Page:Hoffmann's Strange Stories - Hoffman - 1855.djvu/234

 disease progressed, or the remedy was worse than the disease, Salvator was making his way slowly towards the other world.

Poor Catherine passed the whole night in praying to the Madonna and all the saints in heaven to aid her old lodger, and not allow him to die so young and with so promising a future before him. The young girls, in despair, accused the doctor's medicines, and uttered plaintive cries at each convulsion of the sick man, who had become delirious. This scene of tears and terror lasted until broad day. Suddenly in an attack of fever, Salvator furiously sprang from the bed, seized all the phials one after the other, and threw them out of the window. The wise Splendiano, who was then entering the house, was copiously inundated with the stinking fluid in the phials, which broke on his head. He ran, squalling strangely: "Master Salvator has become mad! in ten minutes he is a dead man! Give me the picture, dame Catherine! I will have it immediately, to pay for my visits!"

The old lady opened the chest without saying a word; but when the doctor saw the rags with which it was filled, his eyes, fringed with scarlet, became inflamed with anger; he stamped his foot, gritted his teeth, and, devoting the whole house in Bergognona street to all the devils in h, he flew like a bomb-shell, violently driven from a mortar by an explosion.

When the fever had left him, Salvator fell back into a state of insensibility again. The good Catherine believing that he was going, ran to the neighboring monastery to seek for father Bonifazio to administer the last sacraments to him. But at the sight of the sick man, the reverend man guessed that his ministry was not yet in season, and that the artist, with judicious care, might escape from it, provided that the door should be immediately shut against the doctor. Wiser remedies soon reëstablished an equilibrium in the organs of the sick man. When he opened his eyes again, his first glance fell upon a young man of distinguished exterior, who threw himself on his knees at his bedside, and exclaimed, weeping with joy: