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 A T F A C E VA LU E

33218_Akenson.indd 1 2022-10-18 09:16

33218_Akenson.indd 2 2022-10-18 09:16
 At Face Value
The Life and Times of
Eliza McCormack/John White

D o n A k e n son

Second Edition

McGill-­Queen’s University Press

Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

33218_Akenson.indd 3 2022-10-18 09:16

 © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023
ISB N 978-0-2280-1179-8 (paper)
ISB N 978-0-2280-1240-5 (eP DF )
ISB N 978-0-2280-1241-2 (eP UB)
Legal deposit first quarter 2023
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
First edition 1990
All dramatic and visual rights © Langdale Productions Ltd
The moral rights of the author, Don Akenson, have been asserted
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free
(100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: At face value: the life and times of Eliza McCormack/John White /
Don Akenson.
Names: Akenson, Donald H., author.
Description: Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220411387 | Canadiana (ebook)
20220416575 | IS BN 9780228011798 (softcover) | I SB N 9780228012405
(PDF) | ISBN 9780228012412 (eP UB)
Subjects: LC S H: White, Eliza McCormack, 1832-1894—Fiction. | L C SH : White,
John, 1831-1894—Fiction. | L CS H: Canada—History—19th century—Fiction. |
LC SH: Feminists—Canada—Fiction. | L CS H: Male impersonators—Canada—
Fiction. | LCS H: Legislators—Canada—Fiction. | L C G F T : Novels.

Classification: L CC P S 8601.K46 A92 2023 | DDC C 813/.54—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

33218_Akenson.indd 4 2022-10-18 09:16

 Contents

Preface vii

P a rt One D one g al’ s O w n

1 The Real World 3
2 Mumming 17
3 Hard Roads 36
4 Rites of Passage 57

P a rt T wo Ne w D i m e n s i o n s
5 I Blush to Remember 75
6 Prospecting 87
7 Hard Graft 101
8 Emancipation 116

P a rt T h r e e My O w n M an
9 Home and Hearth 129
10 Civic Sense 139
11 Gathering Force 146
12 The People’s Choice 158
13 Loyalties 168

33218_Akenson.indd 5 2022-10-18 09:16

 vi Contents

P a rt F o ur C h a ngi n g F o rt u n e s
14 Lapses 183
15 Assay 194
16 Postscript 198

A Note on Sources 201

33218_Akenson.indd 6 2022-10-18 09:16

 Preface

Everyone knows that Agnes Campbell MacPhail was Canada’s first

female member of Parliament, elected in 1921. That is incontestable.
But consider …
When the former member of Parliament for East Hastings died in
1894, his funeral, conducted by the Grand Orange Lodge of Ontario
East, “was remarkable above anything else for the number of ladies
present.” That was what the local newspaper said, and it was what
first called John White to my attention. White’s obituary mentioned
his unusual sympathy for women and quoted his oft-stated dictum,
“Give me the ladies on my side and I don’t care much for the men.”
This was not a throwaway line: it was a considered principle of politi-
cal solidarity. Given that women did not receive the vote in dominion
elections until after World War I, it seemed that something more
than electoral expediency might be involved here.
As I tracked White down, certain facts about his life made sense
while others proved unsettling. The available documentation allows
one to trace White from birth in County Donegal before the charnel
months of the cholera epidemic of 1832, through a sadly deprived
childhood that knew the Great Famine of the 1840s, and then to
emigration to Canada. For a time White disappears. It is not until the
mid-1850s that he resurfaces, north of Belleville, Ontario, with money
in hand. He had entered an alliance with a woman of some means and
become a big-time operator in a small-town way: cheese-factory
and foundry owner, local politician, Orange Lodge official. In 1871
White surprised everyone by winning a dominion parliamentary elec-
tion, and from then until 1887 he was a trustworthy Tory backbencher.
Not a great career, but an interesting and in some ways puzzling one.

33218_Akenson.indd 7 2022-10-18 09:16

 viii Preface

I let White sit for a while in my file of intriguingly elliptical Irish

immigrants to Canada. Then I came across Eliza McCormack, a
transvestite prostitute who had some high times and legal troubles in
central Canada in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Her intersection
with Ogle Gowan, the founder of the Orange Order in Canada, is
described in The Orangeman.
Something clicked. I recalled McCormack was a County Donegal
Protestant name (as was White) and that the McCormacks, like the
Whites (with whom they intermarried), were poor farmers and artisans
who had settled in small Protestant enclaves among the overwhelm-
ingly Catholic and undeniably hostile Roman Catholic peasantry of
that part of Ulster. Although the province of Ulster is usually thought
to have escaped the worst effects of the Irish famine, parts of it, espe-
cially Donegal, were hard hit. Starvation and epidemics of typhus and
relapsing fever raged through the population. Mortality records for
the time are scarce, but one of the hastily scribbled notes made by an
attendant at the temporary fever hospital in Donegal town lists among
the dead one “John White, young man, about fifteen or sixteen.”

❦
One of the intellectual turning points of twentieth-century historical
writing is Joan Kelly-Gadol’s 1977 essay “Did Women Have a
Renaissance?” Her work prompts one to ask how any historical con-
cept might be gender loaded. Inquiry can carry so many unexamined
assumptions about gender that it obscures more than it illuminates.
Historians of women have successfully argued that a patriarchal society
has existed for most of the duration of Western history and that patri-
archy has had consequences for both the position of women and the
nature of the historical record. Evidence about the character and
quality of women’s lives is only a small fraction of that available for
men’s lives. Consequently, the historical methods that have been used
in male history are inadequate for the task of recovering female his-
tory. New methods and new historiographic canons must evolve for
dealing with women’s history, avid in my view these should be fused
with the methods that have been applied to male history.
In biography, a good way to apply this gender sensitivity is to ask,
“How would my view of my subject change if, in an effort to escape
an unthinking gender bias, I assumed that he is actually a woman, or
she a man?” This is not a bad exercise: if nothing else it prevents
our falling into Carlyle’s trap of believing that history is merely the

33218_Akenson.indd 8 2022-10-18 09:16

 Preface ix

collective biography of great men. Samuel Johnson was right when

he said that “the business of a biography … is to lead the thoughts
into domestic privacies and display the minute details of daily life,”
but there is more to it than that. In his autobiography Mark Twain
remarks, “What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his
words! His real life is in his head and known to none but himself.”
The biographer must explore domestic and private facts and proceed
from that basis to make a speculative entry into the subject’s heart,
mind, and soul. This is why the best biographers are always doing
two things at once: setting down the facts, big and small, and on the
same pages and at the same time, writing a novel. Evaluating the fine
work of biographer Richard Ellman, Edward Mendelson points out
that “any attentive reader may find [Ellman’s] novel in the interstices
of [the Joyce] book’s archival reportage. Its presence announces itself
whenever Ellman (like all recent biographers) tells us what Joyce was
thinking in such-and-such a city or what he felt when such-and-such
happened.” This is the way modern biography works. “We have
focused our gaze,” Mendelson concludes, “on the inaccessible inner
reaches of authorial psyche without quite facing the fact that we have
no way of making the inaccessible accessible. So we invent what we
cannot know and call the result ‘biography.’” Good biography always
has simultaneously deconstructed and reconstructed perceived histori-
cal reality.
It took a long time for the penny to drop, but finally I realized that
the best way to make sense of the career of John White in Canada
was to recognize that he was actually a she: that Eliza McCormack
had taken on the deceased John White’s name and much of his per-
sona. What a pinched, pained, and heroic life she must have led! At
heart she was a loving and generous person, a loyal friend and a
devoted provider for her family. Withal she had a straight from the
shoulder honesty and a rural shrewdness that made her a character
to be reckoned with. She was a postmodern (perhaps even a post-
feminist) heroine in what was not yet a modern age.
Was John White really a woman? That is a question from male
history and an inherently, if unconsciously, hostile one. The known
facts of White’s life fit the hypothesis, but the reality can never be
known and that is just the point: in a culture where most historical
records have been made and preserved by males it is very difficult to
get at the true stories about women’s lives. Heuristic biography can
correct in part this historical imbalance. We know with certainty that

33218_Akenson.indd 9 2022-10-18 09:16

 x Preface

although the details of all save a very few female lives in the past are
lacking, women played major roles in the history of Western society.
As historians, we can either go back to stark fact-grinding biographies
(which in their selection and arrangement of facts are fictive, but in
an unconscious and unexamined manner), or we can try to get inside
our subject’s mind – and in so doing accept the fact that biography,
like many other forms of historical investigation, demands an ener-
getic, self-conscious exercise of imagination. Perhaps we should put
a different tag on biography. Stories of individual human lives might
better be called speculative history or historians’ fiction. In any case,
they should be accepted for what they are.

❦
I am grateful for financial support and encouragement in the writing
of this book to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, the School of Graduate Studies and Research of Queen’s
University, the Directorate of Multiculturalism of the Government
of Canada, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, County
Monahan, and Villa Serbelloni, the Rockerfeller Foundation, Bellagio,
Italy. And I am particularly in the debt of two anonymous readers for
McGill-Queen’s University Press for their constructive and critical
assessment of an earlier draft of this manuscript.

33218_Akenson.indd 10 2022-10-18 09:16

 Pa rt One

Donegal’s Own

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33218_Akenson.indd 2 2022-10-18 09:16
 1

The Real World

There are many things that tie the world together, and at the time of
the birth of Eliza McCormack White the main tie was cholera. In 1826
the disease, endemic to the filthy villages and urban slums of the
Indian subcontinent, escaped and travelled to Russia and from thence
to central Europe. At the time, no one knew how cholera was spread,
although a few sages suggested, correctly, that it was communicated
through some discharge of the victim that entered the water supply.
But if the causes of the pandemic were unknown, its effects were not.
Victims experienced violent vomiting and severe diarrhoea – or rice
water, as it was known – wrenching cramps and, more often than not,
collapse and death within a few hours. Newspapers in the British
Isles, the Canadas, and the United States charted the inexorable march
of the dread disease from the Baltic countries to the Mediterranean
basin and into central France. Its every step moved closer to the English
Channel. Weekly cholera reports were a matter of general morbid
fascination. One can imagine various governmental health authorities,
like generals of the late Roman empire, placing flags on their maps
and sadly shaking their heads at the inevitable approach of disaster.
Cholera reached England in 1831 and by the fall of that year spread
throughout the country. Because so many migrants persisted in emi-
grating to the Canadas from the British Isles, colonial administrators
tried to set up quarantine procedures, but these did little good. In
June 1832 a ship arrived at Grosse Isle having lost forty-two pas-
sengers to the disease en route. The vessel passed through the quar-
antine without impediment, and the disease began its westward trek
across British North America. Montreal, Cornwall, Brockville,

33218_Akenson.indd 3 2022-10-18 09:16

 4 Donegal’s Own

Kingston, Belleville, and York (now Toronto) were stops on this fune-
real progress. Meanwhile, in almost perfect step with its advance
across the Canadian colonies, cholera marched through Scotland
and Ireland.
The great Irish cholera panic is the backdrop to the birth of Eliza
McCormack White. The disease had first appeared in Belfast in
mid-March 1832. A week later it was in Dublin and three days after
that, Cork. By mid-June most but not all of the thirty-two Irish
counties had reported an outbreak. The terror that ran through
the countryside is easy to imagine in theory, but its magnitude is
quite beyond anything experienced in the English-speaking world
in the twentieth century. This incurable sickness was careening into
a largely preliterate, poverty-­stricken population that believed in
the intervention of the supernatural in everyday life. The epidemic
was beyond human explanation and, consequently, it could only be
stopped by divine intervention.
Thus the “blessed turf.” On Saturday the ninth of June someone
visiting the Roman Catholic chapel at Charlesville, County Cork,
reported that the Blessed Virgin Mary had appeared on the chapel
altar and left some ashes that were a certain protection against cholera.
These ashes, she ordered, were to be tied into small parcels and taken
to cottages in the area they were to be hidden in the rafters or chim-
neys. A relieved cottager would then take ashes from his own chimney
or hearth, tie them into four parcels, carry them to four cottages that
had not yet been visited, and so on. So desperate were the Irish peas-
ants for solace in their hour of peril that in a mere four hours, between
midnight and 4 a m, the message spread across an area of more than
forty square miles in the Cork region. And it kept traveling, trans-
formed as it went. By Monday the eleventh of June it had reached
Queen’s county to the north. Now it involved not ashes but “blessed
turf.” The fundamental magic was the same, however – follow certain
supernatural steps and avoid the plague. In six days, between the
ninth and fifteenth of June 1832, the miraculous cure for the pandemic
spread across three-quarters of the country. Only the mountainous
and most rugged parts of Ireland were excepted. The magical cure
reached Ballyshannon, County Donegal, on Wednesday the thirteenth
of June. This was just a few miles from where Martha White, in the
last days before childbirth, lived.
Martha White was a Protestant by habit. Her husband, John C.
White, was one by fervent conviction. Like most Protestants, they

33218_Akenson.indd 4 2022-10-18 09:16

 The Real World 5

scoffed at the superstitions of the Catholic peasantry. Holy water,

charms, and amulets were already suspect; now the papists had turf
and ashes to keep themselves from illness. The Whites feared the
twisting indignity of death from cholera just as much as their Catholic
neighbours, but being Protestants, that had something more on their
mind: they saw the scurrying of their Catholic neighbours from cot-
tage to cottage – clandestine, often nocturnal movements – and con-
cluded that the papists were up to something. The Whites were not
alone in this. In places throughout Ireland, Protestants went to the
police or to the local magistrates to report a Catholic conspiracy.
Many Protestants took to staying up at night in fear of attack. But
the Irish Catholics were not like the Hungarian peasantry who, in the
belief that the nobility was spreading cholera, murdered members of
aristocratic families. There were few recorded instances of violence.
One of these was, however, in County Donegal, and John and Martha
White resolved to keep alert.
Not that the Whites would have had anything to worry about even
if the Catholics had taken to laying waste the nobility and gentry.
White was a blacksmith with only a small cottage, an attached work-
shop that he called a foundry, and two acres of potato ground, all
rented from the local landlord. Like even the poorest of Irish Protestants,
the Whites considered themselves to be a step above the superstitious
papists. In truth, however, the Protestants were every bit as given to
portents (“freets”), faith healing, and the supernatural as the Catholics.
John White Sr, like many of his fellows, spent hour after hour in a
literal-minded reading of the Bible. Many nights he would hunch over
the Scriptures and incline them on his lap so that the flickering light
from the turf fire could illuminate the holy page. He would study in
especial detail the prophetic books of the Old and New Testaments.
Even during the summer months, when the days were long, he trans-
ferred a glowing piece of turf from his foundry to the cottage hearth
so that he could fan a flame if the need to read God’s holy word took
him after nightfall. His first response to the news that the Catholics
were doing something strange with turf and ashes was to open the
Book of Revelation and ponder the section describing the signs of
the end times. This he read to Martha who, being less religious than
he and massively pregnant, smiled and sighed heavily. “John, dear
man, the end time I await is the deliverance of healthy baby boy.”
The Whites already had one son, John, named after his father.
He had been born a year earlier and baptized by the rector of the

33218_Akenson.indd 5 2022-10-18 09:16

 6 Donegal’s Own

Established (that is, Anglican) Church in the parish of Donegal on

8 May 1831. The Whites adopted the local Gaelic terminology and
called their first born John Oge, meaning young-John, roughly the
equivalent of today’s “John Jr.” Babies in rural Ireland were judged
as much by their size as by their mental alertness, and in this respect
John Oge was a prodigy. He was as fat as a summer stoat and the
pride of his father’s life. Sometimes John Sr would read aloud at night
the section of the Old Testament that goes, “My love, you’re as beauti-
ful as Jerusalem, as lovely as the city of Tirzah, as breathtaking as
those great cities.” He called John Oge the apple of his eye, never
realizing that he was borrowing the vocabulary of a Semitic love poem
to a woman. The adoration of the beloved fit his sentiments exactly.
“The best gift God could give us, Martha, would be another boy
bairn, just like John Oge.”
Martha White was an unusually optimistic woman, which was just
as well, for childbearing in Ireland in this era was the greatest single
danger to a woman’s life. “I’m glad, John, that I can bear another
son. And, if it isn’t a son, well, there will be more of them later on,
so there will.”
A severely practical man, John Sr knew what he must do as soon
as Martha’s labour began. The moment came in the small hours of
the morning of the fifteenth of June. He hurried down the road to
awaken an old widow who acted as midwife in Donegal town. That
done, he stayed out of the way. By an unspoken rule, men were for-
bidden to be in the same room as a woman in parturition. John White
Sr would have been more apt to break the commandment against
murder than he would this fundamental law of the family. Some things
were sacred. White retreated to his smithery and used a bellows to
blow life into the embers on the raised blacksmith’s hearth. He put
on fresh turf and soon there was enough light for him to read The
Song of Solomon. As the pained cries of his wife became more fre-
quent, his thoughts strayed from the holy word. To keep himself
occupied he took a piece of strap iron and placed it in the fire. When
it was red hot, he bent it double over his anvil and began beating it
into something, he was not sure what. He repeated this exercise several
times until, between the bangs of his big hammer, he heard the small
cry of a newborn baby. Then complete silence fell.
Moving slowly, as if afraid of breaking something, the blacksmith
left his forge and went to the door of the family cottage. He held his
breath. Hearing nothing, he proceeded cautiously across the threshold.

33218_Akenson.indd 6 2022-10-18 09:16

 The Real World 7

By the light of the hearth, he could make out the black form of the
midwife. In her arms, wrapped in a large shawl, was the baby. Thank
God, a son! He looked through the dark room at Martha. She was
breathing regularly, in long, exhausted pulls.
The blacksmith entered the room boldly now and saw clearly that
this was a great strong baby. “Let me take the lad from you,” he said
to the midwife. “There’ll be yet another blacksmith in this family!”
He took the infant into his massive hands.
“Sir …” The midwife said. “Sir …”
“A great lad entirely! Don’t you agree?”
“Oh, yes, a great healthy child. Why, in two years, its strength will
be that of a young bullock, no doubt. Only …”
“Only what, woman?”
“It’s a girl child, sir.”
White, startled, shook his head and held the new baby at arm’s
length to examine it. “Are you sure?”
“As sure as there’s a God in heaven. I do know what I am about,
sir,” she added tartly.
“Well, woman, I’ll just check.”
The midwife inhaled audibly and from the straw-filled bed Martha
White tried to say something. Her husband was about to break one
of the taboos of Irish rural life. Men never dealt directly with the
genitalia of children, even of newborn offspring. Inside the mud cabins
of the poorest peasantry, where the young frequently went naked until
ages four or five, adult males were expected to stare past the genera-
tive portions of their children’s anatomy. It was for mothers and elder
daughters to deal with such things.
This was too important to White. He unwrapped the infant and
held it to the light. “You’re right, woman,” he announced to the mid-
wife. “This is a girl. No doubt about it at all.” He swirled the baby
back into the shawl and thrust her at the crone like a dissatisfied
customer returning something to a shopkeeper.
“But look at the bairn again.” The voice was Martha’s, low and
exhausted. “The child is special. Blessed. Don’t you see the sign?”
The blacksmith made a move toward the child. Before touching
her he saw what his wife meant. It should have been obvious. The
caul! The girl had the caul! Plastered around the top and back of her
head was a layer of amniotic membrane that had not been torn away
in the birthing. Throughout Ireland, this was considered a sign of
good luck.

33218_Akenson.indd 7 2022-10-18 09:16

 8 Donegal’s Own

“She’ll never drown,” the midwife declared.

“She’ll have great good fortune!” Martha added from her bed.
“She’ll have the gift of talking and will make people see the world
her way.”
There were a great many freets to pass on. John White knew most
of them already, but he listened attentively. He was not a superstitious
man, he told himself, yet he knew enough not to ignore good fortune.
With plague sweeping the countryside and the suspicious activity of
his papist neighbours, it was a relief to accept a little comfort. When
the midwife had rattled off the last of her prophecies, he thanked her.
He took the infant girl in his arms and looked at her with something
akin to pride. Then, catching himself, he said gruffly, “Still and all,
I’d rather it was a boy.”
❦
In County Donegal, however, the two adamantine rocks of everyday
life – grinding poverty and endemic religious tension – remained
unmovable. If anything, the cholera epidemic of 1832 made these
matters worse.
In the 1830s, the town of Donegal had slightly more than eight
hundred inhabitants and was a deceptively pleasant place to look at.
With its row of sea-side businesses fronting on a wharf and a town
square – shaped like a triangle and called “The Diamond” – with a
wide road leading inland from its apex, the town linked sea com-
munications with inland roads. The town of Donegal (located, as
official documents noted, in the Parish of Donegal, in the Barony of
Tyrhugh, in the County of Donegal, in the Province of Ulster), had
been there in one form on another for at least a millennium. The name
Dun-nan-Gall, the fortress of the foreigners, refers to its Vikings
­settlers, but the town as the Whites knew it had been shaped by the
“plantation of Ulster.” Early in the seventeenth century, the control
wielded by the Gaelic chiefs of Ulster was finally broken and large
parts of the north of Ireland were opened to settlement by Protestants
from England and Scotland. In 1610 Donegal Castle, the last mansion
of the great O’Donnell chiefs of the north, was granted to an English
adventurer, Sir Basil Brooke. It remained in the family through the
1830s. Thus Donegal town became an ordered part of the Protestant
plantation of Ulster. The town resembled a fortress, not physically
but culturally. Donegal town was at the tip of the western salient of

33218_Akenson.indd 8 2022-10-18 09:16

 The Real World 9

Historical provinces of Ireland

the Protestant north. It was the very end of a narrow Protestant pen-
insula in a Catholic sea.
The White’s cottage-cum-foundry was only three-quarters of a mile
west of the centre of town and the road was good. Armed with the
excuse of needing a quarter pound of tea or some fresh-caught cheap

33218_Akenson.indd 9 2022-10-18 09:16

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second volley followed along the low line of exposed flank, and,
being more effective than the first, flung the column into complete
disorder.
Dead men lay awash where they had fallen; wounded men were
plunging in the water, shouting to their comrades for help, what time
their comrades cursed and raved, rousing the echoes of that
normally peaceful valley, as they had been roused before when the
horsemen found themselves in similar plight. Odd shutters and doors
went floating down the stream, and the continuity of the improvised
roof having been broken, those immediately behind the fallen found
themselves exposed now in front as well as on the flank.
A mounted officer spurred through the water, shouting a
command repeatedly as he came, and menacing the disordered
ranks with his sword. At last his order was understood, and the
timber shields were swung from overhead to cover the flank that was
being assailed. That, thought Buonterzo, should checkmate the
defenders of the ford, who with such foresight had shifted their
position. But scarcely was the manœuvre executed when into them
came a volley from the thirty men Bellarion had left at the head of the
bluff in anticipation of just such a counter-movement. Because the
range here was short, not a bolt of that volley failed to take effect,
and by the impression it created of the ubiquity of this invisible
opponent it completed the discomfiture of the assailants. They
turned, flung away their shields, and went scrambling back out of
range as fast as they could breast the water. To speed them came
another volley at their flanks, which claimed some victims, whilst
several men in their panic got into deep water and two or three were
drowned.
Livid with rage and chagrin, Buonterzo watched this second
repulse. He knew from his earlier observations and from the extent
of the volleys that it was the work of a negligible contingent posted to
cover Facino's retreat, and his wrath was deepened by the reflection
that, as a result of this delay, Facino might, if not actually escape, at
least compel him now to an arduous pursuit. No farther than that
could Buonterzo see, in the blindness of his rage, precisely as
Bellarion had calculated. And because he could see no farther, he
stood obstinately firm in his resolve to put a strong force across the
river.
The sun was mounting now towards noon, and already over four
hours had been spent at that infernal ford. Yet realising, despite his
impatience, that speed is seldom gained by hastiness, Buonterzo
now deliberately considered the measures to be taken, and he sent
men for a mile or more up and down streams to seek another
passage. Another hour was lost in this exploration, which proved
fruitless in the end. But meanwhile Buonterzo held in readiness a
force of five hundred men-at-arms in full armour, commanded by an
intrepid young knight named Varallo.
'You will cross in spite of any losses,' Buonterzo instructed him. 'I
compute them to number less than two hundred men, and if you are
resolute you will win over without difficulty. Their bolts will not take
effect save at short range, and by then you will be upon them. You
are to give no quarter and make no prisoners. Put every man in that
wood to the sword.'
An ineffective volley rained on breastplate and helmet at the
outset, and, encouraged by this ineffectiveness, Varallo urged
forward his men-at-arms. Thus he brought them steadily within a
range whereat arbalest bolt could pierce their protecting steel plates.
But Bellarion, whose error in prematurely loosing the first volley was
the fruit of inexperience, took no chances thereafter. He ordered his
men to aim at the horses.
The result was a momentary check when a half-score of stricken
chargers reared and plunged and screamed in pain and terror, and
flung off as many riders to drown helplessly in their armour, weighed
down by it and unable to regain their feet.
But Varallo, himself scatheless, urged them on with a voice of
brass, and brought them after that momentary pause of confusion to
the far bank. Here another dozen horses were brought down, and
two or three men directly slain by bolts before Varallo had
marshalled them and led them charging up and round the shallow
hill, where the ascent was easy to the wood that crowned the bluff.
The whole of Buonterzo's army straggling along the left bank of
the river cheered them lustily on, and the dominant cry that rang out
clearly and boldly was 'No quarter!'
That cry rang in the ears of Facino Cane, as he mounted the
hilltop above and behind Buonterzo's force. He had made such good
speed, acting upon Bellarion's plan, that crossing at Rivergaro he
had joined Carmagnola, whom he met between there and Agazzano,
and sweeping on, round, and up he had completed a circuit of some
twelve miles in a bare five hours.
And here below him, at his mercy now, the strategic position of
that day's dawn completely reversed, lay Buonterzo's army, held in
check there by the skill and gallantry of Bellarion and his hundred
Swiss. But it was clear that he had arrived barely in time to
command victory, and possible that he had arrived too late to save
Bellarion.
Instantly he ordered Cadillac to cleave through, and cross in a
forlorn attempt to rescue the party in the wood from the slaughter
obviously intended. And down the hill like an avalanche went the
French horse upon an enemy too stricken by surprise to take even
such scant measures of defence as the ground afforded.
Over and through them went de Cadillac, riding down scores, and
hurling hundreds into the river. Through the ford his horses plunged
and staggered at almost reckless speed, to turn Varallo's five
hundred, who, emerging from the wood, found themselves cut off by
a force of twice their strength. Back into the wood they plunged and
through it, with de Cadillac following. Out again beyond they rode,
and down the slope to the plain at breakneck speed. For a mile and
more de Cadillac pursued them. Then, bethinking him that after all
his force amounted to one third of Facino's entire army, and that his
presence might be required on the main scene of action, he turned
his men and rode back.
They came again by way of the wood, and along the main path
running through it they found nigh upon a score of Swiss dead, all
deliberately butchered, and one who still lived despite his appalling
wounds, whom they brought back with them.
By the time they regained the ford, the famous Battle of Travo—as
it is known to history—was all but over.
The wide breach made in Buonterzo's ranks by de Cadillac's
charge was never healed. Perceiving the danger that was upon them
from Facino's main army, the two broken ends of that long line went
off in opposite directions, one up the valley and the other down, and
it must be confessed that Buonterzo, realising the hopelessness of
the position in which he had been surprised, himself led the flight of
the latter and more numerous part of his army. It may have been his
hope to reach the open plains beyond Rivergaro and there reform
his men and make a stand that should yet retrieve the fortunes of the
day. But Facino himself with his own condotta of twelve hundred
men took a converging line along the heights, to head Buonterzo off
at the proper moment. When he judged the moment to have arrived,
Facino wheeled his long line and charged downhill upon men who
were afforded in that narrow place no opportunity of assuming a
proper formation.
 Buonterzo and some two hundred horse, by desperate spurring,
eluded the charge. The remainder amounting to upwards of a
thousand men were rolled over, broken, and hemmed about, so that
finally they threw down their arms and surrendered before they were
even summoned to do so.
Meanwhile Koenigshofen, with the third battle into which the army
had been so swiftly divided, dealt similarly with the fugitives who had
attempted to ascend the valley.
Two thousand prisoners, fifteen hundred horses, a hundred
baggage-carts well laden, a score of cannon besides some tons of
armour and arms, was the booty that fell to Facino Cane at Travo. Of
the prisoners five hundred Burgundian men-at-arms were taken into
his own service. A thousand others were stripped of arms, armour,
and horses, whilst the remainder, among whom were many officers
and knights of condition, were held for ransom.
The battle was over, but Facino had gone off in pursuit of
Buonterzo; and Carmagnola, assuming command, ordered the army
to follow. They came upon their leader towards evening between
Rivergaro and Piacenza, where he had abandoned the pursuit,
Buonterzo having crossed the river below the islands.
Carmagnola, flushed and exultant, gave him news of the
completeness of the victory and the richness of the booty.
'And Bellarion?' quoth Facino, his dark eyes grave.
De Cadillac told of the bodies in the wood; Stoffel with sorrow on
his long swarthy face repeated the tale of the wounded Swiss who
had since died. The fellow had reported that the men-at-arms who
rode in amongst them shouting 'No quarter!' had spared no single
life. There could be no doubt that Bellarion had perished with the
rest.
Facino's chin sank to his breast, and the lines deepened in his
face.
'It was his victory,' he said, slowly, sorrowfully. 'His was the mind
that conceived the plan which turned disaster into success. His the
gallantry and self-sacrifice that made the plan possible.' He turned to
Stoffel who more than any other there had been Bellarion's friend.
'Take what men you need for the task, and go back to recover me his
body. Bring it to Milan. The whole nation shall do honour to his ashes
and his memory.'

CHAPTER IX

DE MORTUIS

There are men to whom death has brought a glory that would
never have been theirs in life. An instance of that is afforded by the
history of Bellarion at this stage.
Honest, loyal, and incapable of jealousy or other kindred
meanness, Facino must have given Bellarion a due measure of
credit for the victory over Buonterzo if Bellarion had ridden back to
Milan beside him. But that he would have given him, as he did, a
credit so full as to make the achievement entirely Bellarion's, could
hardly be expected of human nature or of Facino's. A living man so
extolled would completely have eclipsed the worth of Facino himself;
besides which to the man who in achieving lays down his life, we can
afford to be more generous—because it is less costly—than to the
man who survives his achievement.
Never, perhaps, in its entire history had the Ambrosian city been
moved to such a delirium of joy as that in which it now hailed the
return of the victorious condottiero who had put an end to the grim
menace overhanging a people already distracted by internal feuds.
News of the victory had preceded Facino, who reached Milan
ahead of his army two days after Buonterzo's rout.
It had uplifted the hearts of all, from the meanest scavenger to the
Duke, himself. And yet the first words Gian Maria addressed to
Facino in the audience chamber of the Broletto, before the
assembled court, were words of censure.
'You return with the work half done. You should have pursued
Buonterzo to Parma and invested the city. This was your chance to
restore it to the crown of Milan. My father would have demanded a
stern account of you for this failure to garner the fruits of victory.'
Facino flushed to the temples. His jaw was thrust forward as he
looked the Duke boldly and scathingly between the eyes.
'Your father, Lord Prince, would have been beside me on the
battle-field to direct the operations that were to preserve his crown.
Had your highness followed his illustrious example there would be
no occasion now for a reproach that must recoil upon yourself. It
would better become your highness to return thanks for a victory
purchased at great sacrifice.'
The goggle eyes looked at him balefully until their glance faltered
as usual under the dominance of the condottiero's will, the
dominance which Gian Maria so bitterly resented. Ungracefully the
slender yet awkward body sprawled in the great gilded chair, red leg
thrown over white one.
It was della Torre, tall and dark at his master's side, who came to
the Duke's assistance. 'You are a bold man, Lord Count, so to
address your prince.'
'Bold, aye!' growled the Duke, encouraged by that support. 'Body
of God! Bold to recklessness. One of these days ...' He broke off, the
coarse lips curling in a sneer. 'But you spoke of sacrifices?' The
cunning that lighted his brutishness fastened upon that. It boded, he
hoped, a tale of losses that should dim the lustre of this popular
idol's achievement.
Facino rendered his accounts, and it was then that he proclaimed
Bellarion's part; he related how Bellarion's wit had devised the whole
plan which had reversed the positions on the Trebbia, and he spoke
sorrowfully of how Bellarion and his hundred Swiss had laid down
their lives to make Facino's victory certain.
 'I commend his memory to your highness and to the people of
Milan.'
If the narrative did not deeply move Gian Maria, at least it moved
the courtiers present, and more deeply still the people of Milan when
it reached them later.
The outcome was that after a Te Deum for the victory, the city put
on mourning for the martyred hero to whom the victory was due; and
Facino commanded a Requiem to be sung in Saint Ambrose for this
Salvator Patriæ, whose name, unknown yesterday, was by now on
every man's lips. His origin, rearing, and personal endowments were
the sole subjects of discussion. The tale of the dogs was recalled by
the few who had ever heard of it and now widely diffused as an
instance of miraculous powers which disposed men almost to
canonise Bellarion.
Meanwhile, however, Facino returning exacerbated from that
audience was confronted by his lady, white-faced and distraught.
'You sent him to his death!' was the furious accusation with which
she greeted him.
He checked aghast both at the words and the tone. 'I sent him to
his death!'
'You knew to what you exposed him when you sent him to hold
that ford.'
'I did not send him. Himself he desired to go; himself proposed it.'
'A boy who did not know the risk he ran!'
The memory of the protest she had made against Bellarion's
going rose suddenly invested with new meaning. Roughly, violently,
he caught her by the wrist. His face suddenly inflamed was close to
her own, the veins of his brow standing out like cords.
'A boy, you say. Was that what you found him, lady?'
Scared, but defiant, she asked him: 'What else?'
'What else? Your concern suggests that you discovered he's a
man. What was Bellarion to you?'
 For once he so terrified her that every sense but that of self-
preservation abandoned her on the instant.
'To me?' she faltered. 'To me?'
'Aye, to you. Answer me.' There was death in his voice, and in the
brutal crushing grip upon her wrist.
'What should he have been, Facino?' She was almost
whimpering. 'What lewdness are you dreaming?'
'I am dreaming nothing, madam. I am asking.'
White-lipped she answered him. 'He was as a son to me.' In her
affright she fell to weeping, yet could be glad of the ready tears that
helped her to play the part so suddenly assumed. 'I have no child of
my own. And so I took him to my empty mother's breast.'
The plaint, the veiled reproach, overlaid the preposterous
falsehood. After all, if she was not old enough to be Bellarion's
mother, at least she was his senior by ten years.
Facino loosed his grip, and fell back, a little abashed and
ashamed.
'What else could you have supposed him to me?' she was
complaining. 'Not ... not, surely, that I had taken him for my lover?'
'No,' he lied lamely. 'I was not suspecting that.'
'What then?' she insisted, playing out her part.
He stood looking at her with feverish eyes. 'I don't know,' he cried
out at last. 'You distract me, Bice!' and he stamped out.
But the suspicion was as a poison that had entered his veins, and
it was a moody, silent Facino who sat beside his lady at the State
supper given on the following night in the old Broletto Palace. It was
a banquet of welcome to the Regent of Montferrat, his nephew the
Marquis Gian Giacomo, and his niece the Princess Valeria, whose
visit was the result of certain recent machinations on the part of
Gabriello Maria.
 Gabriello Maria had lately been exercised by the fundamental
weakness of Gian Maria's position, and he feared lest the victor in
the conflict between Facino and Buonterzo might, in either case,
become a menace to the Duchy. No less was he exercised by the
ascendancy which was being obtained in Milan by the Guelphs
under della Torre, an ascendancy so great that already there were
rumours of a possible marriage between the Duke and the daughter
of Malatesta of Rimini, who was regarded as the leader of the
Guelphic party in Italy. Now Gabriello, if weak and amiable, was at
least sincere in his desire to serve his brother as in his desire to
make secure his own position as ducal governor. For himself and his
brother he could see nothing but ultimate disaster from too great a
Guelphic ascendancy.
Therefore, had he proposed an alliance between Gian Maria and
his father's old ally and friend, the Ghibelline Prince of Montferrat.
Gian Maria's jealous fear of Facino's popularity had favourably
disposed him, and letters had been sent to Aliprandi, the Orator of
Milan at Casale.
Theodore, on his side, anxious to restore to Montferrat the cities
of Vercelli and Alessandria which had been wrested from it by the all-
conquering Gian Galeazzo, and having also an eye upon the
lordship of Genoa, once an appanage of the crown of Montferrat,
had conceived that the restoration of the former should be a
condition of the treaty of alliance which might ultimately lead to the
reconquest of the latter.
Accordingly he had made haste, in response, to come in person
to Milan that he might settle the terms of the treaty with the Duke.
With him he had brought his niece and the nephew on whose behalf
he ruled, who were included in Gabriello's invitation. Gabriello's aim
in this last detail was to avert the threatened Malatesta marriage. A
marriage between the Duke and the Princess of Montferrat might be
made by Theodore an absolute condition of that same treaty, if his
ambition for his niece were properly fired.
At the banquet that night, Gabriello watched his brother, who sat
with Theodore on his right and the Princess Valeria on his left, for
signs from which he might calculate the chances of bringing the
secret part of his scheme to a successful issue. And signs were not
wanting to encourage him. It was mainly to the Princess that Gian
Maria addressed himself. His glance devoured the white beauty of
her face with its crown of red-gold hair; his pale goggle eyes leered
into the depths of her own which were so dark and inscrutable, and
he discoursed the while, loud and almost incessantly, in an obvious
desire to dazzle and to please.
And perhaps because the lady remained unmoved, serenely
calm, a little absent almost, and seldom condescending even to
smile at his gross sallies, he was piqued into greater efforts for her
entertainment, until at last he blundered upon a topic which
obviously commanded her attention. It was the topic of the hour.
'There sits Facino Cane, Count of Biandrate,' he informed her.
'That square-faced fellow yonder, beside the dark lady who is his
countess. An overrated upstart, all puffed up with pride in an
achievement not his own.'
The phrase drew the attention of the Marquis Theodore.
'But if not his own, whose, then, the achievement, highness?'
'Why a fledgling's, one whom he claims for his adoptive son.' The
adjective was stressed with sarcasm. 'A fellow named Bellarion.'
'Bellarion, eh?' The Regent betrayed interest. So, too did the
Princess. For the first time she faced her odious host. Meanwhile
Gian Maria ran on, his loud voice audible even to Facino, as he no
doubt intended.
'The truth is that by his rashness Facino was all but outfought,
when this Bellarion showed him a trick by which he might turn the
tables on Buonterzo.'
'A trick?' said she, in an odd voice, and Gian Maria, overjoyed to
have won at last her attention, related in detail the strategy by which
Facino's victory had been snatched.
'A trick, as your highness said,' was her comment. 'Not a deed of
arms in which there was a cause for pride.'
 Gian Maria stared at her in surprise, whilst Theodore laughed
aloud.
'My niece is romantic. She reads the poets, and from them
conceives of war as a joyous joust, or a game of chivalry, with equal
chances and a straightforward encounter.'
'Why, then,' laughed the Duke, 'the tale should please you,
madonna, of how with a hundred men this rascal held the ford
against Buonterzo's army for as long as the trick's success
demanded.'
'He did that?' she asked, incredulous.
'He did more. He laid down his life in doing it. He and his hundred
were massacred in cold blood. That is why on Wednesday, at Saint
Ambrose, a Requiem Mass is to be sung for him who in the eyes of
my people deserves a place in the Calendar beside Saint George.'
His aim in this high praise was less to bestow laurels upon
Bellarion than to strip them from Facino. 'And I am not sure that the
people are wrong. Vox populi, vox Dei. This Bellarion was oddly
gifted, oddly guarded.' In illustration of this he passed on to relate
that incident which had come to be known by then in Milan as 'The
Miracle of the Dogs.' He told the tale without any shame at the part
he had played, without any apparent sense that to hunt human
beings with hounds was other than a proper sport for a prince.
As she listened, she was conscious only of horror of this
monstrous boy, so that the flesh of her arm shrank under the touch
of his short, broad-jewelled paw, from which the finger-nails had
been all but entirely gnawed. Anon, however, in the solitude of the
handsome chamber assigned to her, she came to recall and weigh
the things the Duke had said.
This Bellarion had laid down his life in the selfless service of
adoptive father and country, like a hero and a martyr. She could
understand that in one of whom her knowledge was what it was of
Bellarion as little as she could understand the miracle of the dogs.
 CHAPTER X

THE KNIGHT BELLARION

That Requiem Mass at Saint Ambrose's for the repose of the soul
of Bellarion was never sung. And this because, whilst the bells were
solemnly tolling in summons to the faithful, Messer Bellarion, himself,
very much in the flesh, and accompanied by Werner von Stoffel, who
had been sent to recover his body, marched into the city of Milan by
the Ticinese Gate at the head of some seventy Swiss arbalesters,
the survivors of his hundred.
There was some delay in admitting them. When that dusty
company came in sight, swinging rhythmically along, in steel caps
and metal-studded leather tunics, crossbows shouldered, the officer
of the gate assumed them to be one of the marauding bands which
were continually harassing the city by their incursions.
By the time that Bellarion had succeeded in persuading him of his
identity, rumour had already sped before him with the amazing news.
Hence, in a measure as he penetrated further into the city, the
greater was his difficulty in advancing through the crowd which
turned out to meet him and to make him acquainted with the fame to
which his supposed death had hoisted him.
In the square before the cathedral, the crowd was so dense that
he could hardly proceed at all. The bells had ceased. For news of his
coming had reached Saint Ambrose, and the intended service was
naturally abandoned. This Bellarion deplored, for a sermon on his
virtues would have afforded him an entertainment vouchsafed to few
men.
At last he gained the Broletto and the courtyard of the Arrengo,
which was thronged almost as densely as the square outside.
Thronged, too, were the windows overlooking it, and in the loggia on
the right Bellarion perceived the Duke himself, standing between the
tall, black, saturnine della Torre and the scarlet Archbishop of Milan,
and, beside the Archbishop, the Countess Beatrice, a noble lady
sheathed in white samite with black hair fitting as close and regularly
to her pale face as a cap of ebony. She was leaning forward, one
hand upon the parapet, the other waving a scarf in greeting.
Bellarion savoured the moment critically, like an epicure in life's
phenomena. Fra Serafino rightly described the event as one of those
many friendly contrivings of Fortune, as a result of which he came
ultimately to be known as Bellarion the Fortunate.
Similarly he savoured the moment when he stood before the Duke
and his assembled court in the great frescoed chamber known as
the Hall of Galeazzo, named after that son of Matteo Visconti who
was born ad cantu galli.
Facino, himself, had fetched him thither from the court of the
Arrengo, and he stood now dusty and travel-stained, in steel cap and
leather tunic, still leaning upon the eight-foot halbert which had
served him as a staff. Calm and unabashed under the eyes of that
glittering throng, he rendered his account of this fresh miracle—as it
was deemed—to which he owed his preservation. And the account
was as simple as that which had explained to Facino the miracle of
the dogs.
When Buonterzo's men-at-arms had forced the passage of the
ford, Bellarion had been on the lower part of the bluff with some two
thirds of his band. He had climbed at once to the summit, so as to
conduct the thirty men he had left there to the shelter on the
southern slope. But he came too late. The vindictive soldiers of
Buonterzo were already pursuing odd survivors through the trees to
the cry of 'No quarter!' To succour them being impossible, Bellarion
conceived it his duty to save the men who were still with him.
Midway down the wooded farther slope he had discovered, at a spot
where the descent fell abruptly to a ledge, a cave whose entrance
was overgrown and dissembled by a tangle of wild vine and
jessamine. Thither he now led them at the double. The cave
burrowed deeply into the limestone rock.
'We replaced,' he related, 'the trailing plants which our entrance
had disturbed, and retired into the depths of the cave to await
events, just as the first of the horsemen topped the summit. From the
edge of the wood they surveyed the plain below. Seeing it empty,
they must have supposed that those they had caught and slain
composed the entire company which had harassed them. They
turned, and rode back, only to return again almost at once, their
force enormously increased as it seemed to us who could judge only
by sounds.
'I realise now that in reality they were in flight before the French
cavalry which had been sent across to rescue us.
'For an hour or more after their passage we remained in our
concealment. At last I sent forth a scout, who reported a great body
of cavalry advancing from the Nure. This we still assumed to be
Buonterzo's horse brought back by news of Facino's real
movements. For another two hours we remained in our cave, and
then at last I climbed to the summit of the bluff, whence I could
survey the farther bank of the Trebbia. To my amazement I found it
empty, and then I became aware of men moving among the trees
near at hand, and presently found myself face to face with Werner
von Stoffel, who told me of the battle fought and won whilst we had
lain in hiding.'
He went on to tell them how they had crossed the river and
pushed on to Travo in a famished state. They found the village half
wrecked by the furious tide of war that had swept over it. Yet some
food they obtained, and towards evening they set out again so as to
overtake Facino's army. But at San Giorgio, which they reached late
at night, and where they were constrained to lie, they found that
Facino had not gone that way, and that, therefore, they were upon
the wrong road. Next morning, consequently, they decided to make
their own way back to Milan.
They crossed the Po at Piacenza, only to find themselves
detained by the Scotti for having marched into the town without
permission. The Scotti knew of the battle fought, but not of its
ultimate issue. Buonterzo was in flight; but he might rally. And so, for
two days Bellarion and his little band were kept in Piacenza until it
was definitely known there that Buonterzo's rout was complete.
Then, at last, his departure was permitted, since to have detained
him longer must provoke the resentment of the victorious Facino.
'We have made haste on the march since,' he concluded, 'and I
rejoice to have arrived at least in time to prevent a Requiem, which
would have been rendered a mockery by my obstinate tenacity to
life.'
Thus, on a note of laughter, he closed a narrative that was a
model of lucid brevity and elegant, Tuscan delivery.
But there were two among the courtly crowd who did not laugh.
One was Francesco Busone of Carmagnola, Facino's handsome,
swaggering lieutenant, who looked sourly upon this triumph of an
upstart in whom he had already feared a rival. The other was the
Princess Valeria, who, herself unseen in that concourse, discovered
in this narrative only an impudent confession of trickery from one
whom she had known as a base trickster. Almost she suspected him
of having deliberately contrived that men should believe him dead to
the end that by this sensational resurrection he should establish
himself as the hero of the hour.
Gabriello Maria, elegant and debonair, came to shake him by the
hand, and after Gabriello came the Duke with della Torre, to praise
him almost fawningly as the Victor of Travo.
'That title, Lord Duke, belongs to none but my Lord Facino.'
'Modesty, sir,' said della Torre, 'is a garment that becomes a hero.'
'If my Lord Facino did not wear it, sir, you could not lie under your
present error. He must have magnified to his own cost my little
achievement.'
But they would not have him elude their flattery, and when at last
they had done with him he was constrained to run the gauntlet of the
sycophantic court, which must fawn upon a man whom the Duke
approved. And here to his surprise he found the Marquis Theodore,
who used him very civilly and with no least allusion to their past
association.
 At last Bellarion escaped, and sought the apartments of Facino.
There he found the Countess alone. She rose from her seat in the
loggia when he entered, and came towards him so light and eagerly
that she seemed almost to drift across the floor.
'Bellarion!'
There was a flush on her usually pale cheeks, a glitter in her
bright slanting eyes, and she came holding out both hands in
welcome.
'Bellarion!' she cried again, and her voice throbbed like the
plucked chords of a lute.
Instantly he grew uneasy. 'Madonna!' He bowed stiffly, took one of
her proffered hands, and bore it formally to his lips. 'To command!'
'Bellarion!' This time that melodious voice was pitched
reproachfully. She seized him by his leather-clad arms, and held him
so, confronting him.
'Do you know that I have mourned you dead? That I thought my
heart would break? That my own life seemed to have gone out with
yours? Yet all that you can say to me now—in such an hour as this—
so cold and formally is "to command"! Of what are you made,
Bellarion?'
'And of what are you made, madonna?' Roughly almost, he
disengaged himself from her grip. He was very angry, and anger was
a rare emotion in his cold, calculating nature. 'O God! Is there no
loyalty in all this world? Below, there was the Duke to nauseate me
with flattery which was no more than base disloyalty to my lord. I
escape from it to meet here a disloyalty which wounds me infinitely
more.'
She had fallen back a little, and momentarily turned aside.
Suddenly she faced him again, breathless and very white. Her long
narrow eyes seemed to grow longer and narrower. Her expression
was not nice.
'Why, what are you assuming?' There was now no music in her
voice. It was harshly metallic. 'Has soldiering made you fatuous by
chance?' She laughed unpleasantly, as upon a sudden scorn-
provoking revelation. 'I see! I see! You thought that I ...! You thought
...! Why, you fool! You poor, vain fool! Shall I tell Facino what you
thought, and how you have dared to insult me with it?'
He stood bewildered, aghast, and indignant. He sought to recall
her exact expressions. 'You used words, madonna ...' he was
beginning hotly when suddenly he checked, and when he resumed
the indignation had all gone out of him. 'What you have said is very
just. I am a fool, of course. You will give me leave?'
He made to go, but she had not yet done with him.
'I used words, you say. What words? What words that could
warrant your assumptions? I said that I had mourned you. It is true.
As a mother might have mourned you. But you ... You could think ...'
She swung past him, towards the open loggia. 'Go, sir. Go wait
elsewhere for my lord.'
He departed without another word, not indeed to await Facino,
whom he did not see again until the morrow, a day which for him was
very full.
Betimes he was sought by the Lord Gabriello Maria, who came at
the request of the Commune of Milan to conduct him to the Ragione
Palace, there to receive the thanks of the representatives of the
people.
'I desire no thanks, and I deserve none.' His manner was almost
sullen.
'You'll receive them none the less. To disregard the invitation were
ungracious.'
And so the Lord Gabriello carried off Bellarion, the son of nobody,
to the homage of the city. In the Communal Palace he listened to a
recital by the President of his shining virtues and still more shining
services, in token of their appreciation of which the fathers of the
Ambrosian city announced that they had voted him the handsome
sum of ten thousand gold florins. In other words, they had divided
between himself and Facino the sum they had been intending to
award the latter for delivering the city from the menace of Buonterzo.
 After that, and in compliance with the request of the Council, the
rather bewildered Bellarion was conducted by his noble escort to
receive the accolade of knighthood. Empanoplied for the ceremony
in the suit of black armour which had been Boucicault's gift to him,
he was conducted into the court of the Arrengo, where Gian Maria in
red and white attended by the nobility of Milan awaited him. But it
was Facino, very grave and solemn, who claimed the right to bestow
the accolade upon one who had so signally and loyally served him
as an esquire. And when Bellarion rose from his knees, it was the
Countess of Biandrate, at her husband's bidding, who came to
buckle the gold spurs to the heels of the new knight.
For arms, when invited to choose a device, he announced that he
would adopt a variant of Facino's own: a dog's head argent on a field
azure.
At the conclusion a herald proclaimed a joust to be held in the
Castle of Porta Giovia on the morrow when the knight Bellarion
would be given opportunity of proving publicly how well he deserved
the honour to which he had acceded.
It was a prospect which he did not relish. He knew himself without
skill at arms, in which he had served only an elementary
apprenticeship during those days at Abbiategrasso.
Nor did it increase his courage that Carmagnola should come
swaggering towards him, his florid countenance wreathed in smiles
of simulated friendliness, to claim for the morrow the honour of
running a course and breaking a lance with his new brother-knight.
He smiled, nevertheless, as falsely as Carmagnola himself.
'You honour me, Ser Francesco. I will do my endeavour.'
He noted the gleam in Carmagnola's eyes, and went, so soon as
he was free, in quest of Stoffel, with whom his friendship had ripened
during their journey from Travo.
'Tell me, Werner, have you ever seen Carmagnola in the tilt-yard?'
'Once, a year ago, in the Castle of Porta Giovia.'
'Ha! A great hulking bull of a man.'