Page:Gesta Romanorum - Swan - Wright - 2.djvu/30

18 face; but why all this is done, I do not comprehend."

On hearing this, the lady immediately entered the private chamber before alluded to, and narrowly inspected every closet and crevice. At length, she came to the place wherein the tablets, inscribed with the ignominy of his birth, and which he was wont to read day by day, were deposited; and then she wept most piteously. For they were the same which she had laid in the cradle; and which, when they now started up before her, as it were, by magic, she remembered too well. She opened them, and recognized her own hand-writing. "Alas!" she exclaimed, "how has he obtained this dark testimony of my crime, if he be not my son?" And then bursting into a lamentable cry, "Woe is me, that I ever saw the light of heaven—would that I had died ere I was born." The soldiers in the hall, hearing the clamour produced by the anguish and perturbation of her mind, ran into the chamber, and found her stretched upon the earth. They stood around her a considerable time before she was able