'Dio mio, do you hear?' whispered the Frenchman to Messer Antonio Giustiniani, the Venetian ambassador, 'he will strike him!'
The Venetian shrugged his shoulders. If it came to blows, he thought the son more likely to stab the father, than the father the son. Since the murder of the Duke of Candia, the Pope had feared Cæsar; his paternal pride and doting fondness had become mixed with a superstitious terror. All remembered how Perotto, the youngest of the chamberlains, had taken refuge from Cæsar under the folds of the papal mantle, and Cæsar had poniarded him on the pontiff's breast, splashing Alexander with his blood. Giustiniani guessed also that the present dispute was a feint, got up for the Frenchman's benefit, to persuade him that if the duke had designs against Florence the Pope was innocent of them. Giustiniani believed that the two always supported each other; the father never doing what he said, the son never saying what he did.
Having threatened, cursed, and all but excommunicated his son, the Pope returned to the hall of audience still trembling, panting, and wiping the perspiration from his empurpled face. Nevertheless, in his eyes shone a gleam of amusement. Again he called the Frenchman, and this time drew him towards the Cortile del Belvedere.
'Your Holiness knows,' began the envoy, much distressed, 'I had no desire to breed discord——'
'What? did you hear?' cried the Pope, seeming much astonished. And without giving him time to think, he took him familiarly by the chin with finger and thumb (a sign of great amity), and spoke impetuously of his devotion to the Most Christian King, and of the extraordinary purity of Cæsar's motives. The Frenchman was bewildered, and though he had irrefragable proof of the deception, felt disposed rather to deny the evidence of his own eyes than to disbelieve that voice, those eyes, those lips. Indeed, Alexander always lied like one inspired. He never pre-arranged what he was going to say, but lied as artlessly, as innocently as a woman in love. He had practised this art so long that he had attained perfection in it; he was an artist carried away by his imagination.
V
At this moment his secret body-servant approached the pope and whispered to him. Alexander with an anxious air passed into the next room, and thence through a concealed door into a narrow vaulted passage where Cardinal Monreale's cook was awaiting him.
He brought news that the quantity of poison had been insufficient and the cardinal was recovering. However, after minutely catechising the cook, the Pope convinced himself that his victim would die in two or three months' time, which would be all the better as averting suspicion.
'It seems a pity, too!' thought Alexander. 'The poor old man was amusing and a good Christian.'