He had employed the stilted fooling of the period to cover his confusion and to gain time; for the matter was of moment and it had taken him unaware—he did not know how to answer her.
"Nay, nay, Aluisi—I am distressed; there is some great trouble; I command thy knowledge."
He had never heard her use the word before, and it became her well.
"Fair cousin, it is not new," he answered deferentially, but pausing to choose his words, for it was no time to fill her soul with alarms. "It is, I hear them say, some question of a mutiny in Cerines."
"It will mean an uprising?—danger for the King?"
"Nay, have no fear; it was quelled at once."
"How quelled?"
"So soon as discovery of the plot was made—before any steps had been taken to carry out their plans."
"How quelled?" she asked again, dissatisfied.
"The manner of it was not reported to me," he answered truthfully enough; "I knew not that the question would be put to me," he added with an attempt to turn easily from a subject on which he dared not speak freely to matter more nearly touching his office—of her commands for Venice for the galley that was to sail on the morrow. But meanwhile the vision of horror rose before him of that which he had seen with his own eyes; and lest, watching him so closely she should learn too much, he dropped his gaze, feigning to seek for some items on the tablet he held in his hand. How should he tell her the story of this plot to influence an uprising, to wrest the stronghold of Cerines for Carlotta, the rival claimant and heir? How explain this conspiracy against her husband when she probably knew nothing of what lay beneath it? How could he speak of the staunch loyalty to Carlotta of the leader of this conspiracy, of whom the disaffected were making a hero, and who had preferred any fate to the necessity of swearing fealty to Janus! He had shuddered at the barbarism which could decree such a fate for the conspirators; nor could he forget the horror of those bodies cut in bits, and swung on high, in the four quarters of the town—a ghastly warning for all men to see—as they walked to and fro in the marvellous great city of Nikosia—the city of luxury and of churches.