'Know'st nothing of his deserts,' cried Carlo. 'Be advised!'
'By love,' cried the boy. 'He is worthy of it—a good man—I carry a letter to him from my father. Fall back, I say.'
He drove in his heels, and the horse plunged and started, tearing the rein from Lanti's grasp. It was true that Bembo bore this letter, among others, in his pouch. The Abbot of San Zeno was so long out of the world as to have miscalculated the durations of court favour. Cola had been an influence in his time.
'Devil take him!' growled Carlo; but he followed, scowling and slashing, in his wake. The mob, authorised of its worst humour, took his truculence ill. That reduced him to a very devilish sobriety. He began to strike with an eye to details, 'blazing' his passage through the throng. The method justified itself in the opening out of a human lane, at the end of which he saw Bembo spring upon the stage.
The executioner was cutting deliberately, monotonously on, and as monotonously the voice went moaning. Messer Jacopo, standing at iron ease beside, took no thought, it seemed, of anything—least of all of interference with the Duke's will. It must have been, therefore, no less than an amazing shock to that functionary to find himself all in an instant stung and staggered by a bolt from the blue. He may have been, like some phlegmatic serpent, conscious of a hornet winging his way; but that the insect should have had it in its mind to pounce on him!
He found himself and his voice in one metallic clang:—
'Seize him, men!'
Carlo panted up, and Jacopo recognised him on the moment.
'Messer Lanti! Death of the Cross! Is this the Duke's order?'
'Christ's, old fool!' gasped the cavalier. 'Touch him, I say, and die. I neither know nor care.'