We must now return to the chateau. Between those fated women stood the unforgiving one.
"Mothers both!" he uttered, pointing jocosely. "Mother, traitress to your son, we part no more. Mother, rival to your daughter, Jewess or Gingaree, you have lost your Clotilde. Vainly, like your sires, may you wander crying Chloe! Chloe! till she too is old Clo—till—"
But we draw the curtain o'er his savage joy. Poison and poignard had been pacific penances to those he dealt the Duchess, ere, with delirious haste, he ascended with his wretched parent in the aërial car. The Lady Ketura, meanwhile, fled to her skiff, which, but for the incantations of the wizard Gorius, she could not have steered, her wrists being yet stiff from the thumb-screws applied to extort her unutterable secret. Thus for weeks did they buffet,—one with ether, the other with the waves,—without touching even earth, much less any more palatable food. Their squalid tatters spread pestilence around, and the rage of hunger gnawed them both.
It was now that the volcano began to spout in tragic lines of liquid fire: a furious tempest added shipwreck to the scene. A flaming brand from the irruption lighted on the sail,—the conflagration spread,—a spiral blaze darted on high,—the roar of combustion announced that it had ignited the infernal gas, and the accursed aëronaut was precipitated on the shore. Ketura now remembered how she had loved, and crawled to kiss the dear perfidious Murkenhole. Bats, toads, lemurs, owls, snails, spiders, and other reptilous vermin, slimily beset her loathsome way, gibbering with too intelligible triumph; but, leaning her back against a rock, and firmly placing her foot before, she shouted, "Come one, come all! this rock shall fly from its firm base as soon as Ketura!"
He of the charmed life had fallen unharmed, and, hearing this heroic defiance, rushed to consummate his hellish vengeance. But the Duchess of Boaz anticipated his asking eye. Madly she dashed her veined temples against the jagged rock—all was black darkness. Wooden hurried forward,—slipped,—fell. Was it the ocean foam which rendered his path precarious? He scooped up some, in the hollow of his hand, to quench his burning thirst, and lend him voice for one more vow of hate! Holy nature! his slide was formed of Ketura's brain!—'twas that his lip had touched. Still, as life ebbed from her gangrenous coagulated wounds, her lacerated arms, like crushed vipers, wound their torn muscles round his felon knee. With a glare of fury he beheld the demon laughing o'er his prey, but, as the master of these forfeit souls, spurned the already putrescent masses of still conscious mortality into the turgid sable of that yawning gulf: their life-rending shriek awaked the distant bandits, who had been deaf to the phenomena of nature. What sight awaits them?
Now all the gods to speed! it is the Steam Beacon of the Railroad, which begins to flare in token of their chieftain's victory: and lo! he comes, bearing in one hand two papers;—the first, a free pardon for himself and gallant band; the second, a restitution of his Italian estates, as the rightful Count Cigaro. In his other hand he leads the rescued Clotilde, followed by her venerable father Sir Gunterzwartz; and if a momentary cloud o'ershadowed their spirits at the memory of the dead, it was dissipated on the morrow at the altar of Hymen, where the Druidic high-priest, assisted by his patriarchs, conferred the blushing hand of Clotilde on the joy-o'erflowed eye of her devoted Guzman; announcing to the assembled senate this moral lesson,—that necromancy dislocates every vital tie; but that whene'er irregular valour substitutes, in favour of injured beauty, the boudoir of bliss for the dungeon of despair, there is in such exchange no robbery."
To this we can only add, that Miss St. Cloud and a young gentleman we know might write a delightful book between them; and that the sooner they form a literary partnership, the better.
LINES
On seeing "The Young Veteran," John Bannister, toddling up Gower-street,
after he had attained his seventieth birthday.