’What! false? You’ll stick to it?’ ’How can I help?—O! dread my lord, how can I help the truth, unless you ’d wrench from me a travesty of it?’ His breast heaved and sobbed. The tyrant gloomed upon him. ’Is it true, then, he’s a traitor?’ ’O, the blackest—the most subtle! There can I utter without prompting.’ It was true that he believed he could. Remember how, mongrel though he was, his mind had been fed on slander of our saint. Galeazzo dropped into a moody reverie. A long quivering sigh thereat broke from his prostrate victim. Mean wits are cunning for themselves; and, looking up into the dark eyes bent above him, Tassino thought he saw reflected there a first faint ghost of hope. O, to hold, to materialise it! He must be infinitely cautious. He moaned, and wagged his head. The Duke broke out again:— ’False! is he false to me? And yet my wife is true, thou sayest? and yet this woman of Caprona’s jealous, thou sayest? Of whom?—O, dog, beware!’ ’Master, of a shadow. She reads the woman’s baseness in the man’s.’ ’Ho! Not like thou: what, puppy?’ ’Before God, no. ’Tis Madonna’s very innocence helps his designs.’ ’How?’ ’By trusting in, and exalting them for heaven’s. She’ll wake when it’s too late, and weep and curse herself for having betrayed thee.’ ’She will? Betray? Too late? These be terms meeter to a rebellion than a schism.’ ’Yet must I speak them, weeping, though I die.’ The despot gnawed his lip. ’Hast venom in thee, and with reason, to sting the boy?’ ’Alas! to warn thee rather from his fang.’ ’Ha!’ ’It will lie flat against his palate, till the time when with his subtle eyes he shall invite thy hand to stroke his head. No rebellion, lord; no python rearing on his crushing folds. Yet may the little snake be deadlier.’ He was gathering confidence hair by hair. There were glints of coming tempest, well known to him, blooding the corners of Galeazzo’s eyes. He believed, by them, that he should presently ride this storm of his own evoking. ’Ah!’ he moaned, ’I’m sick. Mercy, lord! Truth ’s not itself unless upright.’ The tyrant tossed his hand:— ’Set the dog on his legs.’ The dog so far justified his title that, being released, he crawled abject on all fours to his master’s feet, and crouched there ready to lick them. ’Bah!’ cried the Duke, and spurned him. ’Get on thy hind legs, ape! The rope’s but slackened from thy hanging; the noose yet cuddles to thy neck. Stand’st there to justify thyself, or answer with a separate rack and screw for every lie thou ’st uttered.’ He strode a pace or two like one demented; turned, snarled out a sudden shocking laugh, and came close up again to the trembling, but still confident wretch.