Chapter XXXI: I Know My Own Heart

I had hardly got into the street before a hand touched my arm. I turned and saw Gogo.

“It was you,” he said, “won my deliverance this morning?”

“Yes.”

“From the king?”

“From the king.”

He said not a word more. I questioned him in my turn.

“I sent you a message by the courier. Why did you not come direct to me?”

“I had business first. I answered, ‘If you will tell her that I will witness for her and bring my report this evening, she will understand.’”

“I understood nothing but that you were in no hurry to thank me.”

He made no reply.

“It is only after a struggle with my pride, sir,” I continued, “that I am here to keep your appointment. I think, perhaps, your business might have kept better.”

“Do you? Well, perhaps, after all, you have a shallow wit.”

I looked at him in dumb amaze. We were loitering on, to me aimlessly, though I knew presently how all the time he had been rigidly enforcing our direction. The city was in its hottest night-fever of excitement over the executions that had taken place that day, in a mood already too monstrous to take much heed of the shock and tattered prodigy that stumped by my side. Once, passing a group, I caught a name, and startled, and was hurrying on; but he snatched my wrist, and forced me to linger, absorbing horror to the dregs. I knew his temper by that, and to what I had delivered myself; but I never feared him so much as when he would not speak.

“Gogo,” I whispered suddenly, “you will give me credit for having known nothing of your state all this time. Whenever I asked M. de’ Medici, he assured me of your comfort and prosperity. I am not to blame if he is a cursed liar.”

He did not answer.

“The moment I could,” I said, trembling, “I begged your life. It is the dearest of all I know to me. Are you going to punish me for that?”

Still no answer.

“O!” I said, with a little rally to anger, “if you will not thank me, at least you might say whether or not you received my enclosure this morning?”

“The money?” he muttered. “Yes, I received it.”

I was moved to a little agitated laughter.

“Is everything poisonous that comes from my hands? If you had spent a little of it on food and clothes, my obligation to you would not have been the less.”

“I thought you sent it to me to pay your debts.”

“What debts?”

Again that grim silence. I feared him more than I can tell; feared him so much that no thought of the conquering guile by which I had once been wont to sway him occurred to me to use. I shivered, and drew my cloak faster about me, and hurried by his side without another word.

Whither was he bent? By the roaring quays, it seemed, towards the dark prison from which, only a few hours earlier, she had gone to her self-elected doom.

“Not there!” I sobbed, struggling--“not there! What good can it do now?”

But he turned, short of reaching it, to his left, into a street leading to the great square adjoining, where the gallows was erected; and here, under the shadow of the fortress, stood a church with a lofty tower. Stopping at a door which opened into the base of this last, he tapped three times; and in a moment it yawned, and engulfed us, and the tumult of the living town was become in our ears like the murmur of the sea in a dead cavern.

Our guide, taper in hand, went on before us. The sound of our footsteps reeled and laughed behind, echoing up to unknown altitudes. Ward of that little star of radiance, I had no terror so great as that of its flashing away and committing me to the shadows that seemed always dancing and clutching for me outside its circumference. And then suddenly we were come to a narrow iron gate set in the stone, and to the cowled, motionless figure of a monk who stood thereby.

Without a word uttered by this spectre, the folds of its robe contracted, and a long white hand was thrust forth palm upwards. Gogo put a purse into it.

“Bear witness, Diana,” he said, in a low voice, that boomed and clanged among the stones, “that I deliver the account of my stewardship to the last penny.”

I was sobbing dreadfully, moved by some terror that had in it, nevertheless, no thought of evil intended by him to myself.

“You will take nothing from me?” I gasped.

He addressed the monk.

“It is enough?”

The cowled head bent.

“Then let us through, father, and alone.”

The grate clanked. He gripped my arm, and, seizing the taper from the sacristan, led me down a long flight of steps, through a low doorway, into a crypt. And there, on the damp ground, full in our view, was something lying, and a sheet over.

“No, no!” I screamed. “You have tortured me enough already!”

Never releasing my arm, he set the taper in a crevice, and dragged me to the dreadful bed.

“What!” he said, “are you afraid to look on your work?”

And, pinning me forcibly, he bent and drew the cloth away. And side by side with the other, I saw the dead face of Pissani.

Without a word, I sank down where I stood, and he fell back from me.

“O, woman!” he cried, in a terrible voice, “that you could talk of your pride, with this lying at your heart!”

He clasped his hands, and unclasped them, and struck his forehead, and again writhed them together, as if his grief baffled him from speech. Dragging my body towards him, I huddled cowering at his feet.

“What!” he cried; “no word? no word?”

I moaned, and moved my head in negative.

“Grant he stabbed himself under the gallows,” he said, “since he found he could not look on her agony and live. Are you the more guiltless of his death?”

Again I shook my head.

“At least they are together,” he cried. “By so much you did them service, sending her first. But the price, woman, the price!”

I rose, blind, staggering, to my feet.

“It was my honour. I will go and pay it, and die.”

He caught at and held me.

“To whom?”

“To de’ Medici. Let me go. Only you could have saved me, and you will not; and it is right.”

Never quitting his hold, he turned from me, with a wild gesture of his free arm.

“It was her life or yours,” I said. “Make it my curse, if you will, that I chose the dearer to me.”

With a mad groan, he snatched me from my feet, and, holding me fiercely against his breast, carried me out and to the foot of the steps.

[The End]

NOTES.

[1] #Diana Please# Born _circa_ 1770.

[2] #scapegoat admiral# The unhappy patriot Caracciolo, whose hurried execution at the yardarm of the _Minerva_ raised such a storm of mingled protest and justification at the time. Madame Please’s insinuation must be accepted, if at all, as characteristic; yet there is no denying that Caracciolo’s court-martial (on a charge of deserting his king; to which the culprit pleaded very reasonably that it was his king who had deserted him), conviction by a narrow margin of votes, vindictive sentence, and hasty despatch thereon, afforded the great captain’s enemies the means to as unpleasant an indictment as any they could bring against his conduct of this unhappy Naples business.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES.

Minor spelling inconsistencies (_e.g._ caldron/cauldron, counterbuff/counter-buff, gravel-pit/gravel pit, etc.) have been preserved.

Text version only: “#” is used to indicate bolded text.

Alterations to the text:

Convert footnotes to endnotes.

Silently correct a few punctuation errors (quotation mark pairings, missing periods, etc.)

[Introductory]

Change “so often mentioned in the text, from the _slavic_” to _Slavic_.

[Chapter VIII]

(“She is _grern_ ... She is become, it _appe-ars_,) to _grown_ and _appears_, respectively.

[Chapter IX]

(“Why, you old _de-ar_?” said he.) to _dear_.

[Chapter XVII]

“then, suddenly _panicstruck_, groped for the table” to _panic-struck_.

[Chapter XXIV]

“and, _unfortuntely_, the disease was in the head” to _unfortunately_.

“At _anyrate_ she, in company with Mademoiselle” to _any rate_.

[End of text]