SIX ROMANTIC STORIES.
BY
JAMES PLATT, JUNIOR.
PRICE ONE SHILLING.
LONDON:
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO.,
4 STATIONERS' HALL COURT.
1894.
Entered at Stationers' Hall] [All Rights Reserved.
CONTENTS.
PART I.
BRAVO AND POISONER.
The Bottomless Lake of our Legendwas reputed an outlet of the BottomlessPit. No creature of our world hadever swum its lethal ebb and flow, buton the nights of the great Sabbaths,when the wizardry of all Italy swept to its beetlingcliffs as to their Holiest of Holies, its waterseructed to the rendezvous the retinue of Hell—thewealth of an argosy would not have tempteda Lombard to venture within eye-shot of it afternightfall. Who, then, are these two men of mortalmould that outstare the depths of the BottomlessLake itself, and not only that but from the veryhorns of the Altar of the Black Mass, and not onlythat, but at the witching hour forsooth of night,when graveyards yawn, and the everlasting doorsof Tophet open wide? Their guardian angels ofgood have surely turned from their right hands, andtheir evil guardians of the left are grinning fromhorn to horn. With the chime of twelve from thedistant steeple dies out the last echo of admonition,and they begin to work out such unhallowederrand as alone can have brought them to sodamned a spot; the elder of the two in a tone ofhushed solemnity addresses a series of questionsto the younger, who responds to them with anequally awful gravity, after the manner of acatechism.
"Dost know me who I am?"
"Tosca of Venice, bravo and poisoner."
"And Yourself?"
"Janko the Illyrian, bravo with a right goodwill, but not yet poisoner."
"My ancestry?"
"Sorcerer stock, whose secrets you would fainhave inherited and their trade pursued."
"Why did I not?"
"The Council of Ten bore down upon yourrace, and but for your extreme youth you yourselfwould have crossed the Bridge of Sighs. Orphanedby the State, and retaining for sole inheritancethe swashing blade that still gnaws at yourscabbard, and a few recipes for poisons (whichlast, however, were worth a Borgia's envy), yousoon found yourself compelled to use both the oneand the other to buy you bed and board. Proceedingat first with hesitancy, and never sojourninglong in one locality, you became by degrees therepository of so many family secrets that at thepresent day you may stalk assured through thelength and breadth of Italy, and ruffle it in whatcompany you will."
"And your own story?"
"I know not by what catastrophe the memoryof all my earliest years was shaken loose from me.Suffice it then, that once on a visit to my nativecountry you found me wandering an orphan lik