'Her feeling?' Barbaresco sneered, and Bellarion understood that the sneer was for himself. 'God deliver me from the weariness of reasoning with a fool. Our bolt would have been shot, and none could have guessed the hands that loosed it. Now you have made it known, and you need to be told what will happen if we were mad enough to go through with it. Why, the Princess Valeria would be our instant accuser. She would come forth at once and denounce us. That is the spirit of her; wilful, headstrong, and mawkish. And I am a fool to bid you go back to her and persuade her that you were mistaken. When the blow fell, she would see that what you had first told her was the truth, and our heads would pay.'
He set his elbows on the table, took his head in his hands, and fetched a groan from his great bulk. 'The ruin you have wrought! God! The ruin!'
'Ruin?' quoth Bellarion.
'Of all our hopes,' Barbaresco explained in petulance.
'Can't you see it? Can you understand nothing for yourself, animal, save the things you were better for not understanding? And can't you see that you have ruined yourself with us? With your face and shape and already close in the Lady Valeria's confidence as you are, there are no heights in the State to which you might not have climbed.'
'I had not thought of it,' said Bellarion, sighing.
'No, nor of me, nor of any of us. Of me!' The man's grief became passionate. 'At last I might have sloughed this beggary in which I live. And now ...' He banged the table in his sudden rage, and got to his feet again. 'That is what you have done. That is what you have wrecked by your silly babbling.'
'But surely, sir, by other means ...'
'There are no other means. Leastways, no other means at our command. Have we the money to levy troops? Oh, why do I waste my breath upon you? You'll tell the others to-morrow what you've done, and they shall tell you what they think of it.'
It was a course that had its perils. But if once in the stillness of the night Bellarion's shrewd wits counselled him to rise, dress, and begone, he stilled the coward counsel. It remained to be seen whether the other conspirators would be as easily intimidated as Barbaresco. To ascertain this, Bellarion determined to remain. The Lady Valeria's need of him was not yet done, he thought, though why the Lady Valeria's affairs should be the cause of his exposing himself to the chances of a blade between the ribs was perhaps more than he could satisfactorily have explained.