The Contessa's Vendetta (49 page)

“
Who talks of murder now” I screamed with bitter derision as he writhed on the ground in pain. “What a victory for you if you could have stabbed me and left me here for dead. Then a new world of lies would have been yours with the stain of my blood on your soul. You would have fooled the world, you with the stink of death upon you. And you dared to ask my forgiveness!” I stopped short.

A
strange, bewildered expression suddenly passed over his face. He looked about in a dazed, vague way. Then his gaze became suddenly fixed, and he pointed toward a dark corner and shuddered. “Hush!” he said, in a low, terrified whisper. “She is here!” He stretched out his arms. “Beatrice,” he said.

With a sudden chilled awe
, I looked at the corner of the vault that riveted his attention. All was shrouded in deep gloom.

W
ith a moan he crawled backward as though the ghost he saw threatened him. He paused, his wild eyes gazed upward.

Did he see
some horror there? Had the blow to his head struck him senseless?

He
raised both hands as if to shield himself from an imminent strike, and then he uttered a moan and lost consciousness. Or dead?

I
asked myself this question uncaringly, as I looked down on his inanimate body. The flavor of vengeance was hot in my mouth, and filled me with delirious satisfaction. True, I had been glad, when my poison had coursed through Beatrice’s body and carried her to death, but my gladness had also been mingled with a touch of regret. Now, not one throb of pity stirred inside me; not the faintest emotion of tenderness. Beatrice’s sin was great, but Dario had been the one to tempt her. His crime outweighed hers. And now, there he lay, white and silent in death and I did not care. Had his lover’s ghost indeed appeared before the eyes of his guilty conscience? I did not doubt it. I would not have been surprised if I had seen her poor pale spirit myself, as I gazed down at the lifeless body of the traitor who had wrecked both our lives.

“
Oh, Chiara,” I muttered, half aloud. “We are avenged. You can rest in peace now, my beautiful child. Your father will go to hell for the wrongs he did to us, but is hell black enough to accept his malevolent soul?”

And I slowly moved toward the stairway
. It was time to leave him. Possibly he was dead. If not, then he soon would be, for he had struck his head hard. I paused irresolute. The wild wind battered ceaselessly at the iron gateway, and wailed as though the voices of a hundred creatures lamented.

The
candles were burning low, the darkness of the vault deepened. Its gloom concerned me little. I had grown familiar with its unsightly things, its crawling spiders, its strange uncouth beetles, the clusters of blue fungi on its damp walls. The scurrying noises made by bats and owls, who, scared by the lighted candles, were hiding in holes or corners of refuge, startled me not at all. In my current state of mind, an emperor’s palace was less beautiful to me than this brave charnel house; this stone-mouthed witness of my struggle back to life with all of its misery.

The bell outside the cemetery struck
one. We had been absent from the masquerade ball nearly two hours already. No doubt we were being searched for everywhere. It mattered not. They would never come here to look for us.

I walked
to the stairs. As I placed my foot on the first step, I heard my husband stir. He seemed to come awake from his unconsciousness. I turned to observe him knowing he could not see me where I stood, ready to depart.

I watched as he
murmured something to himself in a low voice, and groaned as he placed his hand on the back of his head, and pulled it away bloodied. He broke out into a laugh—a laugh so out of all keeping with his surroundings, that it startled me more than his attempt to murder me.

Slowly,
with great difficulty, he managed to rise to his feet; and straightened his disordered clothes. He stumbled to the brigand’s coffin, placed both hands on it to steady himself, and stared down into its contents of silver, gold, and a rainbow of gems. He took them carefully in his hands, seeming mentally to calculate their cost and value. Necklaces, bracelets and rings, he pulled out, one after the other, till his hands were overloaded with them. Against the candlelight, they blazed with lustrous color.

I marveled at h
is strange conduct, but did not understand it. I moved away from the staircase and drew nearer to him. Then I heard a strange, low rumbling like a distant earthquake, followed by a sharp cracking sound. A gust of wind rushed round the mausoleum shrieking wildly like some devil in anger. The strong draught extinguished two of the flaring candles.

My
husband, entirely absorbed in examining Cesare Negri’s treasures, apparently saw and heard nothing. Suddenly he broke into a laugh. A chuckling, mirthless laugh such as might come from the lips of the aged and senile. The sound curdled the blood in my veins. It was the laugh of a madman!

“
Dario!” I called to him with an earnest, distinct voice.

He
turned toward me still smiling. His eyes were bright, his face had regained its color, and as he stood in the dim light, with the clustering gems massed together in a glittering fire against his skin, he looked unnaturally, wildly handsome. He nodded to me, half graciously, half haughtily, but gave me no answer.

“
Dario!” I called out again, moved with pity.

He
laughed again; the same terrible laugh.

“
Beatrice? Do you love me?” Then he began to hum a mournful tune.

As the melody echoed through the dreary vault, my bitter wrath against
him partially lessened. Compassion stirred my soul. He was no longer the same man who had wronged and betrayed me. He had the helplessness and fearful innocence of madness. In that condition I could not have hurt a hair of his head. I stepped forward, resolved to lead him out of the vault. After all, I would not leave him like this, but as I approached, he pulled away from me, and early stumbled backward, while a dark frown furrowed his brows. “Who are you?” he yelled. “You are dead! How dare you come out of your grave!”

And he stared at me defiantly
and then he seemed to address some invisible being at his side. “She is dead, Beatrice! Are you not glad?” He paused, apparently expecting some reply, for he looked about him in wonder. “You did not answer me. Why are you so pale?” He muttered, his words rambled forth in disjointedly. “When did you come back from Rome? What have you heard? That I have betrayed you? Oh, no! I love you. Oh, but I forgot. You also are dead, Beatrice! I remember now. You cannot hurt me anymore. I am free once more!”

The strike on his head must have caused him to act like this, or had it suddenly released a madness he had long disguised?

Again I heard a hollow rumbling and crackling sound overhead. What could it be?

Dario hummed
as he plunged his arm down into the coffin of treasure. He gave a shout of pleasure. He had found the old mirror set in its frame of pearls and it seemed to please him. He did not seem conscious of where he was anymore, for he sat down on the upturned coffin that had once held my living body. With complete apathy he gazed into the mirror at his reflection. What a strange and awful picture he made, vainly gazing at himself while surrounded by the mouldering coffins that silently announced how little his vanity was worth, staring at himself in this alcove of skeletons.

I gazed at
him as one might gaze at a dead body; not with loathing anymore, but mournfully. My vengeance was satiated. I could not wage war against this vacant, smiling, mad creature, out of whom the spirit of a devilish intelligence and cunning had been torn, and who therefore was no longer the same man. His loss of wit would compensate for my loss of love.

I
tried to attract his attention again. I opened my lips to speak, but before the words could form themselves, that odd rumbling noise broke again, this time with a loud reverberation that rolled overhead like the thunder of artillery. Before I could understand where it was coming from, before I could advance one step toward my husband, who still sat on the upturned coffin looking at himself in the mirror, before I could utter a word or move an inch, a tremendous crash exploded through the vault, followed by a stinging shower of stones, dust, and pulverized mortar! I stepped backward amazed, bewildered, speechless, instinctively shutting my eyes.

When
I opened them again, everything was in complete darkness. All was silence! The wind howled outside more frantically than ever. A sweeping gust whirled through the vault, blowing some dead leaves against my face, and I heard the boughs of trees creaking noisily in the fury of the storm.

I thought I heard a faint
moan? Quivering in every limb, and sick with a nameless dread, I searched for my tinderbox. Then mastering my shaking hands, I struck a light. The flame was so dim that for an instant I could see nothing. “Dario!” I called loudly. “Dario!”

There
came no answer.

Nearby, I saw one of the
extinguished candles. Reaching for it, I lighted it and held it up with trembling hands. I could not stop my horror at what I saw and shrieked with shock. An enormous block of stone dislodged by the violent storm had fallen from the roof down over the exact place where Dario had been sitting a minute or two before. Crushed under the huge mass, crushed into the very splinters of my own empty coffin, he lay, and I could see nothing, except one white hand protruding—the hand on which his wedding ring glittered! Even as I looked, that hand quivered violently, beat the ground, and then lay still.

It was horrible.

To this day, in my dreams I still see that quivering white hand, the jewels on it sparkling with scornful luster. It appeals, it calls, it threatens, it prays, and when my time comes to die, I know it will beckon me to my grave.

A portion of
Dario’s mantle was visible. A slow stream of blood oozed thickly from beneath the stone; a boulder that could never be moved and that forever sealed him in his awful burial place. How fast the crimson stream of life trickled, staining his mantle with a dark and dreadful hue! Staggering feebly, half delirious with anguish, I approached and touched the white hand that lay stiffly on the ground. I bent my head and almost kissed it, but some strange revulsion rose up inside me and prevented me.

In a stupor of agony I found the
monk’s crucifix that had fallen to the floor. I closed Dario’s still warm finger-tips around it and left it there. An unnatural calmness froze my strained nerves. “This is all I can do for you!” I muttered. “May God forgive you because I cannot!”

C
overing my eyes to shut out the sight before me I turned away. I hurried in a frenzy toward the stairway. On reaching the lowest step I extinguished the light I carried. Some impulse made me glance back. And what I saw, I shall see till the day I die.

Moonlight poured down a long ghostly ray from the opening in the roof caused by the fall
of the great stone. The green glimmer, like a spectral lamp, deepened the surrounding darkness and fell distinctly on one object—that protruding wrist and hand, whiter than snow!

I gazed at it wildly
. The gleam of the coffin’s spilled jewels hurt my eyes. The shine of the silver crucifix clasped in those waxen fingers dazzled my brain. With a frantic cry of terror, I rushed up the steps with maniacal speed, opened the iron gate through which Dario would pass no more, and stood in the free air, face to face with a wind as tempestuous as my own passions.

With
furious haste I shut the entrance to the vault locking and double-locking it. I did not yet fully believe that Dario was actually dead.
I am safe at last. He cannot escape.
I walked around the vault to make sure the secret passage was forever sealed shut. It was.
He cannot scream. He cannot struggle. He will never laugh any more, never kiss, never love, never tell lies to women anymore. He was buried as I was—buried alive!”

Muttering thus to myself with a sort of sobbing incoherence, I turned to meet the snarl of the savage blast of the night, with my brain reeling, my limbs weak and trembling
, with the heavens and earth rocking before me like a wild sea, with the flying moon staring aghast through the driving clouds, with all the universe, as it were, in a broken and shapeless chaos about me.

I went forth to meet my fate, and left him behind.