‘Heavens, yes! It takes more than that knock to kill one of these peasants. He groaned when I carried him in. Here, let me give him some whisky.’
He raised the man’s head and pressed the flask to his lip. Tarquinio groaned again, and presently he opened his eyes. Sybert raised him to a sitting posture against the wall. For a moment his glance wandered about the room, uncomprehendingly, dully. Then, as it fixed upon Sybert, a wild, fierce light suddenly sprang into his eyes. ‘Traitor!’ he gasped out, and he struggled to his feet.
Again Marcia saw that quick look of pain shoot over Sybert’s face; he swallowed a couple of times before speaking, and when he did speak his voice was hard and cold.
‘Can you walk? Then climb over that railing and get away as fast as you can. The soldiers are here, and if they find you they will send you to the galleys—not that it would be any great loss,’ he added with a contemptuous laugh. ‘Italy has no need of such men as you.’
Something of the fierceness faded from the young fellow’s face, and he looked back with the pleading, child-like eyes of the Italian peasant. The two men watched each other a moment without speaking, then Tarquinio turned to the open door with a shrug of the shoulders—Young Italy’s philosophy of life.
They stood silently looking after him as he let himself down to the ground and unsteadily crossed the open space to the shadow of the grove. Sybert was the first to move. He turned aside with a tired sigh that was half a groan, and dropping into a chair, rested his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. All the wild buoyancy that had kept him through the evening had left him, and there was nothing in its place but a dull, unreasoning despair. For the last few weeks he had been glancing at the truth askance. To-night he was looking it full in the face. The people no longer trusted him; he could do no more good in Italy; his work was at an end. Why had they not killed him? That would have been the appropriate conclusion.
Marcia, watching his bowed figure, dimly divined what was going on within his mind. She hesitated a moment, and then with a quick impulse laid her arm about his neck. ‘There isn’t any one but you,’ she whispered.
He sat for a moment, motionless, and then he slowly raised his eyes to hers. ‘What do you mean, Marcia?’
‘And—you’re free to marry me?’