“The circumstances are scarcely as propitious--to me. Your Highness, though, seems in excellent goodhumour.”
Gian Maria looked at him angrily a moment. He was a slow-witted man, and he could devise no ready answer, no such cutting gibe as it would have pleasured him to administer. He walked leisurely to the fire-place, and leant his elbow on the overmantel.
“Your humour led you into saying some things for which I should be merciful if I had you whipped.”
“And, by the same reasoning, charitable if you had me hanged,” returned the fool dryly, a pale smile on his lips.
“Ah! You acknowledge it?” cried Gian Maria, never seeing the irony intended. “But I am a very clement prince, fool.”
“Proverbially clement,” the jester protested, but he did not succeed this time in excluding the sarcasm from his voice.
“Are you mocking me, animal? Keep your venomous tongue in bounds, or I'll have you deprived of it.”
Peppe's face turned grey at the threat, as well it might--for what should such a one as he do in the world without a tongue?
Seeing him dumb and stricken, the Duke continued:
“Now, for all that you deserve a hanging for your insolence, I am willing that you should come by no hurt so that you answer truthfully such questions as I have for you.”
Peppino's grotesque figure was doubled in a bow.
“I await your questions, glorious lord,” he answered.
“You spoke----” the Duke hesitated a moment, writhing inwardly at the memory of the exact words in which the fool had spoken. “You spoke this morning of one whom the Lady Valentina had met.”
The fear seemed to increase on the jester's face. “Yes,” he answered, in a choking voice.
“Where did she meet this knight you spoke of, and in such wondrous words of praise described to me?”
“In the woods at Acquasparta, where the river Metauro is no better than a brook. Some two leagues this side of Sant' Angelo.”
“Sant' Angelo!” echoed Gian Maria, starting at the very mention of the place where the late conspiracy against him had been hatched. “And when was this?”
“On the Wednesday before Easter, as Monna Valentina was journeying from Santa Sofia to Urbino.”
No word spake the Duke in answer. He stood still, his head bowed, and his thoughts running again on that conspiracy. The mountain fight in which Masuccio had been killed had taken place on the Tuesday night, and the conviction--scant though the evidence might be--grew upon him that this man was one of the conspirators who had escaped.