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Updated: May 29, 2025
By the steps glittered the spear-points of a clump of men-at-arms whose swarthy and rugged faces remained impassive under flattened helmets. But as we dismounted a grey-hound came leaping from the castle, and in the doorway hovered an old maid-servant. To her Antonio ran straightway, his cape whipping out behind him. "Speak, Nuta! Is she well?" he demanded. We followed him into the castle.
The faces disappeared; again the torches wandered among the trees. Now and then I heard a shout, the barking of the greyhound, and a woman perhaps old Nuta in hysterics. I began to descend the staircase. The last door through which I had passed was so tightly wedged, from its slamming, that I could not open it. I sat down on the steps to wait till the others should miss me. What thoughts!
"Now everything around her very artfully suggested the sixteenth century the furniture, the most trivial utensils, the costume of the humblest person in the castle. Nuta attended her. The convalescent was told that she had been ill in consequence of the attack on her lover, but that he, instead of succumbing, had been spirited away and stealthily nursed back to health.
It seemed to Nuta, the fact now being subject to discovery by the executors of the estate, that the care of her charge devolved upon me. "At first I believed that old Nuta was the mad one. In the end, however, I accompanied her to the castle.
"Not long ago, the last of the Foscone's modern generation passed away. There came to me an old woman-servant from the castle. It was Nuta, whom you saw below as we entered. "Why had she sought me out? Because, if you please, in the year fifteen hundred one of my family had brought this thing to pass.
The woman's eyes blazed with a deadly fury. "What is thy money to me? Is thy money more to us than the blood of our child? O, thou coward heart!" Grasping his Snider by the tip of the barrel the man looked at his wife with sullen, dulled ferocity. "I am no coward, Nuta. Thou dost not understand. I wish to save the money, but I wish for revenge as well. Yet what can I do?
Guccio, tearing himself with difficulty away from the kitchen and Nuta, betook himself with the things required to the appointed place, whither coming, out of breath, for that the water he had drunken had made his belly swell amain, he repaired, by his master's commandment, to the church door and fell to ringing the bells lustily.
"Do no such thing," Antonio implored me. "And hereafter avoid the supernatural like the plague. May this affair instil into your philosophy of life a little healthy skepticism. There is no better tonic than laughter for one who has caught the malaria of psychical research. But even Nuta, my wife's old dresser at the theater, will tell you that laughter is precious.
"Before one can count ten he will be in the jaws," she said, with savage joy. "Nuta," whispered Martin hoarsely, "'tis but a boy," and the veins stood out on his bronzed forehead as his hand closed tighter around his rifle. "What wouldst thou do, fool?" said the woman fiercely as she seized the weapon by the barrel; "think of thy son who died but yesterday... ah! ah! look! look!"
But Guccio, who was fonder of the kitchen than the nightingale of the green boughs, especially if he scented some serving-wench there, and who had seen in that of the inn a gross fat cookmaid, undersized and ill-made, with a pair of paps that showed like two manure-baskets and a face like a cadger's, all sweaty, greasy and smoky, leaving Fra Cipolla's chamber and all his gear to care for themselves, swooped down upon the kitchen, even as the vulture swoopeth upon carrion, and seating himself by the fire, for all it was August, entered into discourse with the wench in question, whose name was Nuta, telling her that he was by rights a gentleman and had more than nine millions of florins, beside that which he had to give others, which was rather more than less, and that he could do and say God only knew what.
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