'It is you who have brought all this destruction and misery upon me,' he said at length. 'From one step unto another, even to this end, I recognize your work. I was a weak fool not to have seen it before.'
'Is it about my mistress that you speak?' she responded. 'Is it my fault that she has been untrue?'
'If she is false, what need to have told me of it? Was it that the knowledge of it would make me more happy? And did I give it into the hands of my own slaves to watch over my honor? Is it a part of your duty that for weeks you should have played the spy upon herself and me, so as to bring her secret faults to light?'
She stood silent before him, not less amazed at his lingering fondness for his wife than at his reproaches against herself.
'How know I that she is guilty at all?' he said, continuing the train of thought into which his doubts and his better nature had led him. 'I must feel all this for certain. How do I know but what you have brought it about by some cunning intrigue for your own purposes? Speak!'
For Leta to stop now was destruction. Though to go on might bring no profit to her, yet her safety depended upon closing forever the path of reconciliation toward which his mind seemed to stray. And step by step, shrouding as far as possible her own agency, she spread out before him that basis of fact upon which she so well knew how to erect a false superstructure. She told him how the intimacy of Ænone and Cleotos had led her to keep watch—how Ænone had once confessed having had a lover in the days of her obscurity and poverty—how that this Greek was that same lover—and how improbable it was that he could have been domiciled in that house by chance, or for any other purpose than that of being in a situation to renew former intimacies. She told how, after long suspicion, she had settled this identity of the former lover with the slave—and how she had seen them, in the twilight of that very day, standing near the window and addressing each other endearingly by their own familiar names. As Sergius listened, the evident truthfulness of the facts gradually impressed themselves upon him; and no longer doubting his disgrace, he closed his heart against all further hope and charity and affection. The pleasant past no longer whispered its memories to his heart—those were now stifled and dead.
'And what reward for all this do you demand?' he hissed forth, seizing Leta by the arm, 'For of course you have not thus dogged her steps day after day, without expectation of recompense from me.'
Did he mean this—that she was capable of asking reward? Or was he cunningly trying her nature, to see whether she might prove worthy of the great recompense which she had promised herself? It was almost too much now to expect; but her heart beat fast as she saw or fancied she saw some strange significance in the gaze which he fastened upon her. Babbling incoherently, she told how she did not wish reward—how she had done it all for love of him—how she would be content to serve him for life, with no other recompense than his smile—and the like. Still that gaze was fastened upon her with penetrating power, more and more confusing her, and again she babbled forth the same old expressions of disinterested attachment. How it was that at last he understood her secret thoughts and aspirations, she knew not. Certainly she had not spoken, or even seemed to hint about them. But whether she betrayed herself by some glance of the eye or tremor of the voice, or whether some instinct had enabled him to read her, of a sudden he burst into a wild, hollow laugh of disdain, threw her from him, and cried, with unutterable contempt:
'This, then, was the purpose of all! This is what you dreamed of! That you, a slave—an hour's plaything—could so mistake a word or two of transient love-making as to fancy that you could ever be anything beyond what you are now! Poor fool that thou art!—Oho, Drumo!'
The giant entered the room, and Leta again drew back into the closest obscurity she could find, not knowing what punishment her audacity was about to draw upon her. But worse, perhaps, than any other punishment, was the discovery that Sergius had already forgotten her; or rather, that he thought so little about her as to be able to dismiss her and her pretensions with a single contemptuous rebuke. He had called his armor bearer for another purpose than to speak of her. A new phase had passed over his burdened and excited mind. He could not endure that solitude, with ever-present disagreeable reflection. And since his disgrace must, sooner or later, be known, he would brave it out by being himself the first to publish it.