For his thoughts were bitter, and hard to bear alone. His life would be different, he thought, if he lived it again: not wasted, flung away. For the first time he felt he loved his father dearly, for the first time he realized how Mastino loved his wife—he understood. Was all knowledge coming to him so late, things to be made clear only to be darkened forever?
Ah, well, it was all over now; there were only a few moments to—what? He shuddered a little—to what? He wished his father would return, passionately he wished it; he did not want to think—for the first time and the last. He stood there with tight-clasped hands, his eyes on the door, holding desperately onto his control.
And at last Ippolito entered, quietly, closing it behind him. He held a missal in his hand, and a parchment. As he laid them on the table, Vincenzo noticed the last was sealed with the seal of Verona, the ladder of the Scaligeri.
"Mastino?" he whispered.
"Mastino is dead," said d'Este, in a calm voice, and he crumpled the parchment in his hand.
On it was written: "I have betrayed you for Isotta's life," and it was signed with the proudest name in Lombardy—"Mastino Orazio della Scala."
"That shall not destroy the glory of Vincenzo's death," thought d'Este sternly, and he flung it from him, into the room beyond, among the powder—something only fit to be consumed.
The castle within was built largely of wood, and Vincenzo, looking into the darkness with a painful eagerness, watched the powder laid carefully about the walls, extending in a long train to tanks of oil, while fire boughs, dry and leafless, lay scattered thickly. D'Este had not been taken unprepared. Vincenzo's flesh stirred and shrank; he remembered snatching a bat once from the camp fire, and how the pain in his hurt hand had tortured him.
"'Tis a fearful death!" he murmured.
Ippolito turned a drawn face toward him.