But the greatest curiosity of all, and
no antiquity, was a pale, large-eyed little girl, about four years old,
who followed the conjurer's footsteps wherever he went. She was the
brightest and merriest little thing in the world, and frisked through
those shadowy old chambers, among the dead people's trumpery, as gayly as
a butterfly flits among flowers and sunshine.
The child's mother was a beautiful girl named Regina, whose portrait Mr.
Kirkup showed us on the wall. I never saw a more beautiful and striking
face claiming to be a real one. She was a Florentine, of low birth, and
she lived with the old necromancer as his spiritual medium. He showed us
a journal, kept during her lifetime, and read from it his notes of an
interview with the Czar Alexander, when that potentate communicated to
Mr. Kirkup that he had been poisoned. The necromancer set a great value
upon Regina, . . . . and when she died he received her poor baby into his
heart, and now considers it absolutely his own. At any rate, it is a
happy belief for him, since he has nothing else in the world to love, and
loves the child entirely, and enjoys all the bliss of fatherhood, though
he must have lived as much as seventy years before he began to taste it.
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