Don Alberto did not care to tell how he had been wounded, and kept the matter between himself, his doctor, and his own man, giving out that he had been thrown from his horse and had broken one of the bones of his forearm, a story which quite accounted for his wearing his arm in a sling when he appeared after keeping his room during five days. It was natural, too, that Stradella and Ortensia, who had recognised him by the light of the lantern, should say nothing about the matter, and the Bravi did not know who the young man was; so there was a possibility that the whole affair might remain a secret.

Trombin, however, was anxious to discover the name of the adversary he had wounded, and Gambardella was not unwilling to help him, though he considered him quite mad where Ortensia was concerned.

‘You have no imagination,’ Trombin objected, in answer to this charge. ’Can you not understand the peculiar charm of being in love with a lady of whom I have agreed to make an angel at the first convenient opportunity, and whom I have further promised to deliver safe, sound, and alive to her uncle in Venice?’

‘I wish you joy of your puzzles,’ answered Gambardella discontentedly.

‘I derive much solace from the pleasures of imagination,’ Trombin observed, following his own train of thought. ’In me a great romancer has been lost to our age, another Bandello, perhaps a second Boccaccio! An English gentleman of taste once told me that my features resemble those of a dramatist of his country, whose first name was William I forget the second, which I could not learn to pronounce but that my cheeks are even rounder than his were, and my mouth smaller. Under other circumstances, who knows but that I might have been the William Something of Italy? My English friend added that the painted bust of the dramatist on his tomb was quite the most hideous object he had ever seen, so I do not tell you the story out of mere vanity, as you might suppose. My misfortune is that I am generally driven by a sort of familiar spirit to do the things I imagine, instead of writing them down.’

‘And pray what do you imagine you are going to do next?’ inquired Gambardella.

‘It has occurred to me that I might carry off the lady myself,’ Trombin answered in a thoughtful tone.

‘And leave me to manage the rest?’

’You will have no trouble. I shall take the road to Venice, of course, and after a month or two I will hand the lady over to Pignaver, for I dare say she will soon tire of my company. As for you, you will only have to follow her husband, for he will go after his wife as fast as he can, of his own accord, and when you both reach Venice together, I shall be waiting and we will lead him into a trap and give him up to his pretty adorer! The rest will be as I said. She will not be able to keep him a prisoner very long, and when he leaves her house we can settle the business.’

’And of course you will expect me to help you in carrying the young woman off?’

‘Naturally! Should you feel any scruples about it?’

‘No,’ Gambardella answered, in an indifferent tone, but he changed the subject and went back to the question of the rival serenader’s identity. ‘It might be as well to think of more practical matters,’ he said. ’The excellent Tommaso has not found out anything about the man you wounded last night, though he has already ascertained exactly where the ex-Queen of Sweden keeps her jewels!’

’Intelligent creature! He really has a good store of general information! I dare say he will take them some day and leave us without giving notice.’

’It must be very convenient to be born so low in the world as to be able to steal without disgrace,’ observed Gambardella thoughtfully. ’I suppose such fellows have no sense of honour.’

‘None whatever,’ said Trombin, with equal gravity. ’As you say, it must make many things easy when one has no money.’

This conversation had taken place under the great colonnade before Saint Peter’s, late in the afternoon, when the air was pleasantly cool. Bernini’s colonnade was new then, and some of the poorer Romans, dwelling in the desolate regions between the Lateran and Santa Maria Maggiore, had not even seen it. It might have been expected that it was to become the resort of loungers, gossips, foreigners, dealers in images and rosaries, barbers, fortune-tellers, and money-changers, as the ancient portico had been that used to form a straight covered way from the Basilica to the Bridge of Sant’ Angelo; but for some inexplicable reason this never happened, and it was always, as it is now, a deserted place.

The Bravi, who were men of taste, according to their times, admired the architecture extremely, and often walked there for half an hour before it was time to hear the Benediction music in the church, which was always good and sometimes magnificent.

This afternoon they were strolling not far from the bronze gate that gives access to the Vatican; a dozen paces or more behind them, within call but out of hearing of their conversation, walked the excellent Tommaso, otherwise known as Grattacacio, the ex-highway robber, about whom they had just been talking. The last words had barely passed Trombin’s lips when they heard the man’s footsteps approaching them rapidly from behind. They stopped to learn what was the matter.

‘A young gentleman on a mule is coming, with several servants,’ Tommaso said quickly. ‘He has his right arm in a sling. Perhaps he is your man.’

The two friends nodded carelessly, but drew their hats a little lower over their eyes as they turned and walked back, skirting the inner side of the colonnade so as to watch the party that was coming straight across the Piazza in the sun from the direction of Porta Santo Spirito. As soon as they saw the face of the young man who rode the mule they recognised Trombin’s adversary, who wore his broad-brimmed hat far down on the left to screen him from the sun, thus exposing the right side of his face to their view. They went on quietly, as if they had hardly noticed him, and he paid no attention to them. When he and his three servants had almost reached the bronzed gates, the Bravi despatched their man after him to find out his name from the groom who would hold his mule, while they themselves remained where they were, walking slowly up and down, a dozen steps each way.

‘I see a golden opportunity rising in the distance,’ said Trombin. ’It illuminates my imagination and lights up my understanding.’

‘It will probably dazzle mine, so that I shall see nothing at all,’ observed Gambardella with his usual sourness.

‘Possibly,’ Trombin answered pleasantly. ’I shall therefore hide my light under a bushel, as it were, and thus spare your mental eyes a shock that might be fatal to them. For my present inspiration is of such a tremendous nature that an ordinary intelligence might be unsettled by it.’

‘Could you not communicate the nature of it in small doses, as it were?’ asked Gambardella, mimicking him a little. ’One can get accustomed even to poisons in that way, as Mithridates did.’

’To oblige you, I will attempt it, my friend, but I shall endeavour to lead you to guess the truth yourself by asking questions, instead of presenting it to you in disjointed fragments. Now consider that youth whom I ran through the arm the other night, and answer me. Do you suppose that he was serenading Pina, the serving-woman, or Ortensia her mistress?’

‘What a question! It was Ortensia, of course.’

’But was he serenading the Lady Ortensia out of ill-feeling towards her, or out of good-feeling?’

‘Out of good-feeling.’

’What is the good-feeling of a handsome young man towards a beautiful young woman usually called, my friend?’

‘Love, I suppose. What nonsense is this?’

’It is the Socratic method, as recorded by Plato. I learned something of it when I was a student at Padua. Now, you have told me that the young man feels love for the young woman, and you appear to be right; but what do you think he hopes to get from her in return, love or dislike?’

‘Her love, no doubt.’

’You answer well, my friend. Now tell me this also. Will he get her love without the consent of her husband, or with it?’

’Without, if he gets it at all! I am tired of this fooling. It bores me excessively.’

‘You will not be bored long,’ answered Trombin with confidence. ’Answer me one question more. Do you suppose that the young man will have any success with the Lady Ortensia, unless he can separate her from Stradella by some stratagem?’

Gambardella looked sharply at his wordy companion.

‘I begin to take your meaning,’ he said.

‘You have a good mind,’ Trombin answered, ’but it works slowly. You are on the verge of guessing what my inspiration is. Let us, for a large consideration, be the means of carrying off the Lady Ortensia for this rich young man, and when we have done so and received his money, let us execute the plan we have already made. For it will be easy for us to persuade her to do anything we suggest, because both she and her husband are under the greatest obligations to us, whereas the young man would have to employ violence and make a great scandal. But here comes that excellent Tommaso.’

‘You are certainly a great man,’ said Gambardella, looking at Trombin with admiration.

It was clear from Tommaso’s face that the intelligence he brought was important, and as he stood hat in hand before his masters he looked up and down the colonnade to see if there were any one in sight and near enough to listen.

‘The gentleman is Don Alberto Altieri,’ he said, almost in a whisper.

Trombin at once puffed out his pink cheeks, pursed his lips, and whistled very softly, for he was much surprised; but Gambardella seemed quite unmoved, and merely nodded to Tommaso as if well satisfied with the latter’s service. Then the two strolled on again, and their cut-throat servant followed them, just out of hearing of their conversation, as before; for he was much too wise to try any common trick of eavesdropping on a pair of men who would just as soon wring his neck and throw him into a well as look at him. His highest ambition really was to be promoted to help them in one of those outrageous deeds that had made them the most famous Bravi of the whole century, who had received pardons from popes and kings, from the Emperor Leopold, and from the Venetian Republic itself, under which passports they travelled and lived where they pleased, still untouched by the law.

‘This is a delicate business,’ observed Gambardella, for both had heard the gossip about Don Alberto and Queen Christina.

‘It will be the more amusing,’ answered Trombin. ’When I reflect upon the primitive simplicity of the business we undertook for Pignaver, and compare it with the plan we have now conceived and shall certainly execute in a few days, I cannot but congratulate myself on the fertility of my imagination, or, as I might say, upon the resemblance between my mind and that of the novelist Boccaccio. But I feel the superiority of my lot over his in the fact that I am generally the chief actor in my own stories.’

‘The Queen will be useful,’ said Gambardella.

‘Bless her for an admirably amusing woman!’ cried Trombin fervently. ‘She has the mane of the lion and the heart of the hare!’

‘The mane happens to be a wig, my friend,’ sneered the other.

‘In more senses than one,’ retorted Trombin, ’but the hare’s heart is genuine. She was afraid of poor Monaldeschi. You knew it, I knew it, and Luigi Santinelli knew it. She ordered us to kill him because she believed he was selling her secrets to the Spanish, and was going to poison her in their interests. She is always fancying that some one wants to poison her. Oh, yes, my friend, a most diverting character, for she thinks of nothing but herself, and her Self is a selfish, hysterical, cruel, cowardly woman!’

‘I detest her for that business at Fontainebleau,’ answered Gambardella.

’Precisely. So do I, though she amuses me. To strangle a superfluous woman is sometimes unavoidable, and there are occasions when it is wisdom to stab an unnecessary male in the back. But to put an unarmed gentleman to the wall, so to say, in broad daylight and deliberately skewer him, being three to one as we were that day, is a thing I shall decline to do again for all the gold in India, Mexico, and Brazil!’

‘Unless it be paid in cash,’ suggested Gambardella.

‘Cash,’ answered Trombin enigmatically, ’is one of the forces of nature.’