“Is everything poisonous that comes from my hands? If you had spent a
little of it on food and clothes, my obligation to you would not have
been the less.”
“I thought you sent it to me to pay your debts.”
“What debts?”
Again that grim silence. I feared him more than I can tell; feared him
so much that no thought of the conquering guile by which I had once
been wont to sway him occurred to me to use. I shivered, and drew my
cloak faster about me, and hurried by his side without another word.
Whither was he bent? By the roaring quays, it seemed, towards the dark
prison from which, only a few hours earlier, she had gone to her
self-elected doom.
“Not there!” I sobbed, struggling--“not there! What good can it do
now?”
But he turned, short of reaching it, to his left, into a street
leading to the great square adjoining, where the gallows was erected;
and here, under the shadow of the fortress, stood a church with a
lofty tower. Stopping at a door which opened into the base of this
last, he tapped three times; and in a moment it yawned, and engulfed
us, and the tumult of the living town was become in our ears like the
murmur of the sea in a dead cavern.
Our guide, taper in hand, went on before us. The sound of our
footsteps reeled and laughed behind, echoing up to unknown altitudes.
Ward of that little star of radiance, I had no terror so great as that
of its flashing away and committing me to the shadows that seemed
always dancing and clutching for me outside its circumference. And
then suddenly we were come to a narrow iron gate set in the stone, and
to the cowled, motionless figure of a monk who stood thereby.
Without a word uttered by this spectre, the folds of its robe
contracted, and a long white hand was thrust forth palm upwards. Gogo
put a purse into it.
“Bear witness, Diana,” he said, in a low voice, that boomed and
clanged among the stones, “that I deliver the account of my
stewardship to the last penny.”
I was sobbing dreadfully, moved by some terror that had in it,
nevertheless, no thought of evil intended by him to myself.
“You will take nothing from me?” I gasped.
He addressed the monk.
“It is enough?”
The cowled head bent.
“Then let us through, father, and alone.”
The grate clanked. He gripped my arm, and, seizing the taper from the
sacristan, led me down a long flight of steps, through a low doorway,
into a crypt. And there, on the damp ground, full in our view, was
something lying, and a sheet over.
“No, no!” I screamed. “You have tortured me enough already!”
Never releasing my arm, he set the taper in a crevice, and dragged me
to the dreadful bed.
“What!” he said, “are you afraid to look on your work?”
And, pinning me forcibly, he bent and drew the cloth away. And side by
side with the other, I saw the dead face of Pissani.
Without a word, I sank down where I stood, and he fell back from me.
“O, woman!” he cried, in a terrible voice, “that you could talk of
your pride, with this lying at your heart!”
He clasped his hands, and unclasped them, and struck his forehead, and
again writhed them together, as if his grief baffled him from speech.
Dragging my body towards him, I huddled cowering at his feet.
“What!” he cried; “no word? no word?”