He was, he said, mad--MAD!--and
carried away by a hurricane of passions altogether beyond his power
to control. He had not formed any distinct intention of following
his nephew and La Bianca to the Pineta till he reached his own
house. He had happened to approach the Palazzo from the back,
through the stable-yard; and had there found old Niccolo, the groom,
up. Then the idea of waylaying the pair in the forest had occurred
to him. He had ordered a horse to be saddled; and had told the groom
to let no one know that he had left the palace. He then went up to
his room, dismissed his valet, and locked the door, as the servant
had related to Signor Fortini. Then descending to the stables, by
one of those private doors and stairs so frequently to be found in
old Italian palaces, and generally contrived to communicate with the
principal sleeping chamber of the dwelling, he mounted his horse,
and rode furiously to the Pineta, quitting the city, not by the
Porta Nueva, but by the next gate towards the south. He must have
reached the forest before Ludovico and Bianca had left the city. He
put his steaming horse into the abandoned hovel of a watcher of the
cattle on the marshes; and then skulked about the edge of the wood
in the vicinity of the road which enters it from the city. All this
time he had, as he again and again declared in the long and
repetitive document in the lawyer's hands, no formed intention of
any sort in his mind.
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