A TALE OF HORROR.

of the tragic event which had occurred.

155

His tale of horror

was related first to the domestics; but he must see, he said, the Marchese or his son. The former, he was told by the servants, could not be disturbed so early; but their young master, the Count Marco, had been up, they added, by times, -if, indeed, he had gone to bed at all on the conclusion, at no very early hour of the morning, of the last night's entertainment. One of the servants was about to apprize him of the mariner's business, when Marco himself appeared.

The terror-stricken faces of the seaman's late auditors prepared him for some correspondent recital; but not for the trembling, agonizing surmises which followed on the man's brief relation; and when, in a private interview, particulars were detailed which left no doubts, as far at least as concerned the person of the victim, it is difficult to say how the young noble was able (if he did so) to disguise the fearful intensity of his individual interest in that which had befallen.

It is more material to our narrative to notice that the seaman's chief motive for desiring to speak with the masters of the palazzo, was to put into their hands a splendid jewel— a bracelet—which he had picked up, he said, lying close beside the murdered maiden. None of hers (he suspected) could be an ornament so unsuited to her rank and her attire, and it might point to the hand by which she had fallen.

Marco, forcing himself to say something in praise of the mariner's honesty and sagacity, put a gold piece into his hand,

as he received into his own the glittering bauble, on which hung, perhaps, its owner's life; and who that owner was Marco knew well at a single glance. The bracelet was a gift of his own to Beatrice, and her's, beyond a doubt, was the hand which, instigated by jealousy and wounded pride, had plunged the murderous steel into the heart of her humble rival.

She must have seen,—perhaps heard—the purport of his last meeting with Bianca on the terrace, and must have preceded and awaited her victim in the olive grove through which lay her homeward path. All confirmed it;-she had been absent from the ball-room long after he and the party of maskers had returned to it from the garden; and when she re-appeared, he could now remember that her demeanour had been absent, her dark eye restless, her cheek alternately flushed and pallid. And this was the beautiful fiend whom another day would have made his bride; for love, which with the moon had ruled the ascendant on the previous night, had given place with the morning sun to pride, policy, and what he would have called a sense of honour.

In an hour after the mariner had left his father's villa, Marco was closeted at the Palazzo Doria with the Duke. Their interview was long; but to the curious eve's-dropper quiet as

the grave.

Before sunset, the galley which was to have taken the old man and his daughter had left the Gulf for Naples, with Marco

as its passenger, and, strange as it might seem, the two seamen (who, after the unhappy father, had been the first discoverers of the murder,) had also been permitted to sail without their evidence being taken. Concerning the manner of poor Bianca's death there was of course much talking, much surmise, even a slight mockery of investigation; but the matter was soon hushed up.

Nor in the case of Bianca

Murders at Genoa, if not quite so common as at the rival city Venice, were of no rare occurrence; and the voice, especially of plebeian blood, was too often, as elsewhere, accustomed to cry unheeded from the ground. was there any one to sue for the justice not likely to have been obtained; for her old father, her only relative and only friend, was now helpless, almost heedless as a child, and so remained, till, in a few months, he slept beside her. Marco never returned to Genoa, and fell in battle a few years after, having taken service in the army of the French, at that time allies and almost masters of the once proud Republic. And the miserable Beatrice!-what became of her? Never did detected culprit, condemned by man's erring judgment to give up life for life, suffer a penalty so dread as her's. The rank and power which had served to shield her from public condemnation, did not stifle private suspicion: and though to breathe a name like her's in conjunction with a deed of murder, was more, perhaps, than any inhabitant of Genoa, noble or plebeian, would have dared to do, yet on the city walls, which the Italians, with reference to

such a use, have termed proverbially "Fools Paper," some daring hand had ventured, in ambiguous but intelligible terms, to write up her accusation.

But what was this to the "hand writing on the wall,” which above every festive board, on the frescos of every sparkling saloon, on the tapestry of her own chamber, presented itself in characters of blood before the eye of Beatrice. For a season, and with a view by braving to disarm suspicion, did the wretched lady compel herself, or was compelled, perhaps, by her noble family to face the world; but the colour had fled her cheek; her dark eye grew hollow, and at last she veiled them from public notice in a convent of Benedictine Nuns.

There, none were more exemplary in their vigils, their penances, their prayers, than sister Agatha, the name by which the once proud Beatrice Doria was known amongst the nuns. Never to one of them (whatever she might have done in the confessional) did she open the dark secret of her soul; but those of the sisterhood, who occupied adjoining dormitories, told fearful tales of the sounds of agony-groans from the depths of overwhelming dread which, at times, were heard to issue from her cell. Other of her habits caused remark. Seldom in broad day-light, but never of an evening when the nuns were assembled in the convent garden, was she of their number; and always after sunset did she keep the window of her cell close shut, however sultry might be the weather. Could Beatrice have feared the gentle breezes of a summer's

eve? Them she loved not; but far more had she learned to hold in terror and aversion the fire-flies, the Lucciole which came forth when they arose.

Once would she have laughed in derision at the simple superstition of poor Bianca; but upon her it had descended, and in an aggravated form it clung to her guilty spirit. From that Midsummer Eve, when the fire-flies had lighted her in doing her deed of death, they never flitted across her path without recalling its fearful memory. And if the spirit of the murdered maiden had been permitted to revisit earth, and stand before the eye of her destroyer, not more awful to Beatrice would have been the apparition, than the intrusion, into her lonely cell, of a simple harmless Lucciola.