“Excellency, spare me,” I murmured. “Did you know all my miserable story you would be merciful. Did you know with what joy I turned my back on the Court of Pesaro—”
“Aye,” he broke in mockingly, “when Giovanni Sforza threatened to have you hanged for the overboldness of your tongue. Not until then did it occur to you to turn from the shameful life in which the best years of your manhood were being wasted. There! Just now I commended your truthfulness; but the truth that dwells in you is no more, it seems, than the truth we may look for in the mouth of Folly. At heart, I fear, you are a hypocrite, Messer Biancomonte; the worst form of hypocrite—a hypocrite to your own self.”
“Did your Excellency know all!” I cried.
“I know enough,” he answered, with stern sorrow; “enough to make me marvel that the son of Ettore Biancomonte of Biancomonte should play the Fool to Costanzo Sforza, Lord of Pesaro. Oh you will tell me that you went there for revenge, to seek to right the wrong his father did your father.”
“It was, it was!” I cried, with heated vehemence. “Be flames everlasting the dwelling of my soul if any other motive drove me to this shameful trade.”
There was a pause. His beautiful eyes flamed with a sudden light as they rested on me. Then the lids drooped demurely, and he drew a deep breath. But when he spoke there was scorn in his voice.
“And, no doubt, it was that same motive kept you there, at peace for three whole years, in slothful ease, the motleyed Fool, jesting and capering for his enemy’s delectation—you, a man with the knightly memory of your foully-wronged parent to cry hourly shame upon you. No doubt you lacked the opportunity to bring the tyrant to account. Or was it that you were content to let him make a mock of you so long as he housed and fed you and clothed you in your garish livery of shame?
“Spare me, Excellency,” I cried again. “Of your charity let my past be done with. When he drove me forth with threats of hanging, from which your gracious sister saved me, I turned my steps to Rome at her bidding to—”
“To find honourable employment at my hands,” he interrupted quietly. Then suddenly rising, and speaking in a voice of thunder—“And what, then, of your revenge?” he cried.
“It has been frustrated,” I answered lamely. “Sufficient do I account the ruin that already I have wrought in my life by the pursuit of that phantom. I was trained to arms, my lord. Let me discard for good these tawdry rags, and strap a soldier’s harness to my back.”