He fell back, clapping his hand to the bubbling wound and roaring like a bull in pain, just as Casella, almost naked, but sword in hand, came bounding down the stairs with Lungo and yet another following.
For a second it seemed to Bellarion that he had struck too late. If he attempted now to regain the staircase he must inevitably be cut off, and how could he hope with a dagger to meet Casella's sword? Then, on a new thought, he darted forward, and plunged into the long room of that mezzanine. He slammed the door, and shot home the bolts, before Casella and Lungo brought up against it on the other side.
He uncovered at last his lantern and set it down. He dragged the heavy table across the door, so as to reënforce it against their straining shoulders. Then snatching up the cloak in which the lantern had been muffled he made for the window, and threw it open.
He paused to put on his shoes, what time the baffled conspirators were battering and straining at the door. Then he forced the naked dagger as far as it would go into the empty sheath that dangled from his own belt, and tied a corner of the cloak securely to one of the stone mullions so that some five or six feet of it dangled below the sill. Onto this sill he climbed, turned, knelt, and laid hold of the cloak with both hands.
He had but to let himself down hand over hand for the length of cloth, and then only an easy drop of a few feet would lie between himself and safety.
But even as he addressed himself to this, the house-door below was opened with a clatter, and out into the street sprang two of the conspirators.
He groaned as he looked down upon them from his precarious position. Whilst they, in their shirts, capering fantastically as it seemed to him in the shaft of light that cut athwart the gloom from the open door, brandished their glittering blades and waited.
Since there could be no salvation in climbing back, he realised that he was at the end of the wild career he had run since leaving the peace of the Grazie a week ago. A week! He had lived a lifetime in that week, and he had looked more than once in the face of death. He thought of the Abbot's valedictory words: 'Pax multa in cella, foris autem plurima bella.' What would he not give now to be back in the peace of that convent cell!
As he hung there, between two deaths, he sought to compose his mind to prayer, to prepare his soul for judgment, by an act of contrition for his sins. Nor could he in that supreme hour take comfort in his old heresy that sin is a human fiction.
And then, even as his despair of body and spirit touched its nadir, he caught a sound that instantly heartened him: the approach of regularly tramping feet.