THE WIVES OF ENGLAND SWEARING TO PROTECT UNSULLIED THE BRIGHT POKER.
"SAY YOU DID IT!"
A ROMANCE OF SMILES AND TITTERS.
Titter the Third.
Goffoni, however, though he hardly relished the idea of bidding adieu to the world, and a generous Italian public, on the boards of a scaffold—and which he now felt there was something stronger than a mere probability of his doing—at length began to contemplate his lot with all the melodramatic magnanimity of injured innocence. And though he had but little of the martyr in his constitution, yet as Fate had cast him the part, he was determined to fudge up as much stoical sternness as his nature would allow him to throw into the character. Besides, deserted by his Carlotta, he had still no great desire to continue a solitary unit on the slate of creation; so that, to use his own expression, it mattered not when he was sponged out. "What was the world to him?" again he asked himself, and again he gave himself precisely the same answer, videlicet,—"a wilderness, a desert!" Existence, he said, he viewed as a piece of burnt rag, with but a few bright specks flitting across its dark surface; and he cared not how soon "the parson and the clerk" appeared to announce the departure of his vital spark.
But Goffoni had no sooner made up his mind to play the unmitigated hero to the last, than the presence of her whose absence had given him such supernatural fortitude thawed all the artificial ice of his stoicism, and made the hero melt into the man.
Yes! the dark-eyed young partner of his bosom and four-poster—she whom he believed had left him for ever for the Marchese di Castellinaria, had come to console him in his affliction! and Goffoni, though he could have been a Regulus without his Carlotta, felt, when he saw her, all his magnanimity ooze out of his eyes.
"Oh! Bartolo! Bartolo!" sobbed the Signora, "if I hadn't seen it in all the papers I should never have dreamt of finding you here. You can't tell what I've suffered on your account!"
"Oh! Carlotta! Carlotta!" groaned Goffoni: "and what have I not suffered on your account? But for you, alas! I should not have been here."
"For me-e!" hysterically exclaimed Carlotta. "Oh! don't say so! How could I possibly have anything to do with it?"
"Didn't you tell me," inquired the woe-begone Signor, "that you'd leave me—for ever? You did! You know you did!"