The Castle of Otranto | Page 4

affection, was scarce less assiduous about the Princess; at the same
time endeavouring to partake and lessen the weight of sorrow which
she saw Matilda strove to suppress, for whom she had conceived the
warmest sympathy of friendship. Yet her own situation could not help
finding its place in her thoughts. She felt no concern for the death of
young Conrad, except commiseration; and she was not sorry to be
delivered from a marriage which had promised her little felicity, either
from her destined bridegroom, or from the severe temper of Manfred,
who, though he had distinguished her by great indulgence, had
imprinted her mind with terror, from his causeless rigour to such
amiable princesses as Hippolita and Matilda.
While the ladies were conveying the wretched mother to her bed,
Manfred remained in the court, gazing on the ominous casque, and
regardless of the crowd which the strangeness of the event had now
assembled around him. The few words he articulated, tended solely to

inquiries, whether any man knew from whence it could have come?
Nobody could give him the least information. However, as it seemed to
be the sole object of his curiosity, it soon became so to the rest of the
spectators, whose conjectures were as absurd and improbable, as the
catastrophe itself was unprecedented. In the midst of their senseless
guesses, a young peasant, whom rumour had drawn thither from a
neighbouring village, observed that the miraculous helmet was exactly
like that on the figure in black marble of Alfonso the Good, one of their
former princes, in the church of St. Nicholas.
"Villain! What sayest thou?" cried Manfred, starting from his trance in
a tempest of rage, and seizing the young man by the collar; "how darest
thou utter such treason? Thy life shall pay for it."
The spectators, who as little comprehended the cause of the Prince's
fury as all the rest they had seen, were at a loss to unravel this new
circumstance. The young peasant himself was still more astonished, not
conceiving how he had offended the Prince. Yet recollecting himself,
with a mixture of grace and humility, he disengaged himself from
Manfred's grip, and then with an obeisance, which discovered more
jealousy of innocence than dismay, he asked, with respect, of what he
was guilty? Manfred, more enraged at the vigour, however decently
exerted, with which the young man had shaken off his hold, than
appeased by his submission, ordered his attendants to seize him, and, if
he had not been withheld by his friends whom he had invited to the
nuptials, would have poignarded the peasant in their arms.
During this altercation, some of the vulgar spectators had run to the
great church, which stood near the castle, and came back open-
mouthed, declaring that the helmet was missing from Alfonso's statue.
Manfred, at this news, grew perfectly frantic; and, as if he sought a
subject on which to vent the tempest within him, he rushed again on the
young peasant, crying -
"Villain! Monster! Sorcerer! 'tis thou hast done this! 'tis thou hast slain
my son!"
The mob, who wanted some object within the scope of their capacities,

on whom they might discharge their bewildered reasoning, caught the
words from the mouth of their lord, and re- echoed -
"Ay, ay; 'tis he, 'tis he: he has stolen the helmet from good Alfonso's
tomb, and dashed out the brains of our young Prince with it," never
reflecting how enormous the disproportion was between the marble
helmet that had been in the church, and that of steel before their eyes;
nor how impossible it was for a youth seemingly not twenty, to wield a
piece of armour of so prodigious a weight
The folly of these ejaculations brought Manfred to himself: yet whether
provoked at the peasant having observed the resemblance between the
two helmets, and thereby led to the farther discovery of the absence of
that in the church, or wishing to bury any such rumour under so
impertinent a supposition, he gravely pronounced that the young man
was certainly a necromancer, and that till the Church could take
cognisance of the affair, he would have the Magician, whom they had
thus detected, kept prisoner under the helmet itself, which he ordered
his attendants to raise, and place the young man under it; declaring he
should be kept there without food, with which his own infernal art
might furnish him.
It was in vain for the youth to represent against this preposterous
sentence: in vain did Manfred's friends endeavour to divert him from
this savage and ill-grounded resolution. The generality were charmed
with their lord's decision, which, to their apprehensions, carried great
appearance of justice, as the Magician was to be punished by the very
instrument with which he had offended: nor