Startled by the ominous appearance of this incident, the governor immediately rode back, and bade his attendants dismount and lead their horses over a sheep-path which rose on the mountain slope, above the level of the fallen tree, while he would ride on slowly until they rejoined him. Execrating the peasant who had thus annoyed him, he turned his courser’s head, and we proceeded at a slow pace to the now contiguous spot which I had described to Colonna as best suited to his purpose. Here the base of an enormous cliff projected like a rampart into the defile, and sloped abruptly into two right angles, connected by a level line of nearly perpendicular rock, which rose in castellated grandeur to a towering height. The numerous crevices and hollows were fringed with dazzling heath-flowers and luxuriant creepers, between which the bare black surface of the rock frowned on the passing gazer like the ruined stronghold of some mountain robber. We now turned the first angle of the cliff, looking upward as we rode at the majestic front of this singular work of nature. Still gazing, we had proceeded about fifty paces, and the governor was remarking, that the level and lofty summit would make a commanding military station, when suddenly our coursers halted, and looking down we saw before us the tall and kingly figure of Colonna, standing like an apparition in the pathway. His right hand rested on his unsheathed sword, and his attitude was that of careless and assured composure; but in his gathered brow, and in the boding glitter of his eye, I could discern the deadly purpose of the forest lion, about to spring upon his prey, and fully confident in his own powers and resources. At this sudden encounter of Montalto’s son, who seemed to start with spectral abruptness from the ground beneath us, Barozzo shook in his saddle as if he had seen an accusing spirit. For a moment the blood left his face, his breath shortened, and his chest heaved with strong internal emotion, but his iron features soon regained their wonted character of intrepidity. He then darted upon me a keen look of inquiry and suspicion; before, however, he had time to speak, Colonna was upon him. Rapidly advancing, he seized the bridle of his horse, and thus addressed him:—“Barozzo! the measure of thy crimes is full, and retribution is at hand! Colonna the painter is no more, but the son of Montalto has escaped thy dagger, and demands atonement for his father’s blood. Dismount, assassin! and defend thy worthless life!”
The deep and startling grandeur of Colonna’s voice, and the implacable hostility which flashed from his fierce eyeballs, shook the firm sinews of the guilty governor, and again his swarthy lineaments were blanched with terror. By a sudden and powerful effort, however, he regained self-mastery, and gathering into his grim features all the pride and insolence of his soul, he darted upon his youthful enemy a sneer of contempt. “Presuming vagrant!” he shouted, in accents hoarse with wrath, “dare to impede my progress, and my retinue, which is at hand, shall scatter thy limbs on the highway!”
Still firmly grasping the bridle, Colonna eyed him for a moment with quiet scorn, and then he smiled—briefly indeed, but with a stinging mockery, a hot and withering scorn of eye and lip, that seared the haughty chieftain to the brain. Writhing with sudden frenzy, he spurred his mettled charger, and endeavoured to ride down his opponent; but the generous animal, true to the instincts of a nature nobler than his master’s, refused to advance, and plunged and demi-volted with a violence which would have unseated a less experienced rider. At this moment, the heavy trampling of approaching horses rolled in doubling echoes through the ravine. Encouraged by the welcome sound, Barozzo attempted to draw his sword, but before the plunging of his horse would allow him to reach the hilt, the vigilant Colonna smote him on the cheek with his sheathed weapon. Then relinquishing the bridle, and stepping lightly sideways, he struck the horse’s flank, and the startled animal, straining every sinew, bounded away like a ball, and quickly disappeared round the second angle of the cliff, followed by the loud laugh of the exulting Colonna, whose fierce ha! ha! re-echoed through the rocky hollow like a trumpet-call. Meanwhile the Greeks, who had turned the first angle in time to behold the termination of the struggle, drew their sabres, and pushing their horses into a gallop, rushed down upon us like infuriated tigers. Anticipating their attack, I was not unprepared to aid my gallant friend in this emergency; but all assistance was superfluous to one so fertile in resources. He turned with graceful promptitude upon the savage Cretans, and before their powerful steeds could measure the short intervening distance, his sword was firmly set between his teeth, and two pistols appeared with magical abruptness in his grasp. Levelled by an eye which never failed, these weapons lodged a bullet in the breast of each approaching Greek. The colossal riders reeled in their saddles; their sabres quivered in their weakened grasp, and reclining for support upon the necks of their startled horses, they successively passed us, and turned the angle beyond which their chief had disappeared. Colonna now threw down his pistols, and exclaimed exultingly, “Now is the crowning hour, my Angelo! follow me, and you shall find the scaly monster of my dream caught in a trap from which no human power can free him.”
I rode by his side in wondering anticipation, and when we had passed the angle, I beheld a scene which still remains engraven on my memory. The defile here expanded into an irregular oval, the extremity of which was blocked up by a dense and impervious mass of young beech and poplar, rising above thrice the height of a tall man, and levelled that morning by the ponderous axe of the indefatigable Colonna. The courser of Barozzo had plunged deep into the leafy labyrinth, and the unhorsed governor, entangled by his velvet drapery, was endeavouring to extricate himself from the forked and intersecting branches, while the horses of the Greeks stood panting in the shade, near the bleeding bodies of their fallen masters, and the noble brutes snorted with horror, and shook in every joint, as with lowered necks and flaming eyes, they snuffed the blood of the expiring wretches.
As we approached the governor, he succeeded in releasing himself by cutting his rich mantle into shreds with his dagger. Stepping out of his leafy toils, he stood before us like a wild beast caught in a hunter’s trap, foaming, furious, and breathless, but evidently dismayed by the sudden and irremediable loss of his armed followers. Divested of the drapery which had served the double purpose of concealment and display, we observed that he was accoutred in back and breast proof armour, of the light steel scales I have before described. He looked the very serpent of Colonna’s dream, and the malignant scowl of his small and snaky eyes gave singular force to the resemblance. His generous enemy allowed him time to recover from the fatigue of disentangling himself, and then approached him. “Barozzo!” said he, “last night I shot thy cowardly assassin. In dying penitence he called himself thy agent in the murder of my noble parent, and bade me shun the daggers of thy savage Cretans. But Montalto’s son would risk a thousand lives to gain his just revenge, and again he warns thee to defend thy life. Pisani shall be umpire of the combat, and his time-honoured name is pledge enough that no foul play is meant thee.”
The governor, who had now recovered breath and self-possession, folded his arms, and met the stern defiance of his youthful foe with a look of contemptuous indifference. Not deigning a reply, he addressed himself to me in tones of angry expostulation, and expressed his indignant surprise that a son of the Senator Pisani should thus lend himself to the designs of a young vagrant, who was destined to grace the benches of a galley. My reply was anticipated by the fiery Colonna, whose sword flashed with lightning quickness from the scabbard, while his haughty lip curled up with unutterable scorn.
“Remorseless villain!” he shouted, in a voice of appalling wrath, “I know a venom yet shall sting thy recreant spirit into action. Know, Ercole Barozzo! that Foscari’s daughter was wooed and won by me—plighted her troth to me—long ere she saw thy truculent and yellow visage. Nay, more, she would ere this have fled with me from Lombardy, had not higher duties staid our mutual purpose.”
The governor, although a renowned and fearless soldier in earlier life, had betrayed a terror on the first view of Colonna, and a reluctance to engage with him in single-handed conflict, which I had referred to the depressing action of a diseased conscience, or to the increased love of life generated by his prosperous condition; but a taunt like this was beyond all human endurance; it stung him to the very soul, and roused his lazy valour into life and fury. His sinews stiffened with rage, and his widely-opened eyes glared upon Colonna like those of a tigress at bay, while his teeth remained firmly clenched, and inaudible maledictions quivered on his working lips. Tearing his formidable sword from its sheath, he rushed like one delirious upon his adversary, and their blades met with a clash which told the deadly rancour of the combatants.
I now witnessed a conflict unparalleled for intense and eager thirst of blood. It was truly the death-grapple of the lion and the serpent. The noble and generous Colonna, pursuing his just revenge, and trusting, like the kingly animal, to native strength and courage, sought no unfair advantage; while the crafty Barozzo, huge in body, tortuous in mind, and scaled with impenetrable steel, well personified the reptile of Colonna’s vision. Although a practised and wary swordsman, he did not wield his weapon like Colonna, who, with equal skill in stratagem and feint, was unrivalled in that lightning-quickness and ready sympathy of eye and hand, for which the Italians are pre-eminent amongst the swordsmen of Europe; but the courage and self-possession of the governor had been exercised in frequent conflicts with the Moslem; his sinews were strung with martial toil and daily exercise; and his well-mailed person presented so little vulnerable surface as greatly to protract and facilitate his defence. He soon learned, however, to respect the formidable skill and untiring arm of his young opponent, whose weapon played with a motion so rapid and incessant, that he seemed to parry and thrust at the same instant; and had not the large and powerful hand of Barozzo retained a firm grasp of his hilt, he would have been disarmed at the first onset. After a few passes, Colonna’s point struck the centre of the governor’s corselet with a force which made the scales sink deep beneath the pressure, but the tempered steel resisted this and many other well-directed hits. The conflict proceeded with unabated fierceness, and for a period which would have utterly exhausted men of ordinary lungs and sinews, when Barozzo, finding all his lunges ineffective, and fearing premature exhaustion, endeavoured to sustain and collect his powers by remaining on the defensive; but it was now too late. His sword was irrecoverably entangled in the whirlwind involutions of Colonna’s weapon—his hold began to relax—and he saw the moment rapidly approaching when he should be disarmed, and at the mercy of an unappeasable foe.[A] Despairing of success, thirsting for revenge, and regardless of the laws of fair and open combat, he suddenly drew his long dagger, dropped on one knee, and made a thrust which would have proved fatal to a less vigilant adversary. But Colonna had anticipated the possibility of this base attempt from one so destitute of all chivalrous feeling, and his quick eye observed and met the movement. Stepping lightly back, he whirled his keen-edged blade with a force which cut deep into Barozzo’s wrist. The dagger dropped from his palsied grasp, and, at the same instant, his sword flew above his head. Colonna, having disarmed his treacherous enemy while still kneeling, disdained to follow up his advantage, and coolly said to him, “That trick was worthy of you, governor! but your murderous game is nearly up. Resume your sword, and clutch the guard more firmly, or in three passes more you will be food for vultures!”
Barozzo, who had started from the ground, and now stood foaming at the mouth like a chafed panther, said nothing in reply, but seized his sword, and rushed upon his generous adversary with desperate but unavailing ferocity. I could now perceive that Colonna pressed him more hotly than before, and that his point no longer sought the corselet, but the throat of Barozzo, where indeed alone he was mortally vulnerable, and where, ere long, the death-stroke reached him. A few passes had been exchanged without a hit, when suddenly Barozzo’s sword again flew from his grasp, and long before it reached the ground, Colonna’s point was buried in his throat. The thrust was mortal. The steel had severed the duct of life; the hot blood bubbled out in streams; and the huge Barozzo staggered, reeled, and fell upon his back. A bloody froth now gathered round his lips, which worked with agony and rage; the life-blood ebbed apace, and soon the trunk and limbs of the colossal chieftain were stiffened in death. But even in death the dominant passions of his soul were strongly written in his livid features. His glazed and sunken eyes still glared with fiend-like malice on his conqueror, and every lineament was inwrought with reckless and insatiable ferocity.