“It is all very well for you to lie there and laugh, but you wouldn’t have laughed if you had been treated as I was, I can tell you!” sobbed Giuseppa. “And it’s all because you never tell me any thing, as other husbands do.”
“Bosh!” answered the Devil; “I should have enough to do, if I told you all the stories like that! Why, it’s the commonest thing in the world. That king’s son was a good young man, obedient to all the advice of his elders. But after a time he got with bad companions, who introduced him to some of my people. After they had played him a number of tricks, one day one of them took into his head to give him a stunning good illness, to punish him for some luck he had had against them at cards. And that’s the history of that—there’s nothing commoner in life.”
Giuseppa made a sign to know if Clamer had heard all he wanted to know, and, finding he was satisfied, let the Devil go to sleep again.
As soon as he began to snore very soundly, Giuseppa lifted the bed-clothes, and Clamer once more applied his stick. Whether by getting used to the work and therefore less nervous, he really hit him harder, or whether the previous blows had made the Devil more sensitive, he certainly woke this time in a more furious passion than ever, and with so rapid a start that it was all Clamer could do to get out of his sight in time.
“What have you been dreaming now?” he exclaimed, in his most fearful voice. “I declare, I can scarcely keep my hands off you!”
“Don’t be angry,” answered Giuseppa; “it is I who have had the worst of it. I dreamt I was passing through a country where the trees had given up bearing fruit; and when the people saw me go by, they all came round me, and said, as I was the Devil’s wife, I must know what ailed their trees; and when I couldn’t tell them, they cut down great branches, and ran after me, poking the sharp, rough points into my sides! You may believe if I tried to run away fast.”
The Devil had never had such a laugh since he had been a devil, as at this story, and the whole palace echoed with his merriment.
When Giuseppa found him once more in such good humour, she went on,—
“And why do you do such mischievous things, and make people so savage? It isn’t fair that they don’t dare to touch you and all their ill-will falls on me.”
“As it happens, it’s not my doing at all this time; at least, I didn’t go out of my way to do it for any sort of fun. It all came about in the regular way of business.”