“I’m afraid I bore you, sir,” I said, smiling. “Your tastes are not literary, I fear?”
“I seldom read fiction,” he answered. “I consider it too trivial, and a waste of time.”
“Do you really think so? I grant you, if the work is not of a truly moral nature, like the present. As I was going to tell you, the subject of this story, or tragedy in narrative, is edifying in the extreme. There was once in Castile a parish priest, an exceedingly handsome fellow, who, in a moment of impulse, fell deeply in love with a Spanish lady.”
There was no need to look up now. I felt that they were both fascinated, not knowing what was to come. Ellen’s hand was on my chair, which vibrated with the violent beating of her heart.
“Very prettily does Sebastiano describe the course of this amour. The priest’s first struggles to resist temptation, his frequent fastings and spiritual purgings, his growing desperation, his final yielding to the spell. To be brief, he at last spoke to her, avowed his passion, and flung himself, despairing and imploring, at her feet.”
“And she?” asked Ellen, in a voice so low that I scarcely heard her.
“Oh, the story says but little of her answer, though doubtless it was to the purpose, as the sequel proves. They understood one another, and might doubtless have been happy, but for one unfortunate impediment, which both had forgotten. The lady had—a husband!”
Ah, that frightened, beating heart! how it leapt and struggled, as the little hand still clutched my chair! I just glanced up, and meeting my gaze, she made an appealing gesture; for she began to understand. As for him, he stood pale and sullen, scowling at me with his seraphic face, and as yet imperfectly comprehending.
“A husband!” I repeated, turning over a leaf. “He, poor devil, was an alchemist, a dreary, doting seeker for the elixir of immortal life, and they thought him—blind. In this they were mistaken. As the poor flat flounder on the bottom of the sea, lying half buried and invisible in the sand and mud, still with its watery jelly of an eye surveys the liquid welkin overhead, so he, our alchemist, was marking much in silence. Well, sir, the thing grew, till at last, out of that obscure laboratory where the dreamer toiled there came a thunderbolt. One fine morning the lady was found—dead!”
“Dead!”