“But what shall I tell my mistress?” asked the man.
As he said so, Regina and her sisters came into the room, striking him dumb with astonishment.
“No, you had better not go back to him,” she said, compassionating him for the treatment that would have awaited him, had he returned without her; “Luxehale would doubtless vent his fury on you for my absence. Better to stay here and serve us; and you need not fear his power as long as you keep out of his territory.”
After this, Luxehale determined to give up young and pretty wives, since they proved sharp enough to outwit him, as he had before given up rich and titled ones, who were like to have knights and princes to deliver them.
This time he said he would look out for a bustling woman of good common sense, who had been knocked about in the world long enough to know the value of what he had to offer her.
So he went out into the town of Trient, and fixed upon a buxom woman of the middle class, who was just in her first mourning for her husband, and mourned him not because she cared for him, for he had been a bad man, and constantly quarrelled with her, but because, now he was dead, she had no one to provide for her, and after a life of comparative comfort, she saw penury and starvation staring her in the face.
He met her walking in the olive-yard upon the hill whence her husband’s chief means had been derived. “And to think that all these fine trees, our fruitful arativo, and our bright green prativo[79], are to be sold to pay those rascally creditors of my brute of a husband!” she mused as she sat upon the rising ground, and cried. “If he had nothing to leave me, why did he go off in that cowardly way, and leave me here? what is the use of living, if one has nothing to live upon?”
The Devil overheard her, and perceived she was just in the mood for his purpose, but took care to appear to have heard nothing.
“And are you still charitably mourning because the Devil has taken your tyrant of a husband?”