“I shall surrender to you in a moment, sir,” said I. “Meanwhile, and you, gentlemen—give us leave apart.” And I drew the bewildered Cavalcanti aside and down the courtyard under the colonnade of the gallery.
“My lord, be wise for Bianca's sake,” I implored him. “I am assured that here is nothing but a trap baited for you. Do not gorge their bait as your valour urges you. Defeat them, my lord, by circumspection. Do you not see that if you resist the Holy Office, they can issue a ban against you, and that against such a ban not even the Emperor can defend you? Indeed, if they told him that his feudatory, the Lord of Pagliano, had been guilty of contumaciously thwarting the ends of the Holy Inquisition, that bigot Charles V would be the first to deliver you over to the ghastly practices of that tribunal. It should not need, my lord, that I should tell you this.”
“My God!” he groaned in utter misery. “But you, Agostino?”
“There is nothing against me,” I answered impatiently. “What sacrilege have I ever committed? The thing is a trumped-up business, conceived with a foul purpose by Messer Pier Luigi there. Courage, then, and self-restraint; and thus we shall foil their aims. Come, my lord, I will ride to Rome with them. And do not doubt that I shall return very soon.”
He looked at me with eyes that were full of trouble, indecision in every line of a face that was wont to look so resolute. He knew himself between the sword and the wall.
“I would that Galeotto were here!” cried that man usually so self-reliant. “What will he say to me when he comes? You were a sacred charge, boy.”
“Say to him that I will be returning shortly—which must be true. Come, then. You may serve me this way. The other way you will but have to endure ultimate arrest, and so leave Bianca at their mercy, which is precisely what they seek.”
He braced himself at the thought of Bianca. We turned, and in silence we paced back, quite leisurely as if entirely at our ease, for all that Cavalcanti's face had grown very haggard.
“I yield me, sir,” I said to the familiar.
“A wise decision,” sneered the Duke.