She was in the act of putting it to her lips, when he interposed, somewhat hurriedly, and with a voice not so steady as usual—
“One moment!” he exclaimed, taking it from her hand, and setting it down again in its place, “we have not made our terms yet; the treaty must be signed and sealed; a libation must be poured to the gods. It is a strong rough wine, that Falernian: I have some Coan here you would like better. You see I have not forgotten your tastes.”
He laughed nervously, and his lip twitched; she knew now that it was the right-hand goblet which held the poison. Both were equally full, and they stood close together on the salver.
“And this man could not slay me after all,” was the thought that for a moment softened her heart, and bade her acknowledge some shadow of compunction for her admirer. Bad as he was, she could not help reflecting that to her influence he owed the only real feeling his life had ever known, and it made her waver, but not for long. Soon the image of Esca, chained and prostrate, passed before her, and the remembrance of her odious bargain goaded her into the bitterest hatred once more.
She placed her hand in the tribune’s with the abandonment of a woman who really loves, she turned her eyes on his with the swimming glance of which she had not miscalculated the power.
“Forgive me,” she murmured. “I have never valued you, never known you till now. I was heartless, unfeeling, mad; but I have learned a lesson to-day that neither of us will ever forget. No, we will never quarrel again!”
He clasped her in his arms, he took her to his heart, his brain reeled, his senses failed him, that bewitching beauty seemed to pervade his being, to surround him with its fragrance like some intoxicating vapour; and whilst his frame thrilled, and his lips murmured out broken words of fondness, the white hand thrown so confidingly across his shoulder had shifted the position of the goblets, and the heart that beat so wildly against his own had doomed him remorselessly to die.
She extricated herself from his embrace, she put her hair back from her brow; love is blind, indeed, or it must have struck him that instead of blushing with conscious fondness, her cheek was as white and cold as marble, though she kept her eyes cast down as if they dared not meet his own.
“Pledge me,” said she, in a tone of the utmost softness, and forcing a playful smile that remained, carved as it were, in fixed lines round her mouth; “drink to me in token of [pg 193]forgiveness; it will be the sweetest draught I have ever tasted when your lips have kissed the cup.”
He reached his hand out gaily to the salver. Her heart stood still in the agony of her suspense, lest he should mark the change she had made so warily; but the goblets were exactly alike, and he seized the nearest without hesitation, and half-emptied it ere he set it down. Laughing, he was in the act of handing to her what remained, when his eye grew dull, his jaw dropped, and, stammering some broken syllables, he sank back senseless upon the couch.