but he interrupts with his old demand for the true word: she shall not say "a thing" . . . and at last that marvellous patience gives way, and in a superb flash of ironic rage she answers him—
"Then, Venus' body! had we come upon
My husband Luca Gaddi's murdered corpse
Within there, at his couch-foot, covered close"
—flinging him the "words" he has whimpered for in full measure, that so at last she may attain to asking if, that morning, he would have "pored upon it?" She knows he would not; then why pore upon it now? For him, it is here, as much as in the deserted house; it is everywhere.
". . . For me
(she goes on),
Now he is dead, I hate him worse: I hate . . .
Dare you stay here? I would go back and hold
His two dead hands, and say, 'I hate you worse,
Luca, than——'"
And in her frenzy of reminiscent hatred and loathing for the murdered man, she goes to Sebald and takes his hands, as if to feign that other taking.
With the hysteria that has all along been growing in him, Sebald flings her back—
". . . Take your hands off mine;
'Tis the hot evening—off! oh, morning, is it?"
—and she, restored to her cooler state by this repulse, and with a perhaps unconscious moving to some revenge for it, points out, with a profounder depth of callousness than she has yet displayed, that the body at the house will have to be taken away and buried—