Mombelli, shattered in nerve and sapped of manhood by his sufferings, cried out, piteously inarticulate. Pitilessly Bellarion waved him away, and the soldiers bore him off, screaming, to the stone chamber under the north-eastern tower. There, in the middle of the uneven stone floor, stood the dread framework of the rack.
Bellarion, who had followed, ordered them to strip him. The men were reluctant to do the office of executioners, but under the eyes of Bellarion, standing as implacable as the god of wrath, they set about it, nevertheless, and all the while the broken man's cries for mercy filled that vaulted place with an ever-mounting horror. At the last, half-naked, he broke from the men's hands and flung himself at Bellarion's feet.
'In the name of the sweet Christ, my lord, take pity on me! I can bear no more. Hang me if you will, but do not let me be tortured again.'
Bellarion looked down on the grovelling, slobbering wretch with an infinite compassion in his soul. But there was no sign of it on his countenance or in his voice.
'You have but to answer my question, sir, and you shall have your wish. You shall be hanged without further suffering. Why did the Duke torture you, and why did the torture cease when it did? To what importunities did you yield?'
'Already you have guessed it, my lord. That is why you use me so! But it is not just. As God's my witness, it is not just. What am I but a poor man caught in the toils of the evil desires of others? As long as God gave me the strength to resist, I resisted. But I could bear no more. There was no price at which I would not have purchased respite from that horror. Death I could have borne had that been all they threatened. But I had reached the end of my endurance of pain. Oh, my lord, if I were a villain there would have been no torture to endure. They offered me bribes, bribes great enough to dazzle a poor man, that would have left me rich for the remainder of my days. When I refused, they threatened me with death unless I did their infamous will. Those threats I defied. Then they subjected me to this protracted agony which the Duke impiously calls his Lent. They drew my teeth, brutally with unutterable violence, two each day until all were gone. Broken and most starved as I was, distracted by pain, which for a fortnight had been unceasing, they began upon my finger-nails. But when they tore the nail from my left thumb, I could bear no more. I yielded to their infamy.'
Bellarion made a sign to the men, and they pulled Mombelli to his feet. But his eyes dared not meet the terrible glance of Bellarion.
'You yielded to their demands that, under the pretence of curing him, you should poison my Lord Facino. That is the thing to which you yielded. But when you say "they" whom do you mean?'
'The Duke Gian Maria and Antonio della Torre.'
Bellarion remembered Venegono's warning—'He is a thing of venom, like the emblem of his house.'