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Updated: May 3, 2025
Then he bade all withdraw, and went with them into an adjoining chamber, fondly nurturing the hopes that were begotten of his belief that Lazzaro Biancomonte was a villain. When we were alone, she and I, I stood a moment where they had left me, my hands pinioned behind me, and the cord which the executioner had held trailing the ground like a lambent tail.
"Who," her eyes seemed to ask me, "was this horseman that rode so late?" My hound rose from the hearth with a growl, and stood bristling, his eyes upon the door. White-haired old Silvio, the last remaining retainer of the House of Biancomonte, came forth from the kitchen, with inquiry and fear blending on his wrinkled, weather-beaten countenance.
I stooped suddenly, under the sway of an impulse, I could not resist, and kissed her upturned face, turning almost dizzy in the act. Then I broke from her clasp, and bracing myself for the task to which we stood committed by that kiss "Paola," said I, "we must devise the means to get away. I will bear you to my mother's home near Biancomonte, that you may dwell there at least until we are wed.
"First, Messer Biancomonte, to discharge my debt. You are, if I am not misinformed, the lord by right of birth of certain lands that bear your name, which suffered sequestration during the reign of the late Costanzo, Tyrant of Pesaro, whose son Giovanni upheld that confiscation. Am I right?" "Your Excellency is very well informed.
"For Lazzaro Biancomonte would never have betrayed me. Nor could he have betrayed me if he would, for after your men had searched the hut in which I was hidden, I walked to Cattolica thinking foolishly that I should be safer there." Lackaday! She had told him the very thing he had sought to know. Yet to make doubly sure he pursued the scent a little farther.
And I, seeing all these signs of alarm, yet knowing what awaited me on the threshold, rose with a laugh, and in a bound had crossed the intervening space. I flung wide the door, and from the gloom without a man's voice greeted me with a question. "Is this the house of Messer Lazzaro Biancomonte?" "I am that Lazzaro Biancomonte," answered I. "What may your pleasure be?"
"Messer Biancomonte," said she, and the sound of the old name, falling from her lips, thrilled me with a joy unspeakable, and seemed already to reinvest me in my old estate, "Messer Biancomonte, you have done me in these four-and-twenty hours such service as never did knight of old for any lady and you did it, too, out of the most disinterested and noble of motives, proving thereby how truly knightly is that heart of yours, which, for my sake, has all but beat its last to-night.
But in those days my views belonged to a long departed age of chivalry, of which I had learnt from such books as came my way at Biancomonte, and which I believed was the life of to-day in the world of men. It was a thing which some tyrants would have had me broken on the wheel. But Giovanni Sforza never so much as manifested anger.
To confute them do I set down these facts of which my knowledge cannot be called in question, and also that you may know the true story of Paola di Santafior and more particularly that part of it which lies beyond the death she did not die. The sun of that Christmas day was setting as we drew near to Biancomonte and the humble dwelling of my old mother. We fell into talk of her once more.
Ramiro's plan would suffer no frustration through my discovery; when to-morrow the sacrilege was discovered the cold body of Lazzaro Biancomonte lying beside the desecrated bier would be but an item in the work of profanation they would find an item that nowise would modify the conclusion to which I anticipated they would come.
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