The face of this man already bore the shadow of coming dissolution. He had been fat once, and so recently that his skin had had no time to adapt itself to the waste within, but hung in folds like wrinkled tripe. His eyes had a haunted, pathetic look in them, for he had lived his later time with a damning secret for company, and he dreaded unspeakably the mortal moment which should find him still unrelieved of its burden. Wherefore he had provisionally, and with a reservation in favour of his own possible recovery, confided to his confessor enough of the business to awaken that cleric’s lively interest, and to send him off in search of one more fitted, by virtue of his canonical rank and authority, to accept contrition and deliver judgment on a momentous matter. The two lost no time in preliminaries.
“This is one, Balatrone,” said the friar, “endowed with the highest gift for absolution. I am about to make known to him the substance of the report you have committed to me.”
“Bene, bene,” said the sick man, nodding exhaustedly. “I ask the good father to purge my soul.”
The “good father” mentioned had seated himself in an obscure corner, his face bowed and concealed by his hood. The other monk took a parchment from his bosom, and referred to it.
“These are the depositions,” he said softly, “of one Andrea Sfondrati, late page to his Holiness Alexander VI. The man died recently under suspicion of poison, and the document came into the hands of Balatrone here.”
“I stole it from his chamber,” declared the patient, in a tremulous but resolved voice, “after I had poisoned him. None but I and he knew of its existence. It is all true. No alternative was left me.”
“Continue,” said the seated monk passionlessly. “Continue, brother. So far this implies nothing beyond your province.”
The Benedictine, unperturbed, unfolded the parchment.
“The statement, Father,” he said, “covers the night of his late Holiness’s mortal sickness, which in a few hours left the throne of St. Peter vacant.” He glanced significantly towards the other, who silently motioned him to proceed. “There were present with his Holiness on that occasion,” he went on, “his son the Don Cesare Borgia and his Eminence the Cardinal Adriano of Corneto. The narrator takes up the tale at the moment when a certain dish was placed before his Eminence during the feast served privately in his honour.”
He shifted, so as to get the light upon the document, and began to read in a clear, low voice: