“Poor girl, do not talk like that. I tell you I am alive—tingling to my finger tips with life and love for you. If I were dead, I should still love you. Death could not kill my love for you. Have you forgotten everything? I thought you loved me. You have often told me so. I believed you would always love me, be true to me forever. Now I find you changed and cold.”
“I did love you, Guisseppi. To the depths of my being I loved you.” Her words came in a passionate torrent in her liquid native tongue. “You were my earth and heaven, my life, my soul’s salvation. All day my thoughts were of you. I dreamed of you at night. There was nothing I would not have done for you. There was nothing I would not have given you. I could have lived for you always. I could have died for you. Did I not come to see you every day in jail? Did I not bring you constantly dishes I had cooked myself with utmost care? Was not I close beside you in the court room every day of the long trial?
“I did everything to soothe and comfort you through all those terrible days. Was it nothing that I remained constant when you were locked in a cell condemned to death? I was true to the very trap-door of the hangman. What greater proof could a woman give of her love than to remain true to a man sentenced as a felon to the eternal disgrace of the gallows?”
She paused for a moment, erect, motionless, her face aflame, seemingly transfigured like the wonder woman of a vision.
“Ah, yes,” she went on; “then there was no one like my Guisseppi; no eyes so bright, no lips so tender, no face so dear. You were my god. Can I ever forget the songs you used to sing to me in the happy days before ‘Devil’ Cardello crossed your life. Your voice was divine. Every note thrilled me. I loved it. To me it was the music of the stars. Nothing in all the world was so beautiful as your voice. But now your voice has changed. There is no longer any music in it. As you speak to me, it seems a voice from the sepulchre.”
Guisseppi raised an arresting hand. He threw back his head. He smiled again.
“My voice has changed? Listen, cara mia.”
Slowly he began to sing an old Italian serenade. The ballad told of a knight of old who had bade a lily-white maid farewell and gone off to the wars and who, wounded and left for dead on the battlefield, was nursed back to life and returned to find his lady unchanged in her devotion against rivals and temptations.
Soft in the opening cadences, Guisseppi’s voice grew in volume and power. It brought out in shades and nuances of wonderful beauty all the charm and romance of the ancient tale—the sadness of farewell, the clash of battle, the wounded soldier’s dreams of his sweetheart as life seemed ebbing, the gladness of his homecoming, his happiness in reunited love.
Into the music, Guisseppi threw all the ardor and passion of his own love. There were notes like tears in his voice when, in minor strain, he sang the sorrows and dreams of the soldier; and the final crescendo passage, vivid with renewed love, was a burst of joyous melody straight from his heart.