“I know not what mercy is!” cried the terrible Italian woman, raising the long, bright, glittering dagger over her head.
“Holy God! protect me! Lady—dear lady, have pity upon me!” shrieked the agonized wretch, her countenance hideously distorted, and appallingly ghastly, as it was raised in such bitterly earnest appeal toward that of the avengeress. “Again I say mercy—mercy!”
“Die, fiend!” exclaimed Nisida; and the dagger, descending with lightning speed, sunk deep into the bosom of the prostrate victim. A dreadful cry burst from the lips of the wretched woman; and she fell back—a corpse!
“Oh! my dear—my well-beloved and never-to-be-forgotten mother!” said Nisida, falling upon her knees by the side of the body, and gazing intently upward—as if her eyes could pierce the entire building overhead, and catch a glimpse of the spirit of the parent whom she thus apostrophized—“pardon me—pardon me for this deed! Thou didst enjoin me to abstain from vengeance—but when I thought of all thy wrongs, the contemplation drove me mad—and an irresistible power—a force which I could not resist—has hurried me on to achieve the punishment of this wretch who was so malignant an enemy of thine; dearest mother, pardon me—look not down angrily on thy daughter!”
Then Nisida gave way to all the softer emotion which attended the reaction that her mind was now rapidly undergoing, after being so highly strung, as for the last few hours it was—and her tears fell in torrents. For some minutes she remained in her kneeling position, and weeping, till she grew afraid—yes, afraid of being in that lonely place, with the corpse stretched on the ground—a place, too, which for other reasons awoke such terrible recollections in her mind.
Starting to her feet—and neither waiting to extinguish the lamp, which she herself had lighted at an early period of the night, nor to withdraw her dagger from the bosom of the murdered Margaretha—Nisida fled from the vault, and regained her own apartment in safety, and unperceived.
*****
When morning dawned, Nisida rose from a couch in which she had obtained two hours of troubled slumber, and, having hastily dressed herself, proceeded to the chamber of her brother Francisco.
But he was not there—nor had his bed been slept in during the past night.
“He is searching after his Flora,” thought Nisida. “Alas, poor youth—how it grieves me thus to be compelled to thwart thee in thy love! But my oath—and thine interests, Francisco, demand this conduct on my part. And better—better it is that thou shouldst hear from strangers the terrible tidings that thy Flora is a prisoner in the dungeon of the inquisition, where she can issue forth only to proceed to the stake! Yes—and better, too, is it that she should die, than that this marriage shall be accomplished!”