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!”
“Yes; but the curious part of the affair has yet to be told. They found her lying, as if sleeping, in her bed; so sweet, so quiet, so peaceful, no one in the world would have dreamed that she had been destroyed by a malignant poison. Such, however, was the case.”
Santley buttoned his coat, and moved nervously towards the door.
“A horrible story!” he said. “I detest these tales of violence and murder. Besides, though I am not a Roman Catholic, I look upon such rubbish as a calumny upon the Christian Church.”