"Since you are resolved, so be it," was all my answer; and we proceeded.

No word did we exchange until we had entered the main street, when she curtly asked me which was the best inn.

"'The Golden Fish,'" said I, as curtly, and to "The Golden Fish" we went.

Arrived there, Madonna Paola took affairs into her own hands. She dismounted, leaving the reins with a groom, and entering the common-room she proclaimed her needs to those that occupied it by loudly calling upon the landlord to find her an escort of three or four knaves to accompany her at once to Pesaro, where they should be well rewarded by the Lord Giovanni, her cousin.

I had followed her in, and I ground my teeth at such an egregious piece of folly. Her hood was thrown back, displaying the lenza of fine linen on her sable hair, and over this a net of purest gold all set with jewels. Her camorra, too, was open, and in her girdle there were gems for all to see. There were but a half-dozen men in the room. Two of these had a venerable air—they may have been traders journeying to Milan—whilst a third, who sat apart, was a slender, effeminate-looking youth. The remaining three were fellows of rough aspect, and when one of them—a black-browed ruffian—raised his eyes and fastened them upon the riches that Madonna Paola with such indifference displayed, I knew what was to follow.

He rose upon the instant, and stepping forward, he made her a low bow.

"Illustrious lady," said he, "if these two friends of mine and I find favour with you, here is an escort ready found. We are stout fellows, and very faithful."

Faithful to their cut-throat trade, I made no doubt he meant.

His fellows now rose also, and she looked them over, giving herself the airs of having spent her virgin life in judging men by their appearance. It was in vain I tugged her cloak, in vain I murmured the word "wait" under cover of my hand. She there and then engaged them, and bade them make ready to set out at once. One more attempt I made to induce her to alter her resolve.

"Madonna," said I, "it is an unwise thing to go a-journeying by night with three unknown men, and of such villainous appearance. To me they seem no better than bandits."

We were standing apart from the others, and she was sipping a cup of spiced wine that the host had mulled for her. She looked at me with a tolerant smile.

"They are poor men," said she. "Would you have them robed in velvet?"

"My quarrel is with their looks, Madonna, not their garments," I answered patiently. She laughed lightly, carelessly; even, I thought, a trifle scornfully.

"You are very fanciful," said she, then added—"but if so be that you are afraid to trust yourself in their company, why then, sir, I need bring you no farther out of the road that you were following when first we met."

Did the child think that some jealousy actuated me, and prompted me to inspire her with mistrust of my supplanters? She angered me. Yet now, more than ever was I resolved to journey with her. Leave her at the mercy of those ruffians, whom in her ignorance she was mad enough to trust, I could not—not even had she whipped me. She was so young, so frail and slight, that none but a craven could have found it in his heart to have deserted her just then.

"If it please you Madonna," I answered smoothly, "I will make bold to travel on with you."

It may be that my even accents stung her; perhaps she read in them some measure of reproof of the ingratitude that lay in her altered bearing towards me. Her eyes met mine across the table, and seemed to harden as she looked. Her answer came in a vastly altered tone.

"Why, if you are bent that way, I shall be glad to have you avail yourself of my escort, Boccadoro."

I had suffered the scorn now of her speech, now of her silence, for some hours, but never was I so near to turning on her as at that moment; never so near to consigning her to the fate to which her headstrong folly was compelling her. That she should take that tone with me!

The violence of the sudden choler I suppressed turned me pale under her steady glance. So that, seeing it, her own cheeks flamed crimson, and her eyes fell, as if in token that she realised the meanness of her bearing. To some natures there can be nothing more odious than such a realisation, and of those, I think, was she; for she stamped her foot in a sudden pet, and curtly asked the host why there was such delay with the horses.

"They are at the door, Madonna," he protested, bowing as he spoke. "And your escort is already waiting in the saddle."

She turned and strode abruptly towards the threshold. Over her shoulder she called to me:

"If you come with us, Boccadoro, you had best be brisk."

"I follow, Madonna," said I, with a grim relish, "so soon as I have paid the reckoning."

She halted and half turned, and I thought I saw a slight droop at the corners of her mouth.

"You are keeping count of what I owe you?" she muttered.

"Aye, Madonna," I answered, more grimly still, "I am keeping count." And I thought that my wits were vastly at fault if that account were not to be greatly swelled ere Pesaro was reached. Haply, indeed, my own life might go to swell it. I almost took a relish in that thought. Perhaps then, when I was stiff and cold—done to death in her service—this handsome, ungrateful child would come to see how much discomfort I had suffered for her sake.

My thoughts still ran in that channel as we rode out of Pesaro, for I misliked the way in which those knaves disposed themselves about us. In front went Madonna Paola; and immediately behind her, so that their horses' heads were on a level with her saddle-bow, one on each side, went two of those ruffians. The third, whom I had heard them call Stefano, and who was the one who had made her the offer of their services, ambled at my side, a few paces in the rear, and sought to draw me into conversation, haply by way of throwing me off my guard.

Mistrust is a fine thing at times. "Forewarned is forearmed," says the proverb, and of all forewarnings there is none we are more likely to heed than our own mistrust; for whereas we may leave unheeded the warnings of a friend, we seldom leave unheeded the warnings of our spirit.

And so, while my amiable and garrulous Ser Stefano engaged me in pleasant conversation—addressing me ever as Messer the Fool, since he knew me not by name—I wrapped my cloak about me, and under cover of it kept my fingers on the hilt of my stout Pistoja dagger, ready to draw and use it at the first sign of mischief. For that sign I was all eyes, and had I been Argus himself I could have kept no better watch. Meanwhile I plied my tongue and maintained as merry a conversation with Ser Stefano as you could wish to hear, for he seemed a ready-witted knave of a most humorous turn of fancy—God rest his rascally soul! And so it came to pass that I did by him the very thing he sought to do by me; I lulled him into a careless confidence.

At last the sign I had been waiting for was given. I saw it as plainly as if it had been meant for me; I believe I saw it before the man for whom it was intended, and but for my fears concerning Madonna Paola, I could have laughed outright at their clumsy assurance. The man who rode on Madonna's right turned in his saddle and put up his hand as if to beckon Stefano. I was regaling him with one of the choicest of Messer Sacchetti's paradoxes, gurgling, myself, at the humour of the thing I told. I paid no heed to the sign. I continued to expound my quip, as though we had the night before us in which to make its elusive humour clear. But out of the tail of my eye I watched my good friend Stefano, and I saw his right hand steal round to the region of his back where I knew his dagger to be slung. Yet was I patient. There should be no blundering through an excessive precipitancy. I talked on until I saw that my suspicions were amply realised. I caught the cold gleam of steel in the hand that he brought back as stealthily as he had carried it to his poniard. Sant' Iddio! What a coward he was for all his bulk, to go so slyly about the business of stabbing a poor, helpless, defenceless Fool.

"But Sacchetti makes his point clear," I babbled on, most blandly; "almost as clear, as comprehensive and as penetrating as should be to you the point of this." And with a swift movement I swung half-round in my saddle, and sank my dagger to the hilt in his side even as he was in the act of raising his.

He made no sound beyond the faintest gurgle—the first vowel of a suddenly choked word of wonder and surprise. He rocked a second in his saddle, then crashed over, and lay with arms flung wide, like a huge black crucifix, upon the white ground. At the same moment a piercing scream broke from Madonna Paola.

I tremble still to think what might have been her fate had not those ruffians who had laid hands on her fallen into the sorry error of holding their single adversary too lightly. They heard the thud of the gallant Stefano's fall, and they never doubted that mine was the body that had gone down. They heard the rapid hoof-beats of my approach, yet, they never turned their heads to ascertain whether they might not be mistaken in their firm conviction that it was Messer Stefano who was joining them.

I kissed my blade for luck, and drove it straight and full into the back of the fellow on Madonna Paola's right. He cried out, essayed to turn in his saddle that he might deal with this unlooked-for assailant, then, overcome, he lurched forward on to the withers of his horse and thence rolled over, and was dragged away at the gallop, his foot caught in a stirrup, by the suddenly startled brute he rode.

So far things had gone with an amazing and delightful ease. If only the last of them had had the amiability to be intimidated by my prowess and to have taken to his heels, I might have issued from that contest with the unscathed glory of a very Mars. But from his throat there came, in answer to his comrade's cry, a roar of rage. He fell back from Madonna, and wheeled his horse to come at me, drawing his sword as he advanced.

"Ride on, Madonna," I shouted. "I will rejoin you presently."

The fellow laughed, a mighty ugly and discomposing laugh, which may or may not have shaken her faith in my promise to rejoin her. It certainly went near to shaking mine. However, she displayed a presence of mind full worthy of the haughtiness and ingratitude of which she had showed herself capable. She urged her mule forward, and, so, left him a clear road to attack me. I made a mistake then that went mighty near to costing me my life. I paused to twist my cloak about my left arm intending to use it as a buckler. Had I but risked the arm itself, all unprotected, in that task, it may well be that it had served me better. As it was, my preparations were far from complete when already he was upon me, with the result that the waving slack of my cloak was in my way to hamper and retard the movements of my arm.

His sword leapt at me, a murderous blue-white flash of moonlit steel. I put up my half-swaddled arm to divert the thrust, holding my dagger ready in my right, and gripping my mule with all the strength of my two knees. I caught the blade, it is true, and turned aside the stroke intended for my heart. But the slack of the cloak clung to the neck of my mule, so that I could not carry my arm far enough to send his point clear of my body. It took me in the shoulder, stinging me, first icy cold then burning hot, as it went tearing its way through. For just a second was I daunted, more at knowing myself touched than by the actual pain. Then I flung my whole body forward to reach him at the close quarters to which he had come, and I buried my dagger in his breast, high up at the base of his dirty throat.

The force of the blow carried me forward, even as it bore him backward; and so, with his sword-blade in my shoulder, and my dagger where I had planted it, we hurtled over together and lay a second amidst what seemed a forest of equine legs. Then something smote me across the head, and I was knocked senseless.

Conceive me, if you can, a sorrier, or more useless thing. A senseless Fool!



CHAPTER VI. FOOL'S LUCK

My return to consciousness seemed to afford me such sensations as a diver may experience as he rises up and up through the depth of water he has plumbed—or as a disembodied soul may know in its gentle ascent towards Heaven. Indeed the latter parallel may be more apt. For through the mist that suffused my senses there penetrated from overhead a voice that seemed to invoke every saint in the calendar on the behalf of some poor mortal. A very litany of intercession was it, not quite, it would appear, devoid of self-seeking.

"Sainted Virgin, restore him! Good St. Paul, who wert done to death with a sword, let him not perish, else am I lost indeed!" came the voice.

I took a deep breath, and opened my eyes, whereat the voice cried out gladly that its intercessions had been heard, and I knew that it was on my behalf that the saints of Heaven had been disturbed in their beatific peace. My head was pillowed in a woman's lap, and it took me a moment or two to realise that that lap was Madonna Paula's, as was hers the voice that had reached my awakening senses, the voice that now welcomed me back to life in terms that were very different from the last that I could remember her having used towards me.

"Thank God, Messer Boccadoro!" she exclaimed, as she bent over me.

Her face was black with shadow, but in her voice I caught a hint of tears, and I wondered whether they were shed on my behalf or on her own.

"I do!" I answered fervently. "Have you any notion of what hour it is?"

"None," she sighed. "You have been so long unconscious that I was losing hope of ever hearing your voice again."

I became aware of a dull ache on the right side of my head. I put up my hand, and withdrew it moist. She saw the action.

"One of the horses must have struck you with its hoof after you fell," she explained. "But I was more concerned for your other wound. I withdrew the sword with my own hands."

That other wound she spoke of was now making itself felt as well. It was a gnawing, stinging pain in the region of my left shoulder, which seemed to turn me numb to the waist on that side of my body, and render powerless my arm. I questioned her touching my three adversaries, and she silently pointed to three black masses that lay some little distance from us in the snow.

"Not all dead?" I cried.

"I do not know," she answered, with a sob. "I have not dared go near them. They frighten me. Mother of Heaven, what a night of horror it has been! Oh, that I had taken your advice, Messer Boccacloro!" she exclaimed in a passion of self-reproach.

I laughed, seeking to soften her distress.

"To me it seems, that whether you would or not, you have been compelled to take it, after all. Those fellows lie there harmless enough, and I am still—as I urged that I should be—your only escort."

"A nobler protector never woman had," she assured me, and I felt a hot pearl of moisture fail upon my brow.

"You were wise, at least, to journey with a Fool," I answered her. "For fools are proverbially lucky folk, and to-night has proven me of all fools the luckiest. But, Madonna," I suggested, in a different tone, "should we not be better advised to attempt to resume, this interesting journey of ours? We do not seem to lack horses?"

A couple of nags were standing by the road-side, together with our mules, and I was afterwards to learn that she, herself, it was had tethered them.

"It must be yet some three leagues to Pesaro," I added, "and if we journey slowly, as I fear me that we must, we should arrive there soon after daybreak."

"Do you think that you can stand?" she asked, a hopeful ring in her voice.

"I might essay it," answered I, and I would have done so, there and then, but that she detained me.

"First let me see to this hurt in your head," said she. "I have been bathing it with snow while you were unconscious."

She gathered a fresh handful as she spoke, and, very tenderly she wiped away the blood. Then from her own head she took the fine linen lanza that she wore, and made a bandage—a bandage sweet with the faint fragrance of marsh-mallow—and bound it about my battered skull. When that was done she turned her attention to my shoulder. This was a more difficult matter, and all that we could do was to attempt to stanch the blood, which already had drenched my doublet on that side. To this end she passed a long scarf under my arm, and wound it several times about my shoulder.

At last her gentle ministrations ended, I sought to rise. A dizziness assailed me scarce was I on my feet, and it is odds I had fallen back, but that she caught and steadied me.

"Mother in Heaven! You are too weak to ride," she exclaimed. "You must not attempt it."

"Nay, but I will," I answered, with more stoutness of tone than I felt of body, and notwithstanding that my knees were loosening under my weight. "It is a faintness that will pass."

If ever man willed himself to conquer weakness, that did I then, and with some measure of success—or else it was that my faintness passed of itself. I drew away from her support, and straightening myself, I crossed to where the animals were tethered, staggering at first, but presently with a surer foot. She followed me, watching my steps with as much apprehension as a mother may feel when her first-born makes his earliest attempts at walking, and as ready to spring to my aid did I show signs of stumbling. But I kept up, and presently my senses seemed to clear, and I stepped out more surely.

Awhile we stood discussing which of the animals we should take. It was my suggestion that we should ride the horses but she wisely contended that the mules would prove the more convenient if the slower. I agreed with her, and then, ere we set out, I went to see to my late opponents. One of them—Ser Stefano—was cold and stiff; the other two still lived, and from the nature of their wounds seemed likely to survive, if only they were not frozen to death before some good Samaritan came upon them.

I knelt a moment to offer up a prayer for the repose of the soul of him that was dead, and I bound up the wounds of the living as best I could, to save them greater loss of blood. Indeed, had it lain in my power, I would have done more for them. But in what case was I to render further aid? After all, they had brought their fate upon themselves, and I doubt not they were paying a score that they had heaped up heavily in the past.

I went back to the mules, and, despite my remonstrances, Madonna Paola insisted upon aiding me to mount, urging me to have a care of my wound, and to make no violent movement that should set it bleeding again. Then she mounted too, nimble as any boy that ever robbed an orchard, and we set out once more. And now it was a very contrite and humbled lady that rode with me, and one that was at no pains to dissemble her contrition, but, rather, could speak of nothing else.

It moved me strangely to have her suing pardon from me, as though I had been her equal instead of the sometime jester of the Court of Pesaro, dismissed for an excessive pertness towards one with whom his master curried favour.

And presently, as was perhaps but natural after all that she had witnessed, she fell to questioning me as to how it came to pass that one of such wit, resource and courage should follow the mean calling to which I had owned. In answer I told her without reservation the full story of my shame. It was a thing that I had ever most zealously kept hidden, as already I have shown.

To be a Fool was evil enough in all truth; but to let men know that under my motley was buried the identity of a man patrician-born was something infinitely worse. For, however vile the trade of a Fool may be, it is not half so vile for a low-born clod who is too indolent or too sickly to do honest work as for one who has accepted it out of a half-cowardice and persevered in it through very sloth.

Yet on that night and after all that had chanced, no matter how my cheeks might burn in the gloom as I rode beside her, I was glad for once to tell that ignominious story, glad that she should know what weight of circumstance had driven me to wear my hideous livery.

But since my story dealt oddly with that Lord of Pesaro, the kinsman whose shelter she was now upon her way to seek, I must first assure myself that the candour to which I was disposed would not offend.

"Does it happen, Madonna," I inquired, "that you are well acquainted with the Lord of Pesaro?"

"Nay; I have never seen him," answered she. "When he was at Rome, a year ago in the service of the Pope, I was at my studies in the convent. His father was my father's cousin, so that my kinship is none so near. Why do you ask?"

"Because my story deals with him, Madonna, and it is no pretty tale. Not such a narrative as I should choose wherewith to entertain you. Still, since you have asked for it, you shall hear it.

"It was in the year that Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro, celebrated his nuptials with the Lady Lucrezia Borgia—three years ago, therefore—that one morning there rode into the courtyard of his castle of Pesazo a tall and lean young man on a tall and lean old horse. He was garbed and harnessed after a fashion that proclaimed him half-knight, half-peasant, and caused the castle lacqueys to eye him with amusement and greet him with derision. Lacqueys are great arbiters of fashion.

"In a loud, imperious voice this cockerel called for Giovanni, Lord of Pesaro, whereupon, resenting the insolence of his manner, the men-at-arms would have driven him out without more ado. But it chanced that from one of the windows of his stronghold the tyrant espied his odd visitor. He was in a mood that craved amusement, and marvelling what madman might be this, he made his way below and bade them stand back and let me speak—for I, Madonna, was that lean young man.

"'Are you,' quoth I, 'the Lord of Pesaro?'

"He answered me courteously that he was, whereupon I did my errand to him. I flung my gauntlet of buffalo-hide at his feet in gage of battle.

"'Your father,' said I, 'Costanzo of Pesaro, was a foul brigand, who robbed my father of his castle and lands of Biancomonte, leaving him to a needy and poverty-stricken old age. I am here to avenge upon your father's son my father's wrongs; I am here to redeem my castle and my lands. If so be that you are a true knight, you will take up the challenge that I fling you, and you will do battle with me, on horse or foot, and with whatsoever arms you shall decree, God defending him that has justice on his side.'

"Knowing the world as I know it now, Madonna," I interpolated, "I realise the folly of that act of mine. But in those days my views belonged to a long departed age of chivalry, of which I had learnt from such books as came my way at Biancomonte, and which I believed was the life of to-day in the world of men. It was a thing which some tyrants would have had me broken on the wheel. But Giovanni Sforza never so much as manifested anger. There was a complacent smile on his white face and his fingers toyed carelessly with his beard.

"I waited patiently, very haughty of mien and very fierce at heart, and when the amusement began to fade from his eyes, I begged that he would deliver me his answer.

"'My answer,' quoth he, 'is that you get you back to the place from whence you came, and render thanks to God on your knees every morning of the life I am sparing you that Giovanni Sforza is more entertained than affronted by your frenzy.'

"At his words I went crimson from chin to brow.

"'Do you disdain me?' I questioned, choking with rage. He turned, with a shrug and a laugh, and bade one of his men to give this cavalier his glove, and conduct him from the castle. Several that had stood at hand made shift to obey him, whereat I fell into such a blind, unreasoning fury that incontinently I drew my sword, and laid about me. They were many, I was but one; and they were not long in overpowering me and dragging me from my horse.

"They bound me fast, and Giovanni bade them let me have a priest, then get me hanged without delay. Had he done that, the world being as it is, perhaps none could blame him. But he elected to spare my life, yet on such terms as I could never have accepted had it not been for the consideration of my poor widowed mother, whom I had left in the hills of Biancomonte whilst I went forth to seek my fortune—such was the tale I had told her. I was her sole support, her only hope in life; and my death must have been her own, if not from grief, why, then from very want. The thought of that poor old woman crushed my spirit as I sat in durance waiting for my end, and when the priest came, whom they had sent to shrive me, he found me weeping, which he took to argue a contrite heart. He bore the tale of it to Giovanni, and the Lord of Pesaro came to visit me in consequence, and found me sorely changed from my furious mood of some hours earlier.

"I was a very coward, I own; but it was for my mother's sake. If I feared death, it was because I bethought me of what it must mean to her."

"At sight of Giovanni I cast myself at his feet, and with tears in my eyes and in heartrending tones, bespeaking a humility as great as had been my erstwhile arrogance, I begged my life of him. I told him the truth—that for myself I was not afraid to die, but that I had a mother in the hills who was dependent on me, and who must starve if I were thus cut off.

"He watched me with his moody eyes, a saturnine smile about his lips. Then of a sudden he shook with a silent mirth, whose evil, malicious depth I was far indeed from suspecting. He asked me would I take solemn oath that if he spared my life I would never again raise my hand against him. That oath I took with a greediness born of my fear of the death that was impending.

"'You have been wise,' said he,' and you shall have your life on one condition—that you devote it to my service.'

"'Even that will I do,' I answered readily. He turned to an attendant, and ordered him to go fetch a suit of motley. No word passed between us until that man returned with those garish garments. Then Giovanni smiled on me in his mocking, infernal way.

"'Not that,' I cried, guessing his purpose.

"'Aye, that,' he answered me; 'that or the hangman's noose. A man who could devise so monstrous a jest as was your challenge to the Tyrant of Pesaro should be a merry fellow if he would. I need such a one. There are two Fools at my Court, but they are mere tumblers, deformed vermin that excite as much disgust as mirth. I need a sprightlier man, a man of some learning and more drollery; such a man, in short, as you would seem to be.'

"I recoiled in horror and disgust. Was this his clemency—this sparing of my life that he might submit it to an eternal shame? For a moment my mother was forgotten. I thought only of myself, and I grew resolved to hang.

"'When you spoke of service,' said I 'I thought of service of an honourable sort.'

"'The service that I offer you is honourable,' he said, with cold amusement. 'Indeed, remembering that your life was forfeit, you should account yourself most fortunate. You shall be well housed and well fed, you shall wear silk and lie in fine linen, on condition that you are merry. If you prove dull our castellan shall have you whipped—for such a one as you could not be dull save out of sullenness, of which we shall seek to cure you if you show signs of it.'

"'I will not do it,' I cried, 'it were too base.'

"'My friend,' he answered me, 'the choice is yours. You shall have an hour in which to resolve what you will do. When they open this door for you at sunset, come forth clad as you are, and you shall hang. If you prefer to live, then don me that robe and cap of motley, and, on condition that you are merry, life is yours.'"

I paused a moment. Our horses were moving slowly, for the tale engrossed us both, me in the telling, her in the hearing. Presently—

"I need not harass you with the reflections that were mine during that hour, Madonna. Rather let me ask you: how should a man so placed make choice to be full worthy of the office proffered him?"

There was a moment's silence while she pondered.

"Why," she answered me, at last, "a fool I take it would have chosen death: the wise man life, since it must hold the hope of better days."

"And since it asked a man of wit to play the fool to such a tune as the Lord Giovanni piped, that wise young man chose life and folly. But was that choice indeed so wise? The story ends not there. That young men whose early life had been one of hardships found himself, indeed, well-housed and fed as the Lord Giovanni had promised him, and so he fell into a slothful spirit, and was content to play the Fool for bed and board.

"There were times when conscience knocked loudly at my heart, and I was tortured with shame to see myself in the garb of Fools, the sport of all, from prince to scullion. But in the three years that I had dwelt at Pesaro my identity had been forgotten by the few who had ever been aware of it. Moreover, a court is a place of changes, and in three years there had been such comings and goings at the Court of Giovanni Sforza, that not more than one or two remained of those that had inhabited it when first I entered on my existence there. Thus had my position grown steadily more bearable. I was just a jester and no more, and so, in a measure—though I blush to say it—I grew content. I gathered consolation from the fact that there were not any who now remembered the story of my coming to Pesaro, or who knew of the cowardliness I had been guilty of when I consented to mask myself in the motley and assume the name of Boccadoro. I counted on the Lord Giovanni's generosity to let things continue thus, and, meanwhile, I provided for my mother out of the vails that were earned me by my shame. But there came a day when Giovanni in evil wantonness of spirit chose to make merry at the Fool's expense.

"To be held up to scorn and ridicule is a part of the trade of such as I, and had it been just Boccadoro whom Giovanni had exposed to the derision of his Court, haply I had been his jester still. But such sport as that would have satisfied but ill the deep-seated malice of his soul. The man whom his cruel mockery crucified for their entertainment was Lazzaro Biancomonte, whom he revealed to them, relating in his own fashion the tale I have told you.

"At that I rebelled, and I said such things to him in that hour, before all his Court, as a man may not say to a prince and live. Passion surged up in him, and he ordered his castellan to flog me to the bone—in short, to slay me with a whip.

"From that punishment I was saved by the intercessions of Madonna Lucrezia. But I was driven out of Pesaro that very night, and so it happens that I am a wanderer now."

At that I left it. I had no mind to tell her what motives had impelled Lucrezia Borgia to rescue me, nor on what errand I had gone to Rome and was from Rome returning.

She had heard me in silence, and now that I had done, she heaved a sigh, for which gentle expression of pity out of my heart I thanked her. We were silent, thereafter, for a little while. At length she turned her head to regard me in the light of the now declining moon.

"Messer Biancomonte," said she, and the sound of the old name, falling from her lips, thrilled me with a joy unspeakable, and seemed already to reinvest me in my old estate, "Messer Biancomonte, you have done me in these four-and-twenty hours such service as never did knight of old for any lady—and you did it, too, out of the most disinterested and noble of motives, proving thereby how truly knightly is that heart of yours, which, for my sake, has all but beat its last to-night. You must journey on to Pesaro with me despite this banishment of which you have told me. I will be surety that no harm shall come to you. I could not do less, and I shall hope to do far more. Such influence as I may prove to have with my cousin of Pesaro shall be exerted all on your behalf, my friend; and if in the nature of Giovanni Sforza there be a tithe of the gratitude with which you have inspired me, you shall, at least, have justice, and Biancomonte shall be yours again."

I was silent for a spell, so touched was I by the kindness she manifested me—so touched, indeed, and so unused to it that I forgot how amply I had earned it, and how rudely she had used me ere that was done.

"Alas!" I sighed. "God knows I am no longer fit to sit in the house of the Biancomonte. I am come too low, Madonna."

"That Lazzaro, after whom you are named," she answered, "had come yet lower. But he lived again, and resumed his former station. Take your courage from that."

"He lived not at the mercy of Giovanni of Pesaro," said I.

There was a fresh pause at that. Then—"At least," she urged me, "you'll come to Pesaro with me?"

"Why yes," said I. "I could not let you go alone." And in my heart I felt a pang of shame, and called myself a cur for making use of her as I was doing to reach the Court of Giovanni Sforza.

"You need fear no consequences," she promised me. "I can be surety for that at least."

In the east a brighter, yellower light than the moon's began to show. It was the dawn, from which I gathered that it must be approaching the thirteenth hour. Pesaro could not be more than a couple of leagues farther, and, presently, when we had gained the summit of the slight hill we were ascending, we beheld in the distance a blurred mass looming on the edge of the glittering sea. A silver ribbon that uncoiled itself from the western hills disappeared behind it. That silvery streak was the River Foglia; that heap of buildings against the landscape's virgin white, the town of Pesaro.

Madonna pointed to it with a sudden cry of gladness. "See Messer Biancomonte, how near we are. Courage, my friend; a little farther, and yonder we have rest and comfort for you."

She had need, in truth, to cry me "Courage!" for I was weakening fast once more. It may have been the much that I had talked, or the infernal jolting of my mule, but I was losing blood again, and as we were on the point of riding forward my senses swam, so that I cried out; and but for her prompt assistance I might have rolled headlong from my saddle.

As it was, she caught me about the waist as any mother might have done her son. "What ails you?" she inquired, her newly-aroused anxiety contrasting sharply with her joyous cry of a moment earlier. "Are you faint, my friend?" It needed no confession on my part. My condition was all too plain as I leaned against her frail body for support.

"It is my wound," I gasped. Then I set my teeth in anguish. So near the haven, and to fail now! It could not be; it must not be. I summoned all my resolution, all my fortitude; but in vain. Nature demanded payment for the abuses she had suffered.

"If we proceed thus," she ventured fearfully, "you leaning against me, and going at a slow pace—no faster than a walk—think you, you can bear it? Try, good Messer 'Biancomonte."

"I will try, Madonna," I replied. "Perhaps thus, and if I am silent, we may yet reach Pesaro together. If not—if my strength gives out—the town is yonder and the day is coming. You will find your way without me."

"I will not leave you, sir," she vowed; and it was good to hear her.

"Indeed, I hope you may not know the need," I answered wearily. And thus we started on once more.

Sant' Iddio! What agonies I suffered ere the sun rose up out of the sea to flood us with his winter glory! What agonies were mine during those two hours or so of that last stage of our eventful journey! "I must bear up until we are at the gates of Pesaro," I kept murmuring to myself, and, as if my spirit were inclined to become the servant of my will and hold my battered flesh alive until we got that far, Pesaro's gates I had the joy of entering ere I was constrained to give way.

Dimly I remember—for very dim were my perceptions growing—that as we crossed the bridge and passed beneath the archway of the Porta Romana, the officer turned out to see who came. At sight of me be gaped a moment in astonishment.

"Boccadoro?" he exclaimed, at last. "So soon returned?"

"Like Perseus from the rescue of Andromeda," answered I, in a feeble voice, "saving that Perseus was less bloody than am I. Behold the Madonna Paola Sforza di Santafior, the noble cousin of our High and Mighty Lord."

And then as if my task being done, I were free to set my weary brain to rest, my senses grew confused, the officer's voice became a hum that gradually waxed fainter as I sank into what seemed the most luxurious and delicious sleep that ever mortal knew.

Two days later, when I was conscious once more, I learned what excitement those words of mine had sown, with what honours Madonna Paola was escorted to the Castle, and how the citizens of Pesaro turned out upon hearing the news which ran like fire before us. And Madonna, it seems, had loudly proclaimed how gallantly I had served her, for as they bore me along in a cloak carried by four men-at-arms, the cry that was heard in the streets of Pesaro that morning was "Boccadoro!" They had loved me, had those good citizens of Pesaro, and the news of my departure had cast a gloom upon the town. To have their hero return in a manner so truly heroic provoked that brave display of their affection, and I deeply doubt if ever in the days of greatest loyalty the name of Sforza was as loudly cried in Pesaro as, they tell me, was the name of Sforza's Fool that day.



CHAPTER VII. THE SUMMONS FROM ROME

If Madonna Paola did not achieve quite all that she had promised me so readily, yet she achieved more than from my acquaintance with the nature of Giovanni Sforza—and my knowledge of the deep malice he entertained for me—I should have dared to hope.

The Tyrant of Pesaro, as I was soon to learn, was greatly taken with this fair cousin of his, whom that morning he had beheld for the first time. And being taken with her, it may be that Giovanni listened the more readily to her intercessions on my poor behalf. Since it was she who begged this thing, he could not wholly refuse. But since he was Giovanni Sforza, he could not wholly grant. He promised her that my life, at least, should be secure, and that not only would he pardon me, but that he would have his own physician see to it that I was made sound again. For the time, that was enough, he thought. First let them bring me back to life. When that was achieved, it would be early enough to consider what course this life should take thereafter.

And she, knowing him not and finding him so kind and gracious, trusted that he would perform that which he tricked her into believing that he promised.

For some ten days I lay abed, feverish at first and later very weak from the great loss of blood I had sustained. But after the second day, when my fever had abated, I had some visitors, among whom was Madonna Paola, who bore me the news that her intercessions for me with the Lord of Pesaro were likely to bear fruit, and that I might look for my reinstatement. Yet, if I permitted myself to hope as she bade me; I did so none too fully.

My situation, bearing in mind how at once I had served and thwarted the ends of Cesare Borgia, was perplexing.

Another visitor I had was Messer Magistri—the pompous seneschal of Pesaro—who, after his own fashion, seemed to have a liking for me, and a certain pity. Here was my chance of discharging the true errand on which I was returned.

"I owe thanks," said I, "to many circumstances for the sparing of my life; but above all people and all things do I owe thanks to our gracious Lady Lucrezia. Do you think, Messer Magistri, that she would consent to see me and permit me again to express the gratitude that fills my heart?"

Mosser Magistri thought that he could promise this, and consented to bear my message to her. Within the hour she was at my bedside and divining that, haply, I had news to give her of the letter I had born her brother, she dismissed Magistri who was in attendance.

Once we were alone her first words were of kindly concern for my condition, delivered in that sweet, musical voice that was by no means the least charm of a princess to whom Nature had been prodigal of gifts. For without going to that length of exaggerated praise which some have bestowed—for her own ear, and with an eye to profit—upon Madonna Lucrezia, yet were I less than truthful if I sought to belittle her ample claims to beauty. Some six years later than the time of which I write she was met on the occasion of her entry into Ferrara by a certain clown dressed in the scanty guise of the shepherd Paris, who proffered her the apple of beauty with the mean-souled flattery that since beholding her he had been forced to alter his old-time judgment in favour of Venus.

He lied, like the brazen, self-seeking adulator that he was, and for which he should have been soundly whipped. Her nose was a shade too long, her chin a shade too short to admit, even remotely, of such comparisons. Still, that she had a certain gracious beauty, as I have said, it is not mine to deny. There was an almost childish freshness in her face, an almost childish innocence in her fine gray eyes, and, above all, a golden and resplendent hair as brought to mind the tresses of God's angels.

That fair child—for no more than a child was she—drew a chair to my bedside.

There she sate herself, whilst I thanked her for her concern on my behalf, and answered that I was doing well enough, and should be abroad again in a day or two.

"Brave lad," she murmured, patting my hand, which lay upon the coverlet, as though she had been my sister and I anything but a Fool, "count me ever your friend hereafter, for what you have done for Madonna Paola. For although it was my own family you thwarted, yet you did so to serve one who is more to me than any family, more than any sister could be."

"What I did, Madonna," I answered, "I did with the better heart since it opened out a way that was barred me, solved me a riddle which my Lord, your Illustrious brother, set me—one that otherwise might well have overtaxed my wits."

"Ah?" Her gray eyes fell on me in a swift and searching glance, a glance that revealed to the full their matchless beauty. Care seemed of a sudden to have aged her face. The question of her eyes needed no translation into words.

"The Lord Cardinal of Valencia entrusted me with a letter for you, in answer to your own," I informed her, and from underneath my pillow I drew the package, which during Magistri's absence I had abstracted from my boot that I might have it in readiness when she came.

She sighed as she took it, and a wistful smile invested the corners of her mouth.

"I had hoped he would have found better employment for you," she said.

"His Excellency promised that he would more fitly employ me in the future did I discharge this errand with secrecy and despatch. But by aiding Madonna Paola I have burned my boats against returning to claim the redemption of that promise; though had it not been for Madonna Paola and what I did, I scarce know how I should have penetrated here to you."

She broke the seal, and rising crossed to the window, where she stood reading the letter, her back toward me. Presently I heard a stifled sob. The letter was crushed in her hand. Then moments passed ere she confronted me once more. But her manner as all changed; she was agitated and preoccupied, and for all that she forced herself to talk of me and my affairs, her mind was clearly elsewhere. At last she left me, nor did I see her again during the time I was confined to my bed.

On the eleventh day I rose, and the weather being mild and spring-like, I was permitted by my grave-faced doctor to take the air a little on the terrace that overlooks the sea. I found no garments but some suits of motley, and so, in despite of my repugnance now to reassume that garb, I had no choice but to array myself in one of these. I selected the least garish one—a suit of black and yellow stripes, with hose that was half black, half yellow, too; and so, leaning upon the crutch they had left me, I crept forth into the sunlight, the very ghost of the man that I had been a fortnight ago.

I found a stone seat in a sheltered corner looking southward towards Ancona, and there I rested me and breathed the strong invigorating air of the Adriatic. The snows were gone, and between me and the wall some twenty paces off—there was a stretch of soft, green turf.

I had brought with me a book that Madonna Lucrezia had sent me while I was yet abed. It was a manuscript collection of Spanish odes, with the proverbs of one Domenico Lopez—all very proper nourishment for a jester's mind. The odes seemed to possess a certain quaintness, and among the proverbs there were many that were new to me in framing and in substance. Moreover, I was glad of this means of improving my acquaintance with the tongue of Spain, and I was soon absorbed. So absorbed, indeed, as never to hear the footsteps of the Lord Giovanni, when presently he approached me unattended, nor to guess at his presence until his shadow fell athwart my page. I raised my eyes, and seeing who it was I made shift to get on my feet; but he commanded me to remain seated, commenting sympathetically upon my weak condition.

He asked me what I read, and when I had told him, a thin smile fluttered across his white face.

"You choose your reading with rare judgment," said he. "Read on, and prime your mind with fresh humour, prepare yourself with new conceits for our amusement against the time when health shall be more fully restored you."

It was in such words as these that he intimated to me that I was pardoned, and reinstated—as the Fool of the Court of Pesaro. That was to be the sum of his clemency. We were precisely where we had been. Once before had he granted me my life on condition that I should amuse him; he did no more than repeat that mercy now. I stared at him in wonder, open-mouthed, whereit he laughed.

"You are agreeably surprised, my Boccadoro?" said he, his fingers straying to his beard as was his custom. "My clemency is no more than you deserve in return for the service you have rendered to the House of Sforza." And he patted my head as though I had been one of his dogs that had borne itself bravely in the chase.

I answered nothing. I sat there as if I had been a part of the stone from which my seat was hewn, for I lacked the strength to rise and strangle him as he deserved—moreover, I was bound by an oath, which it would have damned my soul to break, never to raise my hand against him.

And then, before he could say more, two ladies issued from the doorway on my right. They were Madonna Lucrezia and Madonna Paola. Upon espying me they hastened forward with expressions of pleased surprise at seeing me risen and out, and when I would have got to my feet they stayed me as Giovanni had done. Madonna Paola's words seemed addressed to heaven rather than to me, for they were words of thanksgiving for this recovery of my strength.

"I have no thanks," she ended warmly, "that can match the deeds by which you earned them, Messer Biancomonte."

My eyes drifting to Giovanni's face surprised its sudden darkening.

"Madonna Paola," said he, in an icy voice, "you have uttered a name that must not be heard within my walls of Pesaro, if you would prove yourself the friend of Boccadoro. To remind me of his true identity is to remind me of that which counts not in his favour."

She turned to regard him, a mild surprise in her blue eyes.

"But, my lord, you promised—" she began.

"I promised," he interposed, with an easy smile and manner never so deprecatory, "that I would pardon him, grant him his life and restore him to my favour."

"But did you not say that if he survived and was restored to strength you would then determine the course his life should take?"

Still smiling, he produced his comfit-box, and raised the lid.

"That is a thing he seems to have determined for himself," he answered smoothly—he could be smooth as a cat upon occasion, could this bastard of Costanzo Sforza. "I came upon him here, arrayed as you behold him, and reading a book of Spanish quips. Is it not clear that he has chosen?"

Between thumb and forefinger he balanced a sugar-crusted comfit of coriander seed steeped in marjoram vinegar, and having put his question he bore the sweet-meat to his mouth. The ladies looked at him, and from him to me. Then Madonna Paola spoke, and there seemed a reproachful wonder in her voice.

"Is this indeed your choice?" she asked me.

"It is the choice that was forced on me," said I, in heat. "They left me no garment save these of folly. That I was reading this book it pleases my lord to interpret into a further sign of my intentions."

She turned to him again, and to the appeal she made was joined that of Madonna Lucrezia. He grew serious and put up his hand in a gesture of rare loftiness.

"I am more clement than you think," said he, "in having done so much. For the rest, the restoration that you ask for him is one involving political issues you little dream of. What is this?"

He had turned abruptly. A servant was approaching, leading a mud-splashed courier, whom he announced as having just arrived.

"Whence are you?" Giovanni questioned him.

"From the Holy See," answered the courier, bowing, "with letters for the High and Mighty Lord Giovanni Sforza, Tyrant of Pesaro, and his noble spouse, Madonna Lucrezia Borgia."

He proffered his letters as he spoke, and Giovanni, whose brow had grown overcast, took them with a hand that seemed reluctant. Then bidding the servant see to the courier's refreshment, he dismissed them both.

A moment he stood, balancing the parchments a if from their weight he would infer the gravity of their contents; and the affairs of Boccadoro were, there and then, forgotten by us all. For the thought that rose uppermost in our minds—saving always that of Madonna Lucrezia—was that these communications concerned the sheltering of Madonna Paola, and were a command for her immediate return to Rome. At last Giovanni handed his wife the letter intended for her, and, in silence, broke the seal of his own.

He unfolded it with a grim smile, but scarce had he begun to read when his expression softened into one of terror, and his face grew ashen. Next it flared crimson, the veins on his brow stood out like ropes, and his eyes flashed furiously upon Madonna Lucrezia. She was reading, her bosom rising and falling in token of the excitement that possessed her.

"Madonna," he cried in an awful voice, "I have here a command from the Holy See to repair at once to Rome, to answer certain charges that are preferred against me relating to my marriage. Madonna, know you aught of this?"

"I know, sir," she answered steadily, "that I, too, have here a letter calling me to Rome. But there is no reason given for the summons."

Intuitively it flashed across my mind that whatever the matter might be, Madonna Lucrezia had full knowledge of it through the letter I had brought her from her brother.

"Can you conjecture, Madonna, what are these charges to which my letter vaguely alludes?" Giovanni was inquiring.

"Your pardon, but the subject is scarcely of a nature to permit discussion in the castle courtyard. Its character is intimate."

He looked at her very searchingly, but for all that he was a man of almost twice her years, her wits were more than a match for his, and his scrutiny can have told him nothing. She preserved a calm, unruffled front.

"In five minutes, Madonna," said he, very sternly, "I shall be honoured if you will receive me in your closet."

She inclined her head, murmuring an unhesitating assent. Satisfied, he bowed to her and to Madonna Paola—who had been looking on with eyes that wonder had set wide open—and turning on his heel he strode briskly away. As he passed into the castle, Madonna Lucrezia heaved a sigh and rose.

"My poor Boccadoro," she cried, "I fear me your affairs must wait a while. But think of me always as your friend, and believe that if I can prevail upon my brother to overlook the ill-turn you did him when you entered the service of this child"—and she pointed to Madonna Paola—"I shall send for you from Rome, for in Pesaro I fear you have little to hope for. But let this be a secret between us."

From those words of hers I inferred, as perhaps she meant I should, that once she left Pesaro to obey her father's summons, our little northern state was to know her no more. Once again, only, did I see her, on the occasion of her departure, some four days later, and then but for a moment. Back to Pesaro she came no more, as you shall learn anon; but behind her she left a sweet and fragrant memory, which still endures though many years are sped and much calumny has been heaped upon her name.

I might pause here to make some attempt at refuting the base falsehoods that had been bruited by that time-serving vassal Guicciardini, and others of his kidney, whom the upstart Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere—sometime pedlar—in his jealous fury at seeing the coveted pontificate pass into the family of Borgia, bought and hired to do his loathsome work of calumny and besmirch the fame of as sweet a lady as Italy has known. But this poor chronicle of mine is rather concerned with the history of Madonna Paola di Santafior, and it were a divergence well-nigh unpardonable to set my pen at present to that other task. Moreover, there is scarce the need. If any there be who doubt me, or if future generations should fall into the error of lending credence to the lies of that villain Guicciardini, of that arch-villain Giuliano della Rovere, or of other smaller fry who have lent their helot's pens to weave mendacious records of her life, dubbing her murderess, adulteress, and Heaven knows what besides—I will but refer them to the archives of Ferrara, whose Duchess she became at the age of one-and-twenty, and where she reigned for eighteen years. There shall it be found recorded that she was an exemplary, God-fearing woman; a faithful and honoured wife; a wise, devoted mother; and a princess, beloved and esteemed by her people for her piety, her charity and her wisdom. If such records as are there to be read by earnest seekers after truth be not sufficient to convince, and to reveal those others whom I have named in the light of their true baseness, then were it idle for me to set up in these pages a passing refutation of the falsehoods which it has grieved me so often to hear repeated.

It was two days later that the Lord Giovanni set out for Rome, obedient to the command he had received. But before his departure—on the eve of it, to be precise—there arrived at Pesaro a very wonderful and handsome gentleman. This was the brother of Madonna Paola, the High and Mighty Lord Filippo di Santafior. He had had a hint in Rome that his connivance at his sister's defiant escape was suspected at the Vatican, and he had wisely determined that his health would thrive better in a northern climate for a while.

A very splendid creature was this Lord Filippo, all shimmering velvet, gleaming jewels, costly furs and glittering gold. His face was effeminate, though finely featured, and resembled, in much, his sister's. He rode a cream-coloured horse, which seemed to have been steeped in musk, so strongly was it scented. But of all his affectations the one with which I as taken most was to see one of his grooms approach him when he dismounted, to dust his wondrous clothes down to his shoes, which he wore in the splayed fashion set by the late King of France who was blessed with twelve toes on each of his deformed feet.

The Lord Giovanni, himself not lacking in effeminacy, was greatly taken by the wondrous raiment, the studied lisp and the hundred affectations of this peerless gallant. Had he not been overburdened at the time by the Papal business that impended, he might there and then have cemented the intimacy which was later to spring up between them. As it was, he made him very welcome, and placed at his and his sister's disposal the beautiful palace that his father had begun, and he, himself, had completed, which was known as the Palazza Sforza. On the morrow Giovanni left Pesaro with but a small retinue, in which I was thankful not to be included.

Two days later Madonna Lucrezia followed her husband, the fact that they journeyed not together, seeming to wear an ominous significance. Her eyes had a swollen look, such as attends much weeping, which afterwards I took as proof that she knew for what purpose she was going, and was moved to bitter grief at the act to which her ambitious family was constraining her.

After their departure things moved sluggishly at Pesaro. The nobles of the Lord Giovanni's Court repaired to their several houses in the neighboring country, and save for the officers of the household the place became deserted.

Madonna Paola remained at the Sforza Palace, and I saw her only once during the two mouths that followed, and then it was about the streets, and she had little more than a greeting for me as she passed. At her side rode her brother, a splendid blaze of finery, falcon on wrist.

My days were spent in reading and reflection, for there was naught else to do. I might have gone my ways, had I so wished it, but something kept me there at Pesaro, curious to see the events with which the time was growing big.

We grew sadly stagnant during Lent, and what with the uneventful course of things, and the lean fare proscribed by Mother Church, it was a very dispirited Boccadoro that wandered aimlessly whither his dulling fancy took him. But in Holy Week, at last, we received an abrupt stir which set a whirlpool of excitement in the Dead Sea of our lives. It was the sudden reappearance of the Lord Giovanni.

He came alone, dust-stained and haggard, on a horse that dropped dead from exhaustion the moment Pesaro was reached, and in his pallid cheek and hollow eye we read the tale of some great fear and some disaster.

That night we heard the story of how he had performed the feat of riding all the way from Rome in four-and-twenty hours, fleeing for his life from the peril of assassination, of which Madonna Lucrezia had warned him.

He went off to his Castle of Gradara, where he shut himself up with the trouble we could but guess at, and so in Pesaro, that brief excitement spent, we stagnated once again.

I seemed an anomaly in so gloomy a place, and more than once did I think of departing and seeking out my poor old mother in her mountain home, contenting myself hereafter with labouring like any honest villano born to the soil. But there ever seemed to be a voice that bade me stay and wait, and the voice bore a suggestion of Madonna Paola. But why dissemble here? Why cast out hints of voices heard, supernatural in their flavour? The voice, I doubt not, was just my own inclination, which bade me hope that once again it might be mine to serve that lady.

An eventful year in the history of the families of Sforza and Borgia was that year of grace 1497.

Spring came, and ere it had quite grown to summer we had news of the assassination of the Duke of Gandia, and the tale that he was done to death by his elder brother, Cesare Borgia; a tale which seemed to lack for reasonable substantiation, and which, despite the many voices that make bold to noise it broadcast, may or may not be true.

In that same month of June messages passed between Rome and Pesaro, and gradually the burden of the messages leaked out in rumours that Pope Alexander and his family were pressing the Lord Giovanni to consent to a divorce. At last he left Pesaro again; this time to journey to Milan and seek counsel with his powerful cousin, Lodovico, whom they called "The Moor." When he returned he was more sulky and downcast than ever, and at Gradara he lived in an isolation that had been worthy of a hermit.

And thus that miserable year wore itself out, and, at last, in December, we heard that the divorce was announced, and that Lucrezia Borgia was the Tyrant of Pesaro's wife no more. The news of it and the reasons that were put forward as having led to it were roared across Italy in a great, derisive burst of laughter, of which the Lord Giovanni was the unfortunate and contemptible butt.



CHAPTER VIII. "MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN"

And now, lest I grow tedious and weary you with this narrative of mine, it may be well that I but touch with a fugitive pen upon the events of the next three years of the history of Pesaro.

Early in 1498 the Lord Giovanni showed himself once more abroad, and he seemed again the same weak, cruel, pleasure-loving tyrant he had been before shame overtook him and drove him for a season into hiding. Madonna Paola and her brother, Filippo di Santafior, remained in Pesaro, where they now appeared to have taken up their permanent abode. Madonna Paola—following her inclinations—withdrew to the Convent of Santa Caterina, there to pursue in peace the studies for which she had a taste, whilst her splendid, profligate brother became the ornament—the arbiter elegantiarum—of our court.

Thus were they left undisturbed; for in the cauldron of Borgia politics a stew was simmering that demanded all that family's attention, and of whose import we guessed something when we heard that Cesare Borgia had flung aside his cardinalitial robes to put on armour and give freer rein to the boundless ambition that consumed him.

With me life moved as if that winter excursion and adventure had never been. Even the memory of it must have faded into a haze that scarce left discernible any semblance of reality, for I was once again Boccadoro, the golden-mouthed Fool, whose sayings were echoed by every jester throughout Italy. My shame that for a brief season had risen up in arms seemed to be laid to rest once more, and I was content with the burden that was mine. Money I had in plenty, for when I pleased him the Lord Giovanni's vails were often handsome, and much of my earnings went to my poor mother, who would sooner have died starving than have bought herself bread with those ducats could she have guessed at what manner of trade Lazzaro Biancomonte had earned them.

The Lord Giovanni was a frequent visitor at the Convent of Santa Caterina, whither he went, ever attended by Filippo di Santafior, to pay his duty to his fair cousin. In the summer of 1500, she being then come to the age of eighteen, and as divinely beautiful a lady as you could find in Italy, she allowed herself to be persuaded by her brother—who, I make no doubt had been, in his turn, persuaded by the Lord of Pesaro—to leave her convent and her studies, and to take up her life at the Sforza Palace, where Filippo held by now a sort of petty court of his own.

And now it fell out that the Lord Giovanni was oftener at the Palace than at the Castle, and during that summer Pesaro was given over to such merrymaking as it had never known before. There was endless lute-thrumming and recitation of verses by a score of parasite poets whom the Lord Giovanni encouraged, posing now as a patron of letters; there were balls and masques and comedies beyond number, and we were as gay as though Italy held no Cesare Borgia, Duke of Valentinois, who was sweeping northward with his all-conquering flood of mercenaries.

But one there was who, though the very centre of all these merry doings, the very one in whose honour and for whose delectation they were set afoot, seemed listless and dispirited in that boisterous crowd. This was Madonna Paola, to whom, rumour had it, that her kinsman, the Lord Giovanni, was paying a most ardent suit.

I saw her daily now, and often would she choose me for her sole companion; often, sitting apart with me, would she unburden her heart and tell me much that I am assured she would have told no other. A strange thing may it have seemed, this confidence between the Fool and the noble Lady of Santafior—my Holy Flower of the Quince, as in my thoughts I grew to name her. Perhaps it may have been because she found me ever ready to be sober at her bidding, when she needed sober company as those other fools—the greater fools since they accounted themselves wise—could not afford her.

That winter adventure betwixt Cagli and Pesaro was a link that bound us together, and caused her to see under my motley and my masking smile the true Lazzaro Biancomonte whom for a little season she had known. And when we were alone it had become her wont to call me Lazzaro, leaving that other name that they had given me for use when others were at hand. Yet never did she refer to my condition, or wound me by seeking to spur me to the ambition to become myself again. Haply she was content that I should be as I sas, since had I sought to become different it must have entailed my quitting Pesaro, and this poor lady was so bereft of friends that she could not afford to lose even the sympathy of the despised jester.

It was in those days that I first came to love her with as pure a flame as ever burned within the heart of man, for the very hopelessness of it preserved its holy whiteness. What could I do, if I would love her, but love her as the dog may love his mistress? More was surely not for me—and to seek more were surely a madness that must earn me less. And so, I was content to let things be, and keep my heart in check, thanking God for the mercy of her company at times, and for the precious confidences she made me, and praying Heaven—for of my love was I grown devout—that her life might run a smooth and happy course, and ready, in the furtherance of such an object, to lay down my own should the need arise. Indeed there were times when it seemed to me that it was a good thing to be a Fool to know a love of so rare a purity as that—such a love as I might never have known had I been of her station, and in such case as to have hoped to win her some day for my own.

One evening of late August, when the vines were heavy with ripe fruit, and the scent of roses was permeating the tepid air, she drew me from the throng of courtiers that made merry in the Palace, and led me out into the noble gardens to seek counsel with me, she said, upon a matter of gravest moment. There, under the sky of deepest blue, crimsoning to saffron where the sun had set, we paced awhile in silence, my own senses held in thrall by the beauty of the eventide, the ambient perfumes of the air and the strains of music that faintly reached us from the Palace. Madonna's head was bent, and her eyes were set upon the ground and burdened, so my furtive glance assured me, with a gentle sorrow. At length she spoke, and at the words she uttered my heart seemed for a moment to stand still.

"Lazzaro," said she, "they would have me marry."

For a little spell there was a silence, my wits seeming to have grown too numbed to attempt to seek an answer. I might be content, indeed, to love her from a distance, as the cloistered monk may love and worship some particular saint in Heaven; yet it seems that I was not proof against jealousy for all the abstract quality of my worship.

"Lazzaro," she repeated presently, "did you hear me? They would have me marry."

"I have heard some such talk," I answered, rousing myself at last; "and they say that it is the Lord Giovanni who would prove worthy of your hand."

"They say rightly, then," she acknowledged. "The Lord Giovanni it is."

Again there was a silence, and again it was she who broke it.

"Well, Lazzaro?" she asked. "Have you naught to say?"

"What would you have me say, Madonna? If this wedding accords with your own wishes, then am I glad."

"Lazzaro, Lazzaro! you know that it does not."

"How should I know it, Madonna?"

"Because your wits are shrewd, and because you know me. Think you this petty tyrant is such a man as I should find it in my heart to conceive affection for? Grateful to him am I for the shelter he has afforded us here; but my love—that is a thing I keep, or fain would keep, for some very different man. When I love, I think it will be a valorous knight, a gentleman of lofty mind, of noble virtues and ready address."

"An excellent principle on which to go in quest of a husband, Madonna mia. But where in this degenerate world do you look to find him?"

"Are there, then, no such men?"

"In the pages of Bojardo and those other poets whom you have read too earnestly there may be."

"Nay, there speaks your cynicism," she chided me. "But even if my ideals be too lofty, would you have me descend from the height of such a pinnacle to the level of the Lord Giovanni—a weak-spirited craven, as witnesses the manner in which he permitted the Borgias to mishandle him; a cruel and unjust tyrant, as witnesses his dealing with you, to seek no further instances; a weak, ignorant, pleasure-loving fool, devoid of wit and barren of ambition? Such is the man they would have me wed. Do not tell me, Lazzaro, that it were difficult to find a better one than this."

"I do not mean to tell you that. After all, though it be my trade to jest, it is not my way to deal in falsehood. I think, Madonna, that if we were to have you write for us such an appreciation of the High and Mighty Giovanni Sforza, you would leave a very faithful portrait for the enlightenment of posterity."

"Lazzaro, do not jest!" she cried. "It is your help I need. That is the reason why I am come to you with the tale of what they seek to force me into doing."

"To force you?" I cried. "Would they dare so much?"

"Aye, if I resist them further."

"Why, then," I answered, with a ready laugh, "do not resist them further."

"Lazzaro!" she cried, her accents telling of a spirit wounded by what she accounted a flippancy.

"Mistake me not," I hastened to elucidate. "It is lest they should employ force and compel you at once to enter into this union that I counsel you to offer no resistance. Beg for a little time, vaguely suggesting that you are not indisposed to the Lord Giovanni's suit."

"That were deceit," she protested.

"A trusty weapon with which to combat tyranny," said I.

"Well? And then?" she questioned. "Such a state of things cannot endure for ever. It must end some day."

I shook my head, and I smiled down upon her a smile that was very full of confidence.

"That day will never dawn, unless the Lord Giovanni's impatience transcends all bounds."

She looked at me, a puzzled glance in her eyes, a bewildered expression knitting her fine brows.

"I do not take your meaning, my friend," she complained.

"Then mark the enucleation. I will expound this meaning of mine through the medium of a parable. In Babylon of old, there dwelt a king whose name was Belshazzar, who, having fallen into habits of voluptuousness and luxury, was so enslaved by them as to feast and make merry whilst a certain Darius, King of the Medes, was marching in arms against his capital. At a feast one night the fingers of a man's hand were seen to write upon the wall, and the words they wrote were a belated warning: 'Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.'"

She looked at me, her eyes round with inquiry, and a faint smile of uncertainty on her lips.

"Let me confess that your elucidation helps me but little."

"Ponder it, Madonna," I urged her. "Substitute Giovanni Sforza for Belshazzar, Cesare Borgia for King Darius, and you have the key to my parable."

"But is it indeed so? Does danger threaten Pesaro from that quarter?"

"Aye, does it," I answered, almost impatiently. "The tide of war is surging up, and presently will whelm us utterly. Yet here sits the Lord Giovanni making merry with balls and masques and burle and banquets, wholly unprepared, wholly unconscious of his peril. There may be no hand to write a warning on his walls—or else, as in the case of Babylon, the hand will write when it is too late to avert the evil—yet there are not wanting other signs for those that have the wit to read them; nor is a wondrous penetration needed."

"And you think then—" she began.

"I think that if you are obdurate with him, he and your brother may hurry you by force into this union. But if you temporise with half-promises, with suggestions that before Christmas you may grow reconciled to his wishes, he will be patient."

"But what if Christmas comes and finds us still in this position?"

"It will need a miracle for that; or, at least, the death of Cesare Borgia—an unlikely event, for they say he uses great precautions. Saving the miracle, and providing Cesare lives, I will give the Lord Giovanni's reign in Pesaro at most two months."

We had halted now, and were confronting each other in the descending gloom.

"Lazzaro, dear friend," she cried, almost with gaiety, "I was wise to take counsel with you. You have planted in my heart a very vigorous growth of hope."

We turned soon after, and started to retrace our steps, for she might be ill-advised to remain absent overlong.

I left her on the terrace in a very different spirit from that in which she had come to me, bearing with me her promise that she would act as I had advised her. No doubt I had taken a load from her gentle soul, and oddly enough I had taken, too, a load from mine.

Things fell out as I said they would in far as Giovanni Sforza and Filippo were concerned. Madonna's seeming amenability to their wishes stayed their insistence, and they could but respect her wishes to let the betrothal be delayed yet a little while. And during the weeks that followed, it was I scarce know whether more pitiable or more amusing to see the efforts that Giovanni made to win her ardently desired affection.

Love has sharp eyes at times, and a dullard under the influence of the baby god will turn shrewd and exert rare wiles in the conduct of his wooing. Giovanni, by some intuition usually foreign to his dull nature, seemed to divine what manner of man would be Madonna Paola's ideal, and strove to pass himself off as possessed of the attributes of that ideal, with an ardour that was pitiably comical. He became an actor by the side of whom those comedians that played impromptus for his delectation were the merest bunglers with the art. He gathered that Madonna Paola loved the poets and their stately diction, and so, to please her better, he became a poet for the season.

"Poeta nascitur" the proverb runs, and that proverb's truth was doubtless forced home upon the Lord Giovanni at an early stage of his excursions into the flowery meads of prosody. Fortunately he lacked the supreme vanity that is the attribute of most poetasters, and he was able to see that such things as after hours of midnight-labour he contrived to pen, would evoke nothing but her amusement—unless, indeed, it were her scorn—and render him the laughing-stock of all his Court.

So, in the wisdom of despair, he came to me, and with a gentleness that in the past he had rarely manifested for me, he asked me was I skilled in writing verse. There were not wanting others to whom he might have gone, for there was no lack of rhymsters about his Court; but perhaps he thought he could be more certain of my silence than of theirs.

I answered him that were the subject to my taste, I might succeed in throwing off some passable lines upon it. He pressed gold upon me, and bade me there and then set about fashioning an ode to Madonna Paola, and to forget, when they were done, under pain of a whipping to the bone, that I had written them.

I obeyed him with a right good-will. For what subject of all subjects possible was there that made so powerful an appeal to my inclinations? Within an hour he had the ode—not perhaps such a poem as might stand comparison with the verses of Messer Petrarca, yet a very passable effusion, chaste of conceit and palpitating with sincerity and adoration. It was in that that I addressed her as the "Holy Flower of the Quince," which was the symbol of the House of Santafior.

So great an impression made that ode that on the morrow the Lord Giovanni came to me with a second bribe and a second threat of torture. I gave him a sonnet of Petrarchian manner which went near to outshining the merits of the ode. And now, these requests of the Lord Giovanni's assumed an almost daily regularity, until it came to seem that did affairs continue in this manner for yet a little while, I should have earned me enough to have repurchased Biancomonte, and, so, ended my troubles. And good was the value that I gave him for his gold. How good, he never knew; for how was he, the clod, to guess that this despised jester of his Court was pouring out his very soul into the lines he wrote to the tyrant's orders?

It is scant wonder that, at last, Madonna Paola who had begun by smiling, was touched and moved by the ardent worship that sighed from those perfervid verses. So touched, indeed, was she as to believe the Lord Giovanni's love to be the pure and holy thing those lines presented it, and to conclude that his love had wrought in him a wondrous and ennobling transformation. That so she thought I have the best of all reasons to affirm, for I had it from her very lips one day.

"Lazzaro," she sighed, "it is occurring to me that I have done the Lord Giovanni an injustice. I have misgauged his character. I held him to be a shallow, unlettered clown, devoid of any finer feelings. Yet his verses have a merit that is far above the common note of these writings, and they breathe such fine and lofty sentiments as could never spring from any but a fine and lofty soul."

How I came to keep my tongue from wagging out the truth I scarcely know. It may be that I was frightened of the punishment that might overtake me did I betray my master; but I rather think that it was the fear of betraying myself, and so being flung into the outer darkness where there was no such radiant presence as Madonna Paola's. For had I told her it was I had penned those poems that were the marvel of the Court, she must of necessity have guessed my secret, for to such quick wits as hers it must have been plain at once that they were no vapourings of artistry, but the hot expressions of a burning truth. It was in that—in their supreme sincerity—that their chief virtue lay.

Thus weeks wore on. The vintage season came and went; the roses faded in the gardens of the Palazzo Sforza, and the trees put on their autumn garb of gold. October was upon us, and with it came, at last, the fear that long ago should have spurred us into activity. And now that it came it did not come to stimulate, but to palsy. Terror-stricken at the conquering advance of Valentino—which was the name they now gave Cesare Borgia; a name derived from his Duchy of Valentinois—Giovanni Sforza abruptly ceased his revelling, and made a hurried appeal for help to Francesco Gonzaga, Lord of Mantua—his brother-in-law, through the Lord of Pesaro's first marriage. The Mantuan Marquis sent him a hundred mercenaries under the command of an Albanian named Giacomo. As well might he have sent him a hundred figs wherewith to pelt the army of Valentino!

Disaster swooped down swiftly upon the Lord of Pesaro. His very people, seeing in what case they were, and how unprepared was their tyrant to defend them, wisely resolved that they would run no risks of fire and pillage by aiding to oppose the irresistible force that was being hurled against us.

It was on the second Sunday in October that the storm burst over the Lord Giovanni's head. He was on the point of leaving the Castle to attend Mass at San Domenico, and in his company were Filippo Sforza of Santafior and Madonna Paola, besides courtiers and attendants, amounting in all to perhaps a score of gallant cavaliers and ladies. The cavalcade was drawn up in the quadrangle, and Giovanni was on the point of mounting, when, of a sudden, a rumbling noise, as of distant thunder, but too continuous for that, arrested him, his foot already in the stirrup.

"What is that?" he asked, an ashen pallor overspreading his effeminate face, as, doubtless, the thought of the enemy came uppermost in his mind.

Men looked at one another with fear in their eyes and some of the ladies raised their voices in querulous beseeching for reassurance. They had their answer even as they asked. The Albanian Giacomo, who was now virtually the provost of the Castle, appeared suddenly at the gates with half a score of men. He raised a warning hand, which compelled the Lord Giovanni to pause; then he rasped out a brisk command to his followers. The winches creaked, and the drawbridge swung up even as with a clank and rattle of chains the portcullis fell.

That done, he came forward to impart the ominous news which one of his riders had brought him at the gallop from the Porta Romana.

A party of some fifty men, commanded by one of Cesare's captains, had ridden on in advance of the main army to call upon Pesaro to yield to the forces of the Church. And the people, without hesitation, had butchered the guard and thrown wide the gates, inviting the enemy to enter the town and seize the Castle. And to the end that this might be the better achieved, a hundred or so had traitorously taken up arms, and were pressing forward to support the little company that came, with such contemptuous daring, to storm our fortress and prepare the way for Valentino.

It was a pretty situation this for the Lord Giovanni, and here were fine opportunities for some brave acting under the eyes of his adored Madonna Paola. How would he bear himself now? I wondered.

He promised mighty well once the first shock of the news was overcome.

"By God and His saints!" he roared, "though it may be all that it is given me to do, I'll strike a blow to punish these dastards who have betrayed me, and to crush the presumption of this captain who attacks us with fifty men. It is a contempt which he shall bitterly repent him."

Then he thundered to Giacomo to marshal his men, and he called upon those of his courtiers who were knights to put on their armour that they might support him. Lastly he bade a page go help him to arm, that he might lead his little force in person.

I saw Madonna Paola's eyes gleam with a sudden light of admiration, and I guessed that in the matter of Giovanni's valour her opinions were undergoing the same change as the verses had caused them to undergo in the matter of his intellect.

Myself, I was amazed. For here was a Lord Giovanni I seemed never to have known, and I was eager to behold the sequel to so fine a prologue.



CHAPTER IX. THE FOOL-AT-ARMS

That valorous bearing that the Lord Giovanni showed whilst, with Madonna Paola's glance upon him, his fear of seeming afraid was greater than his actual fear of our assailants, he cast aside like a mantle once he was within the walls of his Castle, and under the eyes of none save the page and myself, for I followed idly at a respectful distance.

He stood irresolute and livid of countenance, his eagerness to arm and to lead his mercenaries and his knights all departed out of him. It was that curiosity of mine to see the sequel to his stout words that had led me to follow him, and what I saw was, after all, no more than I might have looked for—the proof that his big talk of sallying forth to battle was but so much acting. Yet it must have been acting of such a quality as to have deceived even his very self.

Now, however, by the main steps, he halted in the cool gloom of the gallery, and I saw that fear had caught his heart in an icy grip and was squeezing it empty. In his irresolution he turned about, and his gloomy eye fell upon me loitering in the porch. At that he turned to the page who followed in obedience to his command.

"Begone!" he growled at the lad, "I will have Boccadoro, there, to help me arm." And with a poor attempt at mirth—"The act is a madness," he muttered, "and so it is fitting that folly should put on my armour for it. Come with me, you," he bade me, and I, obediently, gladly, went forward and up the wide stone staircase after him, leaving the page to speculate as he listed on the matter of his abrupt dismissal.

I read the Lord Giovanni's motives, as clearly as if they had been written for me by his own hand. The opinion in which I might hold him was to him a matter of so small account that he little cared that I should be the witness of the weakness which he feared was about to overcome him—nay, which had overcome him already. Was I not the one man in Pesaro who already knew his true nature, as revealed by that matter of the verses which I had written, and of which he had assumed the authorship? He had no shame before me, for I already knew the very worst of him, and he was confident that I would not talk lest he should destroy me at my first word. And yet, there was more than that in his motive for choosing me to go with him in that hour, as I was to learn once we were closeted in his chamber.

"Boccadoro," he cried, "can you not find me some way out of this?" Under his beard I saw the quiver of his lips as he put the question.

"Out of this?" I echoed, scarce understanding him at first.

"Aye, man—out of this Castle, out of Pesaro. Bestir those wits of yours. Is there no way in which it might be done, no disguise under which I might escape?"

"Escape?" quoth I, looking at him, and endeavouring to keep from my eyes the contempt that was in my heart. Dear God! Had revenge been all I sought of him, how I might have gloated over his miserable downfall!

"Do not stand there staring with those hollow eyes," he cried, anger and fear blending horridly in his voice and rendering shrill its pitch. "Find me a way. Come, knave, find me a way, or I'll have you broken on the wheel. Set your wits to save that long, lean body from destruction. Think, I bid you."

He was moving restlessly as he spoke, swayed by the agitation of terror that possessed him like a devil. I looked at him now without dissembling my scorn. Even in such an hour as this the habit of hectoring cruelty remained him.

"What shall it avail me to think?" I asked him in a voice that was as cold and steady as his was hot and quavering. "Were you a bird I might suggest flight across the sea to you. But you are a man, a very human, a very mortal man, although your father made you Lord of Pesaro."

Even as I was speaking, the thunder of the besiegers reached our ears—such a dull roar it was as that of a stormy sea in winter time. Maddened by his terror he stood over me now, his eyes flashing wildly in his white face.

"Another word in such a tone," he rasped, his fingers on his dagger, "and I'll make an end of you. I need your help, animal!"

I shook my head, my glance meeting his without fear. I was of twice his strength, we were alone, and the hour was one that levelled ranks. Had he made the least attempt to carry out his threat, had he but drawn an inch of the steel he fingered, I think I should have slain him with my hands without fear or thought of consequences.

"I have no help for you such as you need," I answered him. "I am but the Fool of Pesaro. Whoever looked to a Fool for miracles?"

"But here is death," he almost moaned.

"Lord of Pesaro," I reminded him, "your mercenaries are under arms by your command, and your knights are joining them. They wait for the fulfilment of your promise to lead them out against the enemy. Shall you fail them in such an hour as this?"

He sank, limp as an empty scabbard, to a chair.

"I dare not go. It is death," he answered miserably.

"And what but death is it to remain here?" I asked, torturing him with more zest than ever he had experienced over the agonies of some poor victim on the rack. "In bearing yourself gallantly there lies a slender chance for you. Your people seeing you in arms and ready to defend them may yet be moved to a return of loyalty."

"A fig for their loyalty," was his peevish, craven answer. "What shall it avail me when I'm slain!"

God! was there ever such a coward as this, such a weak-souled, water-hearted dastard?

"But you may not be slain," I urged him. And then I sounded a fresh note. "Bethink you of Madonna Paola and of the brave things you promised her."

He flushed a little, then paled again, then sat very still. Shame had touched him at last, yet its grip was not enough to make a man of him. A moment he remained irresolute, whilst that shame fought a hard battle with his fears.

But those fears proved stronger in the end, and his shame was overthrown by them.

"I dare not," he gasped, his slender, delicate hands clutching at the arms of his chair. "Heaven knows I am not skilled in the use of arms."

"It asks no skill," I assured him. "Put on your armour, take a sword and lay about you. The most ignorant scullion in your kitchens could perform it given that he had the spirit."

He moistened his lips with his tongue, and his eyes looked dead as a snake's. Suddenly he rose and took a step towards the armour that was piled about a great leathern chair. Then he paused and turned to me once more.

"Help me to put it on," he said in a voice that he strove to render steady. Yet scarcely had I reached the pile and taken up the breast-plate, when he recoiled again from the task. He broke into a torrent of blasphemy.

"I will not sacrifice myself," he almost screamed. "Jesus! not I. I will find a way out of this. I will live to return with an army and regain my throne."

"A most wise purpose. But, meanwhile, your men are waiting for you; Madonna Paola di Santafior is waiting for you, and—hark!—the bellowing crowd is waiting for you."

"They wait in vain," he snarled. "Who cares for them? The Lord of Pesaro am I."

"Care you, then, nothing for them? Will you have your name written in history as that of a coward who would not lift his sword to strike one blow for honour's sake ere he was driven out like a beast by the mere sound of voices?"

That touched him. His vanity rose in arms.

"Take up that corselet," he commanded hoarsely. I did his bidding, and, without a word, he raised his arms that I might fit it to his breast. Yet in the instant that I turned me to pick up the back-piece, a crash resounded through the chamber. He had hurled the breastplate to the ground in a fresh access of terror-rage. He strode towards me, his eyes glittering like a madman's.

"Go you!" he cried, and with outstretched arms he pointed wildly across the courtyard. "You are very ready with your counsels. Let me behold your deeds, Do you put on the armour and go out to fight those animals."

He raved, he ranted, he scarce knew what he said or did, and yet the words he uttered sank deep into my heart, and a sudden, wild ambition swelled my bosom.

"Lord of Pesaro," I cried, in a voice so compelling that it sobered him, "if I do this thing what shall be my reward?"

He stared at me stupidly for a moment. Then he laughed in a silly, crackling fashion.

"Eh?" he queried. "Gesu!" And he passed a hand over his damp brow, and threw back the hair that cumbered it. "What is the thing that you would do, Fool?"

"Why, the thing you bade me," I answered firmly. "Put on your armour, and shut down the visor so that all shall think it is the Lord Giovanni, Tyrant of Pesaro, who rides. If I do this thing, and put to rout the rabble and the fifty men that Cesare Borgia has sent, what shall be my reward?"

He watched me with twitching lips, his glare fixed upon me and a faint colour kindling in his face. He saw how easy the thing might be. Perhaps he recalled that he had heard that I was skilled in arms—having spent my youth in the exercise of them, against the time when I might fling the challenge that had brought me to my Fool's estate. Maybe he recalled how I had borne myself against long odds on that adventure with Madonna Paola, years ago. Just such a vanity as had spurred him to have me write him verses that he might pretend were of his own making, moved him now to grasp at my proposal. They would all think that Giovanni's armour contained Giovanni himself. None would ever suspect Boccadoro the Fool within that shell of steel. His honour would be vindicated, and he would not lose the esteem of Madonna Paola. Indeed, if I returned covered with glory, that glory would be his; and if he elected to fly thereafter, he might do so without hurt to his fair name, for he would have amply proved his mettle and his courage.

In some such fashion I doubt not that the High and Mighty Giovanni Sforza reasoned during the seconds that we stood, face to face and eye to eye, in that room, the cries of the impatient ones below almost drowned in the roar of the multitude beyond.

At last he put out his hands to seize mine, and drawing me to the light he scanned my face, Heaven alone knowing what it was he sought there.

"If you do this," said he, "Biancomonte shall be yours again, if it remains in my power to bestow it upon you now or at any future time. I swear it by my honour."

"Swear it by your fear of Hell or by your hope of Heaven and the compact is made," I answered, and so palsied was he and so fallen in spirit that he showed no resentment at the scorn of his honour my words implied, but there and then took the oath I that demanded.

"And now," I urged, "help me to put on this armour of yours."

Hurriedly I cast off my jester's doublet and my head-dress with its jangling bells, and with a wild exultation, a joy so fierce as almost to bring tears to my eyes, I held my arms aloft whilst that poor craven strapped about my body the back and breast plates of his corselet. I, the Fool, stood there as arrogant as any knight, whilst with his noble hands the Lord of Pesaro, kneeling, made secure the greaves upon my legs, the sollerets with golden spurs, the cuissarts and the genouilleres. Then he rose up, and with hands that trembled in his eagerness, he put on my brassarts and shoulder-plates, whilst I, myself, drew on my gauntlets. Next he adjusted the gorget, and handed me, last of all, the helm, a splendid head-piece of black and gold, surmounted by the Sforza lion.

I took it from him and passed it over my head. Then ere I snapped down the visor and hid the face of Boccadoro, I bade him, unless he would render futile all this masquerade, to lock the door of his closet, and lie there concealed till my return. At that a sudden doubt assailed him.