“You have made your choice,” I cried; “it is all said. Only think,
monsieur, think sometimes of what you have lost, before you talk of
the battle being won!”
I hurried from the room, even as my false friend called to me again in
agony, “Diana! Believe me! Listen to me! O, what shall I do?” But,
even in my frenzy, I had the wit to pause the other side of the door,
listening for his response.
“Thou shalt go back to Rome, my dearest, my heart,” he said. “Hearken
to me, my Pattia.”
But she only sobbed dreadfully, “Not like this--not in this disgrace.
I must follow her, even if she kills me.”
“By my soul, no,” he said; “for your life is mine.”
I could hear them wrestling together; till, in a moment, he prevailed,
even before I had guessed he would.
“Hush, my bird,” he panted softly; “there is one other way--if it must
be so indeed.”
There followed a pause. I could have laughed in the mad joy of my
revenge. He was an upstart, this patriot; a son of the people. He
would commit her to his own--wive her, I most fervently prayed--and
deposit his jewel, this little pet of luxury, in the squalid cabin at
Camaldoli where he was born. He had often told me of it; of his early
experiences of the joys of life in a place where the peasant could not
fasten his coat against cold, or take refuge from the sun under a
tree, or borrow a stone from the hill for his paths, or renew his
starved patch with manure of leaves, or set a water-butt to catch the
showers, or be buried decently when he dropped at the plough-tail and
died, because buttons, and the shade of trees, and stones, and dead
leaves, and rain-water, and a dead peasant were all taxed alike--items
in a hundred other feudal impositions which left existence hardly its
own shadow to prevail by. And now these joys would be hers; for I knew
that she had not the strength to oppose him, though enough to damn her
own fool fortune by insisting on the Church’s sanction to her
possession of an estate of mud and wattles. I listened eagerly for the
next.
“If thou wilt be my mother’s daughter?” he said.
I could have clapped my hands. I hurried down the passage and out into
the night, fierce, burning, but with an exultation in my rage. The
sight of men risen, scared and listening, as I passed through the
wineshop, served to recall me to myself and to my danger. I was
outcast from these conspirators--if only they had known!