As she went in through the gate, she did not see the old gate-keeper, Piero, there. The lanterns in the court-yard were not lighted, and there was not a soul to be seen anywhere.
She went up the steps to the gallery, and her foot struck against something hard. It was a little bronze vase, which belonged in the music-room. A few steps higher up she found a knife. It was a sheath-knife, with a long, dagger-like blade. When she lifted it up a couple of dark drops rolled down from its edge. She knew that it must be blood.
And she understood too that what she had feared all the autumn had now happened. Bandits had been in the summer-palace for plunder. And everyone who could run away had run away; but her father, who could not leave his bed, must be murdered.
She could not tell whether the brigands were not still in the house. But now, in the midst of danger, her fears vanished; and she hurried on, unheeding that she was alone and defenceless.
She went along the gallery into the music-room. Broad rays of moonlight fell upon the floor, and in one of those rays lay a human form stretched motionless.
Donna Micaela bent down over that motionless body. It was Giannita. She was murdered; she had a deep, gaping wound in her neck.
Donna Micaela laid the body straight, crossed the hands over the breast, and closed the eyes. In so doing, her hands were wet with the blood; and when she felt that warm, sticky blood, she began to weep. “Alas, my dear, beloved sister,” she said aloud, “it is your young life that has ebbed away with this blood. All your life you have loved me, and now you have shed your blood defending my house. Is it to punish my hardness that God has taken you from me? Is it because I did not allow you to love him whom I loved that you have gone from me? Alas, sister, sister, could you not have punished me less severely?”
She bent down and kissed the dead girl’s forehead. “You do not believe it,” she said. “You know that I have always been faithful to you. You know that I have loved you.”
She remembered that the dead was severed from everything earthly, that it was not grief and assurances of friendship she needed. She said a prayer over the body, since the only thing she could do for her sister was to support with pious thoughts the flight of the soul soaring up to God.