Books: Love at Arms

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"Praised be Heaven for having brought his Highness at last to a sense of
his duty," remarked the courtier.

"It has often happened to me," said Francesco, disregarding his
companion's words, "to malign the Fates for having brought me into the
world a count. But in the future I shall give them thanks, for I see how
much worse it might have been--I might have been born a prince, with a
duchy to rule over. I might have been as that poor man, my cousin, a
creature whose life is all pomp and no real dignity, all merrymaking and
no real mirth--loveless, isolated and vain."

"But," cried the amazed Fanfulla, "assuredly there are compensations?"

"You see that bustle. You know what it portends. What compensation can
there be for that?"

"It is a question you should be the last to ask, my lord. You have seen
the niece of Guidobaldo, and having seen her, can you still ask what
compensation does this marriage offer Gian Maria?"

"Do you, then, not understand?" returned Aquila, with a wan smile. "Do
you not see the tragedy of it? Is it nothing that two States, having
found that this marriage would be mutually advantageous, have determined
that it shall take place? That meanwhile the chief actors--the victims,
I might almost call them--have no opportunity of selecting for
themselves. Gian Maria goes about it resignedly. He will tell you that
he has always known that some day he must wed and do his best to beget a
son. He held out long enough against this alliance, but now that
necessity is driving him at last, he goes about it much as he would go
about any other State affair--a coronation, a banquet, or a ball. Can
you wonder now that I would not accept the throne of Babbiano when it was
offered me? I tell you, Fanfulla, that were I at present in my cousin's
shoes, I would cast crown and purple at whomsoever had a fancy for them
ere they crushed the life out of me and left me a poor puppet. Sooner
than endure that hollow mockery of a life I would become a peasant or a
vassal; I would delve the earth and lead a humble life, but lead it in my
own way, and thank God for the freedom of it; choose my own comrades;
live as I list, where I list; love as I list, where I list, and die when
God pleases with the knowledge that my life had not been altogether
barren. And that poor girl, Fanfulla! Think of her. She is to be
joined in loveless union to such a gross, unfeeling clod as Gian Maria.
Have you no pity for her?"

Fanfulla sighed, his brow clouded.

"I am not so dull but that I can see why you should reason thus to-day,"
said he. "These thoughts have come to you since you have seen her."

Franceseo sighed deeply.

"Who knows?" he made answer wistfully. "In the few moments that we
talked together, in the little time that I beheld her, it may be that she
dealt me a wound far deeper than the one to which she so mercifully
sought to minister."

Now for all that in what the Lord of Aquila said touching the projected
union there was a deal of justice, yet when he asserted that the chief
actors were to have no opportunity of selecting for themselves, he said
too much. That opportunity they were to have. It occurred three days
later at Urbino, when the Duke and Valentina were brought together at the
banquet of welcome given by Guidobaldo to his intended nephew-in-law.
The sight of her resplendent beauty came as a joyful shock to Gian Maria,
and filled him with as much impatience to possess her as did his own
gross ugliness render him offensive in her eyes. Averse had she been to
this wedding from the moment that it had been broached to her. The sight
of Gian Maria completed her loathing of the part assigned her, and in her
heart she registered a vow that sooner than become the Duchess of
Babbiano, she would return to her Convent of Santa Sofia and take the
veil.

Gian Maria sat beside her at the banquet, and in the intervals of eating
--which absorbed him mightily--he whispered compliments at which she
shuddered and turned pale. The more strenuously did he strive to please,
in his gross and clumsy fashion, the more did he succeed in repelling and
disgusting her, until, in the end, with all his fatuousness, he came to
deem her oddly cold. Of this, anon, he made complaint to that
magnificent prince, her uncle. But Guidobaldo scoffed at his qualms.

"Do you account my niece a peasant girl?" he asked. "Would you have her
smirk and squirm at every piece of flattery you utter? So that she weds
your Highness what shall the rest signify?"

"I would she loved me a little," complained Gian Maria foolishly.

Guidobaldo looked him over with an eye that smiled inscrutably, and it
may have crossed his mind that this coarse, white-faced Duke was too
ambitious.

"I doubt not that she will," he answered, in tones as inscrutable as his
glance. "So that you woo with grace and ardour, what woman could
withstand your Highness? Be not put off by such modesty as becomes a
maid."

Those words of Guidobaldo's breathed new courage into him. Nor ever
after could he think that her coldness was other than a cloak, a sort of
maidenly garment behind which modesty bade her conceal the inclinations
of her heart. Reasoning thus, and having in support of it his wondrous
fatuity, it so befell that the more she shunned and avoided him, the more
did he gather conviction of the intensity of her affection; the more
loathing she betrayed, the more proof did it afford him of the consuming
quality of her passion. In the end, he went even so far as to applaud
and esteem in her this very maidenly conduct.

There were hunting-parties, hawking-parties, water-parties, banquets,
comedies, balls, and revels of every description, and for a week all went
well at Urbino. Then, as suddenly as if a cannon had been fired upon the
Palace, the festivities were interrupted. The news that an envoy of
Caesar Borgia's was at Babbiano with a message from his master came like
a cold douche upon Gian Maria. It was borne to him in a letter from
Fabrizio da Lodi, imploring his immediate return to treat with this
plenipotentiary of Valentino's.

No longer did he disregard the peril that threatened him from the all-
conquering Borgia, no longer deem exaggerated by his advisers the cause
for fear. This sudden presence of Valentino's messenger, coming, too, at
a time when it would almost seem as if the impending union with Urbino
had spurred the Borgia to act before the alliance was established, filled
him with apprehension.

In one of the princely chambers that had been set aside for his use
during his visit to Urbino he discussed the tragic news with the two
nobles who had accompanied him--Alvaro de Alvari and Gismondo Santi--and
both of them, whilst urging him to take the advice of Lodi and return at
once, urged him, too, to establish his betrothal ere he left.

"Bring the matter to an issue at once, your Highness," said Santi, "and
thus you will go back to Babbiano well-armed to meet the Duca Valentino's
messenger."

Readily accepting this advice, Gian Maria went in quest of Guidobaldo,
and laid before him his proposals, together with the news which had
arrived and which was the cause of the haste he now manifested.
Guidobaldo listened gravely. In its way the news affected him as well,
for he feared the might of Caesar Borgia as much as any man in Italy, and
he was, by virtue of it, the readier to hasten forward an alliance which
should bring another of the neighbouring states into the powerful
coalition he was forming.

"It shall be as you wish," answered him the gracious Lord of Urbino, "and
the betrothal shall be proclaimed to-day, so that you can bear news of it
to Valentino's messenger. When you have heard this envoy, deliver him an
answer of such defiance or such caution as you please. Then return in
ten days' time to Urbino, and all shall be ready for the nuptials. But,
first of all, go you and tell Monna Valentina."

Confident of success, Gian Maria obeyed his host, and went in quest of
the lady. He gained her ante-chamber, and thence he despatched an idling
page to request of her the honour of an audience.

As the youth passed through the door that led to the room beyond, Gian
Maria caught for a moment the accents of an exquisite male voice singing
a love-song to the accompaniment of a lute.

"Una donna più bella assai che 'l sole..."

came the words of Petrarch, and he heard them still, though muffled, for
a moment or two after the boy had gone. Then it ceased abruptly, and a
pause followed, at the end of which the page returned. Raising the
portière of blue and gold, he invited Gian Maria to enter.

It was a room that spoke with eloquence of the wealth and refinement of
Montefeltro, from the gilding and ultramarine of the vaulted ceiling with
its carved frieze of delicately inlaid woodwork, to the priceless
tapestries beneath it. Above a crimson prie-dieu hung a silver crucifix,
the exquisite workmanship of the famous Anichino of Ferrara. Yonder
stood an inlaid cabinet, surmounted by a crystal mirror and some wonders
of Murano glass. There was a picture by Mantegna, some costly cameos and
delicate enamels, an abundance of books, a dulcimer which a fair-haired
page was examining with inquisitive eyes, and by a window on the right
stood a very handsome harp that Guidobaldo had bought his niece in
Venice.

In that choice apartment of hers the Duke found Valentina surrounded by
her ladies, Peppe the fool, a couple of pages, and a half-dozen gentlemen
of her uncle's court. One of these--that same Gonzaga who had escorted
her from the Convent of Santa Sofia--most splendidly arrayed in white
taby, his vest and doublet rich with gold, sat upon a low stool, idly
fingering the lute in his lap, from which Gian Maria inferred that his
had been the voice that had reached him in the ante-chamber.

At the Duke's advent they all rose saving Valentina and received him with
a ceremony that somewhat chilled his ardour. He advanced; then halted
clumsily, and in a clumsy manner framed a request that he might speak
with her alone. In a tired, long-suffering way she dismissed that court
of hers, and Gian Maria stood waiting until the last of them had passed
out through the tall windows that abutted on to a delightful terrace,
where, in the midst of a green square, a marble fountain flashed and
glimmered in the sunlight.

"Lady," he said, when they were at last alone, "I have news from Babbiano
that demands my instant return." And he approached her by another step.

In truth he was a dull-witted fellow or else too blinded by fatuity to
see and interpret aright the sudden sparkle in her eye, the sudden,
unmistakable expression of relief that spread itself upon her face.

"My lord," she answered, in a low, collected voice, "we shall grieve at
your departure."

Fool of a Duke that he was! Blind, crass and most fatuous of wooers!
Had he been bred in courts and his ears attuned to words that meant
nothing, that were but the empty echoes of what should have been meant;
was he so new to courtesies in which the heart had no share, that those
words of Valentina's must bring him down upon his knees beside her, to
take her dainty fingers in his fat hands, and to become transformed into
a boorish lover of the most outrageous type?

"Shall you so?" he lisped, his glance growing mighty amorous. "Shall you
indeed grieve?"

She rose abruptly to her feet.

"I beg that your Highness will rise," she enjoined him coldly, a coldness
which changed swiftly to alarm as her endeavours to release her hand
proved vain. For despite her struggles he held on stoutly. This was
mere coyness, he assured himself, mere maidenly artifice which he must
bear with until he had overcome it for all time.

"My lord, I implore you!" she continued. "Bethink you of where you are--
of who you are."

"Here will I stay until the crack of doom," he answered, with an odd
mixture of humour, ardour and ferocity, "unless you consent to listen to
me."

"I am ready to listen, my lord," she answered, without veiling a
repugnance that he lacked the wit to see. "But it is not necessary that
you should hold my hand, nor fitting that you should kneel."

"Not fitting?" he exclaimed. "Lady, you do not apprehend me rightly. Is
it not fitting that all of us--be we princes or vassals--shall kneel
sometimes?"

"At your prayers, my lord, yes, most fitting."

"And is not a man at his prayers when he woos? What fitter shrine in all
the world than his mistress's feet?"

"Release me," she commanded, still struggling. "Your Highness grows
tiresome and ridiculous."

"Ridiculous?"

His great, sensual mouth fell open. His white cheeks grew mottled, and
his little eyes looked up with a mighty evil gleam in their cruel blue.
A moment he stayed so, then he rose up. He released her hands as she had
bidden him, but he clutched her arms instead, which was yet worse.

"Valentina," he said, in a voice that was far from steady, "why do you
use me thus unkindly?"

"But I do not," she protested wearily, drawing back with a shudder from
the white face that was so near her own, inspiring her with a loathing
she could not repress. "I would not have your Highness look foolish, and
you cannot conceive how----"

"Can you conceive how deeply, how passionately I love you?" he broke in,
his grasp tightening.

"My lord, you are hurting me!"

"And are you not hurting me?" he snarled. "What is a pinched arm when
compared with such wounds as your eyes are dealing me? Are you not----"

She had twisted from his grasp, and in a bound she had reached the
window-door through which her attendants had passed.

"Valentina!" he cried, as he sprang after her, and it was more like the
growl of a beast than the cry of a lover. He caught her, and with scant
ceremony he dragged her back into the room.

At this, her latent loathing, contempt and indignation rose up in arms.
Never had she heard tell of a woman of her rank being used in this
fashion. She abhorred him, yet she had spared him the humiliation of
hearing it from her lips, intending to fight for her liberty with her
uncle. But now, since he handled her as though she had been a serving-
wench; since he appeared to know nothing of the deference due to her,
nothing of the delicacies of people well-born and well-bred, she would
endure his odious love-making no further. Since he elected to pursue his
wooing like a clown, the high-spirited daughter of Urbino promised
herself that in like fashion would she deal with him.

Swinging herself free from his grasp a second time, she caught him a
stinging buffet on the ducal cheek which--so greatly did it take him by
surprise--all but sent him sprawling.

"Madonna!" he panted. "This indignity to me!"

"And what indignities have not I suffered at your hands?" she retorted,
with a fierceness of glance before which he recoiled. And as she now
towered before him, a beautiful embodiment of wrath, he knew not whether
he loved her more than he feared her, yet the desire to possess her and
to tame her was strong within him.

"Am I a baggage of your camps," she questioned furiously, "to be so
handled by you? Do you forget that I am the niece of Guidobaldo, a lady
of the house of Rovere, and that from my cradle I have known naught but
the respect of all men, be they born never so high? That to such by my
birth I have the right? Must I tell you in plain words, sir, that though
born to a throne, your manners are those of a groom? And must I tell
you, ere you will realise it, that no man to whom with my own lips I have
not given the right, shall set hands upon me as you have done?"

Her eyes flashed, her voice rose, and higher raged the storm; and Gian
Maria was so tossed and shattered by it that he could but humbly sue for
pardon.

"What shall it signify that I am a Duke," he pleaded timidly, "since I am
become a lover? What is a Duke then? He is but a man, and as the
meanest of his subjects his love must take expression. For what does
love know of rank?"

She was moving towards the window again, and for all that he dared not a
second time arrest her by force, he sought by words to do so.

"Madonna," he exclaimed, "I implore you to hear me. In another hour I
shall be in the saddle, on my way to Babbiano."

"That, sir," she answered him, "is the best news I have heard since your
coming." And without waiting for his reply, she stepped through the open
window on to the terrace.

For a second he hesitated, a sense of angry humiliation oppressing his
wits. Then he started to follow her; but as he reached the window the
little crook-backed figure of Ser Peppe stood suddenly before him with a
tinkle of bells, and a mocking grin illumining his face.

"Out of the way, fool," growled the angry Duke. But the odd figure in
its motley of red and black continued where it stood.

"If it is Madonna Valentina you seek," said he, "behold her yonder."

And Gian Maria, following the indication of Peppe's lean finger, saw that
she had rejoined her ladies and that thus his opportunity of speaking
with her was at an end. He turned his shoulder upon the jester, and
moved ponderously towards the door by which he had originally entered the
room. It had been well for Ser Peppe had he let him go. But the fool,
who loved his mistress dearly, and had many of the instincts of the
faithful dog, loving where she loved and hating where she hated, could
not repress the desire to send a gibe after the retreating figure, and
inflict another wound in that much wounded spirit.

"You find it a hard road to Madonna's heart, Magnificent," he called
after him. "Where your wisdom is blind be aided by the keen eyes of
folly."

The Duke stood still. A man more dignified would have left that
treacherous tongue unheeded. But Dignity and Gian Maria were strangers.
He turned, and eyed the figure that now followed him into the room.

"You have knowledge to sell," he guessed contemptuously.

"Knowledge I have--a vast store--but none for sale, Lord Duke. Such as
imports you I will bestow if you ask me, for no more than the joy of
beholding you smile."

"Say on," the Duke bade him, without relaxing the grimness that tightened
his flabby face.

Peppe bowed.

"It were an easy thing, most High and Mighty, to win the love of Madonna
if----" He paused dramatically.

"Yes, yes. E dunque! If----?"

"If you had the noble countenance, the splendid height, the shapely
limbs, the courtly speech and princely manner of one I wot of."

"Are you deriding me?" the Duke questioned, unbelieving.

"Ah, no, Highness! I do but tell you how it were possible that my lady
might come to love you. Had you those glorious attributes of him I speak
of, and of whom she dreams, it might be easy. But since God fashioned
you such as you are--gross of countenance, fat and stunted of shape,
boorish of----"

With a roar the infuriated Duke was upon him. But the fool, as nimble of
legs as he was of tongue, eluded the vicious grasp of those fat hands,
and leaping through the window, ran to the shelter of his mistress's
petticoats.

CHAPTER VII

GONZAGA THE INSIDIOUS

Well indeed had it been for Ser Peppe had he restrained his malicious
mood and curbed the mocking speech that had been as vinegar to Gian
Maria's wounds. For when Gian Maria was sore he was wont to be
vindictive, and on the present occasion he was something even more.

There abode with him the memory of the fool's words, and the suggestion
that in the heart of Valentina was framed the image of some other man.
Now, loving her, in his own coarse way, and as he understood love, the
rejected Duke waxed furiously jealous of this other at whose existence
Peppe had hinted. This unknown stood in his path to Valentina, and to
clear that path it suggested itself to Gian Maria that the simplest
method was to remove the obstacle. But first he must discover it, and to
this he thought, with a grim smile, the fool might--willy-nilly--help
him.

He returned to his own apartments, and whilst the preparations for his
departure were toward, he bade Alvaro summon Martin Armstadt--the captain
of his guard. To the latter his orders were short and secret.

"Take four men," he bade him, "and remain in Urbino after I am gone.
Discover the haunts of Peppe the fool. Seize him, and bring him after
me. See that you do it diligently, and let no suspicion of your task
arise."

The bravo--he was little better, for all that he commanded the guards of
the Duke of Babbiano--bowed, and answered in his foreign, guttural voice
that his Highness should be obeyed.

Thereafter Gian Maria made shift to depart. He took his leave of
Guidobaldo, promising to return within a few days for the nuptials, and
leaving an impression upon the mind of his host that his interview with
Valentina had been very different from the actual.

It was from Valentina herself that Guidobaldo was to learn, after Gian
Maria's departure, the true nature of that interview, and what had passed
between his niece and his guest. She sought him out in his closet,
whither he had repaired, driven thither by the demon of gout that already
inhabited his body, and was wont to urge him at times to isolate himself
from his court. She found him reclining upon a couch, seeking
distraction in a volume of the prose works of Piccinino. He was a
handsome man, of excellent shape, scarce thirty years of age. His face
was pale, and there were dark circles round his eyes, and lines of pain
about his strong mouth.

He sat up at her advent, and setting his book upon the table beside him,
he listened to her angry complaints.

At first, the courtly Montefeltro inclined to anger upon learning of the
roughness with which Gian Maria had borne himself. But presently he
smiled.

"When all is said, I see in this no great cause for indignation," he
assured her. "I acknowledge that it may lack the formality that should
attend the addresses of a man in the Duke's position to a lady in yours.
But since he is to wed you, and that soon, why be angered at that he
seeks to pay his court like any other man?"

"I have talked in vain, then," she answered petulantly, "and I am
misunderstood. I do not intend to wed this ducal clod you have chosen to
be my husband."

Guidobaldo stared at her with brows raised, and wonder in his fine eyes.
Then he shrugged his shoulders a trifle wearily. This handsome and well-
beloved Guidobaldo was very much a prince, so schooled to princely ways
as to sometimes forget that he was a man.

"We forgive much to the impetuousness of youth," said he, very coldly.
"But there are bounds to the endurance of every one of us. As your uncle
and your prince, I claim a double duty from you, and you owe a double
allegiance to my wishes. By my twofold authority I have commanded you to
wed with Gian Maria."

The princess in her was all forgotten, and it was just the woman who
answered him, in a voice of protest:

"But, Highness, I do not love him."

A shade of impatience crossed his lofty face.

"I do not remember," he made answer wearily, "that I loved your aunt.
Yet we were wed, and through habit came to love each other and to be
happy together."

"I can understand that Monna Elizabetta should have come to love you,"
she returned. "You are not as Gian Maria. You were not fat and ugly,
stupid and cruel, as is he."

It was an appeal that might have won its way to a man's heart through the
ever-ready channel of his vanity. But it did not so with Guidobaldo. He
only shook his head.

"The matter is not one that I will argue. It were unworthy in us both.
Princes, my child, are not as ordinary folk."

"In what are they different?" she flashed back at him. "Do they not
hunger and thirst as ordinary folk? Are they not subject to the same
ills; do they not experience the same joys? Are they not born, and do
they not die, just as ordinary folk? In what, then, lies this difference
that forbids them to mate as ordinary folk?"

Guidobaldo tossed his arms to Heaven, his eyes full of a consternation
that clearly defied utterance. The violence of his gesture drew a gasp
of pain from him. At last, when he had mastered it:

"They are different," said he, "in that their lives are not their own to
dispose of as they will. They belong to the State which they were born
to govern, and in nothing else does this become of so much importance as
in their mating. It behoves them to contract such alliances as shall
redound to the advantage of their people." A toss of her auburn head was
Valentina's interpolation, but her uncle continued relentlessly in his
cold, formal tones--such tones as those in which he might have addressed
an assembly of his captains:

"In the present instance we are threatened--Babbiano and Urbino--by a
common foe. And whilst divided, neither of us could withstand him,
united, we shall combine to his overthrow. Therefore does this alliance
become necessary--imperative."

"I do not apprehend the necessity," she answered, in a voice that breathed
defiance. "If such an alliance as you speak of is desirable, why may it
not be made a purely political one--such a one, for instance, as now
binds Perugia and Camerino to you? What need to bring me into question?"

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