Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 046.djvu/241

1839.] "Come," said the old woman, interrupting them, "let us go to supper."

The meal was set, and consisted of vegetables and a flask of rich Florentine wine, which the old dame produced out of a small cupboard. Antonio could eat but little. He kept his eyes riveted on Crescentia, and his disturbed fancy was ever whispering him that she was his dead bride. Then, again, he believed that he lay bound up in a heavy dream—the victim of a delirium which changed all the objects around him—that, perhaps, at that moment he was in the city, in his own home, suffering under the pressure of his own wild imagination, and incapable of perceiving or recognizing any of his friends, who yet might be weeping around him, and striving to comfort his afflicted spirit.

The storm was now past, and the stars were shining in the dark quiet sky. The old woman ate well, and drank better of the sweet wine. "Come, Master Antonio," said she, after a pause, "tell us what it was that took you to Padua, and brought you hither."

Antonio started from his revery.

"You are certainly entitled," replied be, "to interrogate your guest; besides, you appear to have known my father, and. perhaps, my mother also."

"Well, indeed, did I know her," said the old woman. "No one knew her better. Ay, ay, she died just six months before your father made out his second marriage with the Marchioness of Manfredi."

"So you are acquainted with that circumstance, too, are you?"

"Yes, truly," continued she; "it appears as if I had that fair puppet for ever before mine eyes. Tell me, is your beautiful stepmother still alive? When she came up from the country to be married, she was just in the hey-day of her charms."

"I cannot tell you," said Antonio, with a sigh, all that I endured at the hands of this stepmother. She had thrown the spells of enchantment, as it were, around my father, who would rather have acted with the greatest injustice towards his oldest friends, and his own son, than have subjected her to the smallest inconvenience. But matters between him and her were at length very much changed. Yet, I believe, my heart now suffered more from witnessing their mutual hatred than it had formerly done under its own multiplied vexations."

"It appears, then, that matters went on bitter bad in your household?" inquired the old woman, with a discordant chuckle.

Antonio darted a keen glance at the hag as he replied, in a tone of confusion, "I know not how I have been led to speak, in this place, of my own misery and that of my parents."

The old woman drained the red wine which stood mantling in her glass like blood, and with loud laughter replied—"I know no such glorious sport—no such perfect heaven upon earth as is to be witnessed when we see a husband and wife, once a most loving couple, now living together like cat and dog—tearing, scolding, and banning one another like two tigers, and both ready to devote themselves to Satan, provided by doing so each can annoy the other, and break the band that unites them. That, my boy, is the divinest spectacle that human life affords, and greatly is the sport enhanced if we know that the pair, in the early delirium of their passion, broke through every law of God and man in order to come together, and to tie the band which they now abominate so heartily. That, believe me, is a high festival for Satan and all his powers, and is celebrated as a jubilee throughout hell with tinkling cymbals. And now, touching these family affairs of yours——But I must hold my tongue perhaps I might say too much."

Crescentia looked sorrowfully towards the astonished Antonio. "Never mind her," whispered she. "She is drunk, miserable woman."

But the old woman's word, had powerfully recalled to the mind of Antonio the past, with all its dismal scenes. The gloomy day came back upon his soul in which he had seen his stepmother on her deathbed, and his father, in despair, cursing the hour of his birth, and intreating forgiveness of the spirit of his first wife.

"Have you nothing more to tell us?" asked the old woman, arousing him with these words out of his deep revery.

"What more can I have?" said Antonio, bitterly. "You appear to know all about me, or to have learnt it by means of some sort of second sight. Need I tell you that it was our old servant Roberto who poisoned my stepmother, stirred up to revenge by