'The dead man, poor fellow!' the girl went on, half unconscious, the voice like a faint breath from her lips.
'Do not say that again, Bianca Maria. Believe what I say,' the doctor replied with gentle firmness. 'There was no dead man; it was the Ecce Homo statue.'
'Who was it?' she cried out, getting up and looking wildly at him.
He gave a start. He thought it was the crisis, her mind having wandered so long, so he repeated, trying to influence her by his steady gaze:
'It was the Ecce Homo figure. Your father flung it in the well, with a rope round its neck.'
'My God!' she shrieked in a loud voice, raising her arms to heaven. 'God forgive us!'
She fell on her knees and bent forward, touching the ground with her lips. Weeping, praying, sobbing, she went on imploring the Lord to forgive her and her father. Nothing served to quiet her, to get her up from the ground, where she often burst out in long crying-fits. The doctor vainly tried gentleness, kindness, force, violence; he did not succeed in quieting her. Bianca Maria's excitement increased, though there were some stupefied intervals, after which it burst out louder again. Sometimes, while she seemed to be keeping calm, a quick thought crossed her brain, and she threw herself on the ground, crying out: 'Ecce Homo! Ecce Homo, forgive us!'
The doctor looked on, shuddering, his head down on his breast, feeling his will powerless, his science useless. What was to be done? He called in Giovanni and wrote two lines on a card--an order for morphia, which he sent for to the druggist's. But he was afraid to use it: Bianca Maria was not strong enough to bear it. She despairingly, with strong, queer vitality, beat her breast, muttering the Latin words of the _Miserere_, weeping always, as if she had an inexhaustible fountain of tears.
This had gone on for an hour, when quietly the Marquis came into the room. He looked older, wearied, and broken with the weight of life.
'What is the matter with Bianca Maria?' he asked timidly. 'What have you done to her?'
'It is you that are killing her,' the doctor said freezingly.
'You are right--quite right. Darling, I am an assassin!' shrieked the old man.
That man of sixty cast himself at his daughter's feet, trembling with shame and humiliation, shaken by dry sobs. Under the doctor's eyes the scene went on, with filial and paternal positions reversed. That bald, gray-haired father, with his tall, failing form, full of dread and sorrow, shedding old folks' rare burning tears, feeling the whole horror of his fault, bent before his young daughter, begging her to forgive him, with a childish stammer in his voice, just like a boy relieving his childish repentance by crying. The daughter was still trembling from the great wound his inconsiderate cruelty had given her soul; it was quivering with the gall his cruelty still poured into it, while her father's humiliation made her groan still more dolefully. To the strong man, whose life had always been an honest, noble struggle, directed always towards the highest ideals, both of them seemed so weak, so wretched, so utterly unhappy--the one as torturer, the other as victim--that he once more regretted the time when the tragic Cavalcanti family had not got hold of his heart, to grind it to powder. But it was too late; that misery, unhappiness, and weakness struck him so directly now that Amati, strong man as he was, suffered in all these spasms, and could not control his instinct to give help, the feeling that was the secret of his noble soul.