“The wretches! The God-forsaken!” broke in the young girl, and clenched her hands.
“So nothing remained but to trust myself to the contrabbandieri in Poretta. Early in the morning, so they tell me, we can reach Pistoja. The duel is arranged for the afternoon, in a garden just outside of the town.”
Impetuously she grasped his hand in both of hers. “Do not go down there, Filippo,” she said. “They will murder you.”
“Of course, that is what they want, child, nothing less. But how do you know it?”
“I know it here and—here!” and with her finger she touched her forehead and her heart.
“You also are a witch, a soothsayer,” he continued, laughing. “Yes, I think they do wish to murder me. My adversary is the best shot in Tuscany. They have done me the honor to oppose to me a distinguished foe. Now I, too, will not altogether disgrace myself. Yet who knows how regular the proceedings will be? Who can tell? Or perhaps you have magic enough to prophesy that too? But what good would it do, child? It could not alter facts.”
“Now you must drive it out of your mind,” he continued after a short silence, “this following the bent of your foolish old love. Perhaps everything has had to turn out so, that I might not leave the world until I had set you free, free from yourself and your unhappy loyalty, poor child. Think, we may have been poorly suited to one another. Your loyalty was given to another Filippo, a young coxcomb with giddy lips, and carefree except for love. What would you have done with a melancholy brooder, a hermit?” During the last half of the sentence he spoke to himself, pacing up and down, but now he went up to her, and as he was about to seize her by the hand he stopped, shocked by the expression of her face. All the gentleness had gone from her manner, all the color from her lips.
“You do not love me!” she said, slowly and dully, as if another spirit were speaking out of her, as if she were listening to her own words in order to learn what was really meant. Then she drew back her hand with a cry, so that the tiny flames in the lamp threatened to go out. And from without the ear was suddenly chilled by an angry whine and howl from the dog.
“You do not love me, no, no!” she cried, as if beside herself. “Can you give yourself over to death rather than into my arms? Can you speak calmly of your death as if it were not mine, too? It were better for me if these eyes were blind rather than see you again, and these ears had become dumb before they were forced to hear the cruel voice by which I live and die. Why did the dog not tear you to pieces before I knew that you had come? Why did your foot not slip on the edge of the precipice? Alas! Alas! Behold my sorrow, O Madonna!”
She flung herself before the picture, lay with her forehead to the ground, her hands spread far from her, and seemed to pray.