“But why do you come here?” repeated the youth with increasing anxiety. “For what have you come? Why do I find you in my house? You enter only where you have someone to kill. Whom do you seek?”
“I will tell thee all. Let us be seated a moment,” said Death, caressing Tito’s icy hands.
“But, Elena!” whispered the youth.
“Let her rest. She is sleeping now. I watch for her; therefore let us arrange our affairs. Tito, thou art an ingrate! but thou art like all others; once upon the summit, they kick the ladder by which they rose. Oh! thy conduct towards me deserves no pardon from God. How much thou hast made me suffer in these last days! how much! how much!”
“Ah! but I adore her,” cried Tito.
“Thou adorest her, that is it; but thou hadst lost her forever; thou wert a miserable shoemaker, and she was about to marry a person of rank; I intervened, I made thee rich, noble, famous; I freed thee of thy rival; I reconciled thee with thine enemy and carried her to the other world. Finally I gave thee Elena’s hand; and here, at this moment, thou turnest thy back upon me, triest to forget me, and coverest thine eyes so as not to see me. Thou art as stupid as the rest of men. They who should always see me in their thoughts, blind themselves with the vanities of this world, and live without devoting one thought to me, until I come to claim them. My lot is a very unfortunate one. I do not remember of ever approaching one mortal, without having surprised and frightened him as though he had never expected me. Even those of five score years believe that they can do without me. Thou, for thy part, who hast the privilege of actually seeing me, and who art not able to forget me as thou wouldst, placed before thine eyes, the other day, a means of forgetfulness, a bandage of cloth; and to-day thou hidest in a lonely garden, imagining thyself secure from me forever. Fool! Ingrate! False friend! Man!! And that tells all!”
“Well,” stammered Tito, whose confusion and shame had not quieted his suspicious curiosity, “for what reason do you come to my house?”
“I come to complete the mission, which the Eternal One has charged me with, concerning thee.”
“But you do not come to kill us?”
“By no means.”