“We part not yet, lady,” said Fulvius, whose countenance had been growing every moment more flushed, as his lips had been becoming more deadly pale. He rudely grasped her arm, and pushed her back to her seat; “and beware,” he added, “how you attempt again either to escape or to bring aid; your first cry will be your last, cost me what it may.
“You have made me, then, an outcast, not only from society but from Rome, an exile, a houseless wanderer on a friendless earth; was not that enough to satisfy your vengeance? No: you must needs rob me of my gold, of my rightfully, though painfully earned wealth; peace, reputation, my means of subsistence, all you have stolen from me, a youthful stranger.”
“Wicked and insolent man!” exclaimed now the indignant Roman lady, reckless of consequences, “you shall answer heavily for your temerity. Dare you, in my own house, call me a thief?”
“I dare; and I tell you this is your day of reckoning, and not mine. I have earned, even if by crime, it is nothing to you, my full share of your cousin’s confiscated property. I have earned it hardly, by pangs and rendings of the heart and soul, by sleepless nights of struggles with fiends that have conquered; ay, and with one at home that is sterner than they; by days and days of restless search for evidence, amidst the desolation of a proud, but degraded spirit. Have I not a right to enjoy it?
“Ay, call it what you will, call it my blood-money; the more infamous it is, the more base in you to step in and snatch it from me. It is like a rich man tearing the carrion from the hound’s jaws, after he has swollen his feet and rent his skin in hunting it down.”
“I will not seek for further epithets by which to call you; your mind is deluded by some vain dream,” said Fabiola, with an earnestness not untinged with alarm. She felt she was in the presence of a madman, one in whom violent passion, carried off by an unchecked, deeply-moved fancy, was lashing itself up to that intensity of wicked excitement, which constitutes a moral frenzy,—when the very murderer thinks himself a virtuous avenger. “Fulvius,” she continued, with studied calmness, and looking fully into his eyes, “I now entreat you to go. If you want money, you shall have it; but go, in heaven’s name go, before you destroy your reason by your anger.”
“What vain fancy do you mean?” asked Fulvius.
“Why, that I should have ever dreamt about Agnes’s wealth or property on such a day, or should have taken any advantage of her cruel death.”
“And yet it is so; I have it from the emperor’s mouth that he has made it over to you. Will you pretend to make me believe, that this most generous and liberal prince ever parted with a penny unsolicited, ay, or unbribed?”
“Of this I know nothing. But I know, that I would rather have died of want than petitioned for a farthing of such property!”