“Me, madam, whose only sin towards you, as you should know by now, is to have loved you too well? Rose! Rose! have you not blighted my life for me—broken my heart? And how have I repaid you? How but by sacrificing myself to seek you over land and sea, that I might complete your conversion to the bosom of that Church where a Virgin Mother stands stretching forth soft arms to embrace her wandering daughter, and cries to you all day long, 'Come unto me, ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest!' And this is my reward!”
“Depart with your Virgin Mother, sir, and tempt me no more! You have asked me what I dare; and I dare this, upon my own ground, and in my own garden, I, Donna Rosa de Soto, to bid you leave this place now and forever, after having insulted me by talking of your love, and tempted me to give up that faith which my husband promised me he would respect and protect. Go, sir!”
The brothers listened breathless with surprise as much as with rage. Love and conscience, and perhaps, too, the pride of her lofty alliance, had converted the once gentle and dreamy Rose into a very Roxana; but it was only the impulse of a moment. The words had hardly passed her lips, when, terrified at what she had said, she burst into a fresh flood of tears; while Eustace answered calmly:
“I go, madam: but how know you that I may not have orders, and that, after your last strange speech, my conscience may compel me to obey those orders, to take you with me?”
“Me? with you?”
“My heart has bled for you, madam, for many a year. It longs now that it had bled itself to death, and never known the last worst agony of telling you—”
And drawing close to her he whispered in her ear—what, the brothers heard not—but her answer was a shriek which rang through the woods, and sent the night-birds fluttering up from every bough above their heads.
“By Heaven!” said Amyas, “I can stand this no longer. Cut that devil's throat I must—”
“She is lost if his dead body is found by her.”
“We are lost if we stay here, then,” said Amyas; “for those negroes will hurry down at her cry, and then found we must be.”