"No, indeed, I had not a suspicion of it; I was racking my brains to discover who this Anaxarchus could be."[49]
"Messere Virginio!" announced a page, raising the hangings of the door; and immediately after entered a youth, just on the verge of manhood, remarkably handsome, though rather sedate in manner, and dressed in dark colors.
Have you seen a ferocious animal called the jaguar, as, with a terrific spring, he bounds from his hiding-place upon his expected prey? It must have been with a bound little less terrific that the Duke threw himself upon his son Virginio; for in those times the passions were much more demonstrative than was necessary, and, whether tender or fierce, most vehement always, and as the simoom whirls about the sands of the desert, so they subverted the sentiments of the soul. He clasped Virginio convulsively to his heart, kissed his hair and his face, held him long in his arms, and almost suffocated him with embraces, as the boa-constrictor tightens his coils around his enemy;—he dreaded, with passionate jealousy, that others should share in his joy; he drew him to one side, gazed earnestly into his eyes, and then breaking out into actual weeping, he exclaimed, in a voice broken by sobs:
"O my son! O my own child! Hope and pride of the noble house of Orsini!"
All marvelled; and Virginio, instead of replying to such extravagant demonstrations of affection, seemed almost bewildered by them, and looked towards his mother, as if longing for her more tender caresses; but the father endeavored to monopolize all the attention of his son, endeavored to interpose his own person between his eager eyes and the beloved parent they sought. Virginio succeeded, at last, in freeing himself from such ardent endearments, and flew to his mother's outstretched arms; they remained long clasped in a rapturous embrace, which can be likened to nothing on earth but itself, the embrace given by a tender mother to a beloved son; nor even in Heaven can the embraces of the angels before the throne of the Eternal surpass it in affection.
The Duke watched these two beings with a gaze full of sadness; his heart swelled within him, and a half-stifled sigh escaped his lips; his angry, blood-shot eyes turned with a truculent expression upon Troilo, who, overwhelmed with confusion, kept his fixed upon the earth. It is not to be doubted that if Isabella and Troilo had not been wholly preoccupied at that moment, the former with the dear delight of seeing her son again, the latter with the reproaches of his conscience, they would have read their own condemnation in those fearful glances of the Duke, for they revealed the hell in his heart.
As if he could hardly endure to see so closely united, two souls destined so soon to separate, or rather, jealous of an affection which he wished and intended to turn entirely to himself, he called Virginio to him in a somewhat sharp tone, and said:
"It does not belong to me to examine the progress you have made in letters, for of such matters I know but little; but tell me, how well can you manage a horse? How wield your arms? Do swords frighten you?"
"Try and see."
"With all my heart;" and the Duke sent a servant for his fencing weapons, without which, he, a most skilful swordsman, never travelled. Then commenced a furious passage of arms, in which if, as might be expected, the Duke was the superior in strength, Virginio on his side showed a skill equal to his father's, and for his years truly wonderful.