Before this firmness the wrath went out of Barbaresco. Weakly he wrung his hands a moment, then sank sagging into his chair.
‘If the others, if Cavalcanti or Casella, had known how much you had understood, you would never have left this house alive, lest you should do precisely what you have done.’
‘But if it is on her behalf—hers and her brother’s—that you plan this thing, why should you not take her feeling first? What else is right or fair?’
‘Her feeling?’ Barbaresco sneered, and Bellarion understood that the sneer was for himself. ‘God deliver me from the weariness of reasoning with a fool. Our bolt would have been shot, and none could have guessed the hands that loosed it. Now you have made it known, and you need to be told what will happen if we were mad enough to go through with it. Why, the Princess Valeria would be our instant accuser. She would come forth at once and denounce us. That is the spirit of her; wilful, headstrong, and mawkish. And I am a fool to bid you go back to her and persuade her that you were mistaken. When the blow fell, she would see that what you had first told her was the truth, and our heads would pay.’
He set his elbows on the table, took his head in his hands, and fetched a groan from his great bulk. ‘The ruin you have wrought! God! The ruin!’
‘Ruin?’ quoth Bellarion.
‘Of all our hopes,’ Barbaresco explained in petulance. ‘Can’t you see it? Can you understand nothing for yourself, animal, save the things you were better for not understanding? And can’t you see that you have ruined yourself with us? With your face and shape and already close in the Lady Valeria’s confidence as you are, there are no heights in the State to which you might not have climbed.’
‘I had not thought of it,’ said Bellarion, sighing.
‘No, nor of me, nor of any of us. Of me!’ The man’s grief became passionate. ‘At last I might have sloughed this beggary in which I live. And now . . .’ He banged the table in his sudden rage, and got to his feet again. ‘That is what you have done. That is what you have wrecked by your silly babbling.’
‘But surely, sir, by other means . . .’
‘There are no other means. Leastways, no other means at our command. Have we the money to levy troops? Oh, why do I waste my breath upon you? You’ll tell the others to-morrow what you’ve done, and they shall tell you what they think of it.’
It was a course that had its perils. But if once in the stillness of the night Bellarion’s shrewd wits counselled him to rise, dress, and begone, he stilled the coward counsel. It remained to be seen whether the other conspirators would be as easily intimidated as Barbaresco. To ascertain this, Bellarion determined to remain. The Lady Valeria’s need of him was not yet done, he thought, though why the Lady Valeria’s affairs should be the cause of his exposing himself to the chances of a blade between the ribs was perhaps more than he could satisfactorily have explained.
That the danger was very far from imaginary the next morning’s conference showed him. Scarcely had the plotters realised the nature of Bellarion’s activities than they were clamouring for his blood. Casella, the exile, breathing fire and slaughter, would have sprung upon him with dagger drawn, had not Barbaresco bodily interposed.
‘Not in my house!’ he roared. ‘Not in my house!’ his only concern being the matter of his own incrimination.
‘Nor anywhere, unless you are bent on suicide,’ Bellarion calmly warned them. He moved from behind Barbaresco, to confront them. ‘You are forgetting that in my murder the Lady Valeria will see your answer. She will denounce you, sirs, not only for this, but for the intended murder of the Regent. Slay me, and you just as surely slay yourselves.’ He permitted himself to smile as he looked upon their stricken faces. ‘It’s an interesting situation, known in chess as a stalemate.’
In their baffled fury they turned upon Count Spigno, whose indiscretion had created this situation. Enzo Spigno, sitting there with a sneer on his white face, let the storm rage. When at last it abated, he expressed himself.
‘Rather should you thank me for having tested the ground before we stand on it. For the rest, it is as I expected. It is an ill thing to be associated with a woman in these matters.’
‘We did not bring her in,’ said Barbaresco. ‘It was she who appealed to me for assistance.’
‘And now that we are ready to afford it her,’ said Casella, ‘she discovers that it is not of the sort she wishes. I say it is not hers to choose. Hopes have been raised in us, and we have laboured to fulfil them.’
How they all harped on that, thought Bellarion. How concerned was each with the profit that he hoped to wrest for himself, how enraged to see himself cheated of this profit. The Lady Valeria, the State, the boy who was being corrupted that he might be destroyed, these things were nothing to these men. Not once did he hear them mentioned now in the futile disorderly debate that followed, whilst he sat a little apart and almost forgotten.
At last it was Spigno, this Spigno whom they dubbed a fool—but who, after all, had more wit than all of them together—who discovered and made the counter-move.
‘You there, Master Bellarion!’ he called. ‘Here is what you are to tell your lady in answer to her threat: We who have set our hands to this task of ridding the State of the Regent’s thraldom will not draw back. We go forward with this thing as seems best to us, and we are not to be daunted by threats. Make it clear to this arrogant lady that she cannot betray us without at the same time betraying herself; that whatever fate she invokes upon us will certainly overtake her as well.’
‘It may be that she has already perceived and weighed that danger,’ said Bellarion.
‘Aye, as a danger; but perhaps not as a certainty. And tell her also that she as certainly dooms her brother. Make her understand that it is not so easy to play with the souls of men as she supposes, and that here she has evoked forces which it is not within her power to lay again.’ He turned to his associates. ‘Be sure that when she perceives precisely where she stands, she will cease to trouble us with her qualms either now or when the thing is done.’
Bellarion had mockingly pronounced the situation interesting when by a shrewd presentment of it he had given pause to the murderous rage of the conspirators. Considering it later that day as he took the air along the river-brink, he was forced to confess it more disturbingly interesting even than he had shown it to be.
He had not been blind to that weakness in the Lady Valeria’s position. But he had been foolishly complacent, like the skilful chess-player who, perceiving a strong move possible to his opponent, takes it for granted that the opponent himself will not perceive it.
It seemed to him that nothing remained but to resume his interrupted pilgrimage to Pavia, leaving the State of Montferrat and the Lady Valeria to settle their own affairs. But in that case, her own ruin must inevitably follow, precipitated by the action of those ruffians with whom she was allied, whether that action succeeded or failed.
Then he asked himself what to him were the affairs of Montferrat and its princess, that he should risk his life upon them.
He fetched a sigh. The Abbot had been right. There is no peace in this world outside a convent wall. Certainly there was no peace in Montferrat. Let him shake the dust of that place of unrest from his feet, and push on towards Pavia and the study of Greek.
And so, by olive grove and vineyard, he wandered on,
