Bellarion the Fortunate

by Rafael Sabatini

'Most honoured and most dear lady,' he addresses her—'Riveritissima et Carissima Madonna.' The exordium is all that need concern us now.

Ever since at your own invitation I entered your service that evening in your garden here at Casale, where to-day I have again wandered reviving memories that are of the fairest in my life, that service has been my constant study. I have pursued it, by tortuous ways and by many actions appearing to have no bearing upon it, unsuspected by you when not actually mistrusted by you. That your mistrust has wounded me oftentimes and deeply, would have weighed lightly with me had I not perceived that by mistrusting you were deprived of that consolation and hope which you would have found in trusting. The facts afforded ever a justification of your mistrust. This I recognized; and that facts are stubborn things, not easily destroyed by words. Therefore I did not vainly wear myself in any endeavour to destroy them, but toiled on, so that, in the ultimate achievement of your selfless aims for your brother, the Marquis, I might prove to you without the need of words the true impulse of my every action in these past five years. The fame that came to me as a condottiero, the honours I won, and the increase of power they brought me I have never regarded as anything but weapons to be employed in this your service, as means to the achievement of your ends. But for that service accepted in this garden, my life would have been vastly different from all that it has been. No burden heavier than a scholar's would have been mine, and to-day I might well be back with the brethren at Cigliano, an obscure member of their great brotherhood. To serve you, I have employed trickery and double-dealing until men have dubbed me a rogue, and some besides yourself have come to mistrust me, and once I went the length of doing murder. But I take no shame in any of these things, nor, most dear lady, need you take shame in that your service should have entailed them. The murder I did was the execution of a rogue; the conspiracy I scattered was one that would have made a net in which to take you; the deceits I have put upon the Marquis Theodore, chiefly when I made him serve my dear Lord Facino's turn and seduced him into occupying Vercelli, so as subsequently to afford the Duke of Milan a sound reason for moving against him, were deceits employed against a deceiver, whom it would be idle to combat in honest fashion. In his eyes more than any other's—for he is not the only victim of the duplicity I have used to place you ultimately where you should be—I am a double-dealing Judas. And it is said of me, too, that in the field as in the council, I prevail by subterfuge and never by straightforward blows. But my conscience remains tranquil. It is not what a man does or says that counts; but what a man intends. I have embraced as a part of my guiding philosophy that teaching of Plato's which discriminates between the lie on the lips and the lie in the heart. On my lips and in my actions lies have been employed. I confess it frankly. But in my heart no lie has ever been. If I have employed at times dishonest means, at least the purpose for which they have been employed has been unfalteringly, unswervingly honest, and one in the final achievement of which there can be only pride and a sense of duty done.

To this if you believe it—and the facts will presently constrain you to do so, unless my fortune in the field should presently desert me—I need add no details of the many steps in your service. By the light of faith in me from what is written and what is presently to do, you will now read aright those details for yourself.

We touch now the goal whither all these efforts have been addressed.

Upon this follows his concise account of the events from the moment of his escape from Quinto, and upon that an injunction to her to come at once with her brother to Casale, depending upon the protection of his arm and the loyalty of a people which only awaits the sight of its rightful Prince to be increased to enthusiasm and active support.

That letter was despatched next day to Quinto, but it did not reach her until almost a week later between Alessandria and Casale.

Meanwhile early on the morrow the city was thrown into alarm by the approach of a strong body of horse. This was Ugolino da Tenda's condotta, and Ugolino himself rode in with a trumpeter to make renewed submission to the Lord Bellarion, and to give him news of what had happened in Quinto upon the coming of Barbaresco.

Bellarion racked him with questions, as to what was said, particularly as to what the Princess said and how she looked, and what passed between her and Carmagnola. And when all was done, far from the stern reproaches Ugolino had been expecting he found himself embraced by a Bellarion more joyous than he had ever yet known that sardonic soldier.

That gaiety of Bellarion's was observed by all in the days that followed. He was a man transformed. He displayed the light-heartedness of a boy, and moved about the many tasks claiming his attention with a song on his lips, a ready laugh upon the slightest occasion, and a sparkle in his great eyes that all had hitherto known so sombre.

And this notwithstanding that these were busy and even anxious days of preparation for the final trial of strength. He rode abroad during the day with two or three of his officers, one of whom was always Stoffel, surveying the ground of the peninsula that lies between Sesia and Po to the north of Casale, and at night he would labour over maps which he was preparing from his daily notes. Meanwhile he kept himself day by day informed, by means of a line of scouts which he had thrown out, of what was happening at Vercelli.