“If you will not—­what was she to do?” Barto cut the question to interrogate his strayed wits.  “Look at me, Countess Alessandra.  I was in the prison.  I heard that my Rosellina had a tight heart.  She cried for her master, poor heathen, and I sprang out of the walls to her.  There—­there—­she lay like a breathing board; a woman with a body like a coffin half alive; not an eye to show; nothing but a body and a whisper.  She perished righteously, for she disobeyed.  She acted without my orders:  she dared to think!  She will be damned, for she would have vengeance before she went.  She glorified you over me—­over Barto Rizzo.  Oh! she shocked my soul.  But she is dead, and I am her slave.  Every word was of you.  Take another head, Barto Rizzo your old one was mad:  she said that to my soul.  She died blessing you above me.  I saw the last bit of life go up from her mouth blessing you.  It’s heard by this time in heaven, and it’s written.  Then I have had two years of madness.  If she is right, I was wrong; I was a devil of hell.  I know there’s an eye given to dying creatures, and she looked with it, and she said, the soul of Rinaldo Guidascarpi, her angel, was glorifying you; and she thanked the sticking of her heart, when she tried to stab you, poor fool!”

Carlo interrupted:  “Now go; you have said enough.”

“No, let him speak,” said Vittoria.  She supposed that Barto was going to say that he had not given the order for her assassination.  “You do not wish me dead, signore?”

“Nothing that is not standing in my way, signora contessa,” said Barto; and his features blazed with a smile of happy self-justification.  “I have killed a sentinel this night:  Providence placed him there.  I wish for no death, but I punish, and—­ah! the cursed sight of the woman who calls me mad for two years.  She thrusts a bar of iron in an engine at work, and says, Work on! work on!  Were you not a traitress?  Countess Alessandra, were you not once a traitress?  Oh! confess it; save my head.  Reflect, dear lady! it’s cruel to make a man of a saintly sincerity look back—­I count the months—­seventeen months! to look back seventeen months, and see that his tongue was a clapper,—­his will, his eyes, his ears, all about him, everything, stirred like a pot on the fire.  I traced you.  I saw your treachery.  I said—­I, I am her Day of Judgement.  She shall look on me and perish, struck down by her own treachery.  Were my senses false to me?  I had lived in virtuous fidelity to my principles.  None can accuse me.  Why were my senses false, if my principles were true?  I said you were a traitress.  I saw it from the first.  I had the divine contempt for women.  My distrust of a woman was the eye of this brain, and I said—­Follow her, dog her, find her out!  I proved her false; but her devilish cunning deceived every other man in the world.  Oh! let me bellow, for it’s me she proves the mass of corruption!  Tomorrow I die, and if I am mad now, what sort of a curse is that?