'Su! Gia-gia! Bravo, Carlo! That was a Brutus stroke! Uh-uh, Andrea! hast bled him there for arrears of wages! a scrap of gold-cloth, by Socrates! A brave sign, a bright token, Andrea!'
He chuckled and hugged himself, involuntarily embracing in the action the long pendant which hung from his roundlet or turban, and half-pulling the cap from his skull-like forehead.
'Death!' he screeched in an ecstasy, and Lampugnani, glancing at him, went off into husky laughter, and sank back, breathed, upon a bench.
'Cometh in a doctor's gown,' he panted. 'Nay, sir, bonnet! bonnet! or the dummy will suspect you.'
He might have, himself, and with a better advantage to his fortunes, could he have penetrated the vestments of that drear philosophic heart. There was a secret there would have astounded his self-assurance. Montano wore his doctor's robe, meetly as a master of rhetoric, not the least of whose contemplated flights was one timely away from that political arena, whose gladiators in the meanwhile he was bent only on inflaming to a contest in which he had no intention of personally participating. He had a fixed idea, his back and his principles being still painfully at odds, that the cause would be best served by his absence, when once the long train to the explosion he was engineering had been fired at his hand. And so he hugged himself, and Lampugnani laughed.
'Look at Master Lupo, with the sound of thy screech in his ears! As if he thought we contemplated anything but to bring slashed Venetian doublets into vogue!'
He was a large, fleshly creature, was this Lampugnani, needing some fastidious lust to stir him to action, and then suddenly violent. His face was big and vealy, with a mouth in its midst like a rabbit's, showing prominently a couple, no more, of sleek teeth. His eyes drooped under lids so languid as to give him an affectation of fatigue in lifting them. His voice was soft, but compelling: he never lent it to platitudes. An intellectual sybarite, a voluptuary by deliberation, he had tested God and Belial, and pronounced for the less Philistine lordship of the beast. Quite consistent with his principles, he not hated, but highly disapproved of Galeazzo, who, as consistently, had pardoned him some abominable crime which, under Francesco the father, had procured him the death sentence. But Messer Andrea had looked for a more sympathetic recognition of his merits at the hands of his deliverer than was implied in an ill-paid lieutenancy of Guards; and his exclusion from a share in the central flesh-pots was a conclusive proof to him of the æsthetic worthlessness of the master it was his humility to serve.
The Visconti, at whom he breathed his little laugh, was a contrast to him in every way—a bluff, stout-built man, with fat red chaps flushing through a skin of red hair, a braggadocio manner, and small eyes red with daring. There was nothing of his house's emblematic adder about him, save a readiness with poisons; and after all, that gave him no particular distinction. He took a great, stertorous pull at a flagon of wine, and smacked his lips bullyingly, before he answered with a roar:—
'Wounds! scarlet scotched on a ground of flesh-tint—a fashion will please our saint.'
Montano chuckled again, and more shrilly.