He watched the woman turning and running like a mad creature along the dark, delusive paths, like something condemned to vain torture, to some useless but eternal fatigue, like a sister of the fabulous martyrs.
"Stop!"
It seemed that she did not hear him, or that she could not control her fatal agitation, and that he could not rescue her, but must always remain there, a witness of that terrible chastisement.
"Here he is!"
One of the keepers had heard their cries, had approached them, and now entered by the gateway. Stelio met him at the foot of the tower, and together they hastened to find the lost woman. The man knew the secret of the labyrinth, and Stelio prevented any chatter and jests by surprising him with his generosity.
"Has she lost consciousness—has she fallen?" The darkness and the silence were sinister, and he felt alarmed. She did not answer when he called her, and he could not hear her footsteps. Night had already fallen on the place, and a damp veil was descending from the purple sky.
"Shall I find her in a swoon upon the ground," he thought.
He started at seeing a mysterious figure appear at a turning, with a pale face that attracted all the last rays of daylight, white as a pearl, with large, fixed eyes, and lips closely compressed.
They turned back toward the Dolo, taking the same route beside the Brenta. She never spoke, never opened her lips, never answered, as if she could not unclose her teeth. She lay in the bottom of the carriage, wrapped in her cloak, and now and then she shook with a deep shudder, as one attacked by malarial fever. Her friend tried to take her hands in his to warm them, but in vain—they were inert and lifeless. And as they drove along, the statues passed and passed beside them.
The river flowed black between its banks, under the purple and silver sky; the moon was rising. A black boat came down the stream, towed by two gray horses with heavy hoofs, led by a man who whistled cheerfully, and the funnel smoked on the deck like a chimney on a hut. The yellow light of a lantern flashed, and the odor of supper floated on the air; and here and there, as they drove along, the statues passed and passed beside them.