ld
and curse each other, and would each give up heart and soul to Satan,
only to hurt and pain or to get rid of the other. This, my young lad,
is the true glory of mortal life: but more especially, if the two
yoke-fellows have of yore gone stark mad with love, if they have done
everything, even what is a little bit out of the way, for each other,
if they have waded through much of what certain good pious folks would
call crimes and sins, merely for the sake of getting at one another,
merely for the sake of at last tying the knot, which they now so
cordially abhor. Trust me, this is a grand feast for Satan and all his
comrades, and it makes those below keep jubilee and sing psalms. And
here now even ... but I'll hold my tongue; I might easily say too
much."

Crescentia lookt mournfully at the astonisht youth. "Forgive her," she
whispered: "you see she has drunk too much; pity her."

But in Antonio's soul there now rose up with fresh power the image of
former times and all their dark scenes. The sorrowful day came back
upon him, when he saw his stepmother on her deathbed, when his father
was in despair and curst himself and the hour of his birth, and called
upon the spirit of his first wife and prayed for forgiveness.

"Have you nothing else to tell?" askt the old woman, and thereby
awakened him from his dreamy amaze.

"What shall I tell?" said Antonio, with the deepest anguish: "do not
you seem to know everything, or else to have learnt it by soothsay?
Need I tell you that an old servant, Roberto, poisoned her, having
been persecuted by her hatred and thus spurred on to revenge himself?
that this accursed villain attempted to throw the crime upon my
father? He escapes from prison, scales the garden-wall, and in the
grotto thrusts his dagger into my father's breast."

"What old Roberto! Roberto!" cried the old woman almost with a shout
of triumph: "hey, only see how strangely some people will turn out!
Ay, ay, the sneak in his younger days was such a straitlaced
hypocrite, such a holy-seeming dog; afterward however he grew a fine
spirited fellow, as they tell me. It was in the grotto then? How
cunningly things fit together, and shell off till one gets at the
kernel! In that grotto your father in earlier days sat time after time
with his first wife; there at their betrothal he first swore eternal
love to her. In those times Roberto doubtless already wore that
dagger; but he knew not what an odd use he was to make of