The Epiphany mummeries were long overpast, the iron hand of winter was withdrawn from the land, and in the great forest of Pavia, where Gian Galeazzo had loved to hunt, the trees were breaking into bud before Bellarion's condition permitted him to think of quitting the ease of Filippo Maria's castle. His leg had mended well, the knee-joint had recovered its suppleness, and only a slight limp remained.
He spoke of returning to Bergamo. 'This lotus-eating has endured too long already,' he told the Prince in answer to the latter's remonstrances; for Filippo Maria was reluctant to part with one who in many ways had beguiled for him the tedium of his lonely life, rendered lonelier than ever before by the withdrawal of the Countess of Biandrate, who had gone with the Montferrine Princess to Melegnano.
But it was not written that Filippo Maria should be left alone; for on the very eve of Bellarion's intended departure, Facino himself was borne into the Castle of Pavia, crippled by an attack of gout of a severity which had compelled him to leave his camp just as he was preparing to reap the fruits of his long and patient siege.
He had lost weight, and his face out of which the healthy tan had departed was grey and drawn. His hair from fulvid that it had been was almost white. But the spirit within remained unchanged, indomitable, and intolerant of this enforced inertia of the flesh.
He was put to bed immediately on his arrival, for he was in great pain and swore that the gout, which he called by all manner of evil names, had got into his stomach.
'Mombelli warned me there was danger of it.'
'Where is Mombelli?' Bellarion asked. He stood with Filippo Maria by the canopied bed in a spacious chamber in the northern tower, adjacent to the Hall of Mirrors.
'Mombelli, devil take his soul, left me a month ago, when I seemed well, to go to Duke Gian Maria who desired to appoint him his physician. I've sent for him again to the Duke. Meanwhile some Pavese doctor will be required to give me ease.' He groaned with pain. Then, recovering, rapped out his orders to Bellarion. 'It's a mercy you are recovered, for you are needed at Bergamo. Meanwhile Carmagnola commands there, but he has my orders to surrender his authority to you on your arrival.'
It was an order which Carmagnola did not relish, as he plainly showed when Bellarion reached the camp two days later. But he dared not disobey it.
Bellarion examined the dispositions, but changed nothing. He carried forward the plans already made by Facino. The siege could be tightened no further, and, considering the straits to which Malatesta must be reduced, there could be little point in wasting lives on an assault.
A week after Bellarion's coming there rode into the great camp of green tents under the walls of Bergamo, a weary, excited fellow all splashed with mud from the fury of his riding.
Brought, by the guards who had checked his progress, to Facino's large and handsomely equipped pavilion, pitched beside the racing waters of the Serio, this slight, swarthy, fierce-eyed man proved to be that stormy petrel, Giovanni Pusterla of Venegono.
Bellarion rose from the couch, covered by a black bear-skin on which he had been reclining, and closed the beautifully illuminated copy of Juvenal's 'Satires,' which had been a parting gift from Filippo Maria. His gesture dismissed the Swiss halberdiers, who had ushered in this visitor. The very name of Venegono was of ill omen, and ill-omened was the man's haggard countenance now, and his own announcement.
'I bring evil tidings, Lord Count.'
'You are consistent,' said Bellarion. 'A great quality.'
Venegono stared at him. 'Give me to drink,' he begged. 'God! How I thirst. I have ridden from Pavia without pause save to change horse at Caravaggio.'
'From Pavia!' Bellarion's tone and manner changed; apprehension showed in both. But not on that account was he neglectful of the needs of his guest. On an ample square table in mid-tent stood a jug of wine and some beautiful drinking-cups, their bowls of beaten gold, their stems of choicely wrought silver, beside a dish of sweetmeats, bread, and a small loaf of cheese. Bellarion poured a cup of strong red Valtelline. Venegono drained it.
'Aye, I am consistent, as you say. And so is that hellspawn Gian Maria Visconti. Of his consistency, mine. By your leave.'
He flung himself wearily into the cushioned fald-stool by the table, and set down his cup. Bellarion nodded, and resumed his seat on the bear-skin.
'What has happened in Pavia?'
'In Pavia nothing. Nothing yet. I rode there to warn Facino of what is happening in Milan, but Facino ... The man is ill. He could do nothing if he would, so I come on to you.' And now, leaning forward, and scarcely pausing to draw breath, he launched the news he had ridden so desperately to bring. 'Della Torre is back in Milan, recalled by Gian Maria.'
Bellarion waited, but nothing further came.
'Well, man?' he asked. 'Is that all?'
'All? Does it mean so little to you that you ask that? Don't you know that this damned Guelph, whom Facino banished when he should have hanged him, has been throughout the inspirer of all the evil that has been wrought against Facino and against all the Ghibellines of Milan? Don't you understand that his return bodes ill?'
'What can he do? What can Gian Maria do? Their wings are clipped.'
'They are growing fresh ones.' Venegono came to his feet again, his weariness forgotten in his excitement. 'Since della Torre's secret return a month ago, orators have been sent to Theodore of Montferrat, to the battered Vignati, to the Esti, and even to Estorre Visconti, to invite them into a league.'
Bellarion laughed. 'Let them league. If they are so mad as to do so, Facino will smash their league into shards when this Bergamo business is over. You forget that under his hand is the strongest army in Italy to-day. We muster over twelve thousand men.'
'My God! I seem to be listening to Facino himself.' Venegono slobbered in his excitement, his eyes wild. 'It was thus he answered me.'
'Why, then, have troubled to come to me?'
'In the hope that you would see what he will not. You talk as if the army were all. You forget that Gian Maria is a thing of venom, like the emblem of his accursed house. Where there is venom and the will to use it, beware the occasion. If anything should happen to Facino, what hope will remain for the Ghibellines of Milan?'
'What should happen to Facino? At what are you hinting, man?'
Venegono looked at him between rage and compassion. 'Where is Mombelli?' he asked. 'Why is he not with Facino now that Facino needs him? Do you know?'
'But is he not with Facino? Has he not yet arrived?'
'Arrived? Why was he ever withdrawn? To be made physician to the Duke. A pretext, my friend, to deprive Facino of his healing services. Do you know that since his coming to Milan he has not been seen? There are rumours that he is dead, that the Duke has murdered him.'
Bellarion considered. Then he shrugged. 'Your imagination fools you, Venegono. If Gian Maria proposed to strike Facino, he would surely attempt something more active and effective.'
'It may be little, I confess. But it is a straw that points the way of the wind.'
'A straw, indeed,' Bellarion agreed. 'But in any case, what do you require of me? You have not told me that.'
'That you take a strong detachment of your men and repair at once to Milan to curb the Duke's evil intentions and to deal with della Torre.'
'For that my lord's orders would be necessary. My duty is here, Venegono, and I dare not neglect it. Nor is the matter so urgent. It can wait until Bergamo has been reduced, which will not be long.'
'Too long, it may be.'
But not all the passionate pleading with which he now distressed Bellarion could turn the latter from his clear duty, or communicate to him any of the vague alarms which agitated Venegono. And so, at last, he went his ways in despair, protesting that both Bellarion and Facino were beset with the blindness of those whom the gods wish to destroy.
Bellarion, however, saw in Venegono's warning no more than an attempt to use him for the execution of a private vengeance. Three days later he thought he had confirmation of this. It came in a letter bearing Facino's signature, but penned in the crabbed and pointed hand of the Countess, who had been summoned from Melegnano to minister to her lord. It informed Bellarion that the physician Mombelli had come at last in response to Facino's request, and that Facino hoped soon to be afoot again. Indeed, there was already a perceptible improvement in his condition.
'So much for Venegono's rumours that Mombelli has been murdered,' said Bellarion to himself, and laughed at the scaremongering of that credulous hot-head.
But he thought differently when after another three days a second letter reached him signed by the Countess herself.
'My lord begs you to come to him at once,' she wrote. 'He is so ill that Messer Mombelli despairs of him. Do not lose a moment, or you may be too late.'
He was more deeply stirred by that summons than by anything he could remember. If those who accounted him hard and remorselessly calculating could have seen him in that moment, the tears filming his eyes at the very thought of losing this man whom he loved, they must have formed a gentler opinion of his nature.
He sent at once for Carmagnola, and ordered a strong horse to be saddled and twenty lances to prepare to ride with him. Ride with him, however, they did not. They followed. For he rode like one possessed of devils. In three hours he covered the forty miles of difficult road that lay between Bergamo and Pavia, leaving one horse foundered and arriving on a second one that was spent by the time he reached Filippo Maria's stronghold. Down he flung from it in the great courtyard, and, staggering and bespattered, he mounted the main staircase so wide and of such shallow steps that it was possible to ascend it on horseback.
Without pausing to see the Prince, he had himself conducted straight to Facino's chamber, and there under the damask-hung canopy he found his adoptive father supine, inert, his countenance leaden-hued, looking as if he were laid out in death, save for his stertorous breathing and the fire that still glowed in the eyes under their tufted, fulvid brows.
Bellarion went down on his knees beside the bed, and took, in both his own that were so warm and strong, the cold, heavy hand that lay upon the coverlet.
The grey head rolled a little on its pillow; the ghost of a smile irradiated the strong, rugged face; the fingers of the cold hand faintly pressed Bellarion's.
'Good lad, you have lost no time,' he said, in a weak, rasping voice. 'And there is no time to lose. I am sped. Indeed, my body's dead already. Mombelli says the gout is mounting to my heart.'
Bellarion looked up. Beyond the bed stood the Countess, fretful and troubled. At the foot was Mombelli, and in the background a servant.
'Is this so?' he asked the physician. 'Can your skill avail nothing here?'
'He is in God's hands,' said Mombelli, mumbling indistinctly.
'Send them away,' said Facino, and his eyes indicated Mombelli and the servant. 'There is little time, and I have things to tell you. We must take order for what's to follow.'
The orders did not amount to very much. He required of Bellarion that he should afford the Countess his protection, and he recommended to him also Filippo Maria.
'When Gian Galeazzo died, he left his sons in my care. I go to meet him with clean hands. I have discharged my trust, and dying I hand it on to you. Remember always that Gian Maria is Duke of Milan, and whatever the shortcomings he may show, for your own sake if not for his, practise loyalty to him, as you would have your own captains be loyal to you.'
When at last, wearied, and announcing his desire to rest, Facino bade him go, Bellarion found Mombelli pacing in the Hall of Mirrors, and sent him to Facino.
'I shall remain here within call,' he said, and oblivious of his own fatigue he paced in his turn that curious floor whereon birds and beasts were figured in mosaics under the gaudy flashing ceiling of coloured glass, whence the place derived its name.
There Mombelli found him a half-hour later, when he emerged.
'He sleeps now,' he said. 'The Countess is with him.'
'It is not yet the end?' Bellarion asked.
'Not yet. The end is when God wills. He may linger for some days.'
Bellarion looked sharply at the doctor, considered him, indeed, now for the first time since his arrival. This Mombelli was a man of little more than thirty-five. He had been vigorous of frame, inclining a little to portliness, rubicund if grave of countenance with strong white teeth and bright dark eyes. Bellarion beheld now an emaciated man upon whose shrunken frame a black velvet gown hung in loose folds. His face was pale, his eyes dull; but oddest of all the very shape of his face had changed; his jaw had fallen in, so that nose and chin were brought closer like those of an old man, and when he spoke he hissed and mumbled indistinctly over toothless gums.
'By the Host, man! What has happened to you?'
Mombelli shrank visibly from the questions and from the stern eyes that seemed to search his very soul.
'I ... I ... have been ill,' he faltered. 'Very ill. It is a miracle I am alive to-day.'
'But your teeth, man?'
'I have lost them as you see. A consequence of my disease.'
A horrible suspicion was sprouting in Bellarion's mind, nourished by the memory of the rumour of this man's death which Venegono had reported. He took the doctor by the sleeve of his velvet gown, and drew him towards one of the double windows. His shrinking, his obvious reluctance to undergo this closer inspection, were so much added food to Bellarion's suspicion.
'How do you call this disease?' he asked.
Clearly, from his hesitancy, Mombelli had been unprepared for the question. 'It ... it is a sort of podagric affection,' he mumbled.
'And your thumb? Why is that bandaged?'
Terror leapt to Mombelli's eyes. His toothless jaws worked fearfully. 'That? That is naught. An injury.'
'Take off the bandage. Take it off, man. I desire to see this injury. Do you hear me?'
At last Mombelli with shaking fingers stripped the bandage from his left thumb, and displayed it naked.
Bellarion went white, and his eyes were dreadful. 'You have been tortured, master doctor. Gian Maria has subjected you to his Lent.'
This Lent of Gian Maria's invention was a torment lasting forty days, on each of which one or more teeth were torn from the patient's jaws, then day by day a finger nail, whereafter followed the eyes and finally the tongue, whereupon the sufferer being rendered dumb and unable to confess what was desired, he was shown at last the mercy of being put to death.
Mombelli's livid lips moved frantically, but no words came. He reeled where he stood until he found the wall to steady him, and Bellarion watched him with those dreadful, searching eyes.
'To what end did he torture you? What did he desire of you?'
'I have not said he tortured me. It is not true.'
'You have not said it. No. But your condition says it. You have not said it, because you dare not. Why did he do this? And why did he desist?' Bellarion gripped him by the shoulders. 'Answer me.' To what did the torments undergone suffice to constrain you? Will you answer me?'
'O God!' groaned the physician, sagging limply against the wall, and looking as if he would faint.
But there was no pity in Bellarion's face. Come with me,' he said, and it was almost by main force that he dragged the wretched doctor across that hall out to the gallery, and down the wide steps to the great court. Here under the arcade some men-at-arms of Facino's bodyguard were idling. Into their hands Bellarion delivered Mombelli.
'To the question chamber,' he said shortly.
Mombelli, shattered in nerve and sapped of manhood by his sufferings, cried out, piteously inarticulate. Pitilessly Bellarion waved him away, and the soldiers bore him off, screaming, to the stone chamber under the north-eastern tower. There, in the middle of the uneven stone floor, stood the dread framework of the rack.
Bellarion, who had followed, ordered them to strip him. The men were reluctant to do the office of executioners, but under the eyes of Bellarion, standing as implacable as the god of wrath, they set about it, nevertheless, and all the while the broken man's cries for mercy filled that vaulted place with an ever-mounting horror. At the last, half-naked, he broke from the men's hands and flung himself at Bellarion's feet.
'In the name of the sweet Christ, my lord, take pity on me! I can bear no more. Hang me if you will, but do not let me be tortured again.'
Bellarion looked down on the grovelling, slobbering wretch with an infinite compassion in his soul. But there was no sign of it on his countenance or in his voice.
'You have but to answer my question, sir, and you shall have your wish. You shall be hanged without further suffering. Why did the Duke torture you, and why did the torture cease when it did? To what importunities did you yield?'
'Already you have guessed it, my lord. That is why you use me so! But it is not just. As God's my witness, it is not just. What am I but a poor man caught in the toils of the evil desires of others? As long as God gave me the strength to resist, I resisted. But I could bear no more. There was no price at which I would not have purchased respite from that horror. Death I could have borne had that been all they threatened. But I had reached the end of my endurance of pain. Oh, my lord, if I were a villain there would have been no torture to endure. They offered me bribes, bribes great enough to dazzle a poor man, that would have left me rich for the remainder of my days. When I refused, they threatened me with death unless I did their infamous will. Those threats I defied. Then they subjected me to this protracted agony which the Duke impiously calls his Lent. They drew my teeth, brutally with unutterable violence, two each day until all were gone. Broken and most starved as I was, distracted by pain, which for a fortnight had been unceasing, they began upon my finger-nails. But when they tore the nail from my left thumb, I could bear no more. I yielded to their infamy.'
Bellarion made a sign to the men, and they pulled Mombelli to his feet. But his eyes dared not meet the terrible glance of Bellarion.
'You yielded to their demands that, under the pretence of curing him, you should poison my Lord Facino. That is the thing to which you yielded. But when you say "they" whom do you mean?'
'The Duke Gian Maria and Antonio della Torre.'
Bellarion remembered Venegono's warning—'He is a thing of venom, like the emblem of his house.'
'Poor wretch!' said Bellarion. 'You deserve some mercy, and you shall have it, provided you can undo what you have done.'
'Alas, my lord!' Mombelli groaned, wringing his hands in a passion of despair. 'Alas! There is no antidote to that poison. It works slowly gradually corroding the intestines. Hang me, my lord, and have done. Had I been less of a coward, I would have hanged myself before I did this thing. But the Duke threatened that if I failed him the torture should be resumed and continued until I died of sheer exhaustion. Also he swore that my refusal would not save my Lord Facino, whom he would find other means of despatching.'
Bellarion stood between loathing and compassion. But there was no thought in his mind of hanging this poor wretch, who had been the victim of that malignant Duke.
He uttered an order in cold, level tones: 'Restore him his garments and place him in confinement until I send for him again.'
On that he departed from that underground chamber, and slowly, thoughtfully made his way above.
By the time he reached the courtyard his resolve was taken, though his neck should pay for it: Gian Maria should not escape. For the first and only time in those adventurous years of his did he swerve from the purpose by which he laid his course, and turn his hand to a task that was not more or less directly concerned with its ultimate fulfilment.
And so, without pausing for rest or food, you behold him once more in the saddle, riding hard for Milan on that Monday afternoon.
He conceived that he bore thither the first news of Facino's moribund condition.
But rumour had been ahead of him by a day and a half, and the rumour ran, not that Facino was dying, but that he was already dead.
In all the instances history affords of poetic justice to give pause to those who offend against God and Man, none is more arresting than that of the fate of Gian Maria Visconti. Already on the previous Friday word had reached the Duke, not only from Mombelli, but from at least one of the spies he had placed in his brother's household, that the work of poisoning was done and that Facino's hours were numbered. Gloating with della Torre and Lonate over the assurance that at last the ducal neck was delivered from that stern heel under which so long it had writhed like the serpent of evil under the heel of Saint Michael, Gian Maria had been unable to keep the knowledge to himself. About the court on that same Friday night he spoke unguardedly of Facino as dead or dying, and from the court the news filtered through to the city and was known to all by the morning of Saturday. And that news carried with it a dismay more utter and overwhelming than any that had yet descended upon Milan since Gian Maria had worn the ducal crown. Facino, when wielding the authority of ducal governor, had been the people's bulwark against the extortions, brutalities, and criminal follies of their Duke. When absent and deposed from power, he had still been their hope, and they had possessed their soul as best they could against the day of his return, which they knew must dawn. But Facino dead meant an unbridling of the Duke's bestiality, a free charter to his misrule, and for his people an outlook of utter hopelessness. It may be that they exaggerated in their own minds this calamity. It was for them the end of the world. Despair settled that morning upon the city. The Duke would have laughed if it had been reported to him, because he lacked the wit to perceive that when men are truly desperate catastrophes ensue.
And at once, whilst the great mass of the people were stricken by horror into a dull inertia, there were those who saw that the situation called for action. Of these were members of the leading Ghibelline families of Bagio, of del Maino, Trivulzi, Aliprandi, and others. There was that Bertino Mantegazza, captain of the ducal guard whose face the Duke had one day broken with his iron gauntlet, and fiercest and most zealous of all there was that Giovanni Pusterla of Venegono, whose family had suffered such deep and bitter wrongs at the Duke's hands.
There was no suspicion in the mind of any that the Duke himself was responsible for the death of Facino. It was simply that Facino's death created a situation only to be met by the destruction of the Duke. And this situation the Duke himself had been at such hideous pains to bring about.
And so, briefly to recapitulate here a page of Visconti history, it came to pass that on the Monday morning, which was the first day of the Litany of May, as Gian Maria, gaily clad in his colours of red and white, was issuing from his bedroom to repair to Mass in the Church of San Gotthard, he found in the antechamber a score of gentlemen not latterly seen about his court. Mantegazza, who had command of the entrance, was responsible for their presence.
Before the Duke could comment upon this unusual attendance, perhaps before he had well observed it, three of them were upon him.
'This from the Pusterla!' cried Venegono, and with his dagger clove the Duke's brow, slaying him instantly. Yet before he fell Andrea Bagio's blade was buried in his right thigh, so that presently that white-stockinged leg was as red as its fellow.
As a consequence, Bellarion reaching Milan at dusk that evening found entrance denied him at the Ticinese Gate, which was held by Paolo del Bagio with a strong following of men-at-arms. Not until he had disclosed himself for Facino's lieutenant was he admitted and informed of what had taken place.
The irony of the event provoked in him a terrible mirth.
'Poor purblind fool,' was his comment. 'He never guessed when he was torturing Mombelli that he was torturing him into signing his own death-warrant.' That, and the laugh with which he rode on into the city, left Bagio wondering whether his wits had turned.
He rode through streets in uproar, where almost every man he met was armed. Before the broken door of a half-shattered house hung some revolting bleeding rags, what once had been a man. These were all that remained of Squarcia Giramo, the infamous kennel-master who had been torn into pieces that day by the mob, and finally hung there before his dwelling which on the morrow was to be razed to the ground.
He came to the Old Broletto and the Church of Saint Gotthard, and paused there to survey the Duke's body where it lay under an apronful of roses which had been cast upon it by a harlot. Thence he repaired to the stables of the palace, and by making himself known procured a fresh horse. On this he made his way through the ever-increasing tumult of the streets, back to the Ticinese Gate, and he was away through the darkness to cover for the second time that day the twenty miles that lie between Milan and Pavia.
It was past midnight when, so jaded that he kept his feet by a sheer effort of the will, he staggered into Filippo Maria's bedchamber, ushered by the servant who had preceded him to rouse the Prince.
Filippo Maria sat up in bed, blinking in the candlelight, at that tall, swaying figure that was almost entirely clothed in mud.
'Is that you, Lord Bellarion? You will have heard that Facino is dead—God rest his soul!'
A harsh, croaking voice made him answer! 'Aye, and avenged, Lord Duke.'
A quiver crossed the pale fat face under its sleek black cap of hair. The coarse lips parted. 'Lord ... Lord Duke ... you said?' The high-pitched voice was awe-stricken.
'Your brother Gian Maria is dead, my lord, and you are Duke of Milan.'
'Duke of Milan? I am ...?' The grotesque young face showed bewilderment, confusion, fear. 'And Gian Maria ... Dead, do you say?'
Bellarion did not mince matters. 'He was despatched to hell this morning by some gentlemen in Milan.'
'Jesus-Mary!' croaked the Prince, and fell to trembling. 'Murdered ... And you ...?' He heaved himself higher in the bed with one arm, whilst he flung out the other in accusation. He did not love his brother. He profited greatly by his death. But a Visconti does not permit that others shall lay hands on a Visconti.
Bellarion laughed oddly. He had been forestalled. Perhaps it was as well. No need now to speak of his intentions.
'He was slain on his way to Mass this morning, at just about the hour that I arrived here from Bergamo.'
The accusing arm fell heavily to the Prince's obese flank. The beady, lack-lustre eyes still peered at the young condottiero.
'Almost I thought ... And Giannino is dead ... murdered! God rest him!' The phrase was mechanical. 'Tell me about it.'
Bellarion recited what he knew, then staggered out, on the arm of the servant who was to conduct him to the room prepared for him.
'What a world! What a dunghill!' he muttered as he went. 'And how well the old abbot knows it. Pax multa in cella, foris autem plurima bella!'