"What means this jargon?" said the prince, in visible astonishment and
secret awe. "Comest thou to menace me in my own halls, or wouldst
thou warn me of a danger? Art thou some itinerant mountebank, or some
unguessed-of friend? Speak out, and plainly. What danger threatens me?"

"Zanoni and thy ancestor's sword," replied the stranger.

"Ha! ha!" said the prince, laughing scournfully; "I half-suspected thee
from the first. Thou art then the accomplice or the tool of that most
dexterous, but, at present, defeated charlatan? And I suppose thou wilt
tell me that if I were to release a certain captive I have made, the
danger would vanish, and the hand of the dial would be put back?"

"Judge of me as thou wilt, Prince di --. I confess my knowledge of
Zanoni. Thou, too, wilt know his power, but not till it consume thee.
I would save, therefore I warn thee. Dost thou ask me why? I will tell
thee. Canst thou remember to have heard wild tales of thy grandsire;
of his desire for a knowledge that passes that of the schools and
cloisters; of a strange man from the East who was his familiar and
master in lore against which the Vatican has, from age to age,
launched its mimic thunder? Dost thou call to mind the fortunes of thy
ancestor?--how he succeeded in youth to little but a name; how, after a
career wild and dissolute as thine, he disappeared from Milan, a pauper,
and a self-exile; how, after years spent, none knew in what climes or
in what pursuits, he again revisited the city where his progenitors had
reigned; how with him came the wise man of the East, the mystic Mejnour;
how they who beheld him, beheld with amaze and fear that time had
ploughed no furrow on his brow; that youth seemed fixed, as by a spell,
upon his face and form? Dost thou not know that from that hour his
fortunes rose? Kinsmen the most remote died; estate upon estate fell