Tales from Blackwood Volume Viii Part 10

One of the secretaries signed to an attendant, who rang a small hand-bell which stood upon the table.

Upon which the folding-doors at the lower end of the hall were thrown open, and a guard of soldiers, marching in, ranged themselves (a precaution temporarily adopted in that stormy period) on two sides of the chamber. The prisoner, Arionelli, came next, handcuffed and heavily ironed, followed by six or seven unpleasant but not formidable-looking persons, the servants of the executioner. The doors were then again closed and carefully fastened, as if to prevent the possibility of intrusion from without; the soldiers rested their lances, but remained in an att.i.tude of attention; and a curtain was drawn aside by some unseen hand from a recess in the south side of the apartment, which showed the rack and its apurtenances prepared, and the machinery for the water torture.

"Luigino Arionelli!" then said the chief secretary, "do you yet repent you of your contumacy; and will you confess to this tribunal that which you know touching the fate of Lorenzo di Vasari?"

The culprit, to whom this demand was addressed, had he been forty times an outlaw, was a man of excellent presence. Of a stature sufficient to convey the impression of much bodily command and strength, yet boldly and handsomely, rather than very robustly, proportioned; the rich cavalier's dress in which he had been disguised when he was first taken, and of which he still wore the faded remains, accorded well with a deportment as high and unconstrained as that of any n.o.ble in whose presence he was standing. His countenance was pale, and something worn as with fatigue; perhaps it was with anxiety; for a dungeon, and the prospect of being hanged on quitting it, are not the best helps to any man's personal appearance. But he looked at the rack straightforward and steadily, not as with a forced defiance, but as at an object for which he was prepared, if not with which he was familiar; and when he spoke, there was neither faltering in his voice nor apprehension in his feature. "Carlo Benetti!" he said, when the chief secretary had done speaking--"nay, never bend your brow, my lord, for I have worse dangers than your displeasure to meet already. I am at the point of death, when men in most ranks are equal. Have nothing left to lose, so may make s.h.i.+ft to bear the heaviest farther penalty you can inflict. Therefore write down--and see you blur it not--that unless upon terms, and not such terms as the rack to begin, and the gibbet to conclude with, neither you nor your masters shall have any information from me."

The Gonfaloniere turned his eye slowly on the instruments of torture.

"Do you not fear," he said, "to die upon that wheel? Reflect! it is a fate to which you have not yet been sentenced; and it is one, compared with which, the death you have to suffer will be as the pleasures of paradise set against the torments of purgatory."

"When I became a robber," returned Arionelli, coolly, "I looked for some such fate. I reckoned with myself, that I could scarcely live gaily, and not die irregularly. I wished to rein a fleet horse in the field, rather than wait on one in the stable. To sing and thrum on my guitar in idleness half the night, rather than hold the plough, or ply the hatchet, in labour all day. In short, I wished to feed luxuriously--drink freely--have a brave mistress--spurn at law and honesty--in brief, my lord, become a n.o.bleman, not having been born one; and I was content to pay something, at a long day, for the change."

The prisoner's demand was for his own life secured, and for pardon of two of his comrades, who were not yet brought to trial. The disclosures which he could make were desirable; but these were terms on which the State could not purchase them.

"Between the rope and the wheel," added Arionelli, "it is but an hour's endurance, which troubles me little."

"We will try the strength of that endurance," said the President, turning to Gonsalvo di Vasari, who slightly a.s.sented. "Executioner! do your duty. Let the prisoner strip."

The executioner and his a.s.sistants then proceeded immediately to strip the culprit naked to the waist, which they did almost in silence, and very temperately, without any show of violence or roughness; but yet the cold, ready, business-like civility of their manner--the expeditiousness with which they stripped a man for murder and agony, as they might have stripped him for the bath--chilled the heart with more sickness than a demeanour of coa.r.s.eness or ferocity would have done.

The outlaw smiled bitterly; but it was a smile of confidence and impatience rather than insolence. "Gonfaloniere!" he cried, "once more beware! One moment's haste may kill your hopes for ever. Crack but a sinew--strain but a single limb--let your blind rage but do the smallest act that makes Arionelli's life not worth preserving,--not all the wealth that Florence holds shall ever buy your secret: I die, and it dies with me."

No notice was taken of this menace, except by an order to complete the necessary preparations. The criminal was bound to the rack. An attendant had brought the pot of water which stood by to wet the lips of sufferers in their extremity. And the cords were tightened, ready for the first pull, which was commonly followed by a dislocation of both the wrists and shoulders.

At this point many gave way; and it was the custom to try the resolution of culprits under it by a moment's suspense. But Arionelli uttered no word, nor gave any look, which could be construed into an appeal for mercy. His cheek was flushed--hands clenched--the lips strongly drawn in--the teeth set firm together; but in the whole countenance there was but one expression--that of defiance and disdain; and all eyes were fixed, and all ears were open, for the moment of allowance had expired; when, just as the Gonfaloniere's hand was raised to give the last sign for which the executioner waited, and the prisoner was collecting his strength to meet the impending shock, Gonsalvo di Vasari, who had watched the whole scene in silence, but with the closest attention, made a movement to interfere.

A consultation of some length ensued between the judges, or rather between the first two of them, Gonsalvo di Vasari and the President Peruzzi; for the Count Arestino, although many had been curious to think whether he would or would not be present at the process, seemed merely to have taken his seat as an ordinary member of the council, without feeling any peculiar interest in it. The discussion at the table was carried on in a low tone; but the prisoner watched its progress with an eye of keen and penetrating inquiry. Presently (as well as might be judged from his gestures) the Gonfaloniere appeared to yield to some proposal from Gonsalvo di Vasari; and the latter wrote a few words on a slip of paper, and handed them to an usher, who bowed and left the room; after which the President made some communication (which was not heard) to the Count Arestino; and Gonsalvo himself took up the examination.

"You demand, then," said Gonsalvo di Vasari, addressing Arionelli, "your own life, and a pardon for two of your a.s.sociates who are in custody, as the price of the confession which you are to make relative to the disappearance of the Chevalier Lorenzo di Vasari?"

"As the price of my full answer to all your questions on that subject, as far as my knowledge goes, my lord," was the reply--"provided, in the mean time, your lords.h.i.+p causes these cords to be loosened, which give me pain something unnecessarily, and which another turn would have drawn too tight for the advantage of your lords.h.i.+p's objects, or of mine."

"And these a.s.sociates, for whose lives you covenant?" continued Di Vasari, when the prisoner's request had been complied with.

"Are my friends, my lord--men of my own band. They came, indeed, after I was taken, to rescue me at the scaffold; and the least I can do now is to let our cause go together."

"And what if your obstinate silence (to repay that intended obligation) should cause them to die a death of torture, as you are like to do yourself?"

"They will be as able to endure such a fate as I am. I play for the higher stake--our lives. And if the die goes against me, we must suffer."

"And when their turn upon the rack comes," interrupted the Gonfaloniere, "then _they_ will disclose your secret."

"That they will tell you no word of it, my lord, I have the best security--they know nothing of it themselves."

"You are called," said Gonsalvo di Vasari, "Luigino Arionelli. Are you not that Luigino Arionelli who is known by the name of 'The Vine-dresser?'"

"I am known by an hundred names, and seen in an hundred shapes,"

returned the robber. "Ask your officers how many they have seen me in, in this last month, and in this very city? I am the Venetian monk from Palestine, who was preaching at the Cross in the Piazza dei Leoni, while the three great houses beyond the square were emptied, on the fifth day of the plague. And I was the Austrian officer who came with his long retinue to the inn of 'The Golden Flask' (the host will remember what fell out in that lodging), bringing letters and despatches to the Gonfaloniere from Cologne. I was the Genevese physician, who got good practice, and some money, by the 'infallible remedy against the plague;' and your lords.h.i.+ps see, whatever I did for others, I had skill enough to keep clear from it myself. And it was I who ransacked half the houses in the Quartiere St Giovanni in only one night; robbing in a bull's hide, disguised with horns, when two fathers of the Order of Mercy met me, and ran away, mistaking me for the devil."

"Have you not a wife, or a mistress, who is called Aurelia la Fiore?"

"I have. Close with my proposal!" said the outlaw, who seemed excited by the conversation. "I would live, and be once more at liberty, for her sake!"

"Is she your wife, or your mistress only?"

"As chance will have it, not my wife according to the usages of our church. But she might have been. As far as affection is worth--pa.s.sion, devotion--the asking in vain no prize which hand can win, or sacrifice which heart can make; as far as to have no rival--never to have had a rival--in the heart of her husband, so far she is my wife! There are women, perhaps, worse treated, and wives--the wives of princes--worse deserving."

"Was not this Aurelia the daughter of an oil-farmer near Ferrara?"

"She was. Then you have heard the tale? I stabbed the n.o.ble who thought her worth dishonouring, and would have borne her from me. Fortune had shared her stores more evenly between us than he imagined. To him she gave the wealth to purchase pleasure; to me the hand to win it. I was a vine-dresser then; and, but for that event, might have been one still."

"Does Aurelia know this secret, which you would sell to us?"

"That you shall know, my good lord, after you have bought it from me."

"Where is Aurelia now?"

"If you inherit not your kinsman's patrimony, Gonsalvo di Vasari, till you learn that, your patience, as well as your purse, shall fare the harder."

"What if she were in our power?"

The robber smiled contemptuously at the supposition.

"What if I should tell you that she is _here_--in chains and peril--and that every insolence you utter added to her danger?"

"That would be almost a false a.s.sertion, Gonsalvo di Vasari; and the mouths of your race should be clear from dishonour."

"Why, let him then see!" exclaimed Di Vasari, starting from his seat. A door opposite to the recess in which the prisoner stood was thrown open; and a female--it was Aurelia herself--bound, and guarded by Gonsalvo's servants, stood before him.

The recoil of the outlaw burst his bonds like threads; the cords that tied him seemed to fall off by witchcraft more than to be broken. But the effort was involuntary; it was followed by no movement, and indicated no purpose. For one moment the hands of the guards were upon their swords; but a single glance was enough, and showed the precaution was needless.

The shadow of that pa.s.sing door, as it swung slowly to upon its m.u.f.fled hinges, seemed to sweep every trace of former expression from Arionelli's countenance. Familiar with objects of danger and alarm, a moment sufficed him to perceive that the ground on which he had stood, as on a rock, was gone. One convulsive shudder ran through his frame, as the high clear voice of Aurelia p.r.o.nounced, in trembling agony, the name of "Luigino!" He bowed his face, as one who abandoned further contest, and seemed to await what was to come.

"Luigino Arionelli," said Gonsalvo, coldly, and in the measured tone of conscious power, "do you yet repent you of your obstinacy; and will you make confession as to the fate of Lorenzo di Vasari?"

A pause ensued, and the robber attempted to rally his faculties; but the effort was unsuccessful. At length he spoke, but not as he had before spoken; there was a difference in the steadiness of his tone, and a still wider in the carelessness of his manner.--"You know, my lords," he said, "that the power is now yours. There was but one creature on earth for whom I could have wept or trembled, and she is in your hands. The struggle is over; I and my companions have lived like men; and I trust we shall die like men. Let my wife depart; she has done the state no wrong, and has no knowledge of that which you desire to learn. And as soon as she shall have pa.s.sed the boundaries of the Florentine territory, I will confess the whole--much or little--that I can disclose of the fate of the Chevalier di Vasari."

The very deep, though repressed, anxiety with which the speaker put this proposal, seemed to imply a doubt how far it could be accepted. He was not mistaken; those who held the power, knew the tenure by which they held it, and that tenure they were not disposed to part with.

"Trifle not with the sword and with the fire, if you are wise, Arionelli!" said Gonsalvo di Vasari. "Press not too far upon the patience of this court. She whom you call your wife stands, no less than yourself, within the scope of our danger. Whatever mercy is extended to her, must be upon your full and unconditional submission; and not until all questions which may be put to you have been answered satisfactorily.

Therefore I caution you once more; speak instantly, and without reserve; and press no longer on the forbearance of this tribunal; for you guess not the fate which you may draw down upon yourself if you do so."

The outlaw's pa.s.sion rose in his fear's despite. "And press _me_ not too far, my lords," he exclaimed, "if _you_ are wise. For once remove the temptation of Aurelia's safety--and ten thousand times the torments you command shall never win an answer from me. Take heed, good Gonfaloniere, what you do! Ask your slaves here, if, at the foot of the gibbet, I shrank from the death which was before me. You have the power; beware you strain it not too far. I am in your chains--defenceless--helpless.

Those arms are bound, whose strength, if they were free, perhaps the stoutest soldier here might find too much to cope with. But go one point only too far--To tear the hook from the fish's entrails is not to land him! You cannot kill the robber Luigino, though you kill him in extremest tortures, but you kill the secret which you want--the secret for which he dies--at the same moment."

If there be truth in threats like these, it is a truth for which no man (until they are executed) ever gets credit. He who will die, and die content, for his own vengeance, is the exception to the common rule.

Arionelli was bound again to the wheel, and with cords which were stronger than before. Up to that moment his wife had never spoken. Her eyes had remained fixed upon the earth, and there were no sobs accompanied the large drops which fell from them; nor signs scarcely that she wept, beyond the convulsive heaving of her bosom. Once, when the dark attendants surrounded her lover, her lips opened to speak; but she only sank upon her knees--the lips were closed again--and one long shriek issued from them, that seemed to cleave the very roof of the palazzo. And then came the command from Gonsalvo di Vasari--not that which she dreaded, but another--cool, distinct, calculating, and delayed until the confinement of Arionelli was complete.--"Official, bind Aurelia la Fiore, and let the question by water be administered to her."