"Put your mind at rest, my lord," she said, mockingly. "Your secret is safe in my keeping. I do not know your aims, but if you will take me into your confidence you are sure of success. I am only dangerous when I am angered. Why should you not succeed? The Signorina is completely infatuated with you. If we make her believe that you have assumed the character of the Earl of Essex from love of her she will readily forgive you that deceit. Together we can accomplish anything and everything, for you have a winning way with women, and I have brains—yes, more than you give me credit for—and this doll-faced girl shall make our fortunes. When we have sucked the coffers of the Medici dry, take me with you to your own country, and I will be your faithful accomplice there also, for, misshapen and hideous as I am, I love you, my beautiful adventurer; yes, with a devotion of which my mistress is not capable, for she is vain and shallow and selfish. Oh, why did God give her the form of an angel and put my soul in the body of a demon?"
Brandilancia, up to this point speechless with astonishment, had not been able to interrupt her, and the dwarf had climbed to the table, where, perched at his elbow, she had poured her confidences into his ear; but as she drew his face to hers with her small claw-like hands he forgot all considerations of policy in an unconquerable repulsion, and wrenched himself rudely from her.
"Imp!" he exclaimed, "your soul matches your body. You are hideous through and through."
The look which she gave him was full of malignity. "You shall live to learn that the good-will of a devil is better than her ill-will," she said, as she slipped from the table and left the room.
Brandilancia's uneasy compunction which immediately followed his hasty exclamation was soon effaced by the dwarf's apparent forgiveness. "We were both indiscreet," she said to him the following day; "let us forget and be friends."
But Leonora would not forget, and the young man had lost his opportunity of making her his friend.
She immediately carried her doubts to her mistress. "The man is not the Earl of Essex," she asserted. "He is some base impostor, I know not whom, but I will make him declare himself ere long."
Marie de' Medici was silent, but her thoughts were voluble. Since it had pleased her royal lover to come incognito she would betray him to no one nor even allow him to suspect that she had penetrated his disguise, but would flatter the King by feigning that she loved him for himself alone, and would exert every endeavour to make him sincerely her lover.
In spite of the injunction of the Grand Duchess, they often spoke of Henry of Navarre, and Brandilancia in the desire to forward the mission upon which he had been sent, told of Henry's unhappy wedded life, expressing with great frankness his own detestation of the craft and cruelty of Catherine de' Medici and the levity of her daughter Marguerite of Valois.
"You forget," Marie de' Medici had replied, "that they are my kinswomen."