All, that mortal horror stops my pulse! Was I wrong? Why not have borne that, too? Had she loved me, she had chosen it, chosen it rather. And death would have made all right!—God! why not have seized some poignard lying there? why not have sprung upon her, have slain her? Then silence had been simply secure. Then I could have smiled in their frustrated faces, one keen, deep smile, and died. I was dissolved in pain, writhed with prolonged strokes that thrilled me from head to foot, pierced as with acute stabs, my heart seemed to forge thunderbolts to break upon my brain,—but this agony had been spared me. They unbound me, fed me with some stimulating cordial, gave me cold air, and I rose on my elbow a little.
"Swear!" I said, hoarsely. "But you do not keep oaths. God help you? Never! There must be a Hell to help you! Imprecate this, then, on yourself! May you in your smooth white body know the torture I have known, be racked till each bone in your skin changes place, hang festering in chains from the wall of a living grave, make fellowship with putridity, and lie in the pitiless dark to see all the dead who died under your hand rise, rise and accuse you before God! And may your little son know the deeds you have done, live the life those deeds merit, and die the death that I shall die,—if you do not keep your word!"
"What word?" he said.
"Promise, if I reveal all, and my revelations shall be true and thorough therefore,—promise that you will leave her in safe security and freedom to-day, untouched, unscathed, unharmed, and that so ever shall she remain. And false to this oath, may no priest shrive you, no land own you, God blight you and curse you and wither you from the face of the earth!"
And taking a crucifix, he swore the oath.
Then they busied themselves about Lenore, revived her, soothed her, gave her of the same cordial to drink, and placed her once more in her daïs-seat. Her veil was thrown back, her wide blue eyes fixed on me in intense strain, her face and lips still blanched more bitterly beneath that hue, her features sharp as chisel-graven death. Ah, God! must I endure that too? Was she to hear me,—she, not knowing why, never knowing why,—she in whom that look of aching passion and pity was to die out and freeze and fade in one of utter scorn?
They brought me some strange draught, as if one swallowed fire. The blood coursed richly through my shrunken veins; I felt filled with a different life. I arose and left that bed of torture, but came back to it as to my rest.
And lying there, I betrayed Italy.
Root and branch and spray and leaf, I uprooted all my memories; I forgot no name, I lost no fact; I was eagerer than they; I modified nothing, I abbreviated nothing; the past, the future, what had been, was to be, plan and scheme and supreme purpose, I never faltered, I told the whole!
I did not look at her, I kept my eyes on the tyrant; I wished I might have the evil eye,—but that gift was for him, the Neapolitan. Yet at length I heard a low moan trailing toward me; I turned, and saw her face, as I saw it last, Anselmo,—stonily quiet, frozen from indignant pain to icy apathy, and the words she would have said had hissed inarticulately through her ashen lips. Then they brought me the confession, and, as I could, I signed it.