“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.