Page 361 - Revelation

Svetlana de Rohan-Levashova. Revelation

break.

– Well, have a chat with your daughter, Isidora. Maybe, she will be able to bring
reason to your strayed consciousness! I give you one hour; try to become reasonable,
Isidora. Otherwise this meeting will be the last...
Caraffa did not wish to play anymore. It was his life that was at stake, just as the
life of my dearest Anna. And if he did not care a straw about her life, he was ready to
do anything for his.

– Mother, dear! – Anna stood at the threshold, motionless. – How we are going
to destroy him? We shall not be able in fact, mother!
I jumped up from the chair and ran to my only treasure, to my dear girl and
pressed her to my bosom as hard as I could...
– Oh, mother, you will smother me! – Anna’s laughter rang like silver bells.

My heart absorbed this laughter like one sentenced to death absorbs the warm
parting rays of the setting sun.
– There, there, mother dear, we are still alive! We still can fight! You told me
yourself that we would fight as long as we live... So let’s think whether we can do
anything to save the world from this Evil.

She again supported me with her courage! She again found the right words...
This sweet brave girl, almost a child, could not even imagine to what tortures
Caraffa could subject her! What atrocious pain her soul could drown in! But I knew...
I knew everything that awaited her, if I refused to fulfill his wish, if I refused to give the
only thing the Pope craved.
– My dear, my heart... I will not be able to watch you tortured... I will not give you
to him, my girl! Sever and those like him do not care who will be left in this LIFE... So
why must we be different? Why must we worry about somebody else's fate?!

My words scared even me... however deeply in my heart I perfectly understood it
was the blank despair of our situation that provoked them. Certainly, I was not going
to betray that, for the sake of which I lived and my father and my poor Girolamo died.
I just wanted to believe, if only for a fraction of a second, that we could get away from
this terrible "black" Carrafian world, just like that, forgetting about everything...
forgetting about others – people we don’t know... forgetting about evil.
It was the momentary weakness of a tired person, but I understood that I did not
have any right even to permit it. And to crown it all burning wicked tears began to roll
down my face. But I tried so much to keep it from happening! I tried not to show my
dear girl the depths of despair into which my pain-exhausted soul fell...

Anna sadly looked at me with her enormous grey eyes in which deep and very
adult sorrow lived... She quietly stroked my hands, as if wishing to calm me. But my
heart screamed a frenzied scream refusing to yield... I did not wish to lose her. She
made the only remaining sense of my ruined life. I could not allow the inhuman creature
called the Roman Pope to take her from me!
– Mother dear, don’t worry about me. – Anna whispered, as if she had read my
thoughts. – I am not afraid of pain. And if it is very painful, grandfather promised to
take me. I spoke to him yesterday. He will wait for me, if we fail... and dad too. They

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