"You journey to Naples," she said at last with a strange smile while she caught his wrist, her tense arm quivering, her eyes looking into his. "Do you not fear the contagion of that Court of Love?"
Her face seemed suddenly to blaze with intense passion, her eyes taking a reddish lustre and shining like points of fire.
"Hot blood and a cold ending," he said, looking past her, and she took her hand from his wrist and sat silent and stiff, her eyes fixed upon his face. Then she clapped her hands. An attendant conducted Francesco to a chamber which had been prepared for him, but as he passed out of her presence, he still felt the burning touch of her fingers and the strange look of her eyes.—
Sleep would not come readily to Francesco that night, as he lay on the couch prepared for him high up in the Red Tower. A full moon had risen and his wakeful mood shared the wonder and the mystery of the night. A dog bayed in the courtyard; the sound had but the effect of intensifying the stillness. The mere lay like a pavement of black marble, with no wavelets lapping against the base of the tower.
Francesco had lived through many strange moments, since he left Viterbo, and chance had thrown him with a singular suddenness into the life that he sought. Vividly in the midst of his wakefulness he saw the proud beauty of Ilaria as contrasted with the fierce pallor in the face of the lady of the castle, whose name he knew not. It seemed to Francesco that these two confronted one another with a mysterious hatred. And he was conscious of desires that had been awakened within him, the heat of the blood, the simmering of the brain. The woman was beautiful, lithe and limp as a snake and he felt, that once she had set her mind on gratifying a desire, resistance would be utterly in vain.
It was towards midnight when Francesco fell asleep, and his sleep had lasted for about an hour when he started awake in bed with a loud cry and a flinging out of the hands. He sat up with a shiver of fear, awakened from a dream in which torrents of black water had poured down to smother him. A wind had suddenly arisen far off in the valley. Francesco heard it sweeping out of the night, whistling through the aspens and the willows until it struck the tower and moaned about it, like a desperate and dying thing clinging to something that it loved. A cloud passed across the face of the moon. In the court below the watch-dogs set up a fierce howling.
Francesco crossed himself, feeling the presence of evil in the moaning of the wind. The night had sprung from moonbeams and slumber into a tumult of unrest. He heard the water splashing against the base of the tower.
The moon came out again and Francesco rose from the bed and went to the window. The mere was scarred with lines of foam and the aspen boughs glittered and clashed in the moonlight. Francesco, greatly astonished, saw the barge was crossing the water with long, sinuous strokes of the oar. In the barge there stood a figure on horseback, motionless and black as jet, save for a sparkle of moonlight about its head. On the far bank among the aspen trees, a company of horsemen waited, spears erect, helmets glimmering, the wind tossing the dark manes of their steeds.
The nose of the barge turned to the bank, and almost instantly the wind ceased, and a great calm fell. The night grew quiet. The watch-dogs turned into their kennels. The plash of the water against the tower grew less and less.
Francesco saw the black horseman ride up the bank and join those who waited. There was not a sound save the muffled beat of horses' hoofs, as they turned and rode away among the trunks of the aspen trees. The barge had thrust out again and was recrossing the mere, with wrinkles of silver running from its snout. Francesco watched it with a strange misgiving. Who was the man who had disappeared the instant he had entered the presence of the woman? Why were armed men coming and going at this hour of the night? Why should the wind rise so suddenly and die down again when the barge touched the further bank? Reality and dream mingled strangely in the deep of the night, and these happenings made him question his own eyes and ears.