Unorna made as though she would pass him. But he laid his hand upon her arm with a gesture that betrayed his anxiety for her safety. At his touch, her face changed for a moment and a faint blush dyed her cheek.
“You may well ask who I am,” said the Moravian, speaking in a voice half-choked with passion and anger. “She will tell you she does not know me—she will deny my existence to my face. But she knows me very well. I am Israel Kafka.”
The Wanderer looked at him more curiously. He remembered what he had heard but a few hours earlier from Keyork concerning the young fellow’s madness. The situation now partially explained itself.
“I understand,” he said, looking at Unorna. “He seems to be dangerous. What shall I do with him?”
He asked the question as calmly as though it had referred to the disposal of an inanimate object, instead of to the taking into custody of a madman.
“Do with me?” cried Kafka, advancing suddenly a step forwards from between the slabs. “Do with me? Do you speak of me as though I were a dog—a dumb animal—but I will——”
He choked and coughed, and could not finish the sentence. There was a hectic flush in his cheek and his thin, graceful frame shook violently from head to foot. Unable to speak for the moment, he waved his hand in a menacing gesture. The Wanderer shook his head rather sadly.
“He seems very ill,” he said, in a tone of compassion.
But Unorna was pitiless. She knew what her companion could not know, namely, that Kafka must have followed them through the streets to the cemetery and must have overheard Unorna’s passionate appeal and must have seen and understood the means she was using to win the Wanderer’s love. Her anger was terrible. She had suffered enough secret shame already in stooping to the use of her arts in such a course. It had cost her one of the greatest struggles of her life, and her disappointment at the result had been proportionately bitter. In that alone she had endured almost as much pain as she could bear. But to find suddenly that her humiliation, her hot speech, her failure, the look which she knew had been on her face until the moment when the Wanderer awoke, that all this had been seen and heard by Israel Kafka was intolerable. Even Keyork’s unexpected appearance could not have so fired her wrath. Keyork might have laughed at her afterwards, but her failure would have been no triumph to him. Was not Keyork enlisted on her side, ready to help her at all times, by word or deed, in accordance with the terms of their agreement? But of all men Kafka, whom she had so wronged, was the one man who should have been ignorant of her defeat and miserable shame.
“Go!” she cried, with a gesture of command. Her eyes flashed and her extended hand trembled.