He did not want to kill her; he would take her home with him, when he had killed Julius Batiscombe. He had ordered the little carriage to wait for them. How happy she would be! Cautiously he moved on, ready for action if they saw him. He trod so softly, so softly, it was like velvet on the grass.
Then, as he came nearer,--not ten paces off,--he brought his pistol before him and held it ready. So softly he had crept to them that they had not yet heard him, as the summer wind blew gently through the long grasses and the vines about the old bower, and made a sweet murmur of its own.
--"I am always afraid you will laugh at my love"--Leonora was saying, but the words that were to follow were never spoken.
Some slight sound caught her quick woman's ear, and she looked up in the direction whence it came. There stood her husband, not ten paces from her, with an expression in his face which would have frozen the marrow in the bones of a wild beast.
The clean polished barrel of the pistol was pointed full at Batiscombe. Leonora saw that, and saw that Marcantonio's eyes were fixed on her lover and not on herself. Batiscombe saw it all as well as she, one second later. But that one second was enough.
With a spring and a clutching turn, as a tigress will cover her young with herself and turn glaring on her pursuers, Leonora threw her strong, lithe body upon Julius, forcing him back to his seat, and she turned and looked Marcantonio in the face. Their eyes met for one moment. But it was too late: the finger had pulled the trigger and the ball sped true.
Without a sound, without a cry, she fell upon her lover's breast. There she fell, there she died.
From the death wound the heart's blood fell in great drops; it fell down to the ground.
She died for his sake whom she loved; she died, she gave for him her life, the joy and the woe and the love of it for his sake.
Do you ask what is the moral of this? Ask it of yourselves.
Ask it of that quiet man, with delicate features and snow-white hair, who drives in the Villa Borghese. He is well-known in Rome for his honesty, his honour, and his unaffected good sense. He is the Marchese Carantoni, he is Marcantonio, and he is not yet forty years of age.