"But the Duke has given you into my hands,—do you understand? I told him that I desired it of him that I might kill you myself and have a last revenge of you. Only by this tale about you have you or I any shadow of escape. Only so can I save myself from the man he would have me marry. Do you not see? The least alteration of this scheme to-night means ruin and infamy for us both. After dinner De Budry will leave us alone. Then I will show you a secret way. Not even the masons know of it, but only I. It is under the floor of my bedchamber, next to the parlor in which we shall have supper."
"And you?"
"Have you forgotten the new door in my oratory, which leads to the state hall, and thence to the staircase you built into this courtyard? The litter will be waiting there for me. We will leave the cage empty, Pietro!"
"The price is heavy," he muttered,—"the risk terrible."
"Trust me!" she said.
"But how shall I go safe over the bastion and down the castle rock?" he urged.
"Trust me," she said, "and give me your promise, Pietro. There—hush—I must go. Supper is in one hour."
II
When next the door opened, it admitted the Duke's pages, sent to attire the painter for supper. A little later he stepped unguarded out along the accustomed way to supper, and he wore the sword which had been taken from him in his cell; but underneath the arches of doors he apprehended a gleam of steel, and guessed that the tapestry concealed guards the length of the corridor to the Duchess's apartments.
If her face was trebly white before, it was trebly flushed now—or could she have painted it? Pietro asked himself. Her eyes now showed depths they had never betrayed. She sat opposite the Duke-Marshal, and Pietro was between them at the small oblong table. De Budry watched his sister curiously. Time after time it seemed to Pietro that a sign passed between them, and then her lids fell, and were lifted again that she might look at the painter. With every glance it seemed to him that Aloyse looked at him as a woman upon the lover she has chosen. Nevertheless, he knew that that rapt expression truly meant no more than that she saw before her the goal of all her prayers, the sombre peace of a nunnery. And yet, could this vivid creature and the Ice Woman be one and the same? The Duke pressed him to eat. Pietro knew that mullet and ortolans and capon and venison, jellies and creams, were piled before him, and extraordinary good wine poured into his glass. Above all, he knew that whatever he eat Aloyse eat also, and that she drank the same wine. The Duke laughed and chattered about his new barge and his dead groom. Below the window the pages sang catches, and one of them thrummed a zither.
"A love-night truly," said the Duke, grimly, at the end of one of their songs. "Midsummer heat makes the heart tender, and the head full of generous fancies, D'Aranti. Is it not so?"
"Even so, your Grace," replied the painter, smoothly. Then he turned his head, and, for the tenth time at least, encountered those lustrous eyes of the young Duchess. De Budry put up his hand to smooth his beard and hide a grim smile. The French page with the zither lifted up his voice again, and sang of the way the moonflowers open their white disks—lest the lover stumble as he goes through the woods to his lady's house—and of the tears of the climbing rose upon the wall when her window is closed:
"Oh, lovely lamps, in bosquet deep,
Shine till the dawn, and keep my feet,
My feet that fly to her!
Oh, tearful rose, so loudly weep
That she shall melt, and weeping, greet
The eyes that weep for her!"
And the other youths joined in the refrain, till the reiteration of the "Oh rose pleurante!" became like the pattering of water upon a hollow shell.
"It is beautiful in the forest," murmured the Duchess, leaning towards Pietro.
"Beautiful!" he answered, full of trouble and perplexity and admiration. How finely she was acting—if this were indeed acting!
