' Thus Filippo Maria, his eyes full upon the Countess again.
Bellarion laughed. 'Aye! He knew his world, that ancient Oriental!'
But he did not laugh as the days passed, and he observed the growing lechery in the beady eyes with which the Count of Pavia watched the Lady Beatrice's every movement, and the Lady Beatrice's provocative complacency under that vigilance.
One day, at last, coming upon the Countess alone in that library, Bellarion unmasked the batteries he had been preparing.
He hobbled across to the arched window by which she was seated, and leaning against its monial, looked out upon the desolate park. The snows had gone, washed away by rains, and since these had come a frost under which the ground lay now as grey and hard as iron.
'They will be feeling the rigours of the winter in the camp under Bergamo,' he said, moving, as ever, obliquely to the attack.
'They will so. Facino should have gone into winter quarters.'
'That would mean recommencing in the spring a job that is half done already.'
'Yet with his gout and the infirmities of age, it might prove wiser in the end.'
'Each age has its own penalties, madonna. It is not only the elderly among humanity who need compassion.'
'Wisdom oozes from you like sweat from another.' There was a tartness in her accents. 'If I were your biographer, Bellarion, I should write of you as the soldier-sage, or the philosopher-at-arms.'
Propped on his crutch and his one sound leg, Bellarion considered her, his head on one side, and fetched a sigh.
'You are very beautiful, madonna.'
She was startled. 'God save us!' she cried. 'Does the soldier-sage contain a mere man, after all?'
'Your mouth, madonna, is too sweetly formed for acids.'
'The choicest fruits, sir, have an alloy of sharpness. What else about me finds favour in your eyes?'
'In my eyes! My eyes, madonna, are circumspect. They do not prowl hungrily over another's pastures.'
She looked at him between anger and apprehension, and slowly a wave of scarlet came to stain her face and bosom, to tell him that she understood. He lowered himself carefully to a chair, thrusting out his damaged leg, to the knee-joint of which articulation was only just beginning to return.
'I was saying, madonna, that they will be feeling the rigours of the winter in the camp under Bergamo. There was a hard frost last night, and after the frost there will be rains under which the hills thereabouts will melt in mud.' He sighed again. 'You would regret, madonna, to exchange for that the ease and comfort of Pavia.'
'You have the fever again. I am not thinking of making that exchange.'
'No. I am thinking of it for you.'
'You! Saint Mary! And do you dispose of me?'
'It will be cold up there, madonna. But you need cooling. Coolness restores judgment. It will bring you back to a sense of duty to your lord.'
She came to her feet beside him, quivering with anger. Almost he thought her intention was to strike him.
'Have you come here to spy upon me?'
'Of course. Now you know why I broke my leg.'
She looked unutterable scorn. 'The Princess Valeria is right in her opinion of you, in her disdain of you.'
His eyes grew sad. 'If you were generous, madonna—nay, if you were merely honest—you would not embrace her opinions; you would correct them; for you have the knowledge that would suffice to do so. But you are not honest. If you were, there would be no need for me to speak now in defence of the honour of your absent lord.'
'Is it for you to say I am not honest?' There was now more of sorrow than indignation in her voice, and tears were gathering in her eyes, to deepen their sapphire hue. 'God knows I have been honest with you, Bellarion. It is this very honesty you abuse in your present misjudgment of me. Oh! Me miserable!' It was the cry of a wounded soul. She sank down again into her chair. Self-pity welled in her to drown all else. 'I am to be starved of everything. If ever woman was pitiable, I am that woman; and you, Bellarion, you of all living men that know my heart, can find for me only cruelty and reproach!'
It moved him not at all. The plea was too inconsequent and illogical, and the display of a lack of reason repelled him like a physical defect.
'Your plaint, madonna, is that Facino will not make you a duchess. He may do so yet if you are patient.'
Her tears had suddenly ceased.
'You know something!' she exclaimed in a hushed voice.
The rogue fooled her with that illusion, whilst refraining from using words which might afterwards be turned against him.
'I know that you will lose the chance if meanwhile you should cease to be Facino's wife. If you were so mad as to become the leman of another, you know as well as I do that the Lord Facino would put you from him. What should you be then? That is why I am your friend when I think of the camp at Bergamo for you.'
Slowly she dried her eyes. Carefully she removed all stains of tears. It consumed a little time. Then she rose and went to him, and took his hand.
'Thank you, Bellarion, my friend.' Her voice was hushed and tender. 'You need have no fear for me.' She paused a moment. 'What ... what has my lord said to you of his intent?'
'Nay, nay,' he laughed, 'I betray no confidences.' The trickster's tone was a confidence in itself. He swept on. 'You bid me have no fear for you. But that is not enough. Princes are reckless folk. I'd not have you remain in jeopardy.'
'Oh! But Bergamo!' she cried out. 'To be encamped in winter!'
'You need not go so far, nor under canvas. In your place, madonna, I should retire to Melegnano. The castle is at your disposal. It is pleasanter than Pavia.'
'Pleasanter! In that loneliness?'
'It is the company here that makes it prudent. And you may take the Princess Valeria and her brother with you. Come, come, madonna. Will you trifle with fate at such a time? Will you jeopardise a glorious destiny for the sake of an obese young lordling?'
She considered, her face fretful. 'Tell me,' she begged again, 'what my lord has divulged to you of his intentions?'
'Have I not said enough already?'
The entrance of Filippo Maria at that moment saved him the need of further invention. It perturbed him not at all that the Prince's round white face should darken at the sight of them so close and fond. She was warned. Her greed of power and honour would curb her wantonness and ensure her withdrawal to Melegnano as he urged. Bellarion glowed with the satisfaction of a battle won, nor troubled about the deceit he had practised.