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What they got gave them something besides eloquence to lean on: there were now other sermons than young Fra Battista's, and the moral his person pointed had a double edge. In fact, where he pointed with his person, the Dominicans pointed with their sharp tongues. The Franciscans, more homely, pointed with their fingers.
"Do you know whom you have killed?" he answered "Ramirez the vagabond." White, and staring insanely at her father, Linda laughed in his face. After a time he joined her faintly in a deep-toned and distant echo of her peals. Then she stopped, and the old man spoke as if startled "He cried out in son Gian' Battista's voice."
During this portion of his life at Bologna, Cardan seems to have lived comparatively alone, and to have spent his weary leisure in brooding over his sorrows. He began his long rambling epilogue to the De Libris Propriis, and, almost on the threshold, pours out his sorrow afresh over Gian Battista's unhappy fate.
When he was questioned, Gian Battista declared he knew nothing about the report, and was fully as astonished as his father; but two days later Gian Battista's own servant came to the house, and announced that his master had been married that same morning, but that he knew not the name of the bride.
He could not make up his mind as to Gian Battista's recent conduct; if he ate of the cake, he surely could not have put in poison himself, or directed others to do so; if, on the other hand, he had poisoned the cake, Cardan feared greatly that, in the simplicity of his nature, he would assuredly let his accusers know what he had done.
The devotional bias of Cardan's nature seems to have been strengthened temporarily by the terrible experiences of Gian Battista's trial and death; but in the course of his residence at Bologna a marked reaction set in, and the fervent religious outburst, in which he sought consolation during his intolerable sorrow, was succeeded by a calmer mood which regarded the necessary evils of life as transitory accidents, and death as the one and certain end of sorrow, and perhaps of consciousness as well.
This book had been put aside, either through pressure of other work or family troubles, but now the circumstances in which he found himself seemed perfectly congenial for the elaboration of a subject of this nature, so he set to work to finish it, concluding with the chapter De Luctu, which has been used largely as the authority for the foregoing narrative of Gian Battista's crime and death.
He caught at the back of his chair. "In son Gian' Battista's voice," he repeated in a severe tone. "I heard him Ramirez the miserable " Linda helped him into the chair, and, bending low, hissed into his ear "You have killed Gian' Battista." The old man smiled under his thick moustache. Women had strange fancies.
For that reason, he copied it, while Battista's wife held double bandages tight round his head: believing that the letter stood transcribed in a precisely similar hand, he forwarded it to Lieutenant Pierson, and then sank and swooned. Two days he lay incapable and let his thoughts dance as they would.
Public and private calamity fell upon the Duca di Sessa, the Governor of Milan, doubtless because he had allowed the law to take its course. Indeed every person great or small who had been concerned in Gian Battista's condemnation, was, by Cardan's showing, overtaken by grave misfortune.
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