Page:Maurice Hewlett--Little novels of Italy.djvu/61

Rh really do the parties the honour of an interview before I draw the sword. Let me be sure which back I am going to score before I begin to carve. You had better bring the prior and Fra Lancillotto-Battista to me, and if you can collect the young woman and her brat, so much the better."

"Alas! Excellency, I fear the young woman is in pieces," said the bishop. "She has never been heard of since the day of her expulsion."

The advice, however, was good, the judgment good enough; but before it could be followed a stroke more telling than any Can Grande's sword could have made was wrought by Madonna of the Peach-Tree.

On the night of that same day Can Grande was sitting in the palace with two chosen companions, as dare-devil as himself, waiting the hour of an assignation. It was about ten o'clock: at half-past the hour they were to go out cloaked into the streets, bent upon the lifting of a decent burgess's wife from her bed. Hence they were not in the castle, which is near San Zeno, but in the Della Scala Palace, in the very heart of the city. The two accomplices were Baldo Baldinanza, a grey villain, and young Francesco della Rocca Rossa. All three were armed with swords and daggers; the cloaks lay with the masks on the table. A servant came to the door, knocked, and waited. Can Grande, who (to be just) feared no eye upon his goings, shouted him into the room.

"Well, son of a pig," was his greeting, "and what is it now?"

The fellow, whose teeth chattered in his head,