"You should not thank me," said she. "What I did was done for justice's sake."
"I have been presumptuous," I answered humbly, "in conceiving that it might have been for the sake of me."
"But it was that also," she answered quickly, fearing perhaps that she had pained me. "It offended me that the Duke should attempt to browbeat you. I took pride in you to see you bear yourself so well and return thrust for thrust."
"I think your presence must have heartened me," said I. "No pain could be so cruel as to seem base or craven in your eyes."
Again the tell-tale colour showed upon her lovely cheek. She began to pace slowly down the gallery, and I beside her. Presently she spoke again.
"And yet," she said, "I would have you cautious. Do not wantonly affront the Duke, for he is very powerful."
"I have little left to lose," said I.
"You have your life," said she.
"A life which I have so much misused that it must ever cry out to me in reproach."
She gave me a little fluttering, timid glance, and looked away again. Thus we came in silence to the gallery's end, where a marble seat was placed, with gay cushions of painted and gilded leather. She sank to it with a little sigh, and I leaned on the balustrade beside her and slightly over her. And now I grew strangely bold.
"Set me some penance," I cried, "that shall make me worthy."
Again came that little fluttering, frightened glance.
"A penance?" quoth she. "I do not understand."
"All my life," I explained, "has been a vain striving after something that eluded me. Once I deemed myself devout; and because I had sinned and rendered myself unworthy, you found me a hermit on Monte Orsaro, seeking by penance to restore myself to the estate from which I had succumbed. That shrine was proved a blasphemy; and so the penance I had done, the signs I believed I had received, were turned to mockery. It was not there that I should save myself. One night I was told so in a vision."
She gave an audible gasp, and looked at me so fearfully that I fell silent, staring back at her.
"You knew!" I cried.
Long did her blue, slanting eyes meet my glance without wavering, as never yet they had met it. She seemed to hesitate, and at the same time openly to consider me.
"I know now," she breathed.
"What do you know?" My voice was tense with excitement.
"What was your vision?" she rejoined.
"Have I not told you? There appeared to me one who called me back to the world; who assured me that there I should best serve God; who filled me with the conviction that she needed me. She addressed me by name, and spoke of a place of which I had never heard until that hour, but which to-day I know."
"And you? And you?" she asked. "What answer did you make?"
"I called her by name, although until that hour I did not know it."
She bowed her head. Emotion set her all a-tremble.
"It is what I have so often wondered," she confessed, scarce above a whisper. "And it is true—as true as it is strange!"
"True?" I echoed. "It was the only true miracle in that place of false ones, and it was so clear a call of destiny that it decided me to return to the world which I had abandoned. And yet I have since wondered why. Here there seems to be no place for me any more than there was yonder. I am devout again with a worldly devotion now, yet with a devotion that must be Heaven-inspired, so pure and sweet it is. It has shut out from me all the foulness of that past; and yet I am unworthy. And that is why I cry to you to set me some penance ere I can make my prayer."
She could not understand me, nor did she. We were not as ordinary lovers. We were not as man and maid who, meeting and being drawn each to the other, fence and trifle in a pretty game of dalliance until the maid opines that the appearances are safe, and that, her resistance having been of a seemly length, she may now make the ardently desired surrender with all war's honours. Nothing of that was in our wooing, a wooing which seemed to us, now that we spoke of it, to have been done when we had scarcely met, done in the vision that I had of her, and the vision that she had of me.
With averted eyes she set me now a question.
"Madonna Giuliana used you with a certain freedom on her arrival, and I have since heard your name coupled with her own by the Duke's ladies. But I have asked no questions of them. I know how false can be the tongues of courtly folk. I ask it now of you. What is or was this Madonna Giuliana to you?"
"She was," I answered bitterly, "and God pity me that I must say it to you—she was to me what Circe was to the followers of Ulysses."
She made a little moan, and I saw her clasp her hands in her lap; and the sound and sight filled me with sorrow and despair. She must know. Better that the knowledge should stand between us as a barrier which both could see than that it should remain visible only to the eyes of my own soul, to daunt me.
"O Bianca! Forgive me!" I cried. "I did not know! I did not know! I was a poor fool reared in seclusion and ripened thus for the first temptation that should touch me. That is what on Monte Orsaro I sought to expiate, that I might be worthy of the shrine I guarded then. That is what I would expiate now that I might be worthy of the shrine whose guardian I would become, the shrine at which I worship now."
I was bending very low above her little brown head, in which the threads of the gold coif-net gleamed in the fading light.
"If I had but had my vision sooner," I murmured, "how easy it would have been! Can you find mercy for me in your gentle heart? Can you forgive me, Bianca?
"O Agostino," she answered very sadly, and the sound of my name from her lips, coming so naturally and easily, thrilled me like the sound of the mystic music of Monte Orsaro. "What shall I answer you? I cannot now. Give me leisure to think. My mind is all benumbed. You have hurt me so!"
"Me miserable!" I cried.
"I had believed you one who erred through excess of holiness."
"Whereas I am one who attempted holiness through excess of error."
"I had believed you so, so...O Agostino!" It was a little wail of pain.
"Set me a penance," I implored her.
"What penance can I set you? Will any penance restore to me my shattered faith?"
I groaned miserably and covered my face with my hands. It seemed that I was indeed come to the end of all my hopes; that the world was become as much a mockery to me as had been the hermitage; that the one was to end for me upon the discovery of a fraud, as had the other ended—with the difference that in this case the fraud was in myself.
It seemed, indeed, that our first communion must be our last. Ever since she had seen me step into that gold-and-purple dining-room at Pagliano, the incarnation of her vision, as she was the incarnation of mine, Bianca must have waited confidently for this hour, knowing that it was foreordained to come. Bitterness and disillusion were all that it had brought her.
And then, ere more could be said, a thin, flute-like voice hissed down the vaulted gallery:
"Madonna Bianca! To hide your beauty from our hungry eyes. To quench the light by which we guide our footsteps. To banish from us the happiness and joy of your presence! Unkind, unkind!"
It was the Duke. In his white velvet suit he looked almost ghostly in the deepening twilight. He hobbled towards us, his stick tapping the black-and-white squares of the marble floor. He halted before her, and she put aside her emotion, donned a worldly mask, and rose to meet him.
Then he looked at me, and his brooding eyes seemed to scan my face.
"Why! It is Ser Agostino, Lord of Nothing," he sneered, and down the gallery rang the laugh of my cousin Cosimo, and there came, too, a ripple of other voices.
Whether to save me from friction with those steely gentlemen who aimed at grinding me to powder, whether from other motives, Bianca set her finger-tips upon the Duke's white sleeve and moved away with him.