The Wanderess Read Online Free Page A

with your charming
companion, and since I was present yesterday when the two of
you said your touching farewell in the yard before you left for
Florence, and was witness to the strong emotions and vows of love
exchanged between you two, I cannot help taking a great interest
in your case, and the outcome of your affair.”
    “It’s awful,” he said to me, “It has to be a lie! She is not
this cruel… Is she this cruel?! It is true then! This woman is going
to kill me…”
    “I myself have been witness to the cruelty of women,” I
told him, “and am constantly amazed at womankind’s threshold
for cruelty; however, I was also a witness to the tears and amount
of love and devotion this particular young creature showed for
you as she left here yesterday. And in my experience, when a
woman’s cruelty is combined with love and devotion, it is almost
always without exception an act performed not out of treachery,
but as a painful self-sacrifice for the good of her beloved, to obtain
for him a future bounty where he would not know how to obtain
it for himself, or have the courage, patience, or foresight to obtain
it. Womankind always seems to be able to see a dozen steps into
the future, far ahead of what men are able to see. And they have
strength where we do not.”
    The poor devil’s face did not react positively to what I was
saying. He remained pale and lifeless. “I just came back from
Florence,” he told me, “where I learned that I had lost all that was
important to me in this world, other than my mistress. Last night
was the most painful… I spent the night in a graveyard, trembling
beside a small tomb where there were no flowers, only a simple
stone etched with a phrase that tore my soul to pieces every time I
read it. I read it and reread it thousands of times until nothing
remained of my soul except tiny scraps that were held together by
the consolation that my beloved was here at this inn waiting for
me. Then in the dark hours before dawn, I left that tomb and that
person who lies beneath it forever and I returned here to find my
beloved mistress has left me too. It appears she went away with
another man. I don’t understand how it is possible….”
“ I am the other man she went away with.”
    When I said this, Saul shot upright in bed. He shook
violently. His face that had been pale turned red and his eyes
burned like fire. His lips curled with both the hope that there
now stood before him someone who knew where his mistress
might be, and the rage that he was now looking at the devil who
stole his beloved. He reached into his pocket, muttering about a
knife, then a pistol, “I’ll kill you!” he shouted. But finding neither
knife nor pistol, he tore the blanket off his body and leapt from
his bed, “I’ll strangle you!”
    “Settle down! Listen to me carefully, please lie back in
your bed. I’ll tell you the rest of the story…” I approached the
bedside, sat down and urged Saul to listen calmly. “This is the
reason why I came back to find you: Yesterday your mistress was
determined to leave this inn by herself as soon as you left for
Florence. She arranged for a car to take her in the evening to go
to Rome…
    “Because I took a liking to you two, at noontime yesterday
when I observed you from afar as you told her you would be back
for her in the morning at daybreak, whereupon you two would
never again part company—you see, sir, I have a tender heart for
such romantic moments, even when I am not a lucky
participant—so, because I took a liking to you two as a couple, I
decided that I needed to take her to Rome myself , so that I could
find out where she was ultimately going, and why, so as to return
here and report this information to you. Don’t you realize, if it
hadn’t been I who had taken her, it would have been someone
else? And that someone certainly wouldn’t have come back to tell you about it—for very few men have tender hearts when they have
nothing to