“Alas! no,” answered Nina. “He has, I fear, sacrificed himself to me from that dreadful night when I left my native home, confused, bewildered, and little dreaming that it was to be for ever. But I do not detain him; if he wishes to return he may do so.”
“He came with you, and without you he will not go back,” observed Ada.
“While my father lived, I would have returned to see him, at the risk of my life—at the risk of the displeasure of one dearer than life; but now that he is no more, no earthly power should make me quit my husband.”
“But your brother has doubts of the truth of the report of your father’s death, and would still induce you to accompany him,” said Ada.
“What! and allow you to remain?” whispered Nina, her fears, in a moment, rushing back to the baneful course from which they had been diverted. “No, lady, that were folly too great even for me to commit.”
Ada saw that she was touching on dangerous ground.
“Indeed, again you wrong me, Nina,” she said, tenderly pressing her hand. “I did not believe my intentions could be so misconstrued; but I will not mention a subject which is so painful to you.”
“There are few which are not, lady,” returned Nina, again appeased; “for the very language we speak reminds me of the home I have lost, the misery I have caused—it reminds me that I may be stigmatised as a murderess; that the death of the best, the kindest of fathers, may be laid to my charge; and often would such thoughts drive me to madness, and to seek a speedy end to all my misery from the summit of yonder cliff; but for what I have lost, I have gained a prize which recompenses me for all—the love of one without which death would have been welcome; a love I value more than all the earth’s brightest treasure. They say the maidens in your country are calm and cold as the snow on the Appenines, and it were in vain, therefore, for you, lady, to attempt to conceive what that love is. He might abandon me—he might forget me—he might spurn me, but still I should love him, though I slew him for his perfidy; and should die happily on the tomb to which I had consigned him. Then do not speak to me again of quitting him;—he is my world, and all else I have abandoned for him.”
Ada, after this, did not again attempt to renew the subject—indeed, pirate though he was, Zappa, she remembered, was, there existed every reason to believe, the young Italian’s husband; and though utterly unworthy of her devoted affection, as she had herself too strong a proof to doubt, Nina still owed to him the duty of a wife. She had severed other sacred ties, in a way they can never be severed without ultimately bringing grief and remorse to the heart of the guilty one; but she now must abide by the consequences of her fault, and had no power to quit him to whom she had bound herself, even to visit the deathbed of a father. It was painful, however, to Ada, to reflect what must be the ultimate fate of her lovely and interesting companion, when the pirate’s already waning love was burnt out—when the cast on which she had staked her all on earth was lost for ever; or, should the lawless adventurer meet the fate his daring expeditions seemed to court, and when death should claim his own, she should learn that he whom she had so truly loved was a murderer, and a robber, and had died the death of a malefactor, what anguish, what shame, was in store for her—what a dreary future.
The two girls, both equally beautiful in their separate styles, sat together, without speaking, for some time, lost in their own reflections. Both were sad—for one was a prisoner, without a prospect of release: to the mind of the other, a picture of the home of her youth, and her deserted, dying father, had been conjured up with the vividness with which they had never before presented themselves, and some pangs of remorse were agitating her mind. They were startled by a loud peal of thunder, which reverberated through the sky, and looking out through the casement they beheld the whole air of heaven covered with dark rolling clouds, and the sea a mass of white foam, which a blast, like a whirlwind, blew furiously over the surface; while the sullen roar of the lately aroused waves was heard as they lashed the rocks beneath the cliffs. One of those sudden tempests had arisen, which at times visit the shores of the Mediterranean with peculiar fury; their anger, like the rage of a human being, though short, yet causing havoc and destruction wherever it falls. The wind, as it increased, howled and whistled through the ruined building; the lightning darted, with vivid flashes, from the lowering sky; and the waves, worked into fury, rose every instant higher and higher, till they appeared like the water of a boiling cauldron, as their white-headed crests leaped up towards the tower, which they seemed to shake to the very base.