Leonora D'Orco. G. P. R. James
then murmured the words, "A just reproof!" Then taking the paper he had written, he added, "Take a hundred men of your company of ordnance, De Vitry, and set out at once toward Vigevano. Five miles on this side of the town, on the bank of the Ticino, you will find a villa belonging to the Count of Rovera. There you will find young Lorenzo Visconti. Give him that paper, appointing him to the command of the troop of poor young Moustier, who was stabbed, no one knows why or how."
"Oh, sire, I know why, and how too," answered De Vitry, in his usual gay, light-hearted tone; "he was stabbed because he chose to make love to the daughter of the confectioner who lives just below the castle--she is, indeed, a wonderful little beauty; but she is betrothed to a young armourer, and Moustier was not right to seek her for his leman, under her promised husband's very nose. There are plenty of free-hearted dames in Milan, without his breaking up the happiness of two young people who never sought him. Then, as to the way, sire, that is very easily explained---a dark corner, a strong hand, and a sharp dagger over the left shoulder, and the thing was soon accomplished. Ludovic says he will have the young armourer broken on the wheel, to satisfy your majesty; but I trust you will tell him not; for, in the first place, nothing can be proved against him; and, in the next, according to his own notions, he did nothing but what was right; and, in the next, De Moustier was all in the wrong; and, in the next, this youth, Tomaso Bondi, is the best armourer in Italy--no man I ever saw can inlay a Milan corslet as he can."
"All very cogent reasons," answered the king, "and the regent shall do nought to him, to satisfy me. De Moustier forgot the warning I gave him after I was ill at Lyons, when he insulted the young wife of the dean of the weavers; and as he has sought his fate, so he must abide it. But, as I have said, seek out my young Cousin Lorenzo, give him the paper, and tell him to join you next day at Pavia or Vigevano; but do not let your men dismount, and take care that they commit no outrage on the lands of Signor Rovera. At Vigevano you may halt till you hear that I am on my way to Pavia. You shall have timely notice."
The officer took the open paper from the king's hand, and in a nonchalant way gazed at the contents, exclaiming as he did so, "On my faith, it is fairly written!"
The cheek of Charles turned somewhat red, and, fixing his eye keenly upon De Vitry, he said, "You mean no offence, young sir, I believe; but, Baron de Vitry, I tell you, if two years ago your king could not write his name, it was not his fault. Would that all my nobility would try to retrieve their errors as I have striven to remedy the defects of my education."
The young monarch was evidently much pained at what he thought an allusion to the ignorance in which he had been brought up; and De Vitry, whose thoughts were perfectly innocent of such offence, bent his knee and kissed his sovereign's hand, saying, in his frank way, "On my life, sire, I only admired the writing, and wished I were as good a clerk. Heaven knows that, though I can write fast enough, no man can read as fast what I have written. It has cost me many a time more James, than an hour to make out my own letters. This carrying a confounded lance, ever since I was eighteen, makes my finger unfit for handling a quill; and, unless I fall in love, and have to write sweet letters to fair ladies--which God forfend--I dare say the time will come when I shall be unable to write at all."
The king smiled good-humouredly at his blunt officer, for Charles's anger soon passed away, and, bidding him rise, he said, "There, go, De Vitry; you are a rough specimen of our French soldiers, for these silken ladies of the South. I fear you will not make much way with them."
"Oh, they love me all the better, sire," answered De Vitry; "I'm a new dish at their table. But I go to perform your will, sire; and, good faith! I am not sorry to be in the saddle again. But what am I to do with that young fellow, Bayard, who struck the big Ferrara man for calling us barbarians? We have kept a close eye upon him, for he seems never to dream that, if the signor were to meet him alone, he would put a dagger in him, or break his back as a storm breaks a hard young sapling. Good faith, sire, the man would eat the boy up as the old giants used to do with the princes and princesses of I don't know where in days of yore."
"That is well bethought," replied the king. "I wish to have no brawling, De Vitry. Take Bayard with you to Pavia. Stay! let me consider what I can do to smooth his removal from the court, for he is a brave lad, and will some time make a name in life. They are hardy soldiers, these men of the Isere."
"He is of such stuff as kings of France have most need of," answered De Vitry. "Give him ten years more, and I would match him against Mohammed. But the cornet of my troop, you know, sire, died on Friday last of wine poison at Beccafico's--we hold our life on slender tenure in this land--and if your majesty would please to name Bayard to fill his place, he would be very well content, for he loves Bellona's harness more than Cupid's, as my old tutor, the Abbé de Mortemar, used to say when he could not get me to construe Ovid. But I know not how Bayard may take Signor Lorenzo's appointment to De Moustier's troop, he being also one of your pages, and more than a year older."
"Lorenzo Visconti is our cousin, sir," replied Charles, somewhat sternly; "and, were he not so, we suffer no one to comment on our will in ordaining how we shall be served. If Pierre de Terrail hesitates at the honour we confer on him so young, because we name our own kindred to a higher command at a younger age, let him remain as he is. We will not resent such conduct, but we will make him feel that we are King of France."
There was sufficient irritation in his tone to induce the young officer to withdraw; and he left the king's presence, repeating to himself, "Our cousin! I see not how that is; but we are all cousins in Adam, God wot; and the affinity must be somewhere thereabout, I take it. Well, God send me some royal cousins, or right noble ones, for 'tis the only road to promotion in this world."
CHAPTER IV.
It was early in the month of September. The grapes were already purple with the draughts of sunshine which they had drunk in through a long, ardent summer, and the trees had already begun to display "the sear and yellow leaf"--early, early, like those who exhaust in life's young day all the allotted pleasures of man's little space. The autumn had fallen upon them soon. Yet it was a lovely scene, as you gazed from one of those little monticules which stud the Lombard plains. There is something in the descent from the mountains into Italy which seems to anticipate the land--not so much in its physical as in its moral features; a softness, a gentleness, a gracefulness which is all its own, while round about, unseen, but felt in every breeze, is the dark, pestilential swamp, gloomy and despairing, or else a brighter but more treacherous land, fair to the eye, but destructive to vitality, which lures but to destroy. One easily conceives the character of a large portion of the people of the middle ages in Italy from the aspect of the land. But it is of the people of the middle ages only. One can hardly derive any notion of the ancient Roman from the characteristics of the country till one plunges into the Campagna, where the stern, hard features of the scenery seem to represent that force which, alas! has passed away.
And yet it was a lovely scene, and a moment of sweet and calm enjoyment, as three young people sat together on the lower step of a terrace near Vigevano, with a fountain gushing and murmuring some twenty feet above, and a beautiful garden filled with mulberry-trees and vines, and some oranges, not very luxuriant, but diffusing a pleasant but languid odour round. The eye wandered over the shrubs and trees to the lands watered by the Ticino on its way to Pavia; and beyond, in the evening light, long lines of undulating country were marked out in the deep blue tints peculiar to the distant scenery of Italy. The terrace, below which the three were seated, was long and wide, and rising therefrom, near the centre, was one face of a villa, built in a style of which few specimens remain. The taste and genius of Palladio had not yet given to the villa-architecture of Lombardy that lightness and grace which formed the characteristic of a new style of art. There was something, at that time, in every country-house of Italy of the heavy, massive repulsiveness of the old castello. But yet the dawn of a better epoch was apparent, in the works of Andrea Palladio's great master, Trissino; and in the very villa of which I speak, though here and there a strong, tall tower was apparent, and the basement story contained stone enough to have built a score of modern houses, much ornament of a light and graceful character had been lavished upon the whole building, as if to conceal that it was constructed for defence as well as enjoyment. Indeed, as is generally the case, there was