a murder of expediency so much
as to a fierce, lustful butchery of vengeance. Surely it suggests that
Gandia may have been tortured before his throat was cut. Why else were
his wrists pinioned? Had he been swiftly done to death there would have
been no need for that. Had hired assassins done the work they would not
have stayed to pinion him, nor do we think they would have troubled to
fling him into the river; they would have slain and left him where he
fell.

The whole aspect of the case suggests the presence of the master, of the
personal enemy himself. We can conceive Gandia's wrists being tied, to
the end that this personal enemy might do his will upon the wretched
young man, dealing him one by one the ten or fourteen wounds in the body
before making an end of him by cutting his throat. We cannot explain
the pinioned wrists in any other way. Then the man on the handsome white
horse, the man whom the four others addressed as men address their lord.
Remember his gold spurs--a trifle, perhaps; but hired assassins do not
wear gold spurs, even though their bestriding handsome white horses may
be explainable.

Surely that was the master, the personal enemy himself--and it was not
Cesare, for Cesare at the time was at the Vatican.

There we must leave the mystery of the murder of the Duke of Gandia; but
we leave it convinced that, such scant evidence as there is, points to
an affair of sordid gallantry, and nowise implicates his brother Cesare.

CHAPTER V. THE RENUNCIATION OF THE PURPLE

At the Consistory of June 19, 1497 the Sacred College beheld a
broken-hearted old man who declared that he had done with the world, and
that henceforth life could offer him nothing that should endear it to
him.

"A greater sorrow than this could not be ours, for we loved him
exceedingly, and now we can hold neither the Papacy nor any other thing
as of concern. Had we seven Papacies, we would give them all to restore
the duke to life." So ran his bitter lament.

He denounced his course of life as not having been all that it should
have been, and appeared to see in the murder of his son a punishment
for the evil of his ways. Much has been made of this, and quite
unnecessarily. It has been taken eagerly as an admission of his
unparalleled guilt. An admission of guilt it undoubtedly was; but what
man is not guilty? and how many men--ay, and saints even--in the hour of
tribulation have cried out that they were being made to fee