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WITH banners limp in the breathless noontide August heat, the long line of blockading galleys rode drowsily at anchor, just out of gunshot from the shore, at a point where the water, smooth as an enamelled sheet, changed from emerald to sapphire.

From this station Andrea Doria commanded the gulf, from the rugged promontory of Portofino in the east to the distant Cape Melle in the west, and barred the sea approaches to Genoa the Superb, which rose, terrace upon terrace, in glittering marble splendour within the embrace of her encircling hills.

In the rear of his long line were stationed, as became an ancillary squadron, the seven red Pontifical galleys. Richly carved and gilded at stem and stern, they displayed at their mastheads the Papal vexilla: on one the keys of Saint Peter, on the other the besants of the Medici, the House from which His Holiness was sprung. From each red flank the thirty massive oars, thirty-six feet in length, were inclined astern and slightly upwards, presenting, thus at rest, the appearance of a gigantic, half-closed fan.

In the tabernacle—as the poop cabin was termed—of the rearmost galley, a sybaritic chamber, hung and carpeted with the glowing silks of Eastern looms, sat the Papal Captain, that Prospero Adorno who was at once a man of dreams and a man of action, a soldier, and a poet. Other poets have acknowledged him a great soldier, and other soldiers have acknowledged him a great poet. Both state the truth, and only jealousy makes them state it in this wise.

As a poet he lives on and sings to you from The Liguriad, that immortal epic of the sea, whose subject is proclaimed by its opening lines:

Io canto i prodi del liguro lido,

Le armi loro e la lor’ virtù.

As a soldier let it be said at once that he achieved a celebrity never approached by the military deeds of any other poet. Just thirty years of age at the time of this blockade of Genoa, he was already famous as a naval condottiero. Four years ago in an action off Goialatta his skill and intrepidity had saved the great Andrea Doria from disaster at the hands of Dragut-Reis, the Anatolian who for his deeds had come to be known as The Drawn Sword of Islam.

Acclaimed as having plucked a Christian victory from an imminent defeat, his fame had swept like a mistral across the Mediterranean, and it resulted naturally that when, later, Doria passed into the service of the King of France, it was Prospero Adorno who succeeded him as Captain-General of the Pontifical Navy.

Now that His Holiness had entered into alliance with France and Venice against the Emperor, whose troops had scandalized the world by the sack of Rome in May of that year 1527, Andrea Doria, as the Admiral of the King of France and the foremost seaman of his day, was in supreme command of the allied navies; and thus Prospero Adorno found himself once more serving under Doria’s orders. Apparently it placed him in the invidious position of bearing arms against a republic of which his own father was the Doge. Actually, however, since the campaign had for object to break the Imperial yoke under which Genoa groaned, the blockade to which he brought his galleys sought to restore his native land to independence and change his father’s status from that of a puppet-doge at the orders of an Imperial governor to that of an authoritative prince.

From where he now sat, just within the arched entrance of the tabernacle, his calm eyes, so dreamy and slow-moving that they appeared never to see anything, commanded the entire length of the vessel to its rambade, the raised bastion or forecastle in the prow, a hundred and twenty feet ahead of him. Along the narrow gang-deck between the rowers’ benches two slave-wardens slowly paced, and under the arm of each was tucked his whip with the long lash of bullock-hide. On either side of this deck, and below the level of it, the idle slaves drowsed in their chains. There were five men to each oar, three hundred in all; unfortunates of many a race and creed: dusky, sullen Moors and Arabs, tough, enduring Turks, melancholy negroes from the Sus, and even some alien Christians, all rendered kin by misery. From where he sat the Captain could see only their shorn heads and naked, weathered shoulders. Groups of soldiers paced or lounged in the deadworks of the galley, the galleries projecting over the water from the vessel’s sides throughout her length; others squatted on the broad platform amidships, between the kitchen on one side and the heavy ordnance on the other, taking advantage of the shade cast by the sloop that was at rest there upon its blocks.

A sudden blare of trumpets snapped the thread of the Captain’s dreaming. An officer, ascending the companion, rose into view, and stood before the entrance of the cabin.

‘The Captain-General’s barge is coming alongside, Sir Captain.’

Prospero came instantly to his feet with an effortless resilience. It was in this athletic ease of movement, in the long limbs and the broad shoulders, from which he tapered down over lean flanks, that you perceived the man of action. The width of his brow made his shaven countenance look narrow. In the wide, wistful eyes of the visionary and the long, mobile mouth you would have sought in vain the soldier. It was a face that had inherited none of the beauty so arresting in the portrait of his high-spirited, foolish Florentine mother, that Aurelia Strozzi whom Titian painted. Only the bronze-coloured hair, and the vivid blue, though not the elongated shape, of her handsome eyes were repeated in her son. From the sombre richness of his dress, without ornament beyond the girdle of hammered gold slung diagonally over his hips to carry the heavy dagger, you might suppose that in matters of taste he had gone to school to that mirror of courtliness, Baldassare Castiglione.

He was waiting on the vestibule of the poop when the twelve-oared barge drew alongside, trailing a white standard, flecked with golden fleurs-de-lys. From her stern-sheets three men rose and came up the short ladder to the deck. Two of them were big men, but of these the foremost, standing well over two yards high, was almost a half-head taller than the next. The third, more lightly built, was not above middle height.

They were Andrea Doria and his nephews Gianettino and Filippino. Comeliness was no characteristic of the males of the House of Doria, but in the aspect of the stalwart sexagenarian, with his fierce, reddish eyebrows, his great promontory of a nose, and his long, fan-shaped, fulvid beard, there was something venerable, heightened by the stern, controlled dignity with which he hedged himself about. There was strength in the long jaw, intelligence in the lofty brow, from which the thin hair was receding, and craft in the narrow, deep-set eyes. He carried his sixty years with the active, erect virility of a man of forty.

Gianettino, who immediately followed him aboard, was massive and ungainly. His face was a woman’s, and without being ugly was repellent on that account. It was round and shaven, with a long, straight nose and a short chin. There was meanness in the beady eyes and petulance in the small mouth. In his endeavour to emulate the cold aloofness of his uncle he achieved no more than an aggressive arrogance. Men spoke and thought of him as Andrea Doria’s nephew. Actually he was the son of a distant cousin in poor circumstances, and he might have pursued his father’s trade as a silk-weaver had not his uncle, that childless nepotist, adopted and reared him, to pamper him with an indulgence that was destined ultimately to bring the upstart to an untimely end. In apparel he displayed the fundamental ostentation of his nature. His parti-coloured hose and parti-coloured sleeves, modishly puffed and slashed, made him a bewilderment to the eye, in black and white and yellow.

In age both nephews were approaching thirty. Both were black-haired, dark-complexioned men. Beyond this they presented no resemblance. Filippino, as restrained in his dress as Gianettino was flamboyant, displayed something of the same contrast in his person. Lithe and nimble, he moved with a quick, soft tread, stooping a little, where his cousin rolled and swaggered aggressively erect. Of the weakness in Gianettino’s countenance there was no sign in Filippino’s. A nose at once aquiline and fleshly overhung his short upper lip; his eyes, of the colour of mud, were prominent and low-lidded; the short black beard was of too feeble a growth to dissemble the narrowness of his jaw. He carried a bandaged right arm in a sling of black taffeta, and his manner was distempered and sullen.

Almost before they were well within the cabin, and without waiting, as deference dictated, for his uncle to speak, it was he who took the lead, his manner viperish.

‘Our faith in your father, Sir Prospero, cost us rather dear last night. Close upon four hundred men lost, some seventy of them killed outright. You’ll not yet have heard that our cousin Ettore has since died of the wounds he took. I have brought back this keepsake from Portofino.’ He pointed to his arm. ‘That I have brought back my life is no thanks to you.’

Without pause his cousin followed up the onslaught that was taking Prospero completely by surprise. ‘The fact is that our faith has been abused. A trap has been sprung on us. A cursed treachery for which we have to thank Doge Adorno.’

Prospero’s clear eyes looked frigidly from one to other of the ranting twain. There was a stateliness in his self-control. ‘Sirs, I understand your words as little as your manner. You’ll not imply that my father is responsible for the defeat of your rashly attempted landing?’

‘Rashly attempted!’ flared Filippino. ‘Lord God!’

‘I judge from what I was told last night. To have been so instantly and heavily repulsed scarcely argues a properly cautious approach. It was not to be supposed that the Spaniards would slumber at so vulnerable a point.’

‘Aye, if they had been Spaniards!’ bellowed Gianettino. ‘But Spaniards were not concerned.’

‘How, not concerned? Last night your tale was that Imperial troops had met your surprise party in overwhelming numbers.’

At last Andrea Doria intervened. His quiet voice, his gravely placid manner contrasted with the violence of his nephews. Displays of heat were rare in him. ‘We know better today, Prospero. We have some prisoners. They are not Spaniards, but Genoese. Of the militia. And we know now that it was led by the Doge himself.’

Prospero stared in blank surprise at each in turn. ‘My father led a Genoese force against you!’ He almost laughed. ‘That is not credible. My father knows our aims.’

‘Does it follow that he is in sympathy with them?’ asked Gianettino. ‘We have supposed——’

Warmly Prospero interrupted him. ‘To doubt it is to insult him.’

The Lord Andrea intervened again, conciliatory. ‘You’ll be patient with their heat,’ he begged. ‘The death of Ettore has deeply affected us. After all, we must remember—perhaps we should have remembered before—that Doge Adorno holds the ducal crown from the Emperor. He may fear that what came with the Emperor may go with the Emperor.’

‘Why should he? Without Genoese support he could not have been elected. With it he cannot be deposed. Sirs, your information must be as false as your assumptions.’

‘Our information leaves no doubt,’ Filippino answered him. ‘As for the assumptions, your father will know that Cesare Fregoso is in command of the French troops investing him by land. He will not have forgotten that a Fregoso was dispossessed by him of the dogeship. That may make him doubt his own position should the French prevail.’

Prospero shook his head. But before he could speak, Gianettino was adding stormily: ‘It’s these accursed factions that poison faith; this ages-old struggle of Adorni, Fregosi, Spinoli, Fieschi, and the rest. Each brawling for dominion in the State. For generations it has been the Republic’s nightmare. It has rotted the sinews of this Genoa that once was mightier than Venice. Bled white by your cursed strife she has fallen under the heel of foreign despots. We are here,’ he bellowed, ‘to make an end of native factions as well as foreign usurpation. We are in arms to restore to Genoa her independence. We are here to——’

Prospero’s patience gave out. ‘Sir, sir! Save the rest for the market-place. No need here for orations in the manner of Titus Livy. Why we are besetting Genoa I know. Otherwise I should not be with you.’

‘That,’ said the elder Doria, quietly authoritative, ‘should be assurance enough for your father even if he forgets that I am Genoese to the marrow of my spine, and that the good of my country must always be my only object.’

‘My letters,’ said Prospero, ‘assured him that we serve the coalition only so that we may the better serve Genoa. I wrote of the undertaking to you from the King of France, that Genoa shall be restored at last to independence. It must be,’ he concluded, ‘that my letters never reached him.’

‘That is a possibility I have considered,’ said the Lord Andrea.

His volcanic nephews would have argued upon it. But quietly he repressed them.

‘After all, it may be the explanation. The Milanese is full of de Leyva’s Spaniards, and your courier may have been captured. It but remains to write to him again, so that bloodshed may be saved and the gates of Genoa opened to us. The Doge should have enough native militia to overpower the Spaniards in the place.’

‘How shall I get the letter to him now, from here?’ asked Prospero.

The Lord Andrea sat down. He set one hand on his massive knee, and with the other thoughtfully stroked his length of beard. ‘You might send it openly, under a flag of truce.’

Prospero moved slowly about the cabin, pondering. ‘It might be intercepted again by the Spaniards,’ he said at last, ‘and this time it might be dangerous for my father.’

A shadow darkened the entrance of the tabernacle. Prospero’s lieutenant stood on the threshold.

‘Your pardon, Sir Captain. A fisherman of the gulf is alongside. He says he has letters for you, but will deliver them only into your own hands.’

There was a pause of surprise. Then Gianettino swung round hotly upon Prospero. ‘Do you correspond then with the city? And you ask——’

‘Patience!’ his uncle suppressed him. ‘What profit is there in assumptions?’

Prospero glanced at Gianettino without affection. ‘Bring in this messenger,’ he shortly ordered.

And no more was said until a bare-legged youngster had pattered up the companion to the officer’s beckoning, and was thrust into the tabernacle. The lad’s dark eyes shifted keenly from one to another of the four men before him. ‘Messer Prospero Adorno?’ he inquired.

Prospero stood forward. ‘I am he.’

The fisherman drew a sealed package from the breast of his shirt, and proffered it.

Prospero glanced at the superscription, and his fingers were scarcely steady when he broke the seal. Having read the contents with a darkening countenance, he looked up to find the eyes of the three Dorias watching him. He handed the letter in silence to the Lord Andrea. Then to his officer, indicating the fisherman, ‘Let him wait below,’ he said.

From the Lord Andrea came presently a sigh that was of relief. ‘At least this shows that your surmise was right, Prospero.’ He turned to his nephews. ‘And yours,’ he told them, ‘without justification.’

‘Let them read for themselves,’ said Prospero.

The Admiral handed the sheet to Gianettino.

‘It’s a warning to you both against rash assumptions,’ he gently chided his nephews. ‘I am glad to know that His Serenity’s action comes from a lack of understanding of our aims. Once you will have informed him, Prospero, by the means now supplied you, we may confidently hope that Genoa’s resistance will be at end.’

There was a silence whilst the nephews together read the letter.

‘From prisoners taken last night at Portofino,’ wrote Antoniotto Adorno, ‘I learn with consternation that you are in command of the Papal squadron of the fleet blockading us. But for assurances which make doubt impossible, I could not credit that you are in arms against your native land, much less that you should be in arms against your own father. Although no explanation seems possible, yet unless something has happened to change your whole nature, some explanation there must be. A fisherman of the gulf will take this to you, and will no doubt be allowed to reach you. He will bring me your answer if you have one, which I pray God you may have.’

Filippino looked darkly at his uncle. ‘I share your hope, sir, but not your confidence. To me the Doge’s tone is hostile.’

‘And to me,’ Gianettino agreed with him. He swung arrogantly to Prospero. ‘Make it plain to His Serenity that he can do himself no greater harm than by resisting us. In the end the might of France must prevail, and the Doge will be held responsible for any blood unnecessarily shed.’

Prospero looked squarely and calmly into that countenance, so weak of feature and yet so bold of expression. ‘If you have such messages for my father, you may send them in your own hand. But I should not advise it. For I never yet knew an Adorno who would yield to bullying. You might remember that also, Gianettino, when you speak to me. If anyone has told you that there are no limits to my patience, he has lied to you.’

It might have been the prelude to a very pretty quarrel if the Admiral had not been quick to smother any further provocation from his bristling nephews. ‘Faith, you’ve been too patient already, Prospero, as I shall make these malaperts understand.’ He rose. ‘No need to incommode you any longer, now that all is clear. We but delay the dispatch of your letter.’

And he drove out the arrogant pair before they could work further mischief.