If I
could climb down to the garden, and then perhaps up again to my own
chamber, I might get me to bed, what time Fifanti still hammered at that
door. Meanwhile his voice came rasping through those slender timbers, as
he mocked the Lord Cardinal he supposed me.
"You would not be warned, my lord, and yet I warned you enough. You would
plant horns upon my head. Well, well! Do not complain if you are gored by
them."
Then he laughed hideously. "This poor Astorre Fifanti is blind and a fool.
He is to be sent packing on a journey to the Duke, devised to suit my Lord
Cardinal's convenience. But you should have bethought you that suspicious
husbands have a trick of pretending to depart whilst they remain."
Next his voice swelled up again in passion, and again the door was shaken.
"Will you open, then, or must I break down the door! There is no barrier
in the world shall keep me from you, there is no power can save you. I
have the right to kill you by every law of God and man. Shall I forgo that
right?" He laughed snarlingly.
"Three hundred ducats yearly to recompense the hospitality I have given
you--and six hundred later upon the coming of the Duke!" he mocked. "That
was the price, my lord, of my hospitality--which was to include my wife's
harlotry.
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