old instinct of Antonello, had picked up the remnants of the Perlimpimpino powder left by the doctor. 'Cousin!' I now exclaimed, 'you can save me yet; you can save the Count! Hasten to his cell, remind him of the remains of the powder in his pocket, and learn from him the way to use it, and all will yet be well!' He shook his head incredulously, pressed my hand, and went.
"Sadly passed the minutes away. The horrid doubt oppressed me, whether the powder would exercise its wondrous efficacy in the absence of the doctor; whether the mystic sentences he spoke over it had not everything to do with its power; whether the gaoler could exercise the necessary quickness and accuracy in its use. The lamp that half lit up my low vault burnt darkly and sadly, as if impatiently waiting my departure, so that it, too, might go to sleep. In despair I threw myself on the marble bench and shut my eyes, but the glitter of the dreadful axe shone through my fast-closed eyelids. Then a knock at the door sounded in my ears, and the words: 'Wake up, Antonello, the priest is waiting; take thy beheading, cousin, and afterwards thou mayest sleep till the trump of doom!'
"The memory of what followed—of confession and absolution, of the executioner's block—has completely vanished from my brain. I only know that I sneezed violently, opened my eyes, and found myself once more in my usual dress, lying at the foot of the column under the shadow of the holy Teodoro; that I saw standing at my feet the patrician Orazio Memmo, and that I heard him calling: 'Hi, wake up, Antonello! A league's row on the canal!'
"'Excellenza!' I cried, and you will go again to the enchanted garden of Proporinazzo? And we are both really alive and free, and the confusion with our heads is now happily disposed of?'
"He measured me with his eye, shook his head as if at a loss to understand me, and asked if I was still dreaming, or if the cheap Vincentin wine was muddling my brain. Dejected and silent I loosed the chain and rowed the nobleman up and down. No trace of any strange red and silver gondola could be seen, far or near. Count Orazio dozed away the hour on the water with a composure that seemed inexplicable to me. When we landed, I implored him at least to tell me whether we had no further consequences to fear on the part of the Tribunal; whether he had not saved a pinch or two of the Perlimpimpino powder for future contingencies. But he persisted in pretending surprise and called me a fool; and I then concluded that a stony silence had been imposed on him by the Inquisition, and that he pretended ignorance with design.
"Since that day I have not breathed a word of the incident to any human being; and you, my children, are the first to whom, under the seal of an oath, I entrust it. Had I not, since that day, suffered from a peculiar twitching sensation in the neck, at the place where the double wound was made—especially when the weather changes—I might have taken the whole for a dreadful dream. As it is, however, the plain facts remain, burned in, in vivid colours, on my brain."
With these words my father closed his story, the telling of which had used up all his remaining strength. We sent at once for the priest of San Moise. He came with the holy Viaticum, and anointed the forehead of my father, who soon after breathed out his last sigh. Peace be with the soul of the honest man!
