“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?

“Now to-morrow is an hour—­a laugh!  But if I’ve not been shot from a true bow—­if I’ve been a sham for two years—­if my name, and nature, bones, brains, were all false things hunting a shadow, Countess Alessandra, see the misery of Barto Rizzo!  Look at those two years, and say that I had my head.  Answer me, as you love your husband:  are you heart and soul with him in the fresh fight for Lombardy?” He said this with a look penetrating and malignant, and then by a sudden flash pitifully entreating.

Carlo feared to provoke, revolted from the thought of slaying him.  “Yes, yes,” he interposed, “my wife is heart and soul in it.  Go.”

Barto looked from him to her with the eyes of a dog that awaits an order.

Victoria gathered her strength, and said:  “I am not.”

“It is her answer!” Barto roared, and from deep dejection his whole countenance radiated.  “She says it—­she might give the lie to a saint!  I was never mad.  I saw the spot, and put my finger on it, and not a madman can do that.  My two years are my own.  Mad now, for, see!

“I worship the creature.  She is not heart and soul in it.  She is not in it at all.  She is a little woman, a lovely thing, a toy, a cantatrice.  Joy to the big heart of Barto Rizzo!  I am for Brescia!”

He flung his arm like a banner, and ran out.

Carlo laid his sword on a table.  Vittoria’s head was on his mother’s bosom.

The hour was too full of imminent grief for either of the three to regard this scene as other than a gross intrusion ended.