He felt her warm, breathing, alive, quivering in the hollow of his arm.
In the exulting consciousness of his strength, and the triumphant excitement of his mind, he struck out for his freedom.
`A treasure,' he said. All was still. She did not understand. `A treasure.
A treasure of silver to buy a gold crown for thy brow.'
`A treasure?' she repeated in a faint voice, as if from the depths of a dream. `What is it you say?'
She disengaged herself gently. He got up and looked down at her, aware of her face, of her hair, her lips, the dimples on her cheeks -- seeing the fascination of her person in the night of the gulf as if in the blaze of noonday. Her nonchalant and seductive voice trembled with the excitement of admiring awe and ungovernable curiosity.
`A treasure of silver!' she stammered out. Then pressed on faster: `What?
Where? How did you get it, Giovanni?'
He wrestled with the spell of captivity. It was as if striking a heroic blow that he burst out:
`Like a thief!'
The densest blackness of the Placid Gulf seemed to fall upon his head.
He could not see her now. She had vanished into a long, obscure, abysmal silence, whence her voice came back to him after a time with a faint glimmer, which was her face.
`I love you! I love you!'
These words gave him an unwonted sense of freedom; they cast a spell stronger than the accursed spell of the treasure; they changed his weary subjection to that dead thing into an exulting conviction of his power.
He would cherish her, he said, in a splendour as great as Dona Emilia's.
The rich lived on wealth stolen from the people, but he had taken from the rich nothing -- nothing that was not lost to them already by their folly and their betrayal. For he had been betrayed -- he said -- deceived, tempted. She believed him. . . . He had kept the treasure for purposes of revenge; but now he cared nothing for it. He cared only for her. He would put her beauty in a palace on a hill crowned with olive trees --a white palace above a blue sea. He would keep her there like a jewel in a casket. He would get land for her -- her own land fertile with vines and corn -- to set her little feet upon. He kissed them. . . . He had already paid for it all with the soul of a woman and the life of a man. . . . The Capataz de Cargadores tasted the supreme intoxication of his generosity.
He flung the mastered treasure superbly at her feet in the impenetrable darkness of the gulf, in the darkness defying -- as men said -- the knowledge of God and the wit of the devil. But she must let him grow rich first --he warned her.
She listened as if in a trance. Her finger stirred in his hair. He got up from his knees reeling, weak, empty, as though he had flung his soul away.
`Make haste, then,' she said. `Make haste, Giovanni, my lover, my master, for I will give thee up to no one but God. And I am afraid of Linda.'
He guessed at her shudder, and swore to do his best. He trusted the courage of her love. She promised to be brave in order to be loved always -- far away in a white palace upon a hill above a blue sea. Then with a timid, tentative eagerness she murmured:
`Where is it? Where? Tell me that, Giovanni.'
He opened his mouth and remained silent -- thunderstruck.
`Not that! Not that!' he gasped out, appalled at the spell of secrecy that had kept him dumb before so many people falling upon his lips again with unimpaired force. Not even to her. Not even to her. It was too dangerous.
`I forbid thee to ask,' he cried at her, deadening cautiously the anger of his voice.
He had not regained his freedom. The spectre of the unlawful treasure arose, standing by her side like a figure of silver, pitiless and secret, with a finger on its pale lips. His soul died within him at the vision of himself creeping in presently along the ravine, with the smell of earth, of damp foliage in his nostrils -- creeping in, determined in a purpose that numbed his breast, and creeping out again loaded with silver, with his ears alert to every sound. It must be done on this very night -- that work of a craven slave!
He stooped low, pressed the hem of her skirt to his lips, with a muttered command: