Page:ThePrincessofCleves.djvu/202

190 It was to no purpose that this poor creature attested my innocence, by all the asseverations she was capable of making; it appeared evident to them, that if I had not already been guilty in fact, I intended to be so that night; and therefore leaving her in the house where they had first carried her, they went to the place where their attendants waited with the horses; they ordered them to pursue their journey, telling them, they would overtake them the next day. This being done, they concealed themselves in the skirts of the town where they were not known, till the approach of night; when, disguised and muffled in their cloaks, they returned, and waited at the end of a back lane, through which they knew Lorenzo must be obliged to pass; and as soon as they saw him, without giving him the least warning of his fate, plunged both their daggers in his breast, on which he immediately fell: the place being extremely private, gave them no apprehensions of any person coming along, and they tarried by the dead body, till some men, whom they had ordered at that hour, came and joined them, and carried it to the house of a surgeon, who had been brought up in the family of count Caprera, and was entirely at his devotion. Revenge not satiated even with the death of the supposed offender, this cruel husband and father pursued it farther yet, denying the rites of burial to the lifeless bones, which they ordered to be clean scraped, and disrobed of all their flesh, and then set up in the manner you see. For that, oh Miramillia! continued she, pointing to the anatomy, that dreadful spectacle was the once gay, admired Lorenzo. Here the bursting grief broke in a second time on her discourse, and she was compelled to give some time to it before she could proceed; which at last she did in these words: Little was I capable of guessing what had happened, yet was I seized with a strange disorder at the receipt of Lawrana's billet; and when afterward I was told by