And meantime
the footsteps of the two men rang out on the dry pavement of the clear,
broad, deserted thoroughfare, whose black shadows were sharply outlined
by the moonlight.

All at once Prada himself became silent. His loquacious _bravura_ was
exhausted, the frightful struggle going on in his mind wholly possessed
and paralysed him. Twice already he had dipped his hand into his coat
pocket and felt the pencilled note whose four lines he mentally repeated:
"A legend avers that the fig-tree of Judas now grows at Frascati, and
that its fruit is deadly for him who may desire to become pope. Eat not
the poisoned figs, nor give them either to your servants or your fowls."
The note was there; he could feel it; and if he had desired to accompany
Pierre, it was in order that he might drop it into the letter-box at the
Palazzo Boccanera. And he continued to step out briskly, so that within
another ten minutes that note would surely be in the box, for no power in
the world could prevent it, since such was his express determination.
Never would he commit such a crime as to allow people to be poisoned.

But he was suffering such abominable torture. That Benedetta and that
Dario had raised such a tempest of jealous hatred within him! For them he
forgot Lisbeth whom he loved, and even that flesh of his flesh, the child
of whom he was so proud. All sex as he was, eager to conquer and subdue,
he had never cared for facile loves. His passion was to overcome. And now
there was a woman in the world who defied him, a woman forsooth whom he
had bought, whom he had married, who had been handed over to him, but who
would never, never be his. Ah! in the old days, to subdue her, he would
if needful have fired Rome like a Nero; but now he asked himself what he
could possibly do to prevent her from belonging to another. That galling
thought made the blood gush from his gaping wound. How that woman and her
lover must deride him! And to think that they had sought to turn him to
ridicule by a baseless charge, an arrant lie which still and ever made
him smart, all proof of its falsity to the contrary. He, on his side, had
accused them in the past without much belief in what he said, but now the
charges he had imputed to them must come true, for they were free, freed
at all events of the religious bond, and that no doubt was their only
care. And then visions of their happiness passed before his eyes,
infuriating him. Ah! no, ah! no, it was impossible