Released, she hung her head, let fall her hands. The altarcloth, as if tossed by a great wind, lay far away from them, gleaming white on the black ground.
`From fear of losing my hope of you,' said Nostromo.
`You knew that you had my soul! You know everything! It was made for you! But what could stand between you and me? What? Tell me!' she repeated, without impatience, in superb assurance.
`Your dead mother,' he said, very low.
`Ah! . . . Poor mother! She has always . . . She is a saint in heaven now, and I cannot give you up to her. No, Giovanni. Only to God alone. You were mad -- but it is done. Oh! what have you done? Giovanni, my beloved, my life, my master, do not leave me here in this grave of clouds. You cannot leave me now. You must take me away -- at once -- this instant -- in the little boat. Giovanni, carry me off tonight, from my fear of Linda's eyes, before I have to look at her again.'
She nestled close to him. The slave of the San Tome silver felt the weight as of chains upon his limbs, a pressure as of a cold hand upon his lips. He struggled against the spell.
`I cannot,' he said. `Not yet. There is something that stands between us two and the freedom of the world.'
She pressed her form closer to his side with a subtle and naive instinct of seduction.
`You rave, Giovanni -- my lover!' she whispered, engagingly. `What can there be? Carry me off -- in thy very hands -- to Dona Emilia -- away from here. I am not very heavy.'
It seemed as though she expected him to lift her up at once in his two palms. She had lost the notion of all impossibility. Anything could happen on this night of wonder. As he made no movement, she almost cried aloud:
`I tell you I am afraid of Linda!' And still he did not move. She became quiet and wily. `What can there be?' she asked, coaxingly.
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.