“Are my friends, my lord—men of my own band. They came, indeed, after I was taken, to rescue me at the scaffold; and the least I can do now is to let our cause go together.”
“And what if your obstinate silence (to repay that intended obligation) should cause them to die a death of torture, as you are like to do yourself?”
“They will be as able to endure such a fate as I am. I play for the higher stake—our lives. And if the die goes against me, we must suffer.”
“And when their turn upon the rack comes,” interrupted the Gonfalonière, “then they will disclose your secret.”
“That they will tell you no word of it, my lord, I have the best security—they know nothing of it themselves.”
“You are called,” said Gonsalvo di Vasari, “Luigino Arionelli. Are you not that Luigino Arionelli who is known by the name of ‘The Vine-dresser?’”
“I am known by an hundred names, and seen in an hundred shapes,” returned the robber. “Ask your officers how many they have seen me in, in this last month, and in this very city? I am the Venetian monk from Palestine, who was preaching at the Cross in the Piazza dei Leoni, while the three great houses beyond the square were emptied, on the fifth day of the plague. And I was the Austrian officer who came with his long retinue to the inn of ‘The Golden Flask’ (the host will remember what fell out in that lodging), bringing letters and despatches to the Gonfalonière from Cologne. I was the Genevese physician, who got good practice, and some money, by the ‘infallible remedy against the plague;’ and your lordships see, whatever I did for others, I had skill enough to keep clear from it myself. And it was I who ransacked half the houses in the Quartiere St Giovanni in only one night; robbing in a bull’s hide, disguised with horns, when two fathers of the Order of Mercy met me, and ran away, mistaking me for the devil.”
“Have you not a wife, or a mistress, who is called Aurelia la Fiore?”
“I have. Close with my proposal!” said the outlaw, who seemed excited by the conversation. “I would live, and be once more at liberty, for her sake!”
“Is she your wife, or your mistress only?”