But he did not laugh as the days passed, and he observed the growing lechery in the beady eyes with which the Count of Pavia watched the Lady Beatrice's every movement, and the Lady Beatrice's provocative complacency under that vigilance.
One day, at last, coming upon the Countess alone in that library, Bellarion unmasked the batteries he had been preparing.
He hobbled across to the arched window by which she was seated, and leaning against its monial, looked out upon the desolate park. The snows had gone, washed away by rains, and since these had come a frost under which the ground lay now as grey and hard as iron.
'They will be feeling the rigours of the winter in the camp under Bergamo,' he said, moving, as ever, obliquely to the attack.
'They will so. Facino should have gone into winter quarters.'
'That would mean recommencing in the spring a job that is half done already.'
'Yet with his gout and the infirmities of age, it might prove wiser in the end.'
'Each age has its own penalties, madonna. It is not only the elderly among humanity who need compassion.'
'Wisdom oozes from you like sweat from another.' There was a tartness in her accents. 'If I were your biographer, Bellarion, I should write of you as the soldier-sage, or the philosopher-at-arms.'
Propped on his crutch and his one sound leg, Bellarion considered her, his head on one side, and fetched a sigh.