51

I.

THE splendid, silent room framed him like a portrait as he came forward, moving with the grace of a courtier or a woman, a figure all scarlet velvet and white fur, with here and there a glimpse of gold, or the swift shimmer of a jewel which caught the light. His scarlet cap, with its white, curving feather, hung from one delicate hand; about his neck was a broad gold chain, with a pendant curiously worked in gold and rubies,-a mulberry-tree, the favourite emblem of his master, the Duke of Milan. The old Cardinal-Bishop, looking up from the richly-bound breviary before him, stared for a moment, as though dazzled.

This,

then, was the Duke's envoy, this young, slight man, with his keen face, his half-shut eyes, his splendour of dress, his courteous insolence of

manner.

He stood bowing, cap in hand; but in his eyes the Cardinal read a challenge. He did not understand its meaning, for he had never seen the man before.

He rose, a lean, majestic figure, and held out his hand. The Envoy, touching the ground with one knee, kissed the great amethyst in the old man's ring. Then, smiling superbly, he drew himself up. "His Eminence the Cardinal-Bishop?" he asked softly.

The Cardinal bent his head once more. "The same, at your service, Messer Maledetto. I have the honour of entertaining the Envoy of the most illustrious Duke of Milan?"

"The honour is mine, Eminence. It is one which I have long desired,

FONTARINI.

to meet face to face a man who bears the great name of Fontarini." Was it irony which barbed the smooth tones? The Cardinal moved uneasily, motioned his visitor to a seat, and himself sat down again, shutting his breviary as he did so. The Envoy's keen glance fell on the closed book. "Ah, what a holy occupation, Eminence," he said, in his soft, jarring voice. "What a spot for meditation!"

In

Again the Cardinal shot a sharp glance at the inscrutably smiling face before him. Was it irony, or impertinence? And yet the man was in the right. Through the long window immediately in front of the old man's seat one could see, as in a picture, the marvellous outline of the castle of Fiorola, perched on its high plateau above the little town. the evening light, the late sunshine which comes just before sunset and turns all things to gold, the solid masonry of the great keep stood out against the pale sky, majestic and immovable as the mountains beyond it. On the tower, a sudden splash of colour against the grey and brown of brick and stone, the banner of the Duke of Fiorola stretched itself to a cool air from the hills,—the scarlet banner with the white falcon of the Fontarini soaring proudly among its gorgeous folds.

The Cardinal, with his eyes lifted to the tower, forgot the odd mockery in the stranger's tone. A light, half proud, half tender, showed in his worn face. "The Falcon of the Fontarini," he murmured to himself.

The Envoy heard him. His eyes, too, were fastened upon the banner,

see I wear your colours. I only spoke by hearsay. Men talk of the White Falcon where I live. It is a symbol, they say, an emblem of pride never stained by any shame, faith never marred by any treachery. The women of the Fontarini are above suspicion; the men are paladins of loyalty and honour. So they say."

Again there was that ring of unutterable bitterness in the smooth, mocking voice. The Cardinal's pale old face flushed like a boy's. are you," he stammered, "who dare to throw doubt upon our honour?"

"Who

the wall beside you. Look in it, and tell me who I am.'

The Cardinal did not look. He stared at his visitor's face instead. "It is impossible," he said.

The Envoy smoothed his white feather more carefully than before. Presently he began to speak, in the quiet, monotonous tone of one who prepares to tell a story. "Listen, Eminence," he said. "There was a great house once in which men held the repute of their honour above all things; and in it there were two brothers, and a woman, of their own kin, betrothed to one of them. But both loved her, and one was a priest." The Cardinal gave a swift shiver, and then sat very still. Maledetto went on. "Both loved her; and it was the priest whom she loved ; a great sin, Eminence, and one to be paid for dearly, as you shall see. There was a scandal,-a scandal in the house which held honour so highly; but no one suspected the priest. The lady's betrothed suspected a page,— a foolish, rainbow-coated, lute-tinkling youth. He found him near her window one night, half-killed him, and sent him about his business. The rest was patched up, for the honour of the house. The lady took the veil ; the priest became, in due course, a cardinal, -a cardinal famed for his virtues. The other brother died head of his house."

There was silence. Then the Cardinal spoke. "Is that all?"

Maledetto smiled oddly. "Not quite, Eminence. There was a child, -to attest the honour of the house. An awkward legacy, Eminence! They might have strangled it, at least, but they had less mercy. The child was smuggled to Milan. It grew up among thieves and cut-throats; it found refuge in a convent, and learned the ways of priests; it lied and stole and stabbed before it was

twenty. It found service with a great man, and came to fortune; but it remembered the ways by which it had come." His tone was so sinister that the Cardinal raised his bowed head. "It is here," Maledetto said quietly.

The Cardinal stretched out his hands with a swift, appealing gesture. "What do you want?"

Maledetto laughed. "What I shall take, Eminence. See here, to save your honour, the honour of your house, you sent your own flesh and blood into beggary, you plunged a child's soul into infamy unspeakable, you denied your son. You sent me into hell, to keep your White Falcon clean! Well, I have come to ask for justice, for reparation; and I shall have it."

"Gold?" muttered the Cardinal.

The Envoy shook his head. "I have stabbed a man in the back, and betrayed a woman, for gold. You offer it too late, Eminence. No, I will have vengeance. I come as the

envoy of the Duke of Milan to his ally of Fiorola, who has broken treaty with him."

The Cardinal started up. "It is a lie !"

I

"I have the papers, Eminence. hold the honour of the Fontarini in the hollow of my hand. But I will respect it, on one condition. The first thing that I ask for in Fiorola shall be mine, be it what it may. One thing out of all your wealth you shall give me, Eminence,-you and your house, who owe me justice. Will you agree, to save the White Falcon of the Fontarini?"

"What is the thing you ask?"

An evil smile flickered in Maledetto's eyes. "When I have seen your wealth, I will choose, Eminence. But remember,-I have full power from the Duke. A word, and Sanseverino's army will surround Fiorola ;

another word, and your house is shamed before all the world."

He went out softly, an ominous scarlet figure in the gloom; and the Cardinal sat where he had left him, gazing with wide-open eyes at the banner on the tower above him.

II.

An hour later a splendid train clanked and jangled up the hill to the castle of Fiorola. Cardinal Fontarini, on his white mule, rode silent and cowed at Maledetto's side. He cast now and then a frightened glance at the scarlet and white figure, with its sinister, unmoved face, its keen eyes fixed eagerly on the tower which hung above them beyond the rough windings of the mountain road. It seemed to the old man as though the doom of the great house of Fontarini rode there at his side, serene in white and scarlet bravery, a-glitter with jewels which had been won Heaven alone could tell by what terrible deeds. "I have stabbed a man in the back, and betrayed a woman for gold," he had said; and the words, and all the degradation they implied, would not be banished from the Cardinal's ear and mind. He had murdered and betrayed-for gold; and he was a Fontarini. The old man's eyes involuntarily sought the white bird on the banner which floated above. Was there no mark on those stainless feathers? Were they still as they had been when he last looked at them? A Fontarini had done such things, and lived to tell the tale,— nay, to boast, with bitter irony, of his deed. The Cardinal's head sank lower and lower on his breast, and he muttered an uneasy prayer as he rode. Let the Saints keep the honour of Fontarini, he cried in his own heart. He himself had tried to hide the stain which his sin had brought upon the

falcon flag; and lo, here the dishonour of his house rode at his side, a vivid figure laden with disaster, and inspired by deadly hatred and scorn for the great race which had given him birth, and disowned him.

"A mighty fortress, Eminence," he heard Maledetto's smooth voice say in his ear, as they turned the last corner and came upon the castle, lying huge and grey upon its plateau, like an old lion asleep.

"May Heaven defend it!" the Cardinal murmured swiftly, and crossed himself to seal the prayer.

Maledetto smiled suddenly, a smile not pleasant to see. "You have done your best, Eminence," he said. "Now let us see what Heaven means to do without your help. It seems to me that on one occasion you helped,Heaven-too well."

Even as he spoke they rode in under the great archway to the courtyard where the Duke of Fiorola waited to greet the envoy of Lodovico Sforza. He was younger than Maledetto, slighter, more boyish, a personality less mature, both for evil and for good. All the bravery of his dress did not set him off as Maledetto was set off by his white and scarlet; all his jewels failed to lend him the same effect of splendour. He moved a little stoopingly, as though his state weighed heavily upon his narrow shoulders. His greeting had not the princely courtesy which showed in Maledetto's reply. The Cardinal, watching the two men, was moved to an unwilling admiration by Maledetto's supreme grace of bearing and speech.

The tedious courtesies were ended at last. Wine had been offered and accepted, a mere passing refreshment before the solid banquet of the evening. The Duke led his guest through halls and galleries, pointing out, with a halting tongue and hesitating finger,

the ancient glories of Fiorola. Maledetto was full of praises, and capped his host's sparse phrases with generous appreciation of all he saw. But in his heart he was saying, as the Cardinal well knew, that the splendours of Fiorola only deepened his own. wrong. He might have pardoned being exiled from a hovel; but exile from this palace he would never forgive. He remembered horrible alleys in Milan, days of hunger and cold and despair; he thought of the rags which had covered his own body, and contrasted them with the rich livery of the stammering young man at his side, whose only claim to greatness lay in the fact that he had been born heir to the dukedom of Fiorola. Would this tongue-tied youth have known how to carve his fortunes as he, Maledetto, had done, if he too had been thrust out from all shelter of roof or name into the gutters of Milan? And had Maledetto owned a great name, to what heights might he not have attained, instead of being doomed to serve another man?

The Cardinal read his enemy's thoughts as they went. A strange fear clutched all the time at his heart, an inexplicable dread of what a moment might bring forth. His dread took shape at last before the portrait of a girl with red-brown hair, upon which Maledetto's eyes fixed themselves with a curious intentness, and before which he seemed inclined to halt for explanations. The Cardinal hurried the procession past the picture in safety, with nothing said. Soon afterwards he found an opportunity to whisper in the Duke's ear a command before which the young man's jaw dropped stupidly. Even in the act, he caught Maledetto's questioning glance, and trembled.

He trembled still more when, on sitting down to the state banquet, he marked Maledetto's keen eyes roam

to the empty place in which the Duchess of Fiorola should have sat at her lord's side,—the young Duchess of a few weeks only, the girl whose beauty half Italy knew by heart. Did he too know it, the Cardinal wondered? Was that why he came as Duke Lodovico's envoy to Fiorola?

The Duke saw the glance and answered it in his blundering way. "Our Lady Duchess is sick, Messer Maledetto," he said, "or she had not missed the joy of greeting you."

Maledetto's eyes dropped modestly from the Duke's face. "I will hope to claim her greeting another day, my Lord Duke," he said.

III.

It was morning. The Duke, whose brain was not fitted for diplomacy, was closeted with his horse-breaker. In a cool, dark chamber, over-looking a small rose-garden, Maledetto and the Cardinal sat in close but admirably courteous conflict. The treaty was broken, there was no doubt of that. For once the old man's cunning had overreached itself. He had planned greater glory, greater wealth, for the Fontarini, and he had delivered himself into the hands of the Duke of Milan and his envoy. Maledetto was calm, even agreeable; it pleased him to see the old man's wrath and shame. He smiled now and then as the discussion proceeded, and trifled with a rose which he had taken from a bowl on the table at which they sat. The silky, scented thing full of the bloom and perfume of summer, seemed to set his thoughts straying in pleasant paths. He hummed the refrain of a love-song by Niccolo da Correggio as they battled over the broken treaty.

At last the Cardinal, fairly beaten in all his arguments, sat back, white and silent, in his chair. Maledetto, with the rose held lightly against his

lips, watched him with a malicious smile. "Take heart, Eminence," he said ironically; "there is still our compact. Give me my pay, and I will leave you in peace; one thing out of all the wealth and splendour of the Fontarini,—surely, it is a cheap price to pay! Think,-I have but to speak the word, and Sanseverino has your fine castle in his clutch. Where will the Fontarini be then? One thing out of all your wealth, -oh, it is more than worth the price!"

The Cardinal's head was sunk upon his breast. Something in the tone of Lodovico Sforza's envoy made him look up sharply. "One thing?" he repeated. "What is it, Messer Maledetto, this trifle for which you will sell your vengeance?"

Maledetto, smiling still, pointed through the window with the rose in his hand. "You see it yonder, Eminence," he said.

The old man half raised himself in his chair, and then sank back, with a dreadful, livid face. Beyond the window, in the rose garden, the young Duchess of Fiorola sunned herself in the glow and splendour of the summer morning. Her white robe shone angelically in the young light, a cap bound with pearls crowned her red curls like an aureole, her face, turned towards the two men whom she could not see, wore a half expectant smile. Perhaps the murmur of their talk reached her where she stood, with a rose, the fellow to that which Maledetto held, poised lightly between her fingers. The Cardinal's eyes turned slowly from the unconscious girl below to Maledetto's face, with its superbly insolent smile. Dog,-beast!" he gasped.

Maledetto bent his head pleasantly. "I am sorry you do not like your own work, Eminence," he said. "Such as I am, you have made me. Is it