But Manto found another father.  She sat at Virgil’s feet in Elysium; and as he stroked the fair head, now golden with perpetual youth, listened to his mild reproofs and his cheerful oracles.  By her side stood a bowl filled with the untasted waters of Lethe.

“Woe,” said Virgil—­but his manner contradicted his speech—­“woe to the idealist and enthusiast!  Woe to them who live in the world to come!  Woe to them who live only for a hope whose fulfilment they will not behold on earth!  Drink not, therefore, of that cup, dear child, lest Duke Virgil’s day should come, and thou shouldst not know it.  For come it will, and all the sooner for thy tragedy and thy comedy.”

THE CLAW

The balm and stillness of a summer’s night enveloped a spacious piazza in the city of Shylock and Desdemona.  The sky teemed with light drifting clouds through which the beaming of the full moon broke at intervals upon some lamp-lit palace, thronged and musical, for it was a night of festivity, or silvered the dull creeping waters.  Ever and anon some richly attired young patrician descended the steps of one or other of these mansions, and hurried across the wide area to the canal stairs, where his gondola awaited him.  Whoever did this could not but observe a tall female figure, which, cloaked and masked, walked backwards and forwards across the piazza, regarding no one, yet with an air that seemed to invite a companion.

More than one of the young nobles approached the presumably fair peripatetic, and, with courtesy commonly in inverse ratio to the amount of wine he was carrying home, proffered his escort to his gondola.  Whenever this happened the figure removed her mask and unclasped her robe, and revealed a sight which for one moment rooted the young man to the earth and in the next sent him scampering to his bark.  For the countenance was a death’s head, and the breast was that of a mouldering skeleton.

At last, however, a youth presented himself who, more courageous or more tipsy than his fellows, or more helplessly paralysed with horror than they, did not decline the proffered caress, and suffered himself to be drawn within the goblin’s accursed embrace.  Valiant or pot-valiant, great was his relief at finding himself clasped, instead of by a loathsome spectre, by a silver-haired man of noble presence, yet with a countenance indescribably haggard and anxious.

“Come, my son,” he cried, “hasten whither the rewards of thy intrepidity await thee.  Impouch the purse of Fortunatus!  Indue the signet of Solomon!”

The young man hesitated.  “Is there nought else?” he cautiously demanded.  “Needs it not that I should renounce my baptism?  Must I not subscribe an infernal compact?”

“In thy own blood, my son,” cheerfully responded the old gentleman.

“Peradventure,” hesitatingly interrogated the youth, “peradventure you are he?”