Ludovico suddenly leapt to a blaze.
'Dog! Wouldst bandy with me, dog? Beware, I say! Who blabbed my secrets to the lady of Casa Caprona?'
He was himself again with the cry. His faculty of instant self-control was a thing quite fearful. Narcisso cowered before him; shrunk under the playful wagging of his finger.
'Messer—in the Lord's name!' he could only stammer—'Messer!'
'O thou fond knave!' complained the Prince, showing his teeth in a smile; 'to think to play that double game, one patron against another, and stake thine empty wits against the reckoning! Well, thou art confessed and damned.' He drew back a pace. 'But one word more,' he said, raising his voice. 'What hast thou to plead that I call not up those that will silence for ever thy false, treacherous tongue?'
He stood by the door. It was a very reasonable inference that he had not ventured into such a quarter unattended. Narcisso stood gasping and intertwining his thick fingers, but he could find no words.
'What!' smiled Ludovico; 'no excuse, no explanation? No answer of any kind? Shall I call, then?' He seemed to hesitate. 'Yet perhaps one loop-hole, though undeserved, I'll lease thee on condition.' He moved again forward a little, and spoke in a lower tone: 'There's news wanted of a certain stolen ring. Dog! do I not know who thieved it, and for whom? Now shalt thou undertake to go yet once again, and, robbing the receiver, bring the spoil to me—or be damned here and now for thy villainy.'
He thought he had netted at last the quarry of his long, patient stalking; but for once his confidence was at fault. Watching intently for the effect of his words, he grew conscious of some change transfiguring, out of terror and astonishment, the face of his victim. Foul, ignoble, animal beyond redemption as that was in all its features, its swinish eyes could yet extract and emit, it seemed, from the thin, dead ashes of some ancient fire, a stubborn spark of self-renunciation. He could read it in them unmistakably. The man stood straight before him, for the first and only time in his life, a hero.
Ludovico gazed in silence. He found, to do him the right justice, this psychic revelation of acuter interest to him than his own defeat foreseen in the light of it. But Tassino's subdued whimpering jarred him out of his abstraction.
'Well, is it agreed?' he asked with a sigh. For the moment he almost shrunk in the apprehension of an affirmative reply.