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Updated: June 9, 2025
"Of whom art thou speaking, dear?" demanded the wondering, but not the less awe-struck, Adelheid, believing that the weakened nerves of the poor girl were unstrung by the horror of the spectacle "it is a traveller like ourselves, that has unhappily perished in the very storm from which, by the kindness of Providence, we have been permitted to escape.
It centres round Adelheid, the young and beautiful widow of Lothair, a Lombard king. Taken prisoner by his successor, the tyrant Berengarius, she is immured in a castle on the Lago di Garda, and threatened with a forced marriage with the son of her oppressor. This threat seems to endow her with superhuman power.
"I doff my beaver to thy Switzerland, friend Melchior," cried the Signor Grimaldi, after directing the attention of Adelheid to one of the peaks of Savoy, of which he had just remarked that it seemed a spot where an angel might love to light in his visits to the earth; "if thou hast much of this, we of Italy must look to it, or by the shades of our fathers! we shall lose our reputation for natural beauty.
My sister, who has certainly no admiration for the honors that have humiliated our race for so many generations I might say ages have we not ancient honors, Adelheid, as well as thou? my sister is contracted to one who bargains for eternal secrecy on this point, as the condition of his accepting the hand and ample dowry of one of the gentlest of human beings!
"Say no more, Adelheid for my sake for thine own sake, say no more in mercy, be silent! Thou never canst be mine No, no honor forbids it; in thee it would be madness, in me dishonor we can never be united. What fatal weakness has kept me near thee I have long dreaded this " "Dreaded!" "Nay, do not repeat my words, for I scarce know what I say.
I cannot speak of all the plans and projects which we discussed, but at last one of them was carried out. One dark, rainy night Adelheid changed clothes with her maid, actually deceived the guard not the fellow who had admitted me with a story that she had been sent in great haste to get some medicine for her royal mistress, and joined me outside the prison.
So he grew to know the children of the house intimately, and kept up his intercourse with the family after his return to Berlin. When Wallmoden married he felt that both he and Adelheid had been hardly treated by the Colonel, when the latter sent some plausible excuse for not attending the wedding. Adelheid knew little or nothing of the Colonel's fateful history.
"Why should the truth be ever known!" exclaimed Adelheid, nearly gasping for breath, in her eagerness to propose some expedient that should rescue Sigismund for ever from so odious an office. "Thou sayest that there are ample means in thy family relinquish all to this youth, on condition that he assume thy place!" "I would gladly beggar myself to be quit of it "
"Dost, feel thyself better, and more able to listen to thy friends, dear Christine?" asked Adelheid, taking the hand of the repudiated and deserted girl with the tenderness of an affectionate sister. Until now the sufferer had only spoken the few words related, in mild reproof of her mother's indiscretion.
"O! do not, do not condemn him;" whispered Christine, covering her face with her hands. "He has found himself unequal to bearing the burthen of our degradation, and he should be spoken of in pity rather than with hatred." Adelheid was silent; but she regarded the poor trembling girl, whose head now nestled in her bosom, with melancholy concern.
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