In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 33

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XXXIII.

 

HEN the two who had hidden, without, returned with timidity and wonder to their resting-place, they found it empty. He was no longer there; he had left them his weapons. They stood a moment, silent, from the reaction of a horrible fear and an overwhelming sense of wonder, gratitude, and rejoicing.

Then the glance of Este lighted on the slender tools of death, and he took them up and examined them with tenderness and delight.

'He has left these for us!' he cried to her. 'Look! he must love you very much.'

'It is for Joconda's sake,' she answered him; her face was grey with a terror that she would never have felt for herself alone. The horror of the past hours clung to her as the spider's web clings to the hand that has touched it. A sense of cowardice and of something shameful was upon her; she could not have explained what she felt. It hurt her that all the courage, all the sacrifice of self, all the risk and peril, should have been allotted to Sanctis, not to her. It was a great debt that would for ever hang like a stone about her neck; she could never again be free to menace him, to brave him, to insult him if she chose, and drive him away with the scourge of her words.

'He has done us a very noble service,' said Este, as he still feasted his eyes on the pistols; 'and he has done us a still greater, yet, by leaving these. Now we need never be taken—alive. He is a generous man. You must think so?'

'No doubt he is generous,' she answered slowly; then with sudden violence she turned on Este.

'Will he stay here, think you, or go away?'

'How can I tell?'

'I think he will go, now that he has seen you.'

'You had told him nothing?'

'How could I tell him? He might have betrayed you.'

'No; he would never do that. I wish we knew whether he would go; he loves you———'

'I do not think so. Why should he? It is for Joconda's sake that he does these things. I hope he will go; now that he has saved us, I can say nothing to him that I used to say.'

'You have been harsh to him?'

'Yes; because he wearied me. He wanted me to go to his own land, to another life. I told you all that; it troubled me and I was harsh. The other day I told him I would kill him; I had my knife out against his heart, and I would have done it. Yes; he is generous, but I do not like such debt as this laid on me. One cannot breathe under it. When I see him again, what can I say? I shall never be free;—he has saved you; how can I pay him for that if I live a thousand years?'

'All the payment he would wish, you would not give; and if you would, I should not let you give it. Oh, my dear, you are very blind. Men love you———'

'I do not want that,' said Musa, with the sternness he so seldom saw in her. 'You do not understand; he has done this tonight because it was right to do it, because he is generous, as you say; the other day I would have killed him.'

'Because it is me that you love,' murmured Este, as his hand laid down the pistols and stole up about her throat.

She shook him off a little roughly.

'Yes, I love you,' she said, with an infinite meaning in the simple words, 'I love you. You are all I have, and I have saved you, and I would give my life for yours.'

'That is love. Yet you are so cold———'

'Cold? I? I think not; but do not touch me; it was so you touched the woman dead in Mantua. It angers me———'

She was about to say 'it frightens me,' but the strong courage inherent in her shrank from the acknowledgment of any fear. When he would have insisted, she still put him away from her with more sternness than he had ever seen.

'We have escaped with our lives tonight,' she said, with reproach and awe in her voice; 'think not of me; pray to God.'

Then she loosened his hand off her once more, and went to where the coffin of Joconda lay, and kneeled down there and murmured her thanksgiving.

He stood by the Lucumo's bier and did not venture to follow her.

Neither did he dare to put up any prayer.

 

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