In this mood he would sit for hours with his arms folded, and gazing upon the vacant air, sighing sometimes-but never conscious of the presence of his once beloved wife, who sat before him, and watched his stedfast countenance, till she wept at his want of sympathy. Day passed after day, and night after night, but there was no change in the darkness of his mind, till one morning, as he sat, his reason as it were returned upon him like the dawn of day, when the sky is first streaked with light, and the world gains a weak intelligence of the things that are in it. He had been looking for some minutes on his wife without knowing her, but tears glistened, for the first time, in his eyes, and at last two large drops, and with those his delirium, were shed from his eyelids.. He immediately recognized his wife, and cast himself into her arms. The joyful lady, in her turn, found it hard to retain her senses. After returning his ca resses in the tenderest manner, she hastened immediately to Don Rodrigo, who, though severely hurt, had got better of his wound, and watched the more dreadful malady of his friend, sometimes indeed, in hope, but more commonly in despair of his recovery. At the first news, therefore, he ran hastily to the room, and soon cast himself into the arms of his friend: but the latter received him coldly; and before Rodrigo could finish even a brief salutation, he felt the other's arms loosening from around his neck, and beheld his head suddenly drop, as if it had been displeasing that their eyes should meet again. It seemed, indeed, that his malady had already returned upon him; but in another moment the body fell forwards on the floor, and instantly the blood gushed from a hidden wound in the side, which had hitherto been concealed by the mantle. A pair of scissors, covered with blood and broken, for the wound had been desperately bestowed, dropped from him as he fell for, to show more sadly the lady's own joyful forgetfulness, she had supplied the weapon for this dreadful catastrophe. As for the miserable lady, it was feared, from the violence of her grief, that the same dismal blow would have been her death; but her heart had been too long inured to such sufferings to be so speedily broken; and at last, attaining to that peace which belongs only to the comforts of our holy religion, she devoted her widowhood to God, and cheerfully ended an old age of piety in the Convent of St. Faith. |