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Bower was wrestling with a mad desire to grapple with him and fling him down among the black rocks. Stampa crept nearer. A ghastly smile lit his rugged features, and his pickel clattered to the broken shingle at his feet. "I offer you to-morrow," he said. "I am in no hurry. Have I not waited sixteen years? But it may be that you are tortured by a devil, Marcus Bauer. Shall it be now?"
The court of Spain expressing some doubts with regard to the pregnancy of the duchess of Parma, she underwent a formal examination by five midwives of different nations, in presence of the elder duchess dowager, several ladies of quality, three physicians and a surgeon; and was declared with child: nevertheless, after having kept all Europe in suspense for six months, she owned she had been deceived; and general Stampa, with the Imperial forces, took formal possession of the duchies of Parma and Placenta.
"Confiteor Deo omnipotenti," mumbled Stampa, and the bridegroom in this strange rite knew that he was making the profession of a faith he did not share. His mind cleared by degrees. He was still under the spell of bodily fear, but his brain triumphed over physical stress, and bade him disregard these worn out shibboleths. Nevertheless, the words had a tremendous significance.
She suspected that he carried his hostility to the absurd pitch of refusing to partake of any food provided by Bower. It was a queer coincidence that Spencer harbored the same notion with regard to Stampa, and wondered at it. "I shall starve willingly," he said. "It will be a just punishment for declining the good things that did not tempt me when they were available."
If I am not there, and you go to Zermatt some day well, just ask for Stampa. They will tell you what has become of me." She found it hard to reconcile this broken, careworn old man with her cheery companion of the previous afternoon. What did he mean? She understood his queer jargon of Italianized German quite clearly; but there was a sinister ring in his words that blanched her face.
Stampa threw out his hands in emphatic gesture. "What can one do?" he cried. "They are always a danger, like the snow cornice and the névé. There is a chimney on the Jungfrau through which stones are constantly shooting from a height of two thousand feet. You cannot see them, they travel too fast for the eye. You hear something sing past your ears, that is all.
Aurelia shone with all the fabled graces of nymph or goddess; and to Sir Launcelot might be applied what the divine poet Ariosto says of the Prince Zerbino: Natura il fece e poi ruppe la stampa When Nature stamp'd him, she the die destroy'd.
Oddly enough, it never occurred to her that a woman might be lying in that dreary tenement. Her first vague imagining suggested that Bower had committed a crime, killed a man, and that an avenger had dragged him to his victim's last resting place. That Stampa was laboriously plodding through the marriage ritual was a fantastic conceit of which she received no hint.
She killed herself. She came from Zermatt. I have lived nearly all my life in this valley, and hers is the only suicide I can recall." "Why did she kill herself, and when?" The official supplied the date; but he had no knowledge of the affair beyond a village rumor that she had been crossed in love. As for poor old Stampa, who met with an accident about the same time, he never mentioned her.
The Italian press condemned the proceedings of the Conference in language to the full as strong as that of the German or Austrian journals. The Stampa affirmed that those who, like Bissolati, were in the beginning for placing their trust in one of the two coteries at the Conference were guilty of a fatal mistake.
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