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- Author: Rafael Sabatini
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“It would poison me, I think,” she answered coldly.
You are cruel, and—alas!—mistrustful,” said he. “Can you guess nothing of the anxiety that has been mine these two days, of the fears that have haunted me as I thought of you and your wanderings?”
Her lip curled, and her face took on some slight vestige of colour. Her spirit was a thing for which I might then have come to love her had it not been that already I loved her to distraction.
“Yes,” said she, “I can guess something of your dismay when you found your schemes frustrated; when you found that you had come too late to San Domenico.”
“Will you not forgive me that shift to which my adoration drove me?” he implored, in a honeyed voice—and a more fearful thing than Ramiro the butcher was Ramiro the lover.
At that scarcely covert avowal of his passion she recoiled a step as she might before a thing unclean. The little colour faded from her cheek, the scorn departed from her lip, and a sickly, deadly fear overspread her lovely face. God! that I should stand there and witness this insult to the woman I adored and worshipped with a fervour that the Church seeks to instil into us for those about the throne of Heaven. It might not be. A blind access of fury took me. Of the consequences I thought nothing. Reason left me utterly, and the slight hope that might lie in temporising was disregarded.
Before those about me could guess my purpose, or those others, too engrossed in the scene at the far end of the hall, could intervene, I had sprung from between the executioners and dashed across the space that separated me from the Governor of Cesena. One well-aimed blow, and there should be an end to Messer Ramiro. That was the only thought that found room in my disordered mind.
One or two there were who cried out as I sped past them, swift as the hound when it speeds after the fleeing hare. But I was upon Ramiro ere any could have sufficiently mastered his surprise to interfere.
By the nape of his great neck I caught him from behind, and setting my knee at his spine I wrenched him backward, and so flung him over on the floor. Down I went with him, my hand reaching for the dagger at his jewelled girdle, and I had found and drawn it in that swift action of mine ere he had bethought him of his hands. Up it flashed and down. I sank it through the crimson velvet of his rich doublets straight at the spot where his heart should be—if he were so human as to have a heart. The next instant I turned cold and sick. My desperate effort had been all for nothing. In my hand I was left with the bronze hilt of his great poniard; the blade had broken off against the mesh of steel the coward wore beneath his finery.
There was a rush of feet about us, a piercing scream from Madonna Paola, and it was to her that I owed my life in that grim moment. A dozen blades were naked and would have transfixed me as I lay, but that she covered my body with her own and bade them strike at me through her.
A moment later and the powerful hands of the Governor of Cesena were at my throat. I was lifted and tossed aside, as though I had been a hound and he the bull I had beset. And as he swung me over and crushed me to the ground, he knelt above me and grinned horribly into my purpling face.
A second we stayed so, and I thought indeed that my hour was come, when suddenly I felt the blood in my head released once more. He had taken his hands from my throat. He seized me now by the collar and dragged me rudely to my feet.
“Take this knave and lock him in his chamber,” he bade a couple of his bravi. “I may have need of him ere he dies.”
Messer Ramiro,” came the interceding voice of Madonna Paola, “what he did, he did for me. You will not let him die for it?”
There was a pause during which he looked at her, whilst the men were roughly dragging me across the hall.
“Who knows, Madonna?” he said, with a bow and an infernal smile. “If you were to beg his life, it might even come to pass that I might spare it.”
He did not wait for her answer, but stepping after me he called to the men that led me. In obedience they halted, and he came forward. We were now at the foot of the staircase.
“Boccadoro,” said he, planting himself before me, and eyeing me with eyes that were very full of malice, “you will recall the punishment I promised you if I came to discover it was you had thwarted me in Pesaro. It is the second time you have fooled Ramiro del’ Orca. There does not live the man who can boast that he did it thrice, nor will I risk it that you be that man. Make your peace with Heaven, for at sunset—in an hour’s time—you hang. There is one little thing that might save you even yet, and if you find life sweet, you would do well to pray that that little thing may come to pass.”
I answered him nothing, but I bowed my head in token that I had heard and he signed to the men to proceed with me, whilst turning on his heel he stepped down the hall again to where Madonna Paola, overcome with weakness, had sunk upon a stool.
As I was leaving the gallery I had a last glimpse of her, sitting there with drawn face and haggard eyes that followed me as I passed from her sight, whilst Ramiro del’ Orca stood beside her murmuring words that did not reach me. His so-called courtiers and his men-at-anus were trooping out of the room, no doubt in obedience to his dismissal.
I have heard tell of the calm that comes upon brave men when hope is dead and their doom has been pronounced. Uncertainty may have tortured and made cowards of them; but once that uncertainty is dissolved and suspense is at an end, resignation enters their soul, and, possessing it, gives to their bearing a noble and dignified peace. By the mercy of Heaven they are made, maybe, to see how poor and evanescent a thing is life; and they come to realise that since to die is a necessity there is no avoiding, as well might it betide to-day as ten years hence.
Such a mood, however, came not to soothe that last hour of mine, and yet I account myself no coward. It was an hour of such torture and anguish as never before I had experienced—much though I had undergone—and the source of all my suffering lay in the fact that Madonna Paola was in the hands of the ogre of Cesena. Had it not been for that most untoward circumstance I almost believe that while I waited for the sun to set on that December afternoon, my mood had not only been calm but even in some measure joyous, for it must have comforted my last moments to reflect that for all that Messer Ramiro was about to hang me, yet had I sown the seeds of his own destruction ere he had brought me to this pass.
I did, indeed, reflect upon it, and it may even be that, in spite of all, I culled some grain of comfort from the reflection. But let that be. My narrative would drag wearily were I to digress that I might tell you at length the ugly course of my thoughts whilst the sands of my last hour were running swiftly out. For, after all, my concern and yours is with the story of Lazzaro Biancomonte, sometime known as Boccadoro the Fool, and not with his philosophies—philosophies so unprofitable that it can benefit no man that I should set them down.
My windows faced west, and so I was able to watch the fall of the sun, and measure by its shortening distance from the horizon the ebbing of my poor life. At last the nether rim of that round, fiery orb was on the point of touching the line of distant hills, and it was casting a crimson glow along the white, snow-sheeted landscape that was singularly suggestive of a tide of blood—a very fitting tide to flow and ebb about the walls of the Castle of Cesena.
One little thing there was might save me, Ramiro had said. But I had shut the thought out of my mind to keep me from utter distraction. The only little thing in which I held that my salvation could lie would be in the miraculous arrival of Cesare Borgia, and of that not the faintest hope existed. If the greatest luck attended Mariani’s errand and the greatest speed were made by the Duke once he received the letter, he could not reach Cesena in less than another eight hours. And another eight minutes, to reckon by the swift sinking of the sun would see the time appointed for my hanging. I thought of Joshua in that grim hour, and in a mood that approached the whimsical I envied him his gift. If I could have stayed the setting of the sun, and held it where it was till midnight, all might yet be well if Mariani had been diligent and Cesare swift.
The key grating in the lock put an end to my vague musings, and reminded me of the fact that I had neglected to employ that last hour as would have become a good son of Mother Church. For an instant I believe that my heart turned me to thoughts of God, and sent up a prayer for mercy for my poor sinful soul. Then the door swung wide. Two halberdiers and a carnifex in his odious leathern apron stood before me. Clearly Ramiro sought to be exact, and to have me hanging the instant the sun should vanish.
“It is time,” said one of the soldiers, whilst the executioner, stepping into my chamber, pinioned my wrists behind me, and retaining hold of the cord bade me march. He followed, holding that slender cord, and so, like a beast to the shambles, went I.
Once more they led me into the hall, where the shadows were lengthening in dark contrast to the splashes of sunlight that lingered on the floor, and whose blood�red hue was deepened by the gules of the windows through which it was filtered.
Ramiro was waiting for me, and six of his officers were in attendance. But, for once, there were no men-at-arms at hand. On a chair, the one usually occupied by Ramiro, himself, sat Madonna Paola, still in her torn and bedraggled raiment, her face white, her eyes wild as they had been when first she had been haled into Ramiro’s presence, some two hours ago, and her features so rigidly composed that it told the tale of the awful self-control she must be exerting—a self-control that might end with a sudden snap that would plunge her into madness.
A wild rage possessed me at sight of her. Let Ramiro be ruthless and cruel where men were concerned; that was a thing for which forgiveness might be found him. But that he should submit a lady, delicately nurtured as was Madonna, to such horrors as she had undergone since she had awakened from his sleeping-potion in the Church of San
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