Bellarion's remark had been imprudent. Still more imprudent was the laugh he now uttered.
'Ask yourself who should destroy them,' he said. 'In your place I should have asked myself that before I went to the trouble of building them.'
'How should Theodore know of it, shut up as he is in Vercelli, eight miles away?'
Part of his question was answered on the instant by a demoniac uproar from the strip of land across the water. Cries of rage and terror, shouts of encouragement and command, the sound of blows, and all the unmistakable din of conflict, rose fiercely upon the deepening gloom.
'He knows, it seems,' said Bellarion, and again he laughed.
Carmagnola stood a moment, clenching and unclenching his hands, his face white with rage. Then he span round where he stood and with an inarticulate cry dashed from the tent.
One withering glance Valeria flashed into Bellarion's sardonically amused countenance, then, summoning her brother, she followed Carmagnola.
Bellarion set down his book upon the table by the tent-pole, took up a cloak, and followed them at leisure, through the screen of bare trees behind which his pavilion had been pitched, and along the high bank of the swirling river towards the head of Carmagnola's bridge.
There, as he expected, he found them, scarcely visible in the gloom, and with them a knot of men-at-arms and a half-dozen stragglers, all that had escaped of the party that Carmagnola had sent across an hour ago. The others had been surrounded and captured. Last of all to win across, arriving just as Bellarion reached the spot, was Belluno, who had commanded them, an excitable Neapolitan who leapt up the bank from the bridge ranting by all the patrons of Naples that they had been betrayed.
Over the river came a sound of tramping feet. Dimly reflected in the water they could see the forms of men who otherwise moved invisible on the farther bank, and presently came a sound of axes on timber.