Before she could frame an answer there was Gonzaga feverishly urging her to act upon so wise and timely a suggestion, and seek safety in flight from a place that Gian Maria would tear stone from stone. His words pattered quickly and piteously in entreaty, till in the end, facing him squarely:
“Are you afraid, Gonzaga?” she asked him.
“I am--afraid for you, Madonna,” he answered readily.
“Then let your fears have peace. For whether I stay or whether I go, one thing is certain: Gian Maria never shall set hands upon me.” She turned again to Francesco. “I see a certain wisdom in the counsel of flight you would have offered me, no less than in what I take to be your advice that I should remain. Did I but consult my humour I should stay and deliver battle when this tyrant shows himself. But prudence, too, must be consulted, and I will give the matter thought.” And now she thanked him with a generous charm for having come to her with this news and proffered his assistance, asking what motives brought him.
“Such motives as must ever impel a knight to serve a lady in distress,” said he, “and perhaps, too, the memory of the charity with which you tended my wounds that day at Acquasparta.”
For a second their glances met, quivered in the meeting, and fell apart again, an odd confusion in the breast of each, all of which Gonzaga, sunk in moody rumination, observed not. To lighten the awkward silence that was fallen, she asked him how it had transpired so soon that it was to Roccaleone she had fled.
“Do you not know?” he cried. “Has not Peppe told you?”
“I have had no speech with him. He but reached the castle, himself, late last night, and I first saw him this morning when he came to announce your presence.”
And then, before more could be said, there arose a din of shouting from without. The door was pushed suddenly open, and Peppe darted into the room.
“Your man, Ser Francesco,” he cried, his face white with excitement. “Come quickly, or they will kill him.”
The thing had begun with the lowering glances that Francesco had observed, and had grown to gibes and insults after he had disappeared. But Lanciotto had preserved an unruffled front, being a man schooled in the Count of Aquila's service to silence and a wondrous patience. This insensibility those hinds translated into cowardice, and emboldened by it--like the mongrels that they were--their offensiveness grew more direct and gradually more threatening. Lanciotto's patience was slowly oozing away, and indeed, it was no longer anything but the fear of provoking his master's anger that restrained him. At length one burly ruffian, who had bidden him remove his head-piece in the company of gentlemen, and whose request had been by Lanciotto as disregarded as the rest, advanced menacingly towards him and caught him by the leg, as Ercole had caught his master. Exasperated at that, Lanciotto had swung his leg free, and caught the rash fellow a vicious kick in the face that had felled him, stunned and bleeding.