After he had drawn blank, like the soldiers he had sent to search the enclosure, he returned, baffled, with his four fellows at his heels. The Princess Valeria, wandered now in company with those other gay ones along the terrace by the balustrade.
‘You come empty-handed, then,’ she rallied him.
‘I’ll stake my life he entered the garden,’ said the captain sullenly.
‘You are wise in staking something of no value.’
He disregarded alike the taunt and the titter it drew from her companions. ‘I must report to his highness. Do you say positively, madonna, that you did not see this fellow?’
‘Lord, man! Do you still presume to question me? Besides, if you’re so confident, why waste time in questions? Continue your search.’
The captain addressed himself to her companions. ‘You, sirs and ladies, did you have no glimpse of this knave—a tall youngster, dressed in green?’
‘In green!’ cried the Lady Valeria. ‘Now that is interesting. In green? A dryad, perhaps; or, perhaps my brother here.’
The captain shook his head. ‘That is not possible.’
‘Nor am I in green,’ added the young marquis. ‘Nor have I been outside the garden. She mocks you, Messer Bernabó. It is her cursed humour. We have seen no one.’
‘Nor you, Messer Corsario?’ Pointedly now the captain addressed the pedant, as by his years and office the likeliest, to return him a serious answer.
‘Indeed, no,’ the gentleman replied. ‘But then,’ he added, ‘we were some way off, as you observed. Madonna, however, who was up here, asserts that she saw no one.’
‘Ah! But does she so assert it?’ the captain insisted.
The Lady Valeria looked him over in chill disdain. ‘You all heard what I said. Repetition is a weariness.’
‘You see,’ the captain appealed to them.
Her brother came to his assistance. ‘Why can’t you answer plainly, and have done, Valeria? Why must you forever remember to be witty? Why can’t you just say “no”?’
‘Because I’ve answered plainly enough already, and my answer has been disregarded. Ser Bernabó shall have no opportunity to repeat an offence I am not likely to forget.’ She turned away. ‘Come, Dionara, and you, Isotta. It is growing chill.’
With her ladies obediently following her she descended towards the lower gardens and the palace.
Messer Bernabó stroked his chin, a man nonplussed. The Lord Castruccio chided him.
‘You’re a fool, Bernabó, to anger her highness. Besides, man, what mare’s nest are you hunting?’
The soldier was pale with vexation. ‘You saw as I did that, as we crossed the gardens, her highness was coming from that enclosure.’
‘Yes, booby,’ said Corsario, ‘and we saw as you did that she came alone. If a man entered by that gate as you say, he got no farther than the enclosed garden, and this your men have searched already. You gain nothing by betraying suspicions. Who and what do you suppose this man?’
‘Suppose! I know.’
‘What do you know?’
‘That he is a rogue, a brigand scoundrel, associate of Lorenzaccio da Trino who slipped through our fingers an hour ago.’
‘By the Host!’ cried Corsario, in genuine surprise. ‘I thought . . .’ He checked abruptly, and dissembled the break by a laugh. ‘And can you dream that the Lady Valeria would harbour a robber?’
‘Can I dream, can any man dream, what the Lady Valeria will do?’
‘I could dream that she’ll put your eyes out if ever the power is hers,’ lisped the Lord of Fenestrella with the malice that was of his nature. ‘You heard her say they are too good, and that she’ll remember it. You should be less ready to tell her all you see. He is a fool who helps to make a woman wise.’
The Marquis laughed to applaud his friend’s philosophy, and his glance approved him fawningly.
The young soldier considered them.
‘Sirs, I will resume my search.’
When they had searched until night closed in upon the world, investigating every hedge and bush that might afford concealment, the captain came to think that either he had been at fault in concluding that the fugitive had sought shelter in the garden, or else the rogue had found some way out and was now beyond their reach.
He retired crestfallen, and the three gentlemen who had accompanied his search and who did not conceal their amusement at its failure went in to supper.
CHAPTER V
THE PRINCESS
At about the time that the young Lord of Montferrat was sitting down belatedly to table with his tutor and his gentleman-in-waiting, a very bedraggled and chilled Bellarion, who for two hours had been standing immersed to the chin in water, his head amid the branches of the alder-bush, came cautiously forth at last. He ventured no farther, however, than the shallow tongue of land behind the marble pavilion, ready at the first alarm to plunge back into his watery concealment.
There he lay, shivering in the warm night, and taking stock of his plight, an exercise which considerably diminished him in his self-confidence and self-esteem.
‘Experience,’ he had been wont to say—being rather addicted, I gather, to the making of epigrammatic formulæ—‘is the hornbook of fools, unnecessary for the practical purposes of life to the man of wit.’
It is possible that he was tempted to revise this dictum in the light of the events of that disastrous day, recognising that a little of the worldly experience he despised might have saved him most if not all of its disasters. If he admitted this without yet admitting the fallacy of his aphorism, it was only to reach a conclusion even more humiliating. He had strayed from lack of experience, therefore it followed, he told himself, that he was a fool. That is one of the dangers of reasoning by syllogism.
He had accepted the companionship of a man whose face pronounced him a scoundrel, and whose various actions in the course of the day confirmed the message of his face, and this for no better reason than that the man wore a Franciscan’s frock. If his sense did not apprise him that a Franciscan’s habit does not necessarily cover a Saint Francis, there was a well-known proverb—cucullum non facit monachum—which he might have remembered. Because sense and memory had alike failed him, he had lost his purse, he had lost the letter which was his passport for the long and arduous journey before him, he had narrowly escaped losing his liberty, and he would be lucky if he were quit of all this mischief without losing his life. The lesser evils of the ruin of a serviceable suit of clothes and the probability of taking a rheum as the result of his immersion went for the moment disregarded.
Next he considered the rashness, the senselessness, of his seeking sanctuary in this garden. Was worldly experience really necessary, he wondered, to teach a man that the refuge of which he does not know the exit may easily become a trap? Had he not excelled at the Grazie as a chessplayer from his care and ability in pondering the moves that must follow the immediate one? Had he read—amongst other works on the art of war which had ever held his mind in fascination—the ‘De Re Militari’ of Silvius Faustus to so little purpose that he could not remember one of its first axioms, to the effect that he is an imprudent leader who goes into action without making sure that his line of retreat is open?
By such questions as