In the torrid heat of the following noontide, Bellarion rode alone to visit Stoffel at Casalbagliano. He did not go round by the lines, but straight across country, which brought him past the inner posts of surveillance and as close under the red walls of Alessandria as it was safe to go.
The besieged city seemed to sleep in the breathless heat of the low-lying lands upon which it had been reared. Saving an occasional flash of steel from the weapon or breastplate of some sentinel on the battlements, there was no sign of a life which starvation must by now have reduced to the lowest ebb.
As Bellarion rode he meditated upon the odd course of unpremeditated turbulence which he had run since leaving the seclusion of Cigliano a year ago. He had travelled far indeed from his original intention, and he marvelled now at the ease with which he had adapted himself to each new set of circumstances he met, applying in worldly practice all that he had learnt in theory by his omnivorous studies. From a mental vigour developed by those studies he drew an increasing consciousness of superiority over those with whom fate associated him, a state of mind which did not bring him to respect his fellow man.
Greed seemed to Bellarion, that morning, the dominant impulse of worldly life. He saw it and all the stark, selfish evil of it wherever he turned his retrospective glance. Most cruelly, perhaps, had he seen it last night in the Countess Beatrice, who dignified it—as was common—by the name of ambition. She would be well served, he thought, if that ambition were gratified in such a way that she should curse its fruit with every hour of life that might be hers thereafter. Thus might she yet save her silly, empty soul.
He was drawn abruptly from the metaphysical to the physical by two intrusions upon his consciousness. The first was a spent arbalest bolt, which struck the crupper of his horse and made it bound forward, a reminder to Bellarion that he had all but got within range of those red walls. The second was a bright object gleaming a yard or two ahead of him along the track he followed.
The whole of Facino's army might have passed that way, seeing in that bright object a horseshoe and nothing more. But Bellarion's mind was of a different order. He read quite fluently in that iron shoe that it was cast from the hind hoof of a mule within the last twenty-four hours.
Two nights ago a thunderstorm had rolled down from the Montferrine hills, which were now hazily visible in the distance on his right. Had the shoe been cast before that, rust must have dimmed its polished brightness; yet, as closer examination confirmed, no single particle of rust had formed upon it. Bellarion asked himself a question: Since no strangers were allowed to come or go within the lines, what man of Facino's had during the last two days ridden to a point so barely out of range of an arbalest bolt from the city? And why had he ridden a mule?
He had dismounted, and he now picked up the shoe to make a further discovery. A thick leather-cased pad attached to the underside of it.
He did not mount again, but leading his horse he proceeded slowly on foot along the track that led to Casalbagliano.
It was an hour later when the outposts challenged him on the edge of the village. He found Stoffel sitting down to dinner when he reached the house where the Swiss was quartered.