But her terror for him broke out again. She had not told him all she knew, still less all she suspected.
'But I am in earnest!' she cried, holding herself back from him so that he could see her eyes. 'It is true earnest, deadly earnest. They mean to kill you—in the end, they will! Oh, tell me that you will not go!'
'San Giacinto has bought the place——'
'Let him go, and be killed, then, and perhaps they will be satisfied! What do I care for anyone but you? Is it nothing, that I love you so? That we have told each other? That you say you love me? Is it all nothing but words, mere words, empty words?'
'No, it is my whole life, dear——'
'Then your life is mine, and you have no right to throw it away, just to please your cousin. Let him get a regiment of soldiers sent there by the government to live in Santa Vittoria. Then after three or four years the brigands will be all gone.'
'Three or four years!' Orsino laughed, in spite of himself.
'Ah, you do not know!' exclaimed Vittoria, sadly. 'You do not know our country, nor our people. You think it is like Rome, all shopkeepers and policemen, and sixty noble families, with no mafia! You laugh now—but when they have killed you I shall not live to laugh again. Am I your life? Then you are mine. What will there be without you, when they have killed you? And the Winchester rifles shoot so far, and the outlaws aim so straight! How can you be saved? Do you think it is nothing that I should know that you are going to your death?'
'It is an exaggeration,' said Orsino, trying to soothe her. 'Such things are not done in a civilised country in the nineteenth century.'
'Such things? Ah, and worse, far worse! Last year they buried a man up to his neck in the earth, alive, and left him there to die, in the woods not far from Camaldoli, because they thought he was a spy! And one betrayed some of the band last summer, and they did not kill him at once, but caught him and tortured him, so that it took him three days to die. You do not know. You laugh, but you do not know what people there are in Sicily, nor what Sicilians will do when they are roused. Promise me that you will not go!'