“What shall be done with him, mistress?” they asked.

Manto long stood silent, torn by conflicting emotions.  At length she said, in a strange, unnatural voice: 

“Put him into the Square Tower.”

“And now, mistress, what further?  How to choose the new consuls?”

“Ask me no more,” she said.  “I shall never prophesy again.  Virtue has gone away from me.”

The leaders departed, to intrigue for the vacant posts, and devise tortures for Benedetto.  Manto sat on the rampart, still and silent as its stones.  Anon she rose, and roved about as if distraught, reciting verses from Virgil.

Night had fallen.  Benedetto lay wakeful in his cell.  A female figure stood before him bearing a lamp.  It was Manto.

“Benedetto,” she said, “I am a wretch, faithless to my country and to my master.  I did but even now open his sacred volume at hazard, and on what did my eye first fall?

  Trojaque nunc stares, Priamique arx alta maneres.

But I can no other.  I am a woman.  May Mantua never entrust her fortunes to the like of me again!  Come with me, I will release thee.”

She unlocked his chains; she guided him through the secret passage under the moat; they stood at the exit, in the open air.

“Fly,” she said, “and never again draw sword against thy mother.  I will return to my house, and do that to myself which it behoved me to have done ere I released thee.”

“Manto,” exclaimed Benedetto “a truce to this folly!  Forsake thy dead Duke, and that cheat of Liberty more crazy and fantastic still.  Wed a living Duke in me!”

“Never!” exclaimed Manto.  “I love thee more than any man living on earth, and I would not espouse thee if the earth held no other.”

“Thou canst not help thyself,” he rejoined; “thou hast revealed to me the secret of this passage.  I hasten to the camp.  I return in an hour with an army, and wilt thou, wilt thou not, to-morrow’s sun shall behold thee the partner of my throne!”

Manto wore a poniard.  She struck Benedetto to the heart, and he fell dead.  She drew the corpse back into the passage, and hurried to her home.  Opening her master’s volume again, she read: 

  Taedet coeli convexa tueri.

A few minutes afterwards her father entered the chamber to tell her he had at last found the philosopher’s stone, but, perceiving his daughter hanging by her girdle, he forbore to intrude upon her, and returned to his laboratory.

It was time.  A sentinel of the besiegers had marked Benedetto’s fall, and the disappearance of the body into the earth.  A pool of blood revealed the entrance to the passage.  Ere sunrise Mantua was full of Frederick’s soldiers, full also of burning houses, rifled sanctuaries, violated damsels, children playing with their dead mothers’ breasts, especially full of citizens protesting that they had ever longed for the restoration of the Emperor, and that this was the happiest day of their lives.  Frederick waited till everybody was killed, then entered the city and proclaimed an amnesty.  Virgil’s bust was broken, and his writings burned with Manto’s body.  The flames glowed on the dead face, which gleamed as it were with pleasure.  The old alchemist had been slain among his crucibles; his scrolls were preserved with jealous care.