For a moment anger prevented him from speaking. “No!” he broke out at last, “not with you, never with you! Treacherous serpent! It is laughable that you still think to ensnare me in your slippery coils. We are now as completely separated as ever. I despise you that you hold me weak and pitiable enough to be won over by these little artifices. I will not go with you! Let me have one of your servants and then—pay yourself for the price of the contrabbandieri.”
He threw a purse to her, and opened the door to search for some one who might conduct him down the mountain. “Put yourself to no trouble,” said she, “you will find none of the servants; they are all away in the mountains. And, besides, there is no one in Treppi who could serve you. Poor, feeble, old women, old men and children, they are still in their huts. If you do not believe me—look!
“And apart from all else,” she continued, as he stood at the threshold irresolute, in fury and vexation, and turned his back on her. “Why, think you, is the way so impossible and dangerous if I guide you? I had a dream last night by which I see that you are not intended for me. It is true, I shall still always like you a little, and it will give me pleasure still to chat with you for a few hours. Must I, for that reason, be laying snares for you? You are free to go from me wherever you will, to death or to life. Only, I would go along with you a little way. I will swear to you, if that will appease you, that it will be for only a short way—by my life, not so far as Pistoja. Only so far until you have struck the right path. For if you go off on your own account you will soon lose your way, so that you can go neither forward nor back. You ought to know that, indeed, from your former tramps over the mountain.”
“Pest!” he murmured, and bit his lip. But he saw that the sun was rising, and after all, perhaps, what serious grounds had he for anxiety? He turned about and looked at her, and believed that he could trust the evidence of the clear-tempered look in her great eyes, that no kind of treachery lurked behind her words. She seemed to him to have become altogether another person since yesterday, and he had to confess that there was a feeling of uneasiness, mingled with his surprise, that yesterday’s attack of violent passion had passed over so soon and without leaving a trace. He looked at her a while longer, but she gave cause for no suspicion whatever.
“If you have grown reasonable, then,” he said, “let it be so. Come!”
Without any special sign of pleasure, she rose and said: “We must eat first; we will not find anything on the way.” She set a plate before him and a jug, and then she herself began to eat, standing by the hearth, but of wine she drank not a drop. He, on the contrary, to make a quick end of the matter, ate a few spoonfuls, gulped down the wine, and lighted his cigar at the coals on the hearth. During all this time not a look had he vouchsafed in her direction, but he saw as he looked at her by chance, for she was standing near him, that there was a bright spot on each of her cheeks and something like triumph in her eyes. She rose impetuously, seized the jug, and at one fling shattered it on the stone floor.
“No one else shall drink out of this,” said she, “since your lips have hung upon it.”
He started up in surprise; for a moment the suspicion crossed his mind: “Has she given me poison?” But immediately he preferred to believe that it was only the dying flame left of the love-worship she had forsworn, and without further ado he followed her out of the house.
“They have taken the horse on with them to Poretta,” she remarked, for by his eyes he seemed to be looking for the animal. “You could not have ridden away, either, without danger. The roads are steeper than yesterday.”
She now went on before him, and soon they left behind them the huts that stood out in the sharp sun, lifeless and without the tiniest cloud of smoke issuing from the chimneys.