They met once more—they spent three days together, without knowing they were not to see each other again. He hurried back to take the lead in a brilliant but cruel campaign. It included the battle of Pavia. Robertson calls Pescara the ablest and most enterprising of the Imperial generals; and certainly he divided with Lannoy the merit of this victory, which caused the captivity of two kings, and changed the fate of Europe.
Pescara thought himself injured, in having Francis the First taken out of his hands; and his known pique on the subject made a certain political party, with the Pope for its real, and a man named Morone for its ostensible head, think they might perhaps detach him from the Spanish interest—in other words, make a traitor of him.
In an evil hour, Pescara listened. Where was the pure, lofty influence of his wife at that moment? She was far away, believing in his unstained honour. A fatal letter was written by him, yielding to the tempter's snares, and entrusted to a messenger named Gismondo Santi.
This man, lodging at a low hostelry on his journey, was murdered by the landlord, and buried under his staircase. As no tidings, consequently, were heard of the unfortunate emissary, Pescara concluded he had turned traitor (like his master) and carried his despatches to the Emperor. Fancy his feelings.
Oh, for Vittoria! Oh that she had been with him at first!—oh! that she were with him now! As he clasped his strong hands over his burning eyes, and strove to think, he seemed to see her, sitting at her writing-table, pensively gazing at his miniature, and then at the crucifix above it, with a prayer for him on her lips—a prayer that he might be surrounded by an atmosphere of sanctity and safety.
After crowning such a brilliant campaign by winning the battle of Pavia, should he end by dying a disgraced man?—a convicted traitor, like De Bourbon, with, perhaps, the felon death that De Bourbon had escaped? And all for what? What dust and ashes the Evil One gives us to drink!
Just then, a courier, hot with haste, brought him a letter—it was from Vittoria. Too agitated to disentangle gently the tress of her fair hair knotted round it, he cut it with his dagger, and devoured rather than read it.
Some bird of the air had carried the matter!—she had heard of the plot! No Lady Macbeth was Vittoria, to urge her husband on to guilt—she was his guardian angel, and wrote, with infinite trouble and anxiety, to implore him to think of his hitherto unstained character, and to weigh well what he was about, declaring to him that she had no desire to be the wife of a king, but only of a loyal and upright man.
This letter decided Pescara as to his course. He wrote a full confession to the Emperor, who certainly owed him small thanks for it, seeing he believed him to know all already; and the confederates he compromised owed him still less. Pescara was too deep in the mire now, to come out unstained. He returned to his allegiance to the Emperor, but he betrayed his friends, his tempters, accomplices, or whatever name we may give them. The Pope, of course, was above danger; but Morone fell into a regular trap laid for him.
Vittoria, far away in her little island, would only hear as much as Pescara chose to tell her, and in his own way. She would suppose his character unscathed, his possession of imperial favour undiminished, since he was shortly afterwards made generalissimo of the forces. Suddenly his health broke down. No one could say why, unless the slight wounds he had received at Pavia had injured him more than was supposed. A troubled mind, probably, was at the root of his mortal sickness.