“You knew the truth.”
“What if I did! Do you bear in mind how for years we have made a fortune out of its suppression?”
“I know how you have, dog.”
“I have kept you in comforts, Priestess—at least, I think, in comforts. No more of those, if our parts were once confessed; but straw and chains and rods, and a stone bed in Penitenza. The oracle would fall with the priest. What will you do when you have killed me?”
“Go to her up there, and tear the truth out of her throat, or end her too. He sha’n’t die unavenged—my God! do you hear me?”
“Melodrama, melodrama! Well, if you prefer it to the prose of commonsense! But for that, he might be saved yet.”
He heard how her breath caught at the word; and his own found relief in a little silent snigger.
“The truth?” he said. “She’d not yield it, to save a sinner at her saint’s expense, though you dragged out her tongue with pincers—I know the stubborn fool. But, grant she were to—what benefit to you, when they hanged you for my murder?”
“My neck for his.”
“Melodrama, I say. I say there’s a better way for you. Why, look you, I might have warned him, let him forestall his enemies, escape to France; and so, a condemned outcast, he had been lost to you for ever. Now you can save him—go with him, if you will, and win back his old passion out of his new gratitude.”