After the door had closed a silence followed, in which I paced the room in long strides, aflame now with the all-consuming fire of jealousy. I do believe that Satan had set all the legions of hell to achieve my overthrow that night. Naught more had been needed to undo me than this spur of jealousy. It brought me now to her side. I stood over her, looking down at her between tenderness and fierceness, she returning my glance with such a look as may haunt the eyes of sacrificial victims.
“Why dared he come?” I asked.
“Perhaps... perhaps some affair connected with Astorre...” she faltered.
I sneered. “That would be natural seeing that he has sent Astorre to Parma.”
“If there was aught else, I am no party to it,” she assured me.
How could I do other than believe her? How could I gauge the turpitude of that beauty's mind—I, all unversed in the wiles that Satan teaches women? How could I have guessed that when she saw Fifanti speak to that lad at the gate that afternoon she had feared that he had set a spy upon the house, and that fearing this she had bidden the Cardinal begone? I knew it later. But not then.
“Will you swear that it is as you say?” I asked her, white with passion.
As I have said, I was standing over her and very close. Her answer now was suddenly to rise. Like a snake came she gliding upwards into my arms until she lay against my breast, her face upturned, her eyes languidly veiled, her lips a-pout.
“Can you do me so great a wrong, thinking you love me, knowing that I love you?” she asked me.
For an instant we swayed together in that sweetly hideous embrace. I was as a man sapped of all strength by some portentous struggle. I trembled from head to foot. I cried out once—a despairing prayer for help, I think it was—and then I seemed to plunge headlong down through an immensity of space until my lips found hers. The ecstasy, the living fire, the anguish, and the torture of it have left their indelible scars upon my memory. Even as I write the cruelly sweet poignancy of that moment is with me again—though very hateful now.