“I saw whose hand struck the blow.” She spoke with deadly quietness. “I have seen him more than once under this roof. But whose was the brain? Who furnished him this weapon? It was gone from the arras the day after you brought him to the casa to be your sicario—to do what you dared not do yourself! Fool!” Her voice rose. “Do you think a peer of England common clay for your clean-handed bravos? Are English nobles stabbed abroad without an accounting to the last soldo? Do you suppose no Romagnan noble ever went to the fortress with confiscate estates? Is your reputation so clean that if he dies you think to escape what I shall say?”
A greenish hue had overspread the fiery sallow of the old count’s face, ghastly under the candles. She had touched two vulnerable points at once—cupidity and fear. Something, too, in what she said brought a swift unwelcome memory. He recalled another—a poet, also—Manzoni, the Italian, dead by a hired assassin in Forli years before; in the night sometimes still that man’s accusing look came before him. Beads of sweat started on his forehead.
“Cheeks of the Virgin!” cried Count Gamba, who had maintained a rigid silence. “Have you no word to this?”
“He was her lover! She knew where to find him to-day. It is not the first time. He was her lover before I married her.”
The other’s hands clenched. Teresa’s accusation had astonished and shocked him. But as he saw that cowering look, speaking its own condemnation, he credited for the first time the story of that other slain man. At this affront, his gaunt, feeble form straightened with all the dignity and pride of his race.
Teresa’s answer rang with a subtle, electric energy. “That is false! You never asked—you only accused. Believing all falsehood of me, you have made every day of my life in your house a separate purgatory. I have kept silent thus long, even to my father. Now I speak before him. Father,” she said with sudden passion, “he has believed this since my wedding day. There is scarcely an hour since then that he has not heaped insult and humiliation upon me. I will bear it no longer! I have already appealed to the Curia.”
Her eyes transfixed her husband. “By the law I may not leave your roof to nurse this man, so I have brought him here. What you have believed of myself and of him is false. But now, if you will hear the truth, I will tell you! I do love him! I love him as I love my life—and more, the blessed Virgin knows!—a million times more!”
As she spoke her passion made her beauty extraordinary. It smote her father with appealing force and with a pang at his own ambitious part in her wedding. He had thought of rank and station, not of her happiness.
“You shall answer to me, Count, for this!” he said sternly.
“No, father!”