“I will not excuse my own deeds; perhaps I cannot. We Italians are in a hurricane; I cannot reflect. It may be that I do not act more thinkingly than a wild beast.”
“You have spoken it,” Anna exclaimed.
“Countess Lena, he fights in your ranks as a common soldier. He encounters more than a common soldier's risks.”
“The man is brave,—we knew that,” said Anna.
“He is more than brave, he is devoted. He fights against us, without hope of reward from you. Have I utterly ruined him?”
“I imagine that you may regard it as a fact that you have utterly ruined him,” said Anna, moving to break up the parting interview. Lena turned to follow her.
“Ladies, if it is I who have hardened your hearts, I am more guilty than I thought.” Vittoria said no more. She knew that she had been speaking badly, or ineffectually, by a haunting flatness of sound, as of an unstrung instrument, in her ears: she was herself unstrung and dispirited, while the recollection of Anna's voice was like a sombre conquering monotony on a low chord, with which she felt insufficient to compete.
Leone was waiting in the carriage to drive to the ferry across the Adige. There was news in Roveredo of the king's advance upon Rivoli; and Leone sat trying to lift and straighten out his wounded arm, with grimaces of laughter at the pain of the effort, which resolutely refused to acknowledge him to be an able combatant. At the carriage-door Wilfrid bowed once over Vittoria's hand.
“You see that,” Anna remarked to her sister.
“I should have despised him if he had acted indifference,” replied Lena.