'You want peace, you dogs? You'll deafen me with hellcat cries of peace! What peace do you give me, you filthy rabble? But you shall have peace! Oho! You shall have it.' He stood in his stirrups, and swung round to his captain. 'Ho, there, you!' His face was inflamed with fury, a wicked mockery, and evil mirth hung about his swollen purple lips. So terrible, indeed, was his aspect that della Torre, who rode beside him, ventured to set upon his arm a restraining hand. But the Duke flung the hand off, snarling like a dog at his elderly mentor. He backed his horse until he was thigh to thigh with his captain.
'Give them what they ask for,' he commanded. 'Clear me a way through this dungheap! Use your lances. Give them the peace they want.'
A great cry arose from those who stood nearest, held there by the press behind.
'Lord Duke! Lord Duke!' they wailed.
And he laughed at them, laughed aloud in maniacal mockery, in maniacal anticipation of the gratification of his unutterable blood-lust.
'On! On!' he commanded. 'They are impatient for peace!'
But the captain of his guard, a gentleman of family, Bertino Mantegazza, sat his horse appalled, and issued no such order as he was bidden.
'Lord Duke ...' he began, but got no further, for the Duke, catching the appealing note in his voice, seeing the horror in his eyes, suddenly crashed his iron glove into the young man's face. 'God's blood! Will you stay to argue when I command?'
Mantegazza reeled under that cruel blow, and with blood suffusing his broken face would have fallen but that one of his men caught and supported him in the saddle.
The Duke laughed to see what he had done, and took command himself. 'Into them! Charge!' he commanded in a shout on which his voice shrilled up and cracked. And the Bavarian mercenaries who composed the guard, to whom the Milanese were of no account and all civilians contemptible, lowered their lances and charged as they were bidden.