She was so close to me that I could almost feel the beating of her heart. Some subtle perfume reaching me and combining with the dominion that her eyes seemed to have established over me completed my subjugation. I was as warm wax in her hands. Forgotten were all considerations of rank and station. We were just a man and a woman whose fates were linked irrevocably by love. I stooped suddenly, under the sway of an impulse, I could not resist, and kissed her upturned face, turning almost dizzy in the act. Then I broke from her clasp, and bracing myself for the task to which we stood committed by that kiss—
“Paola,” said I, “we must devise the means to get away. I will bear you to my mother’s home near Biancomonte, that you may dwell there at least until we are wed. But the thing that exercises my mind is how to make our unobserved escape from Pesaro.”
“I have thought of it already,” she informed me quietly.
“You have thought of it?” I cried. “And of what have you thought?”
For answer she stepped back a pace, and drew the cowl of the monk’s habit over her head until her features were lost in the shadows of it. She stood before me now, a diminutive Dominican brother. Her meaning was clear to me at once. With a cry of gladness I turned to the drawer whence I had taken the habit in which she was arrayed, and selecting another one I hastily donned it above the garments that I wore.
No sooner was it done than I caught her by the arm.
“Come, Madonna,” I bade her in an urgent voice. At the first step she stumbled. The habit was so long that it cumbered her feet. But that was a difficulty soon conquered. With my dagger I cut a piece from the skirt of it, enough to leave her freedom of movement; and, that accomplished, we set out.
We crossed the church swiftly and silently, and a moment I left her in the porch whilst I surveyed the street. All was quiet. Pesaro still slept, and it must have wanted some two hours or more to the dawn.
A fine rain was falling as we sallied out, and there was a sting in the December wind which made us draw our cowls the tighter about our face. Abandoning the main street, I led her down some narrow alleys, deserted like all the rest of the city, and not so much as a stray cat abroad in that foul weather. It was very dark, and a hundred times we stumbled, whilst in some places I almost carried her bodily to avoid the filth of the quarter we were traversing. At length we gained the space in front of the gates that open on to the northern road, known as Porta Venezia, and I would have blundered on and roused the guard to let us out, using the Borgia ring once more—that talisman whose power had grown during these years, so that it would now open me almost any door in Italy. But Paola stayed me. Wisely she counselled that we should do nothing that might draw too much attention upon ourselves, and she urged me to wait until the dawn, when the guard would be astir and the gates opened.
So we fled to the shelter of a porch, and there we waited, huddling ourselves out of the reach of the icy rain. We talked little during the time we spent there. For my own part I had overmuch food for thought, and a very natural anxiety racked me. Soon the monks would be descending to the church, and they would discover the havoc there, and spread the alarm.