Then in a moment she had crept away, and stolen toward where Beatrix, who had also left the saddle, stood, while, seizing her arm she whispered, "Follow me. Now is the time."
"To him?"
"Yes," Zara said--"yes, to him. To him you love. You do love him, do you not?"
"Ah, yes! Ah, yes! Oh, save him! Save him!"
"Come," said Zara--and Beatrix thought that as the other spoke now, her voice had changed. As, indeed it had. For (still thinking that the English girl could have but one man in her thoughts, and he the one whom she herself loved and hated alternately--the latter passion being testified by the manner in which she had, in a moment of impulse, given him the physic-nut oil and the poisoned mullet) her blood had coursed like wildfire through her veins at hearing Beatrix's avowal, and her voice had become choked. For Beatrix had forgotten in the excitement of the last few hours to undeceive the girl; had forgotten, indeed, the cross-purposes at which they had been that morning in the garden at "Floresta;" and thus Zara still deemed that they were rivals--deemed, too, that this white-faced rival was the favoured one.
"She loves him," she muttered to herself, her heart and brain racked with torture and with passion; "she loves him. She loves him. And he loves her! But--she shall never have him, nor he her. Come," she cried again, savagely this time. "Come, then, and see him. And--love him. It will not be for long," she added to herself.
Whereupon she drew Beatrix away toward the back of the house, going around by the farthest side of it, and on, until, at last, they stood at the foot of the stairs outside that gave access to the floor above, on that farthest side. Here, they were quite remote from the parley that was going on between those who were in the front and the dark shrouded figure on the veranda above; yet Beatrix noticed that, still, they were not alone. For, as they approached those outside stairs she saw three or four dark forms vanish away from them, and steal farther into the obscurity of the night.
"Who are those?" she asked timorously, nervously, as she watched their retreating figures.
"Men," said Zara, "who to-night will take the Englishman, tied and bound, out to the sea in Sebastian's boat, and sink him."
"Oh, my God!" wailed Beatrix, nearly fainting. "Oh! Oh!"