The old man caught up a beaker from the buffet and handed it to the boy.
“Here, my son,” said he. “Hasten to his Excellency.”
The lad took the beaker from his father’s hands, and trembling in his fear of Ramiro’s anger, he sprang forward to serve him. In his haste the poor youth slipped in some grease that had clung to the rushes. In seeking to recover himself he tripped over the feet of one of the halberdiers that guarded me, and measured his length upon the floor at Ramiro’s feet, flooding the Governor’s legs with the wine he carried.
How shall I tell you of the horror that was the sequel?
For just one instant Ramiro looked down at the sprawling lad, his eyes glowing like a madman’s. Then suddenly he rose, stooped, and set one hand to the boy’s belt, the other to the collar of his jerkin. Feeling himself lifted, and knowing whose were the dread hands that held him, poor Beppo uttered a single scream of terror. Then Ramiro swung him round with an ease that displayed the man’s prodigious strength. For just a second he seemed to hesitate how to dispose of the human bundle that he held. Then, as if suddenly taking his resolve, that devil hurled the lad across the little intervening space, straight into the heart of the blazing fire.
Beppo hurtled against the logs with a sickening crash, and a thousand sparks leapt up and vanished in the cavern of the chimney. Ramiro wheeled sharply about, and snatching the pike from the hands of one of my guards, he pinned down the poor body of the boy to make sure of his victim’s entire destruction.
Away by the buffet old Mariani looked on with a face as grey as ashes, his eyes protruding in horror at the thing they witnessed. One glimpse I had of him, and I scarce know which was the sight that sickened me more, the fathers anguish or the twitching limbs of the burning child. Two legs and two arms protruded from the blaze and writhed and wriggled horribly what time the flames peeled the garments from them and licked the flesh from the bones. At length they fell still and sank down into the white heat of the logs, a hideous, pungent odour spreading through the chamber. From the old man by the buffet, who had stood spellbound during this ghastly scene, there broke at last an anguished cry.
“Mercy, my lord, mercy!”
The Governor of Cesena straightened himself from his task, pulled the pike from the flames, and restored it to the man-at-arms. Then turning to Mariani:
“Fetch me wine,” he bade him curtly, as he seated himself once more upon the chair from which he had risen to perform that deed of ghastly ruthlessness.