Andrea nodded briskly.
"Si, si, signer. He has a bad memory as it is--it shall grow worse at your command! Believe it!"
I laughed, shook hands, and parted with the friendly little fellow, he returning to the Molo, and I slowly walking homeward by way of the Villa Reale. An open carriage coming swiftly toward me attracted my attention; as it drew nearer I recognized the prancing steeds and the familiar liveries. A fair woman clad in olive velvets and Russian sables looked out smiling, and waved her hand.
It was my wife--my betrothed bride, and beside her sat the Duchess di Marina, the most irreproachable of matrons, famous for her piety not only in Naples but throughout Italy. So immaculate was she that it was difficult to imagine her husband daring to caress that upright, well-dressed form, or venturing to kiss those prim lips, colder than the carven beads of her jeweled rosary. Yet there was a story about her too--an old story that came from Padua--of how a young and handsome nobleman had been found dead at her palace doors, stabbed to the heart. Perhaps--who knows--he also might have thought-"Che bella cosa e de morire accisa, Nnanze a la porta de la nnamorata!"
Some said the duke had killed him; but nothing could be proved, nothing was certain. The duke was silent, so was is duchess; and Scandal herself sat meekly with closed lips in the presence of this stately and august couple, whose bearing toward each other in society was a lesson of complete etiquette to the world. What went on behind the scenes no one could tell. I raised my hat with the profoundest deference as the carriage containing the two ladies dashed by; I knew not which was the cleverest hypocrite of the two, therefore I did equal honor to both. I was in a meditative and retrospective mood, and when I reached the Toledo the distracting noises, the cries of the flower-girls, and venders of chestnuts and confetti, the nasal singing of the street-rhymers, the yells of punchinello, and the answering laughter of the populace, were all beyond my endurance. To gratify a sudden whim that seized me, I made my way into the lowest and dirtiest quarters of the city, and roamed through wretched courts and crowded alleys, trying to discover that one miserable street which until now I had always avoided even the thought of, where I had purchased the coral-fisher's clothes on the day of my return from the grave. I went in many wrong directions, but at last I found it, and saw at a glance that the old rag-dealer's shop was still there, in its former condition of heterogeneous filth and disorder. A man sat at the door smoking, but not the crabbed and bent figure I had before seen--this was a younger and stouter individual, with a Jewish cast of countenance, and dark, ferocious eyes. I approached him, and seeing by my dress and manner that I was some person of consequence, he rose, drew his pipe from his mouth, and raised his greasy cap with a respectful yet suspicious air.