"TRAITORS DIE SLOWLY."
They had returned to the hotel, and Armytage had dined with her, but the
meal had been a very dismal one. Gemma, with woman's instinct, knew
that she looked horribly untidy, and that her eyes betrayed unmistakable
signs of recent tears, therefore she was glad when the meal concluded,
and she could escape from the staring crowd of diners.
From her lover's manner, it was also plain that, notwithstanding his
protestations of blind affection in Leghorn, he had suddenly awakened to
the fact that some deep mystery lay behind her, and that he was
disinclined to carry their acquaintance much further without some
explanation. Time after time, as she sat opposite him at the table, she
had watched him narrowly, looking into his dark, serious eyes in
silence, and trying to divine his thoughts. She wondered whether, if he
left her, his love for her would be sufficient to cause him to return to
her side. Or had he met, as she once feared he would, some other
woman--a woman of his own people; a woman, perhaps, that he had loved
long ago? This thought sank deeply into her mind. As she watched him
and listened to his low, jerky speech, it seemed plain to her that she
had guessed the truth. He had grown tired of her, and was making her
enforced silence an excuse for parting. When this thought crossed her
mind, her bright, clear eyes grew luminous with unshed tears.
He told her that to meet next morning was impossible, as he had business
to transact. This she knew to be a shallow excuse, as only that morning
he had told her that his time was completely at her disposal. Yes,
there was no disguising the truth that he had grown weary of her, and
now meant to discard her. Yet she loved him.
When an Italian woman loves, it is with a fierce, uncontrollable
passion, not with that too often sickly admiration for a man's good
looks which is so characteristic of love among the more northern
nations. In no country is love so ardent, so passionate, so enduring,
as in the sunny garden of Europe. The Italian woman is slow to develop
affection, or even to flirt with the sterner sex; but when she loves, it
is with all the strength of her being; she is the devoted slave of her
lover, and is his for life, for death. Neither the strength of Italian
affection nor the bitterness of Italian jealousy can be understood in
England, unless by those who have lived among the hot-blooded Tuscans in
that country where the sparkle of dark eyes electrify, and where the
knives are cheap, and do their work swiftly and well.
They passed out of the table d'hote room into the hall. Then he
stretched forth his hand.
"You are not coming to see me to-morrow, Nino?" she asked in a low,
despondent voice.
"No," he replied. "I have an appointment."
"But you can surely dine here?"
"I am not quite certain," he answered. "If I can, I will send you a
telegram."
"You are impatient--you who promised me to wait until I could give you
some satisfactory explanation. It is cruel of you--very cruel, Nino,"
she said in a voice scarcely above a whisper.
"You are never straightforward," he replied quickly. "If you confessed
to me, all this anxiety would at once cease."
"I cannot."
"No," he said meaningly; "you will not. You dare not, because your past
has not been what it should have been! Buona sera!" and with this
parting allegation he lifted his hat and bowed stiffly.
"Felicissima notte, Nino," she answered so low as to be almost
inaudible.
Then he turned and passed out of the great glass doors which the porters
held open for him.
Gemma went to her room, and, bursting into tears, sat for a long time
alone, despairing, plunged in grief. She knew by her lover's manner
that he had forsaken her, and she felt herself alone in gigantic London,
where the language, the people, the streets, all were strange to her.
As she sat in her low easy chair, a slim, graceful figure in her
pale-blue dinner-dress, she clenched her tiny hands till the nails
embedded themselves in the palms, as she uttered with wild abandon the
name of the man she so fondly loved.
"Ah!" she cried aloud. "You, Nino, who have treated me with this
suspicion and contempt--you who have brought me here among your people
and deserted me--can never know how much I have sacrificed for your
sake. Nor can you ever know how fondly I love you. Why have I acted
with all this secrecy must for ever remain a mystery. You have left
me," she added in a hoarse, strained voice, half inaudible on account of
her sobs--"you have left me now; but some day when I am free--when I can
show you things in their true light--you will regret that to-night you
have broken a woman's heart." And she bent forward and gave way to a
flood of hot, passionate tears.
Fully half an hour she sat plunged in a deep melancholy, but at last she
rose and crossed the room unsteadily. Her fair brow bore a look of
determination, her face was hard set, and in her tear-stained eyes was
an expression of strength of will.
"Yes," she murmured, "I'll risk all. My life cannot be rendered more
hopeless, more wretched, than it now is in this atmosphere of doubt and
suspicion." Then she bathed her face in eau-de-Cologne, sniffed her
smelling-salts, rubbed her cheeks with a towel to take away their
ghastly pallor, and assuming her travelling coat, with its wide fur
collar and cuffs, which, being long, hid her dress, she put on her hat
and went out.