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“Then get you to work at once upon it. I will have your chamber prepared.”
He sent for his seneschal, a person—like most Of the servants at the Palace—strange to me, and he gave orders that I should be sumptuously lodged. He was grown more splendid than ever in the prosperity that seemed to surround him here at Pesaro, in this Palace that had undergone such changes and been so enriched during the past two years as to go near defying recognition.
When the seneschal had shown me to the quarters he had set apart for me, I made bold to make inquiries concerning Madonna Paola.
“She is in the garden, Illustrious,” answered the seneschal, deeming me, no doubt, a great lord, from the respect which Filippo had indicated should be shown me. Madonna has the wisdom to seek the little sunshine the year still holds. Winter will be soon upon us.”
I agreed with the old man, and dismissed him. So soon as he was gone, I quitted my chamber, and all dust staineded as I was I made my way down to the garden. A turn in one of the boxwood-bordered alleys brought me suddenly face to face with Madonna Paola.
A moment we stood looking at each other, my heart swelling within me until I thought that it must burst. Then I advanced a step and sank on one knee before her.
“You sent for me, Madonna. I am here.” There was a pause, and when presently I looked up into her blessed face I saw a smile of infinite sorrow on her lips, blending oddly with the gladness that shone from her sweet eyes.
“You faithful one,” she murmured at last. “Dear Lazzaro, I did not look for you so soon.”
“Within an hour of your messenger’s arrival I was in the saddle, nor did I pause until I had reached the gates of Pesaro. I am here to serve you to the utmost of my power, Madonna, and the only doubt that assails me is that my power may be all too small for the service that you need.”
“Is its nature known to you?” she asked in wonder. Then, ere I had answered, she bade me rise, and with her own hand assisted me.
“I have guessed it,” answered I, “guided by such scraps of information as from your messenger I gleaned. It concerns, unless I err, the Lord Ignacio Borgia.”
“Your wits have lost nothing of their quickness,” she said, with a sad smile, “and I doubt me you know all.”
“The only thing I did not know your brother has just told me—that you are to be wed before Christmas. He has ordered me to write your epithalamium.”
She drew into step beside me, and we slowly paced the alley side by side, and, as we went, withered leaves overhead, and withered leaves to make a carpet for our fret, she told me in her own way more or less what I have set down, even to her brother’s self-seeking share in the transaction that she dubbed hideous and abhorrent.
She was little changed, this winsome lady in the time that was sped. She was in her twenty-first year, but in reality she seemed to me no older than she had been on that day when first I saw her arguing with her grooms upon the road to Cagli. And from this I reassured myself that she had not been fretted overmuch by the absence of the Lord Giovanni.
Presently she spoke of him and of her plighted word which her brother and those supple gentlemen of the House of Borgia were inducing her to dishonour.
“Once before, in a case almost identical, when all seemed lost, you came— as if Heaven directed—to my rescue. This it is that gives me confidence in such aid as you might lend me now.”
“Alas! Madonna,” I sighed, “but the times are sorely changed and the situations with them. What is there now that I can do?”
“What you did then. Take me beyond their reach.”
“Ah! But whither?”
“Whither but to the Lord Giovanni? Is it not to him that my troth is plighted?”
I shook my head in sorrow, a thrust of jealousy cutting me the while.
“That may not be,” said I. “It were not seemly, unless the Lord Giovanni were here himself to take you hence.”
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“Then I will write to the Lord Giovanni,” she cried. “I will write, and you shall bear my letter.”
“What think you will the Lord Giovanni do?” I burst out, with a scorn that must have puzzled her. “Think you his safety does not give him care enough in the hiding-place to which he has crept, that he should draw upon himself the vengeance of the Borgias?”
She stared at me in ineffable surprise. “But the Lord Giovanni is brave and valiant,” she cried, and down in my heart I laughed in bitter mockery.
“Do you love the Lord Giovanni, Madonna?” I asked bluntly.
My question seemed to awaken fresh astonishment. It may well be that it awakened, too, reflection. She was silent for a little space. Then—
“I honour and respect him for a noble, chivalrous and gifted gentleman,” she answered me, and her answer made me singularly content, spreading a balm upon the wounds my soul had taken. But to her fresh intercessions that I should carry a letter to him, I shook my head again. My mood was stubborn.
“Believe me, Madonna, it were not only unwise, but futile.”
She protested.
“I swear it would be,” I insisted, with a convincing force that left her staring at me and wondering whence I derived so much assurance. “We must wait. From now till Christmas we have more than two months. In two months much may befall. As a last resource we may consider communication with the Lord Giovanni. But it is a forlorn hope, Madonna, and so we will leave it until all else has failed us.”
She brightened at my promise that at least if other measures proved unavailing, we should adopt that course, and her brightening flattered me, for it bore witness to the supreme confidence she had in me.
“Lazzaro,” said she, “I know you will not fail me. I trust you more than any living mam; more, I think, than even the Lord Giovanni, whom, if God pleases, I shall some day wed.”
“Thanks, Madonna mia,” I answered, gratefully indeed. “It is a trust that I shall ever strive to justify. Meanwhile have faith and hope, and wait.”
Once before, when, to escape the schemes of her brother who would have wed her to the Lord Giovanni, she had appealed to me, the counsel I had given her had been much the same as that which I gave her now. At the irony of it I could have laughed had any other been in question but Madonna Paola— this tender White Flower of the Quince that was like to be rudely wilted by the ruthless hands of scheming men.
That night I would have supped in my own quarters but that Filippo sent for me and bade me join him and swell the little court he kept. At times I believe he almost thought that he was the true Lord of Pesaro—an opinion that may have been shared by not a few of the citizens themselves. Certainly he kept a greater state and was better housed than the duke of Valentinois’ governor.
It was a jovial company of perhaps a dozen nobles and ladies that met about his board, and Filippo bade his servants lay for me beside him. As we ate he questioned me touching the occupation that I had found during my absence from Pesaro. I used the greatest frankness with him, and answered that my life had been partly a peasants, partly a poet’s.
“Tell me what you wrote,” be bade me his eyes resting on my face with a new look of interest, for his love of letters was one of the few things about him that was not affected.
“A few novelle, dealing with court-life; but chiefly verses,” answered I.
“And with these verses—what have you done?”
“I have them by me, Illustrious,” I answered. He smiled, seemingly well pleased.
You must read them to us,” he cried. “If they rival that epic of yours, which I have never forgotten, they should be worth hearing.”
And presently, supper being done, I went at his bidding to my chamber for my precious manuscripts, and, returning, I entertained the company with the reading of a portion of what I had written. They heard me with an attention that might have rendered me vain had my ambition really lain in being accounted a great writer; and when I paused, now and again, there was a murmur of applause, and many a pat on the shoulder from Filippo whenever a line, a phrase or a stanza took his fancy.
I was perhaps too absorbed to pay any great attention to the impression my verses were producing, but presently, in one of my pauses, the Lord Filippo startled me with words that awoke me to a sense of my imprudence.
“Do you know, Lazzaro, of what your lines remind me in an extraordinary measure?”
“Of what, Excellency?” I asked politely, raising my eyes from my manuscript. They chanced to meet the glance of Madonna Paola. It was riveted upon me, and its expression was one I could not understand.
“Of the love-songs of the Lord Giovanni Sforza,” answered he. “They resemble those poems infinitely more than they resemble the epic you wrote two years ago.”
I stammered something about the similarity being merely one of subject. But he shook his head at that, and took good note of my confusion.
“No,” said he, “the resemblance goes deeper. There is the same facile beauty of the rhymes the same freshness of the rhythm—remotely resembling that of Petrarca, yet very different. Conceits similar to those that were the beauty spots of the Lord Giovanni’s verses are ubiquitous in yours, and above all there is the same fervent earnestness, the same burning tone of sincerity that rendered his strambotti so worthy of admiration.”
“It may be,” I answered him, my confusion growing under the steady gaze of Madonna Paola, “it may be that having heard the verses of the Lord Giovanni, I may, unconsciously, have modelled my own lines upon those that made so deep an impression on me.”
He looked at me gravely for a moment.
“That might be an explanation,” he answred deliberately, “but frankly, if I were asked, I should give a very different one.”
“And that would be?” came, sharp and compelling, the voice of Madonna.
He turned to her, shrugged his shoulders and laughed. “Why, since you ask me,” he said, “I should hazard the opinion that Lazzaro, here, was of considerable assistance to the Lord Giovanni in the penning of those verses with which he delighted us all—and you, Madonna, I believe, particularly.”
Madonna Paola crimsoned, and her eyes fell. The others looked at us with inquiring glances—at her, at Filippo and at me. With a fresh laugh Filippo turned to me.
“Confess now, am I not right?” he asked good�humouredly.
“Magnificent,” I murmured in tones of protest, “ask yourself the question. Was it a likely thing that the Lord Giovanni would enlist the services of his jester in such a task?”
“Give me a straightforward answer,” he insisted. “Am I right or wrong?”
“I am giving you more than a straightforward answer, my lord,” I still evaded him, and more boldly now. “I am setting you on the high-road to solve the matter for yourself by an appeal to your own good sense and reason. Was it in the least likely, I repeat, that the Lord Giovanni would seek the services of his Fool
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