When Donna Isidora rushed from Quentin, she took her way unerringly (as she knew the villa well) up several flights of stairs, through passages and suites of apartments, where he could not have followed her without a guide, until she reached a little room, which had been the library and confessional of the family chaplain.
Remote from the rest of the house, its shelves full of books, its table and desk littered with letters and papers, with little religious pictures on the walls, a Madonna crowned by a white chaplet on a bracket, a vase of withered lilies, and other little matters indicative of taste, were all untouched as when the poor Padre Florez had last been there. In rambling over the villa, if Ribeaupierre's dragoons had been in the chamber, they found nothing in it which they deemed valuable enough to destroy or carry off.
Here it was that Donna Isidora had been, when, in a fit of petulance, she had before absented herself from Quentin. She set down the lamp, and taking up a book which she had been previously perusing, and which she had found lying upon the desk where the padre had left it open, for its pages were covered with dust, she muttered—
"Let me read it again, and let me be assured; but oh, if I should destroy him or myself! What matter, then? Better both die than that she should have him, whoever she is—wherever she is! Oh, Padre Florez—Padre Florez, if this anecdote you have left in my way should be but a snare to death!"
Then she ground her little pearly teeth as she spoke, and turned with trembling hands the dust-covered page which the chaplain's hand had indicated for some scientific purpose with certain marks in pencil, ere he had cast the volume on his desk, doubtless when scared from the villa by the irruption of Ribeaupierre's dragoons.
It was a quarto volume on poisons, printed at Madrid, and the paragraph which interested Isidora ran as follows.
"Note of a medicated wine, which produceth various emotions and quaint fancies, but chiefly love and madness for a time in those who partake thereof.
"Celius, an ancient Latin writer, telleth us of a company of young men, who were drinking in a taberna of the luxurious city of Agrigentum in Sicily, in those days when the tyrant Phalaris usurped the sovereignty thereof, and who, on a sudden, were seized by a malady of the brain. Being in sight of the sea, they believed themselves to be on board of a ship which was about to be cast away in a storm, and while clamouring and shouting wildly, to save themselves, they flung out of the windows the whole of the furniture; and in this belief they continued for some hours, even after being brought before a magistrate, whom they mistook for a pilot, and besought in moving terms to steer the galley aright, lest she should founder.
"On others, this wine acted as a philtre, and on seeing women, they fell madly in love with them, threatening their own destruction if their love were not responded to.
"I was persuaded in my own mind, says Celius, that this singular malady could only arise from some adulteration of the wine, and therefore had the landlord summoned before a magistrate, who compelled him to confess that he was in the habit of adulterating wines with a mixture of henbane and mandrakes (the root of which is said to bear a resemblance to the human form), and which must thus doubtless be considered the cause of this singular disease."