"But you love me!" I cried to her; and a great sob rose in my throat.
"You refuse to do this thing?" she answered.
"Yes."
Then she threw me away from her with the strength of a tigress: "Imbecile! You thought I loved you? I should have used you: that is all."
The lamp went out: the darkness was complete. I stretched my hands out, to meet but empty air. If I were alone I could not tell: I touched nothing, I heard nothing, I saw nothing. A strange giddiness came upon me; my limbs trembled under the weight of my body and gave way; I lost consciousness. It is what we call in this country a stroke of the blood.
When my senses revived I opened my eyes. It was still night about me, but a pallid light shone into the chamber, for the moon had risen, and its rays penetrated through the iron bars of the high windows. I remembered all.
I rose with pain and effort: the heavy fall on the stone floor had bruised and strained me. A great stupor, the stupor of horror, had fallen upon me. I felt all at once old, quite old. The thought of my mother passed through my mind for the first time for many days. My poor mother!
By the light of the moon I tried to find my way out of this chamber—a chamber accursed. I gained the entrance of the gallery. Silence reigned everywhere. I could not tell what hour it was. The lustre from the skies sufficed to illumine fitfully the vast and sombre passages. I found the door by which I had entered the house, and I felt the hot air of the night blow upon my forehead, as hot now as it had been at noonday.
I passed into the great open court. Above it hung the moon, late risen, round, yellow, luminous. I looked upward at it: this familiar object seemed to me a strange and unknown thing. I walked slowly across the pavement of the courtyard on a sheer instinct, as you may see a wounded dog walk, bearing death in him. My heart seemed like a stone in my breast: my blood seemed like ice in my veins. All around me were the walls of Sant' Aloïsa, silent, gray, austere.
My foot touched something on the ground. I looked at it. It was a thing without form—a block of oak wood or a slab of marble?—yet I looked at it, and my eyes were rooted there and could not look elsewhere. The moon shed a sinister white light upon this thing. I looked long, standing there motionless and without power to move. Then I saw what it was, this shapeless thing: it was the body of Taddeo Marchioni—dead, horribly dead, fallen face downward, stretched out upon the stones, a knife plunged into the back of the throat, and left there. He had been stabbed from behind.