After having been accustomed, from the cradle to the age of four-
and-twenty, to all that riches could procure--after having lived in
the sure expectation of wealth up to an age when it was too late to
think of making himself capable of earning a competence for himself
in any conceivable manner, this marriage would take from him
suddenly, and for ever, all such prospect; and the death of the
woman who had bewitched his uncle thus fatally would make all safe,
for the Marchese Lamberto was not a marrying man--was, as all the
town knew, the last man in the world to have dreamed of taking a
wife now at this time of his life.
No; it was the fatal fascination, the witchery, the lures of this
one woman. Remove her, and all would be right.
Ah! The mischief, the woe, the scandal, the disgrace, the
irretrievable calamity, and the misery, that this accursed folly of
the Marchese Lamberto had caused. Ah! to think of all the sorrow and
trouble this woman brought with her into the city when she was so
triumphantly welcomed within the walls by these two unhappy men--the
uncle and the nephew.
It was strongly and curiously characteristic of the Italian mind
that Signor Fortini, in coming to the conclusion that this deed
must, beyond the possibility of doubt, have been committed by the
Marchese Ludovico and none other, was mainly and specially moved by
compassion for the perpetrator of the crime.
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