me and give me leave
to go succour Ruggieri inasmuch as I can.' The physician, hearing
this, for all he was angry, answered jestingly, 'Thou hast given
thyself thine own penance therefor, seeing that, whereas thou
thoughtest yesternight to have a lusty young fellow who would shake
thy skincoats well for thee, thou hadst a sluggard; wherefore go and
endeavour for the deliverance of thy lover; but henceforth look thou
bring him not into the house again, or I will pay thee for this time
and that together.'

The maid, thinking she had fared well for the first venue, betook
herself, as quickliest she might, to the prison, where Ruggieri lay
and coaxed the gaoler to let her speak with the prisoner, whom after
she had instructed what answers he should make to the prefect of
police, an he would fain escape, she contrived to gain admission to
the magistrate himself. The latter, for that she was young and buxom,
would fain, ere he would hearken to her, cast his grapnel aboard the
good wench, whereof she, to be the better heard, was no whit chary;
then, having quitted herself of the grinding due,[259] 'Sir,' said
she, 'you have here Ruggieri da Jeroli taken for a thief; but the
truth is not so.' Then, beginning from the beginning, she told him the
whole story; how she, being his mistress, had brought him into the
physician's house and had given him the drugged water to drink,
unknowing what it was, and how she had put him for dead into the
chest; after which she told him the talk she had heard between the
master carpenter and the owner of the chest, showing him thereby how
Ruggieri had come into the money-lenders' house.

[Footnote 259: Or "having risen from the grinding" (_levatasi dal
macinio_).]

The magistrate, seeing it an easy thing to come at the truth of the
matter, first questioned the physician if it were true of the water
and found that it was as she had said; whereupon he let summon the
carpenter and him to whom the chest belonged and the two money-lenders
and after much parley, found that the latter had stolen the chest
overnight and put it in their house. Ultimately he sent for Ruggieri
and questioned him where he had lain that night, whereto he replied
that where he had lain he knew not; he remembered indeed having gone
to pass the night with Master Mazzeo's maid, in whose chamber he had
drunken water for a sore thirst he had; but what became of him after
he knew not, save that, when he awoke, he found himself