Pope Jacynth and Other Fantastic Tales
Date: 1903-12-31T22:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Supernatural Fiction; Horror; Fantasy
Description: A collection of tales in a mood of myth and legend and folklore, spiced with flavors of the supernatural.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA

POPE  JACYNTH

AND  OTHER  FANTASTIC  TALES

VERNON LEE
(Violet Paget)

MobileRead Edition
2020

Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of British writer Violet Paget (14 October 1856 – 13 February 1935). She is remembered today primarily for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics. An early follower of Walter Pater, she wrote over a dozen volumes of essays on art, music, and travel.

This book was first published in 1904.
The text is in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- Pope Jacynth
- Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady
- A Wedding Chest
- The Lady and Death
- St. Eudaemon and His Orange-Tree
- The Featureless Wisdom

Pope Jacynth

Forming a portion of the Codex Ebumeus of the suppressed Abbey of Nonantola

It was Pope Jacynth who built anew the basilica over the bodies of the holy martyrs, Paul and John, brothers; and who wainscoted the choir, and laid down the flooring, and set up the columns of the nave, a row on either side, all of precious marble. And it was of his death and the marvellous thing which was seen afterward, showing indeed the justice of God and His infinite mercy, that the following tale is told.

This Jacynth, whose name in the world and in the cloister was Odo, was known all through Italy, and through the Marquisate of Tuscany and the County of Benevento, and the Kingdom of Sicily and such dominions as belonged to the Grecian Emperors, for his great and unparalleled humility and his exceeding ardent and exclusive love of God. And in these lay his ruin. For, even as is written in the book of the Prophet Job, which it were sin for any layman to read, and damnation for any clerk to translate, that the Lord allowed Satan to try his faithful servant with many plagues and doubts and evil incitements, so it pleased Him who is the Mirror of all Truth, to make a wager with Satan concerning the soul of this man Odo or otherwise Jacynth. And this when he was still in his mother’s womb. For the Lord said to Satan: “I grant leave that thou tempt any man whatsoever at My choice among such as shall be born into the world before the sun, which turns forever round earth, shall have gone back to the spot where it now is.”

And Satan caused the man Odo, afterwards Jacynth, to be born to the greatest dignity in his land, even to be first-born of Averard, Marquis of Tusculum. But Odo cared not for the greatness of his birth, and the wealth of his father’s house. And, being only fourteen years of age, he fled from his parents and went on the ship of a certain mariner, who brought wine and tanned hides and fair white stone for building from Greece, Istria, and Salernum, to the port of Rome, which is below Mount Aventine, and took back the fleece of sheep and thin cheese, and slabs of porphyry and serpentine from the temples of the heathen. But Satan caused Odo to grow most marvellously in beauty and shapeliness of body and loveliness of countenance and sweetness of voice, so that pirates captured him and sold him, being eighteen years of age, to Alecto, Queen of the Amazons, which inhabit the isles beyond the pillars of Hercules, and are most wondrously fair women. And Queen Alecto became enamoured of the beauty of Odo, otherwise Jacynth, and offered him her love and every delight. But Jacynth scourged himself with ropes of thistles, and ate only of the fruit of the prickly pear and drank only of water from the marshes; and he shaved his head and stained his face with certain herbs, and consorted with lepers, and spurned the queen and her delicates.

Then Satan caused Odo, otherwise Jacynth, to increase most mightily in strength and courage, so that he could wrestle with the lions in the desert and cleave a strong man in twain with one blow. So that the people, seeing his might and wondering greatly thereat, made him their captain, captain even over hundreds, that he might avenge them on certain wicked kings, their neighbours, and clear the country of robbers and wild beasts. But when he had put the kings in chains and thrown the robbers into dungeons, and exterminated the wild beasts, Jacynth, who was then called Odo, put up his sword and allowed not that any man should be killed or sold into captivity, and bade them desist from slaying the hares and deer and wild asses, saying that these also were creatures of God and worthy of kindness. And he was at this time thirty-two years of age.

Then Satan caused Odo, later to be called Jacynth, to exceed all other men in subtlety of mind. And he learned all languages, both living and dead, as those of the Grecians, Romans, Ethiopians, and even of Armorica and Taprobane; and studied all books on philosophy, divine and natural astrology, medicine, music, alchemy, the properties of herbs and numbers, magic and poetry and rhetoric, whatsoever books have been written since the building of Babel, when all languages were dispersed. And he went from place to place teaching and disputing; and whithersoever he went, and mostly in Paris and at Salernum, did he challenge all doctors, rabbis, and men of learning to discuss with him on any subject of their choosing, and always did he demonstrate before all men that their arguments were wrong and their science vain. But when Odo, otherwise Jacynth, had done this, he burned his books, save the gospels, and retired to a monastery of his founding. And he was at this time forty and five years of age.

Then Satan caused Odo, later called Jacynth, to become wondrously knowing of the heart of man and his wickedness, and wondrous full of unction and fervour, and all men came to his monastery, which was called Clear Streams, and listened to his preaching and reformed their ways, and many put themselves under his rule, and of these there were such multitudes that the monastery would not hold them, and others had to be built in all parts of the world. And kings and emperors confessed to him their sins, and stood at his bidding clothed in sackcloth at the church door, singing the penitential psalms and holding lighted tapers.

But Odo, later called Jacynth, instituted abbots and heads of the order, and for himself retired into the wild places of the mountains and built himself there a hermitage of stone quarried with his own hands, and planted fruit-trees and pot-herbs, and lived there alone, praying and meditating, high up near the well-head of the river which runs down through the woods to the Tyrrhene Sea. And he was sixty years of age.

And Satan went up before the Lord and said, “Verily I can tempt him yet. Grant me, I pray Thee, but the use of Thine own tools, and I will bring Thee the soul of this man bound in mortal sin.” And the Lord answered, “I grant it” And at the prayer of Satan, God caused him to be acclaimed as pope. And the cardinals and prelates and princes of the earth journeyed to the hermitage, and sought for the man Odo, who henceforth was to be called Jacynth. And they found him in his orchard pruning a fig-tree, and by his side were the herbs for his supper in a clean platter, and the gospel lay on his lectern, and there stood by it a tame goat, ready to be milked; and on a hook hung his red hat, and a crucifix was by the lectern. And in the wall of his garden, which was small, with a well in the midst and set round with wooden pillars, was a window, with a pillar carved of stone in the middle, and through the window one could see the oak woods below, and the olive-yards, and the river winding through the valley, and the Tyrrhene Sea, with ships sailing, in the distance. Now when he saw the cardinals and prelates and princes of the earth, Odo, who was thenceforth called Jacynth, put down his pruning-hook; and when he had heard their message he wept, and knelt before the crucifix, and wept again, and cried, “Woe’s me! Terrible are the trials of Thy servants, O Lord, and great must be Thy mercy.” But he went with them to be crowned Pope, because his heart was full of humbleness and the love of God. And Pope Jacynth, formerly Odo, was seventy-five years of age when they set him on his throne.

And the Lord called to him Satan, and was angered, and said, “What wilt thou do next, Accursed One?” And Satan replied, “I will do no more, O Lord. Suffer this man but to live the space of five years, and then watch we for our wager.”

And they took Pope Jacynth, once called Odo, and carried him to the palace, which is over against the Church of St. Peter, and before which stands the pine cone of brass, made as a talisman by the Emperor Adrian. And they arrayed him in fine linen from Egypt, and silk from Byzantium, as befits a Pope; and his cope was of beaten gold, even gold beaten to the thinness of a leaf, wrought all over with the history of our Lord and His Apostles, with a border of lambs and lilies, a lamb and a lily all the way turn about And his stole was likewise of gold, gold plates cunningly riveted, and it was set all round with precious stones, emeralds, and opals, and beryls and sardonyxes, and the stone called Melitta, all perfectly round and the size of a pigeon’s egg; and two goodly graven stones of the ancients, one showing a chariot-race and the other the effigy of the Emperor Galba, most cunningly cut in relief. And his mitre also was of riveted gold, and inside it was fastened the lance-head of Longinus, which touched the flesh of our Lord; and on the outside it was bordered with pearls, and in its midst was a sapphire the size of a swan’s egg worked marvellously into a cup, which was the cup that the Angel brought to our Lord. And when they had arrayed Pope Jacynth in this apparel, they placed him in his chair, which was of cedar-wood covered with plates of gold, and they bore him, eight bearers, namely, three counts, three marquises, a duke, and the Exarch of the Pentapolis, on their shoulders; and the cushions of his chair were of silk. And over him they bore a canopy embroidered most marvellously with the signs of the Zodiac by the Matrons of Amalfi. And before him went two carrying fans of the feathers of the white peacock, and two bearing censers filled with burning ambergris, and six blowing on clarions of silver. And in this manner was he enthroned above the place where rests the body of the Apostle, behind the ambones of onion stone, and the railing of alabaster openwork showing peacocks and vine leaves, and under the dome where our Lord sits in judgement on a ground of purple and sea-green and gold, and the holy lambs pasture on green enamel, each with a palm tree by his side, and the great gold vine rises on a ground of turquoise blue. And on either side of the throne was a column of precious marble taken from a temple of the heathen, even a column of red porphyry from the temple of Mars, and a column of alabaster, cunningly fluted, from the temple of Apollo. And the bells in the belfry, which is set with discs of serpentine and platters from Majorca, began to ring, and the trumpets to sound, and all the people sang the psalm Magnificat. And the heart of Pope Jacynth, formerly called Odo, was filled with joy and pride, because in the midst of his glory he knew himself to be more humble than the lepers outside the city gate. And the people prostrated themselves before Pope Jacynth, and prayed for his blessing.

And Pope Jacynth slept on the rushes in his chamber, and drank only water from the well and eat only salad, and beneath his robe he wore a shirt of camel’s hair, mighty rough to the body. And he gloried in his humbleness. And he took of the money of the jubilee year, which twenty priests raked with silver rakes where the pilgrims passed the bridge by the Emperor Adrian’s tomb, and would have none of it for himself, but distributed half to the poor and the widows and orphans, and with the other he caused stonemasons to quarry for marble among the temples of the heathen, and to draw thence the columns having flutings and sculptured capitals to set up in the nave, and to saw into slabs the pillars of porphyry and serpentine and Egyptian marble, for wainscoting and flooring. And in this fashion did he build the basilica by the Ostian gate. And he dedicated it to St. John and St. Paul, slaves and servants of Flavia, the sister of the Emperor Domitian, meaning to show thereby that in the love of God the lowest are highest; for he gloried in his humbleness. And they brought him blind men, and those with grievous sores, and lepers, to bless, that they might recover. And Pope Jacynth blessed them, and washed their sores and embraced them; and Pope Jacynth gloried in his humility.

Now when Satan saw this, he laughed; and the sound of his laughter was as a rushing wind, that burns the shoots of the wheat (for it was spring), and nipped the blossom of the almond-tree and plum-tree, causing it to fall in great profusion, as every man could testify. And Satan went before the Lord and said: “Behold, O Lord, I have won my wager. For the man Jacynth, once Odo, has sinned against Thee, even the sin of vaingloriousness; so do Thou give him to me, body and soul.” And the Lord answered: “Take thou the man Jacynth, formerly Odo, his body and his soul, and do therewith whatsoever thou please, for he has sinned the sin of vaingloriousness; but for Myself I reserve that which remaineth.”

So Satan departed. And he took the body of Pope Jacynth, and touched it with invisible fingers; and lo, it did gradually turn into stone; and he took the soul of Pope Jacynth, and blew on it, and behold, it shrank slowly and hardened, and became a stone, even a diamond, which, as all know, burns forever.

Now the people and the pilgrims were so amazed at the humility of Pope Jacynth, that they clamoured to see him; and they attacked the gate of the palace over against the Church of St. Peter, the gate which has a gable, and in it our Lord clad in white, on a ground of gold, with a purple halo round his head, all done in mosaic by the Grecians. So the priests and the barons were afraid of the violence of the people and particularly of the pilgrims from the north, and they promised to bring Pope Jacynth for them to worship. And they dressed him in his vestments of beaten and riveted gold, set with precious stones and graven stones, and placed him on his throne of cedarwood, and the eight bearers, three counts, two marquises, two dukes, and the Exarch of the Pentapolis, raised him on their shoulders and bore him through the square, with the censer-bearers before and the trumpeters and the fans of white peacock. And the people fell on their knees. Only there stood up one, who afterwards vanished, and was the Apostle Peter, and he cried, “Behold, Pope Jacynth has turned into an idol, even an idol of the heathen.” But when the people had dispersed, and the procession had entered the church, the throne-bearers knelt down, and the throne was lowered, and behold, Pope Jacynth was dead.

But when the embalmers and the physicians took the body after three days that it had lain in state, surrounded by tapers, with lamps hung all round, under the mosaic of the dome, they found that it was uncorrupted, and had turned into marble, even marble of Paros, like the idols of the ancient Grecians. And they wondered greatly. And the learned men disputed, and decided that Pope Jacynth, formerly called Odo, must have been a wizard, for this certainly was devilry. So they caused his body to be taken and burned into lime, which, being turned to the finest marble, it readily did. Only, when they came to remove the lime, they found in the midst of it a burning diamond, that instantly vanished, nor was any man in time to seize it. And likewise a thing of the consistency of a dead leaf, and smelling wonderfully of violets, but it was shaped in the image of a heart And it also vanished, nor was any man quick enough to seize it.

Now when he came down from the palace, hard by the pine cone of the Emperor Adrian, Satan did meet an angel of the Lord, even Gabriel, who was entering, wrapped round in wings of golden green. And Satan said, “Hail! brother, whither goest thou? for there remaineth of the man Jacynth, called formerly Odo, only a little lime, which was his body, and this stone that burneth eternally, which was his soul.” And Satan laughed. But the angel answered, “Laugh not, most foolish fellow-servant of the Lord. For I go to seek of the man Odo, sometime called Pope Jacynth, only the heart which the Lord has reserved for Himself for all eternity, because it was full of love and hope in His mercy.” Now as Gabriel passed by, behold! a pomegranate tree along the wall, which had dried up and died in the frost ten years before, sprouted and put forth buds.

—

Prince Alberic
and the Snake Lady

In the year 1701, the Duchy of Luna became united to the Italian dominions of the Holy Roman Empire, in consequence of the extinction of its famous ducal house in the persons of Duke Balthasar Maria and of his grandson Alberic, who should have been third of the name. Under this dry historical fact lies hidden the strange story of Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady.

I

The first act of hostility of old Duke Balthasar towards the Snake Lady, in whose existence he did not, of course, believe, was connected with the arrival at Luna of certain tapestries after the designs of the famous Monsieur Le Brun, a present from his Most Christian Majesty King Lewis the XIV. These Gobelins, which represented the marriage of Alexander and Roxana, were placed in the throne-room, and in the most gallant suite of chambers overlooking the great rockery garden, all of which had been completed by Duke Balthasar Maria in 1680; and, as a consequence, the already existing tapestries, silk hangings, and mirrors painted by Marius of the Flowers, were transferred into other apartments, thus occasioning a general re-hanging of the Red Palace at Luna. These magnificent operations, in which, as the court poets sang, Apollo and the Graces lent their services to their beloved patron, aroused in Duke Balthasar’s mind a sudden curiosity to see what might be made of the rooms occupied by his grandson and heir, and which he had not entered since Prince Alberic’s christening. He found the apartments in a shocking state of neglect, and the youthful prince unspeakably shy and rustic; and he determined to give him at once an establishment befitting his age, to look out presently for a princess worthy to be his wife, and, somewhat earlier, for a less illustrious but more agreeable lady to fashion his manners. Meanwhile, Duke Balthasar Maria gave orders to change, the tapestry in Prince Alberic’s chamber. This tapestry was of old and Gothic taste, extremely worn, and represented Alberic the Blond and the Snake Lady Oriana, as described in the Chronicles of Archbishop Turpin and the poems of Boiardo. Duke Balthasar Maria was a prince of enlightened mind and delicate taste; the literature as well as the art of the dark ages found no grace in his sight; he reproved the folly of feeding the thoughts of youth on improbable events; besides, he disliked snakes and was afraid of the devil. So he ordered the tapestry to be removed and another, representing Susanna and the Elders, to be put in its stead. But when Prince Alberic discovered the change, he cut Susanna and the Elders into strips with a knife he had stolen out of the ducal kitchens (no dangerous instruments being allowed to young princes before they were of an age to learn to fence) and refused to touch his food for three days.

The tapestry over which little Prince Alberic mourned so deeply had indeed been both tattered and Gothic. But for the boy it possessed an inexhaustible charm. It was quite full of things, and they were all delightful. The sorely-frayed borders consisted of wonderful garlands of leaves and fruits and flowers, tied at intervals with ribbons, although they seemed all to grow like tall narrow bushes, each from a big vase in the bottom corner, and made of all manner of different plants. There were bunches of spiky bays, and of acorned oak leaves; sheaves of lilies and heads of poppies, gourds, and apples and pears, and hazelnuts and mulberries, wheat ears, and beans, and pine tufts. And in each of these plants, of which those above named are only a very few, there were curious live creatures of some sort – various birds, big and little, butterflies on the lilies, snails, squirrels, mice, and rabbits, and even a hare, with such pointed ears, darting among the spruce fir. Alberic learned the names of most of these plants and creatures from his nurse, who had been a peasant, and he spent much ingenuity seeking for them in the palace gardens and terraces; but there were no live creatures there, except snails and toads, which the gardeners killed, and carp swimming about in the big tank, whom Alberic did not like, and who were not in the tapestry; and he had to supplement his nurse’s information by that of the grooms and scullions, when he could visit them secretly. He was even promised a sight, one day, of a dead rabbit – the rabbit was the most fascinating of the inhabitants of the tapestry border – but he came to the kitchen too late, and saw it with its pretty fur pulled off, and looking so sad and naked that it made him cry. But Alberic had grown so accustomed to never quitting the Red Palace and its gardens, that he was usually satisfied with seeing the plants and animals in the tapestry, and looked forward to seeing the real things only when he should be grown up. “When I am a man,” he would say to himself – for his nurse scolded him for saying it to her – “I will have a live rabbit of my own.”

The border of the tapestry interested Prince Alberic most when he was very little – indeed, his remembrance of it was older than that of the Red Palace, its terraces and gardens – but gradually he began to care more and more for the picture in the middle.

There were mountains, and the sea with ships; and these first made him care to go on to the topmost palace terrace and look at the real mountains and the sea beyond the roofs and gardens; and there were woods of all manner of tall trees, with clover and wild strawberries growing beneath them; and roads, and paths, and rivers, in and out; these were rather confused with the places where the tapestry was worn out, and with the patches and mendings thereof, but Alberic, in the course of time, contrived to make them all out, and knew exactly whence the river came which turned the big mill-wheel, and how many bends it made before coming to the fishing-nets; and how the horsemen must cross over the bridge, then wind behind the cliff with the chapel, and pass through the wood of pines in order to get from the castle in the left-hand corner nearest the bottom to the town, over which the sun was shining with all its beams, and a wind blowing with inflated cheeks on the right hand close to the top.

The centre of the tapestry was the most worn and discoloured; and it was for this reason perhaps that little Alberic scarcely noticed it for some years, his eye and mind led away by the bright red and yellow of the border of fruit and flowers, and the still vivid green and orange of the background landscape. Red, yellow, and orange, even green, had faded in the centre into pale blue and lilac; even the green had grown an odd dusty tint; and the figures seemed like ghosts, sometimes emerging and then receding again into vagueness. Indeed, it was only as he grew bigger that Alberic began to see any figures at all; and then, for a long time he would lose sight of them. But little by little, when the light was strong, he could see them always; and even in the dark make them out with a little attention. Among the spruce firs and pines, and against a hedge of roses, on which there still lingered a remnant of redness, a knight had reined in his big white horse, and was putting one arm round the shoulder of a lady, who was leaning against the horse’s flank. The knight was all dressed in armour – not at all like that of the equestrian statue of Duke Balthasar Maria in the square, but all made of plates, with plates also on the legs, instead of having them bare like Duke Balthasar’s statue; and on his head he had no wig, but a helmet with big plumes. It seemed a more reasonable dress than the other, but probably Duke Balthasar was right to go to battle with bare legs and a kilt and a wig, since he did so. The lady who was looking up into his face was dressed with a high collar and long sleeves, and on her head she wore a thick circular garland, from under which the hair fell about her shoulders. She was very lovely, Alberic got to think, particularly when, having climbed upon a chest of drawers, he saw that her hair was still full of threads of gold, some of them quite loose because the tapestry was so rubbed. The knight and his horse were of course very beautiful, and he liked the way in which the knight reined in the horse with one hand, and embraced the lady with the other arm. But Alberic got to love the lady most, although she was so very pale and faded, and almost the colour of the moonbeams through the palace windows in summer. Her dress also was so beautiful and unlike those of the ladies who got out of the coaches in the Court of Honour, and who had on hoops and no clothes at all on their upper part. This lady, on the contrary, had that collar like a lily, and a beautiful gold chain, and patterns in gold (Alberic made them out little by little) all over her bodice. He got to want so much to see her skirt; it was probably very beautiful too, but it so happened that the inlaid chest of drawers before mentioned stood against the wall in that place, and on it a large ebony and ivory crucifix, which covered the lower part of the lady’s body. Alberic often tried to lift off the crucifix, but it was a great deal too heavy, and there was not room on the chest of drawers to push it aside, so the lady’s skirt and feet were invisible. But one day, when Alberic was eleven, his nurse suddenly took a fancy to having all the furniture shifted. It was time that the child should cease to sleep in her room, and plague her with his loud talking in his dreams. And she might as well have the handsome inlaid chest of drawers, and that nice pious crucifix for herself next door, in place of Alberic’s little bed. So one morning there was a great shifting and dusting, and when Alberic came in from his walk on the terrace, there hung the tapestry entirely uncovered. He stood for a few minutes before it, riveted to the ground. Then he ran to his nurse, exclaiming: “O, nurse, dear nurse, look – the lady!”

For where the big crucifix had stood, the lower part of the beautiful pale lady with the gold-thread hair was now exposed. But instead of a skirt, she ended off in a big snake’s tail, with scales of still most vivid (the tapestry not having faded there) green and gold.

The nurse turned round.

“Holy Virgin,” she cried, “why, she’s a serpent!” Then, noticing the boy’s violent excitement, she added, “You little ninny, it’s only Duke Alberic the Blond, who was your ancestor, and the Snake Lady.”

Little Prince Alberic asked no questions, feeling that he must not. Very strange it was, but he loved the beautiful lady with the thread of gold hair only the more because she ended off in the long twisting body of a snake. And that, no doubt, was why the knight was so very good to her.

II

For want of that tapestry, poor Alberic, having cut its successor to pieces, began to pine away. It had been his whole world; and now it was gone, he discovered that he had no other. No one had ever cared for him except his nurse, who was very cross. Nothing had ever been taught him except the Latin catechism; he had had nothing to make a pet of except the fat carp, supposed to be four hundred years old, in the tank; he had nothing to play with except a gala coral with bells by Benvenuto Cellini, which Duke Balthasar Maria had sent him on his eighth birthday. He had never had anything except a Grandfather, and had never been outside the Red Palace.

Now, after the loss of the tapestry, the disappearance of the plants and flowers and birds and beasts on its borders, and the departure of the kind knight on the horse and the dear golden-haired Snake Lady, Alberic became aware that he had always hated both his grandfather and the Red Palace.

The whole world, indeed, were agreed that Duke Balthasar was the most magnanimous and fascinating of monarchs, and that the Red Palace of Luna was the most magnificent and delectable of residences. But the knowledge of this universal opinion, and the consequent sense of his own extreme unworthiness, merely exasperated Alberic’s detestation, which, as it grew, came to identify the Duke and the Palace as the personification and visible manifestation of each other. He knew now – oh, how well! – every time that he walked on the terrace or in the garden (at the hours when no one else ever entered them) that he had always abominated the brilliant tomato-coloured plaster which gave the palace its name: such a pleasant, gay colour, people would remark, particularly against the blue of the sky. Then there were the Twelve Caesars – they were the Twelve Caesars, but multiplied over and over again – busts with flying draperies and spiky garlands, one over every first-floor window, hundreds of them, all fluttering and grimacing round the place. Alberic had always thought them uncanny; but now he positively avoided looking out of the window, lest his eye should catch the stucco eyeball of one of those Caesars in the opposite wing of the building. But there was one thing more especially in the Red Palace, of which a bare glimpse had always filled the youthful Prince with terror, and which now kept recurring to his mind like a nightmare. This was no other than the famous grotto of the Court of Honour. Its roof was ingeniously inlaid with oyster-shells, forming elegant patterns, among which you could plainly distinguish some colossal satyrs; the sides were built of rockery, and in its depths, disposed in a most natural and tasteful manner, was a herd of life-size animals all carved out of various precious marbles. On holidays the water was turned on, and spurted about in a gallant fashion. On such occasions persons of taste would flock to Luna from all parts of the world to enjoy the spectacle. But ever since his earliest infancy Prince Alberic had held this grotto in abhorrence. The oyster-shell satyrs on the roof frightened him into fits, particularly when the fountains were playing; and his terror of the marble animals was such that a bare allusion to the Porphyry Rhinoceros, the Giraffe of Cipollino, and the Verde Antique Monkeys, set him screaming for an hour. The grotto, moreover, had become associated in his mind with the other great glory of the Red Palace, to wit, the domed chapel in which Duke Balthasar Maria intended erecting monuments to his immediate ancestors, and in which he had already prepared a monument for himself. And the whole magnificent palace, grotto, chapel and all, had become mysteriously connected with Alberic’s grandfather, owing to a particularly terrible dream. When the boy was eight years old, he was taken one day to see his grandfather. It was the feast of St. Balthasar, one of the Three Wise Kings from the East, as is well known. There had been firing of mortars and ringing of bells ever since daybreak. Alberic had his hair curled, was put into new clothes (his usual raiment being somewhat tattered), a large nosegay was placed in his hand, and he and his nurse were conveyed by complicated relays of lackeys and of pages up to the ducal apartments. Here, in a crowded outer room, he was separated from his nurse and received by a gaunt person in a long black robe like a sheath, and a long shovel hat, whom Alberic identified many years later as his grandfather’s Jesuit Confessor. He smiled a long smile, discovering a prodigious number of teeth, in a manner which froze the child’s blood; and lifting an embroidered curtain, pushed Alberic into his grandfather’s presence. Duke Balthasar Maria, called in all Italy the Ever Young Prince, was at his toilet. He was wrapped in a green Chinese wrapper, embroidered with gold pagodas, and round his head was tied an orange scarf of delicate fabric. He was listening to the performance of some fiddlers; and of a lady dressed as a nymph, who was singing the birthday ode with many shrill trills and quavers; and meanwhile his face, in the hands of a valet, was being plastered with a variety of brilliant colours. In his green and gold wrapper and orange head-dress, with the strange patches of vermilion and white on his cheeks, Duke Balthasar looked to the diseased fancy of his nephew as if he had been made of various precious metals, like the celebrated effigy he had erected of himself in the great burial-chapel. But, just as Alberic was mustering up courage and approaching his magnificent grandparent, his eye fell upon a sight so mysterious and terrible that he fled wildly out of the ducal presence. For through an open door he could see in an adjacent closet a man dressed in white, combing the long flowing locks of what he recognised as his grandfather’s head, stuck on a short pole in the light of a window.

That night Alberic had seen in his dreams the Ever Young Duke Balthasar Maria descend from his niche in the burial-chapel; and, with his Roman lappets and corslet visible beneath the green bronze cloak embroidered with gold pagodas, march down the great staircase into the Court of Honour, and ascend to the empty place at the end of the rockery grotto (where, as a matter of fact, a statue of Neptune, by a pupil of Bernini, was placed some months later), and there, raising his sceptre, receive the obeisance of all the marble animals – the Giraffe, the Rhinoceros, the Stag, the Peacock, and the Monkeys. And behold I suddenly his well-known features waxed dim, and beneath the great curly peruke there was a round blank thing – a barber’s block!

Alberic, who was an intelligent child, had gradually learned to disentangle this dream from reality; but its grotesque terror never vanished from his mind, and became the core of all his feelings towards Duke Balthasar Maria and the Red Palace.

III

The news – which was kept back as long as possible – of the destruction of Susanna and the Elders threw Duke Balthasar Maria into a most violent rage with his grandson. The boy should be punished by exile, and exile to a terrible place; above all, to a place where there was no furniture to destroy. Taking due counsel with his Jesuit, his Jester, and his Dwarf, Duke Balthasar decided that in the whole Duchy of Luna there was no place more fitted for the purpose than the Castle of Sparkling Waters.

For the Castle of Sparkling Waters was little better than a ruin, and its sole inhabitants were a family of peasants. The original cradle of the House of Luna, and its principal bulwark against invasion, the castle had been ignominiously discarded and forsaken a couple of centuries before, when the dukes had built the rectangular town in the plain; after which it had been used as a quarry for ready-cut stone, and the greater part carted off to rebuild the town of Luna, and even the central portion of the Red Palace. The castle was therefore reduced to its outer circuit of walls, enclosing vineyards and orange-gardens, instead of moats and yards and towers, and to the large gate tower, which had been kept, with one or two smaller buildings, for the housing of the farmer, his cattle, and his stores.

Thither the misguided young Prince was conveyed in a carefully shuttered coach and at a late hour of the evening, as was proper in the case of an offender at once so illustrious and so criminal. Nature, moreover, had clearly shared Duke Balthasar Maria’s legitimate anger, and had done her best to increase the horror of this just though terrible sentence. For that particular night the long summer broke up in a storm of fearful violence; and Alberic entered the ruined castle amid the howling of wind, the rumble of thunder, and the rush of torrents of rain.

But the young Prince showed no fear or reluctance; he saluted with dignity and sweetness the farmer and his wife and family, and took possession of his attic, where the curtains of an antique and crazy four-poster shook in the draught of the unglazed windows, as if he were taking possession of the gala chambers of a great palace. “And so,” he merely remarked, looking round him with reserved satisfaction, “I am now in the castle which was built by my ancestor and namesake, the Marquis Alberic the Blond.”

He looked not unworthy of such illustrious lineage, as he stood there in the flickering light of the pine-torch: tall for his. age, slender and strong, with abundant golden hair falling about his very white face.

That first night at the Castle of Sparkling Waters, Alberic dreamed without end about his dear, lost tapestry. And when, in the radiant autumn morning, he descended to explore the place of his banishment and captivity, it seemed as if those dreams were still going on. Or had the tapestry been removed to this spot, and become a reality in which he himself was running about?

The gate tower in which he had slept was still intact and chivalrous. It had battlements, a drawbridge, a great escutcheon with the arms of Luna, just like the castle in the tapestry. Some vines, quite loaded with grapes, rose on the strong cords of their fibrous wood from the ground to the very roof of the town, exactly like those borders of leaves and fruit which Alberic had loved so much. And, between the vines, all along the masonry, were strung long narrow ropes of maize, like garlands of gold. A plantation of orange-trees filled what had once been the moat; lemons were espaliered against the delicate pink brickwork. There were no lilies, indeed, but big carnations hung down from the tower windows, and a tall oleander, which Alberic mistook for a special sort of rose-tree, shed its blossoms on to the drawbridge. After the storm of the night, birds were singing all round; not indeed as they sang in spring, which Alberic, of course, did not know, but in a manner quite different from the canaries in the ducal aviaries at Luna. Moreover, other birds, wonderful white and gold creatures, some of them with brilliant tails and scarlet crests, were pecking and strutting and making curious noises in the yard. And – could it be true? – a little way further up the hill, for the castle walls climbed steeply from the seaboard, in the grass beneath the olive-trees, white creatures were running in and out – white creatures with pinkish lining to their ears, undoubtedly – as Alberic’s nurse had taught him on the tapestry – undoubtedly rabbits.

Thus Alberic rambled on, from discovery to discovery, with the growing sense that he was in the tapestry, but that the tapestry had become the whole world. He climbed from terrace to terrace of the steep olive-yard, among the sage and the fennel tufts, the long red walls of the castle winding ever higher on the hill. And on the very top of the hill was a high terrace surrounded by towers, and a white shining house with columns and windows, which seemed to drag him upwards.

It was, indeed, the citadel of the place, the very centre of the castle.

Alberic’s heart beat strangely as he passed beneath the wide arch of delicate ivy-grown brick, and clambered up the rough-paved path to the topmost terrace. And there he actually forgot the tapestry. The terrace was laid out as a vineyard, the vines trellised on the top of stone columns; at one end stood a clump of trees, pines, and a big ilex and a walnut, whose shrivelled leaves already strewed the grass. To the back stood a tiny little house all built of shining marble, with two large rounded windows divided by delicate pillars, of the sort (as Alberic later learned) which people built in the barbarous , days of the Goths. Among the vines, which formed a vast arbour, were growing, in open spaces, large orange and lemon trees, and flowering bushes of rosemary, and pale pink roses. And in front of the house, under a great umbrella pine, was a well, with an arch over it and a bucket hanging to a chain.

Alberic wandered about in the vineyard, and then slowly mounted the marble staircase which flanked the white house. There was no one in it The two or three small upper chambers stood open, and on their blackened floor were heaped sacks, and faggots, and fodder, and all manner of coloured seeds. The unglazed windows stood open, framing in between their white pillars a piece of deep blue sea. For there, below, but seen over the tops of the olive-trees and the green leaves of the oranges and lemons, stretched the sea, deep blue, speckled with white sails, bounded by pale blue capes, and arched over by a dazzling pale blue sky. From the lower story there rose faint sounds of cattle, and a fresh, sweet smell as of grass and herbs and coolness, which Alberic had never known before. How long did Alberic stand at that window? He was startled by what he took to be steps close behind him, and a rustle as of silk. But the rooms were empty, and he could see nothing moving among the stacked up fodder and seeds. Still, the sounds seemed to recur, but now outside, and he thought he heard someone in a very low voice call his name. He descended into the vineyard; he walked round every tree and every shrub, and climbed upon the broken masses of rose-coloured masonry, crushing the scented ragwort and peppermint with which they were overgrown. But all was still and empty. Only, from far, far below, there rose a stave of peasant’s song.

The great gold balls of oranges, and the delicate yellow lemons, stood out among their glossy green against the deep blue of the sea; the long bunches of grapes hung, filled with sunshine, like clusters of rubies and jacinths and topazes, from the trellis which patterned the pale blue sky. But Alberic felt not hunger, but sudden thirst, and mounted the three broken marble steps of the well. By its side was a long narrow trough of marble, such as stood in the court at Luna, and which, Alberic had been told, people had used as coffins in pagan times. This one was evidently intended to receive water from the well, for it had a mark in the middle, with a spout; but it was quite dry and full of wild herbs, and even of pale, prickly roses. There were garlands carved upon it, and people with twisted snakes about them; and the carving was picked out with golden brown minute mosses. Alberic looked at it, for it pleased him greatly; and then he lowered the bucket into the deep well, and drank. The well was very, very deep. Its inner sides were covered, as far as you could see, with long delicate weeds like pale green hair, but this faded away in the darkness. At the bottom was a bright space, reflecting the sky, but looking like some subterranean country. Alberic, as he bent over, was startled by suddenly seeing what seemed a face filling up part of that shining circle; but he remembered it must be his own reflection, and felt ashamed. So, to give himself courage, he bent over again, and sang his own name to the image. But instead of his own boyish voice he was answered by wonderful tones, high and deep alternately, running through the notes of a long, long cadence, as he had heard them on holidays at the Ducal Chapel at Luna.

When he had slaked his thirst, Alberic was about to unchain the bucket, when there was a rustle hard by, and a sort of little hiss, and there rose from the carved trough, from among the weeds and roses, and glided on to the brick of the well, a long, green, glittering thing. Alberic recognised it to be a snake; only, he had no idea it had such a flat, strange little head, and such a long forked tongue, for the lady on the tapestry was a woman from the waist upwards. It sat on the opposite side of the well, moving its long neck in his direction, and fixing him with its small golden eyes. Then, slowly, it began to glide round the well circle towards him. Perhaps it wants to drink, thought Alberic, and tipped the bronze pitcher in its direction. But the creature glided past, and came around and rubbed itself against Alberic’s hand. The boy was not afraid, for he knew nothing about snakes; but he started, for, on this hot day, the creature was icy cold. But then he felt sorry. “It must be dreadful to be always so cold,” he said; “come, try and get warm in my pocket.”

But the snake merely rubbed itself against his coat, and then disappeared back into the carved sarcophagus.

IV

Duke Balthasar Maria, as we have seen, was famous for his unfading youth, and much of his happiness and pride was due to this delightful peculiarity. Any comparison, therefore, which might diminish it, was distasteful to the Ever Young sovereign of Luna; and when his son had died with mysterious suddenness, Duke Balthasar Maria’s grief had been tempered by the consolatory fact that he was now the youngest man at his own court. This very natural feeling explains why the Duke of Luna had put behind him for several years the fact of having a grandson, painful because implying that he was of an age to be a grandfather. He had done his best, and succeeded not badly, to forget Alberic while the latter abode under his own roof; and now that the boy had been sent away to a distance, he forgot him entirely for the space of several years.

But Balthasar Maria’s three chief counsellors had no such reason for forgetfulness; and so, in turn, each unknown to the other, the Jesuit, the Dwarf, and the Jester sent spies to the Castle of Sparkling Waters, and even secretly visited that place in person. For by the coincidence of genius, the mind of each of these profound politicians, had been illuminated by the same remarkable thought, to wit: that Duke Balthasar Maria, unnatural as it seemed, would someday have to die, and Prince Alberic, if still alive, become duke in his stead. Those were the times of subtle statecraft; and the Jesuit, the Dwarf, and the Jester were notable statesmen even in their day. So each of them had provided himself with a scheme, which, in order to be thoroughly artistic, was twofold and, so to speak, double-barrelled. Alberic might live or he might die, and therefore Alberic must be turned to profit in either case. If, to invert the chances, Alberic should die before coming to the throne, the Jesuit, the Dwarf, and the Jester had each privately determined to represent this death as purposely brought about by himself for the benefit of one of the three Powers which would claim the duchy in case of extinction of the male line. The Jesuit had chosen to attribute the murder to devotion to the Holy See; the Dwarf had preferred to appear active in favour of the King of Spain; and the Jester had decided that he would lay claim to the gratitude of the Emperor. The very means which each would pretend to have used had been thought out: poison in each case, only while the Dwarf had selected henbane, taken through a pair of perfumed gloves, and the Jester pounded diamonds mixed in champagne, the Jesuit had modestly adhered to the humble cup of chocolate, which, whether real or fictitious, had always stood his order in such good stead. Thus did each of these wily courtiers dispose of Alberic in case he should die.

There remained the alternative of Alberic continuing to live; and for this the three rival statesmen were also prepared. If Alberic lived, it was obvious that he must be made to select one of the three as his sole minister, and banish, imprison, or put to death the other two. For this purpose it was necessary to secure his affection by gifts, until he should be old enough to understand that be had actually owed his life to the passionate loyalty of the Jesuit, or the Dwarf, or the Jester, each of whom had saved him from the atrocious enterprises of the other two counsellors of Balthasar Maria – nay, who knows? perhaps from the malignity of Balthasar Maria himself.

In accordance with these subtle machinations, each of the three statesmen determined to outwit his rivals by sending young Alberic such things as would appeal most strongly to a poor young Prince living in banishment among peasants, and wholly unsupplied with pocket-money. The Jesuit expended a considerable sum on books, magnificently bound with the arms of Luna; the Dwarf prepared several suits of tasteful clothes; and the Jester selected, with infinite care, a horse of equal and perfect gentleness and mettle. And, unknown to one another, but much about the same period, each of the statesmen sent his present most secretly to Alberic. Imagine the astonishment and wrath of the Jesuit, the Dwarf, and the Jester, when each saw his messenger come back from Sparkling Waters with his gift returned, and the news that Prince Alberic was already supplied with a complete library, a handsome wardrobe, and not one, but two horses of the finest breed and training; nay, more unexpected still, that while returning the gifts to their respective donors, he had rewarded the messengers with splendid liberality.

The result of this amazing discovery was much the same in the mind of the Jesuit, the Dwarf, and the Jester. Each instantly suspected one or both of his rivals; then, on second thoughts, determined to change the present to one of the other items (horse, clothes, or books, as the case might be), little suspecting that each of them had been supplied already; and, on further reflection, began to doubt the reality of the whole business, to suspect connivance of the messengers, intended insult on the part of the Prince; and, therefore, decided to trust only to the evidence of his own eyes in the matter.

Accordingly, within the same few months, the Jesuit, the Dwarf, and the Jester, feigned grievous illness to their Ducal Master, and while everybody thought them safe in bed in the Red Palace at Luna, hurried, on horseback, or in a litter, or in a coach, to the Castle of Sparkling Waters.

The scene with the peasant and his family, young Alberic’s host, was identical on the three occasions; and, as the farmer saw that each of these personages was willing to pay liberally for absolute secrecy, he very consistently swore to supply that desideratum to each of the three great functionaries. And similarly, in all three cases, it was deemed preferable to see the young Prince first from a hiding-place, before asking leave to pay their respects.

The Dwarf, who was the first in the field, was able to hide very conveniently in one of the cut velvet plumes which surmounted Alberic’s four-post bedstead, and to observe the young Prince as he changed his apparel. But he scarcely recognised the Duke’s grandson. Alberic was sixteen, but far taller and stronger than his age would warrant His figure was at once manly and delicate, and full of grace and vigour of movement. His long hair, the colour of floss silk, fell in wavy curls, which seemed to imply almost a woman’s care and coquetry. His hands also, though powerful, were, as the Dwarf took note, of princely form and whiteness. As to his garments, the open doors of his wardrobe displayed every variety that a young Prince could need; and, while the Dwarf was watching, he was exchanging a russet and purple hunting-dress, cut after the Hungarian fashion with cape and hood, and accompanied by a cap crowned with peacock’s feathers, for a habit of white and silver, trimmed with Venetian lace, in which he intended to honour the wedding of one of the farmer’s daughters. Never, in his most genuine youth, had Balthasar Maria, the ever young and handsome, been one-quarter as beautiful in person or as delicate in apparel as his grandson in exile among poor country folk.

The Jesuit, in his turn, came to verify his messenger’s extraordinary statements. Through the gap between two rafters he was enabled to look down on to Prince Alberic in his study. Magnificently bound books lined the walls of the closet, and in their gaps hung valuable prints and maps. On the table were heaped several open volumes, among globes both terrestrial and celestial; and Alberic himself was leaning on the arm of a great chair, reciting the verses of Virgil in a most graceful chant. Never had the Jesuit seen a better-appointed study nor a more precocious young scholar.

As regards the Jester, he came at the very moment that Alberic was returning from a ride; and, having begun life as an acrobat, he was able to climb into a large ilex which commanded an excellent view of the Castle yard.

Alberic was mounted on a splendid jet-black barb, magnificently caparisoned in crimson and gold Spanish trappings. His groom – for he had even a groom – was riding a horse only a shade less perfect: it was white and he was black – a splendid negro such as only great princes own. When Alberic came in sight of the farmer’s wife, who stood shelling peas on the doorstep, he waved his hat with infinite grace, caused his horse to caracole and rear three times in salutation, picked an apple up while cantering round the Castle yard, threw it in the air with his sword and cut it in two as it descended, and did a number of similar feats such as are taught only to the most brilliant cavaliers. Now, as he was going to dismount, a branch of the ilex cracked, the black barb reared, and Alberic, looking up, perceived the Jester moving in the tree.

“A wonderful pard-coloured bird!” he exclaimed, and seized the fowling-piece that hung to his saddle. But before he had time to fire the Jester had thrown himself down and alighted, making three somersaults, on the ground.

“My Lord,” said the Jester, “you see before you a faithful subject who, braving the threats and traps of your enemies, and, I am bound to add, risking also your Highnesses sovereign displeasure, has been determined to see his Prince once more, to have the supreme happiness of seeing him at last clad and equipped and mounted.

“Enough!” interrupted Alberic sternly. “You need say no more. You would have me believe that it is to you I owe my horses and books and clothes, even as the Dwarf and the Jesuit tried to make me believe about themselves last month. Know, then, that Alberic of Luna requires gifts from none of you. And now, most miserable councillor of my unhappy grandfather, begone!”

The Jester checked his rage, and tried, all the way back to Luna, to get at some solution of this intolerable riddle. The Jesuit and the Dwarf – the scoundrels – had been trying their hand then! Perhaps, indeed, it was their blundering which had ruined his own perfectly-concocted scheme. But for their having come and claimed gratitude for gifts they had not made, Alberic would perhaps have believed that the Jester had not merely offered the horse which was refused, but had actually given the two which had been accepted, and the books and clothes (since there had been books and clothes given) into the bargain. But then, had not Alberic spoken as if he were perfectly sure from what quarter all his possessions had come? This reminded the Jester of the allusion to the Duke Balthasar Maria; Alberic had spoken of him as unhappy. Was it, could it be, possible that the treacherous old wretch had been keeping up relations with his grandson in secret, afraid – for he was a miserable old coward at bottom – both of the wrath of his three counsellors, and of the hatred of his grandson? Was it possible, thought the Jester, that not only the Jesuit and the Dwarf, but the Duke of Luna also, had been intriguing against him round young Prince Alberic? Balthasar Maria was quite capable of it; he might be enjoying the trick he was playing his three masters – for they were his masters; he might be preparing to turn suddenly upon them with his long neglected grandson like a sword to smite them. On the other hand, might this not be a mere mistaken supposition on the part of Prince Alberic, who, in his silly dignity, preferred to believe in the liberality of his ducal grandfather than in that of his grandfather’s servants? Might the horses, and all the rest, not really be the gift of either the Dwarf or the Jesuit, although neither had got the credit for it? “No, no,” exclaimed the Jester, for he hated his fellow-servants worse than his master, “anything better than that! Rather a thousand times that it were the Duke himself who had outwitted them.”

Then, in his bitterness, having gone over the old arguments again and again, some additional circumstances returned to his memory. The black groom was deaf and dumb, and the peasants, it appeared, had been quite unable to extract any information from him. But he had arrived with those particular horses only a few months ago; a gift, the peasants had thought, from the old Duke of Luna. But Alberic, they had said. had possessed other horses before, which they had also taken for granted had come from the Red Palace. And the clothes and books had been accumulating, it appeared, ever since the Prince’s arrival in his place of banishment Since this was the case, the plot, whether on the part of the Jesuit or the Dwarf, or on that of the Duke himself, had been going on for years before the Jester had bestirred himself! Moreover, the Prince not only possessed horses, but he learned to ride, he not only had books, but he had learned to read, and even to read various tongues; and finally, the Prince was not only clad in princely garments, but he was every inch of him a Prince. He had then been consorting with other people than the peasants at Sparkling Waters. He must have been away – or – someone must have come. He had not been living in solitude.

But when – how – and above all, who?

And again the baffled Jester revolved the probabilities concerning the Dwarf, the Jesuit, and the Duke. It must be – it could be no other – it evidently could only be—

“Ah!” exclaimed the unhappy diplomatist; “if only one could believe in magic!”

And it suddenly struck him, with terror and mingled relief, “Was it magic?”

But the Jester, like the Dwarf and the Jesuit, and the Duke of Luna himself, was altogether superior to such foolish beliefs.

V

The young Prince of Luna had never attempted to learn the story of Alberic the Blond and the Snake Lady. Children sometimes conceive an inexplicable shyness, almost a dread, of knowing more on some subject which is uppermost in their thoughts; and such had been the case of Duke Balthasar Maria’s grandson. Ever since the memorable morning when the ebony crucifix had been removed from in front of the faded tapestry, and the whole figure of the Snake Lady had been for the first time revealed, scarcely a day had passed without their coming to the boy’s mind: his nurse’s words about his ancestors Alberic and the Snake Lady Oriana. But, even as he had asked no questions then, so he had asked no questions since; shrinking more and more from all further knowledge of the matter. He had never questioned his nurse; he had never questioned the peasants of Sparkling Waters, although the story, he felt quite sure, must be well known among the ruins of Alberic the Blond’s own castle. Nay, stranger still, he had never mentioned the subject to his dear Godmother, to whom he had learned to open his heart about all things, and who had taught him all that he knew.

For the Duke’s Jester had guessed rightly that, during these years at Sparkling Waters, the young Prince had not consorted solely with peasants. The very evening after his arrival, as he was sitting by the marble well in the vineyard, looking towards the sea, he had felt a hand placed lightly on his shoulder, and looked up into the face of a beautiful lady dressed in green.

“Do not be afraid,” she had said, smiling at his terror. “I am not a ghost, but alive like you; and I am, though you do not know it, your Godmother. My dwelling is close to this castle, and I shall come every evening to play and talk with you, here by the little white palace with the pillars, where the fodder is stacked. Only, you must remember that I do so against the wishes of your grandfather and all his friends, and that if ever you mention me to anyone, or allude in any way to our meetings, I shall be obliged to leave the neighbourhood, and you will never see me again. Someday when you are big you will learn why; till then you must take me on trust And now what shall we play at?”

And thus his Godmother had come every evening at sunset, just for an hour and no more, and had taught the poor solitary little Prince to play (for he had never played) and to read, and to manage a horse, and, above all, to love: for, except the old tapestry in the Red Palace, he had never loved anything in the world.

Alberic told his dear Godmother everything, beginning with the story of the two pieces of tapestry, the one they had taken away and the one he had cut to pieces; and he asked her about all the things he ever wanted to know, and she was always able to answer. Only about two things they were silent: she never told him her name nor where she lived, nor whether Duke Balthasar Maria knew her (the boy guessed that she had been a friend of his father’s); and Alberic never revealed the fact that the tapestry had represented his ancestor and the beautiful Oriana; for, even to his dear Godmother, and most perhaps to her, he found it impossible even to mention Alberic the Blond and the Snake Lady.

But the story, or rather the name of the story he did not know, never loosened its hold on Alberic’s mind. Little by little, as he grew up, it came to add to his life two friends, of whom he never told his Godmother. They were, to be sure, of such sort, however different, that a boy might find it difficult to speak about without feeling foolish. The first of the two friends was his own ancestor, Alberic the Blond; and the second that large tame grass snake whose acquaintance he had made the day after his arrival at the castle. About Alberic the Blond he knew indeed but little, save that he had reigned in Luna many hundreds of years ago, and that he had been a very brave and glorious Prince indeed, who had helped to conquer the Holy Sepulchre with Godfrey and Tancred and the other heroes of Tasso. But, perhaps in proportion to this vagueness, Alberic the Blond served to personify all the notions of chivalry which the boy had learned from his Godmother, and those which bubbled up in his own breast. Nay, little by little the young Prince began to take his unknown ancestor as a model, and in a confused way, to identify himself with him. For was he not fair-haired too, and Prince of Luna, Alberic, third of the name, as the other had been first? Perhaps for this reason he could never speak of this ancestor with his Godmother. She might think it presumptuous and foolish; besides, she might perhaps tell him things about Alberic the Blond which would hurt him; the poor young Prince, who had compared the splendid reputation of his own grandfather with the miserable reality, had grown up precociously sceptical. As to the Snake, with whom he played every day in the grass, and who was his only companion during the many hours of his Godmother’s absence, he would willingly have spoken of her, and had once been on the point of doing so, but he had noticed that the mere name of such creatures seemed to be odious to his Godmother. Whenever, in their readings, they came across any mention of serpents, his Godmother would exclaim, “Let us skip that,” with a look of intense pain in her usually cheerful countenance. It was a pity, Alberic thought, that so lovely and dear a lady should feel such hatred towards any living creature, particularly towards a kind which, like his own tame grass snake, was perfectly harmless. But he loved her too much to dream of thwarting her; and he was very grateful to his tame snake for having the tact never to show herself at the hour of his Godmother’s visits.

But to return to the story represented on the dear, faded tapestry in the Red Palace.

When Prince Alberic, unconscious to himself, was beginning to turn into a full-grown and gallant-looking youth, a change began to take place in him, and it was about the story of his ancestor and the Lady Oriana. He thought of it more than ever, and it began to haunt his dreams; only it was now a vaguely painful thought; and, while dreading still to know more, he began to experience a restless, miserable craving to know all. His curiosity was like a thorn in his flesh, working its way in and in; and it seemed something almost more than curiosity. And yet, he was still shy and frightened of the subject; nay, the greater his craving to know, the greater grew a strange certainty that the knowing would be accompanied by evil. So, although many people could have answered – the very peasants, the fishermen of the coast, and first and foremost, his Godmother – he let months pass before he asked the question.

It, and the answer, came of a sudden.

•   •   •   •   •

There came occasionally to Sparkling Waters an old man, who united in his tattered person the trades of mending crockery and reciting fairy tales. He would seat himself in summer, under the spreading fig-tree in the Castle yard, and in winter by the peasants’ deep, black chimney, alternately boring holes in pipkins, or gluing plate edges, and singing, in a cracked, nasal voice, but not without dignity and charm of manner, the stories of the King of Portugal’s Cowherd, of the Feathers of the Griffin, or some of the many stanzas of Orlando or Jerusalem Delivered which he knew by heart. Our young Prince had always avoided him, partly from a vague fear of a mention of his ancestor and the Snake Lady, and partly because of something vaguely sinister in the old man’s eye. But now he awaited with impatience the vagrant’s periodical return, and on one occasion, summoned him to his own chamber.

“Sing me,” he commanded, “the story of Alberic the Blond and the Snake Lady.”

The old man hesitated, and answered with a strange look—

“My Lord, I do not know it.”

A sudden feeling, such as the youth had never experienced before, seized hold of Alberic. He did not recognise himself. He saw and heard himself, as if it were someone else, nod first at some pieces of gold, of those his Godmother had given him, and then at his fowling-piece hung on the wall; and as he did so he had a strange thought: “I must be mad.” But he merely said, sternly—

“Old man, that is not true. Sing that story at once, if you value my money and your safety.”

The vagrant took his white-bearded chin in his hand, mused, and then, fumbling among the files and drills and pieces of wire in his tool-basket, which made a faint metallic accompaniment, he slowly began to chant the following stanzas:

VI

Now listen, courteous Prince, to what befell your ancestor, the valorous Alberic, returning from the Holy Land.

Already a year had passed since the strongholds of Jerusalem had fallen beneath the blows of the faithful, and since the Sepulchre of Christ had been delivered from the worshippers of Macomet. The great Godfrey was enthroned as its guardian, and the mighty barons, his companions, were wending their way homewards – Tancred, and Bohemund, and Reynold, and the rest

The valorous Alberic, the honour of Luna, after many perilous adventures, brought by the anger of the Wizard Macomet, whom he had offended, was shipwrecked on his homeward way, and cast, alone of all his great army, upon the rocky shore of an unknown island. He wandered long about, among woods and pleasant pastures, but without ever seeing any signs of habitation; nourishing himself solely on berries and clear water, and taking his rest in the green grass beneath the trees. At length, after some days of wandering, he came to a dense forest, the like of which he had never seen before, so deep was its shade and so tangled were its boughs. He broke the branches with his iron-gloved hand, and the air became filled with the croaking and screeching of dreadful nightbirds. He pushed his way with shoulder and knee, trampling the broken leafage under foot, and the air was filled with the roaring of monstrous lions and tigers. He grasped his sharp double-edged sword and hewed through the interlaced branches, and the air was filled with the shrieks and sobs of a vanquished city. But the Knight of Luna went on, undaunted, cutting his way through the enchanted wood. And behold! as he issued thence, there was before him a lordly castle, as of some great Prince, situate in a pleasant meadow among running streams. And as Alberic approached, the portcullis was raised, and the drawbridge lowered; and there arose sounds of fifes and bugles, but nowhere could he descry any living wight around. And Alberic entered the castle, and found therein guardrooms full of shining arms, and chambers spread with rich stuffs, and a banqueting-hall, with a great table laid and a chair of state at the end. And as he entered a concert of invisible voices and instruments greeted him sweetly, and called him by name, and bid him be welcome; but not a living soul did he see. So he sat him down at the table, and as he did so, invisible hands filled his cup and his plate, and ministered to him with delicacies of all sorts. Now, when the good knight had eaten and drunken his fill, he drank to the health of his unknown host, declaring himself the servant thereof with his sword and heart. After which, weary with wandering, he prepared to take rest on the carpets which strewed the ground; but invisible hands unbuckled his armour, and clad him in silken robes, and led him to a couch all covered with rose-leaves. And when he had lain himself down, the concert of invisible singers and players put him to sleep with their melodies.

It was the hour of sunset when the valorous Baron awoke, and buckled on his armour, and hung on his thigh the great sword Brillamorte; and invisible hands helped him once more.

The Knight of Luna went all over the enchanted castle, and found all manner of rarities, treasures of precious stones, such as great kings possess, and stores of gold and silver vessels, and rich stuffs, and stables full of fiery coursers ready caparisoned; but never a human creature anywhere. And, wondering more and more, he went forth into the orchard, which lay within the castle walls. And such another orchard, sure, was never seen, since that in which the hero Hercules found the three golden apples and slew the great dragon. For you might see in this place fruit-trees of all kinds, apples and pears, and peaches and plums, and the goodly orange, which bore at the same time fruit and delicate and scented blossom. And all around were set hedges of roses, whose scent was even like heaven; and there were other flowers of all kinds, those into which the vain Narcissus turned through love of himself, and those which grew, they tell us, from the blood-drops of fair Venus’s minion; and lilies of which that Messenger carried a sheaf who saluted the Meek Damsel, glorious above all womankind. And in the trees sang innumerable birds; and others, of unknown breed, joined melody in hanging cages and aviaries. And in the orchard’s midst was set a fountain, the most wonderful e’er made, its waters running in green channels among the flowered grass. For that fountain was made in the likeness of twin naked maidens, dancing together, and pouring water out of pitchers as they did so; and the maidens were of fine silver, and the pitchers of wrought gold, and the whole so cunningly contrived by magic art that the maidens really moved and danced with the waters they were pouring out – a wonderful work, most truly. And when the Knight of Luna had feasted his eyes upon this marvel, he saw among the grass, beneath a flowering almond-tree, a sepulchre of marble, cunningly carved and gilded, on which was written, “Here is imprisoned the Fairy Oriana, most miserable of all fairies, condemned for no fault, but by envious powers, to a dreadful fate,” – and as he read, the inscription changed, and the sepulchre showed these words: “O Knight of Luna, valorous Alberic, if thou wouldst show thy gratitude to the hapless mistress of this castle, summon up thy redoubtable courage, and, whatsoever creature issue from my marble heart, swear thou to kiss it three times on the mouth, that Oriana may be released.”

And Alberic drew his great sword, and on its hilt, shaped like a cross, he swore.

Then wouldst thou have heard a terrible sound of thunder, and seen the castle walls rock. But Alberic, nothing daunted, repeats in a loud voice, “I swear,” and instantly that sepulchre’s lid upheaves, and there issues thence and rises up a great green snake, wearing a golden crown, and raises itself and fawns towards the valorous Knight of Luna. And Alberic starts and recoils in terror. For rather, a thousand times, confront alone the armed hosts of all the heathen, than put his lips to that cold, creeping beast! And the serpent looks at Alberic with great gold eyes, and big tears issue thence, and it drops prostrate on the grass; and Alberic summons courage and approaches; but when the serpent glides along his arm, a horror takes him, and he falls back, unable. And the tears stream from the snake’s golden eyes, and moans come from its mouth.

And Alberic runs forward, and seizes the serpent in both arms, and lifts it up, and three times presses his warm lips against its cold and slippery skin, shutting his eyes in horror. And when the Knight of Luna opens them again, behold! O wonder! in his arms no longer a dreadful snake, but a damsel, richly dressed and beautiful beyond compare.

VII

Young Alberic sickened that very night, and lay for many days raging with fever. The peasant’s-wife and a good neighbouring priest nursed him unhelped, for when the messenger they sent arrived at Luna, Duke Balthasar was busy rehearsing a grand ballet in which he himself danced the part of Phoebus Apollo; and the ducal physician was therefore despatched to Sparkling Waters only when the young Prince was already recovering.

Prince Alberic undoubtedly passed through a very bad illness, and went fairly out of his mind for fever and ague.

He raved so dreadfully in his delirium about enchanted tapestries and terrible grottoes, Twelve Caesars with rolling eyeballs, barbers’ blocks with perukes on them, monkeys of verde antique, and porphyry rhinoceroses, and all manner of hellish creatures, that the good priest began to suspect a case of demoniac possession, and caused candles to be kept lighted all day and all night, and holy water to be sprinkled, and a printed form of exorcism, absolutely sovereign in such trouble, to be nailed against the bedpost. On the fourth day the young Prince fell into a profound sleep, from which he awaked in apparent possession of his faculties.

“Then you are not the Porphyry Rhinoceros?” he said, very slowly, as his eye fell upon the priest; “and this is my own dear little room at Sparkling Waters, though I do not understand all those candles. I thought it was the great hall in the Red Palace, and that all those animals of precious marbles, and my grandfather, the Duke, in his bronze and gold robes, were beating me and my tame snake to death with harlequins’ laths. It was terrible. But now I see it was all fancy and delirium.”

The poor youth gave a sigh of relief, and feebly caressed the rugged old hand of the priest, which lay upon his counterpane. The Prince stayed for a long while motionless, but gradually a strange light came into his eyes, and a smile on to his lips. Presently he made a sign that the peasants should leave the room, and taking once more the good priest’s hand, he looked solemnly in his eyes, and spoke in an earnest voice. “My father,” he said, “I have seen and heard strange things in my sickness, and I cannot tell for certain now what belongs to the reality of my previous life, and what is merely the remembrance of delirium. On this I would fain be enlightened. Promise me, my father, to answer my questions truly, for this is a matter of the welfare of my soul, and therefore of your own.”

The priest nearly jumped on his chair. So he had been right. The demons had been trying to tamper with the poor young Prince, and now he was going to have a fine account of it all.

“My son,” he murmured, “as I hope for the spiritual welfare of both of us, I promise to answer all your interrogations to the best of my powers. Speak without reticence.”

Alberic hesitated for a moment, and his eyes glanced from one long lit taper to the other.

“In that case,” he said slowly, “let me conjure you, my father, to tell me whether or not there exists a certain tradition in my family, of the loves of my ancestor, Alberic the Blond, with a certain Snake Lady, and how he was unfaithful to her, and failed to disenchant her, and how a second Alberic, also my ancestor, loved this same Snake Lady, but failed before the ten years of fidelity were over, and became a monk…. Does such a story exist, or have I imagined it all during my sickness?”

“My son,” replied the good priest testily, for he was most horribly disappointed by this speech, “it is scarce fitting that a young Prince but just escaped from the jaws of death – and, perhaps, even from the insidious onslaught of the Evil One – should give his mind to idle tales like these.”

“Call them what you choose,” answered the Prince gravely, “but remember your promise, father. Answer me truly, and presume not to question my reasons.”

The priest started. What a hasty ass he had been! Why, these were probably the demons talking out of Alberic’s mouth, causing him to ask silly irrelevant questions in order to prevent a good confession. Such were notoriously among their stock tricks! But he would outwit them. If only it were possible to summon up St. Paschal Baylon, that new fashionable saint who had been doing such wonders with devils lately! But St. Paschal Baylon required not only that you should say several rosaries, but that you should light four candles on a table and lay a supper for two; after that there was nothing he would not do. So the priest hastily seized two candlesticks from the foot of the bed, and called to the peasant’s wife to bring a clean napkin and plates and glasses; and meanwhile endeavoured to detain the demons by answering the poor Prince’s foolish chatter, “Your ancestors, the two Alberics – a tradition in your Serene family – yes, my Lord – there is such – let me see, how does the story go? – ah yes – this demon, I mean this Snake Lady was a – what they call a fairy – or witch, malefica or stryx is, I believe, the proper Latin expression – who had been turned into a snake for her sins – good woman, woman. is it possible you cannot be a little quicker in bringing those plates for His Highness’s supper? The Snake Lady – let me see – was to cease altogether being a snake if a cavalier remained faithful to her for ten years, and at any rate turned into a woman every time a cavalier was found who had the courage to give her a kiss as if she were not a snake – a disagreeable thing, besides being mortal sin. As I said just now, this enabled her to resume temporarily her human shape, which is said to have been fair enough; but how can one tell? I believe she was allowed to change into a woman for an hour at sunset, in any case and without anybody kissing her, but only for an hour. A very unlikely story, my Lord, and not a very moral one, to my thinking!”

And the good priest spread the tablecloth over the table, wondering secretly when the plates and glasses for St. Paschal Baylon would make their appearance. If only the demon could be prevented from beating a retreat before all was ready! “To return to the story about which Your Highness is pleased to inquire,” he continued, trying to gain time by pretending to humour the demon who was asking questions through the poor Prince’s mouth, “I can remember hearing a poem before I took orders – a foolish poem too, in a very poor style, if my memory is correct – that related the manner in which Alberic the Blond met this Snake Lady, and disenchanted her by performing the ceremony I have alluded to. The poem was frequently sung at fairs and similar resorts of the uneducated, and, as remarked, was a very inferior composition indeed. Alberic the Blond afterwards came to his senses, it appears, and after abandoning the Snake Lady fulfilled his duty as a Prince, and married the Princess…. I cannot exactly remember what Princess, but it was a very suitable marriage, no doubt, from which Your Highness is of course descended.

“As regards the Marquis Alberic, second of the name, of whom it is accounted that he died in odour of sanctity (and indeed it is said that the facts concerning his beatification are being studied in the proper quarters), there is a mention in a life of Saint Fredevaldus, bishop and patron of Luna, printed at the beginning of the present century at Venice, with Approbation and Licence of the Authorities and Inquisition, a mention of the fact that this Marquis Alberic the second had contracted, having abandoned his lawful wife, a left-handed marriage with this same Snake Lady (such evil creatures not being subject to natural death), she having induced him thereunto in hope of his proving faithful ten years, and by this means restoring her altogether to human shape. But a certain holy hermit, having got wind of this scandal, prayed to St. Fredevaldus as patron of Luna, whereupon St. Fredevaldus took pity on the Marquis Alberic’s sins, and appeared to him in a vision at the end of the ninth year of his irregular connection with the Snake Lady, and touched his heart so thoroughly that he instantly forswore her company, and handing the Marquisate over to his mother, abandoned the world and entered the order of St. Romwald, in which he died, as remarked, in odour of sanctity, in consequence of which the present Duke, Your Highness’s magnificent grandfather, is at this moment, as befits so pious a Prince, employing his influence with the Holy Father for the beatification of so glorious an ancestor. And now, my son,” added the good priest, suddenly changing his tone, for he had got the table ready, and lighted the candles, and only required to go through the preliminary invocation of St. Paschal Baylon – “and now, my son, let your curiosity trouble you no more, but endeavour to obtain some rest, and if possible—”

But the Prince interrupted him.

“One word more, good father,” he begged, fixing him with earnest eyes; “is it known what has been the fate of the Snake Lady?”

The impudence of the demons made the priest quite angry, but he must not scare them before the arrival of St. Paschal, so he controlled himself, and answered slowly by gulps, between the lines of the invocation he was mumbling under his breath:

“My Lord – it results from the same life of St. Fredevaldus, that … (in case of property lost, fire, flood, earthquake, plague) … that the Snake Lady (thee we invoke, most holy Paschal Baylon!). The Snake Lady being of the nature of fairies, cannot die unless her head be severed from her trunk, and is still haunting the world, together with other evil spirits, in hopes that another member of the house of Luna (Thee we invoke, most holy Paschal Baylon!) – may succumb to her arts and be faithful to her for the ten years needful to her disenchantments – (most holy Paschal Baylon! – and most of all – on thee we call – for aid against the …)——”

But before the priest could finish his invocation, a terrible shout came from the bed where the sick Prince was lying—

“O Oriana, Oriana!” cried Prince Alberic, sitting up in his bed with a look which terrified the priest as much as his voice. “O Oriana, Oriana!” he repeated, and then fell back exhausted and broken.

“Bless my soul!” cried the priest, almost upsetting the table; “why, the demon has already issued out of him! Who would have guessed that St. Paschal Baylon performed his miracles as quick as that?”

VIII

Prince Alberic was awakened by the loud trill of a nightingale. The room was bathed in moonlight, in which the tapers, left burning round the bed to ward off evil spirits, flickered yellow and ineffectual. Through the open casement came, with the scent of freshly-cut grass, a faint concert of nocturnal sounds: the silvery vibration of the cricket, the reedlike quavering notes of the leaf frogs, and, every now and then, the soft note of an owlet, seeming to stroke the silence as the downy wings growing out of the temples of the Sleep God might stroke the air. The nightingale had paused; and Alberic listened breathless for its next burst of song. At last, and when he expected it least, it came, liquid, loud, and triumphant; so near that it filled the room and thrilled through his marrow like an unison of Cremona viols. It was singing on the pomegranate close outside, whose first buds must be opening into flame-coloured petals. For it was May. Alberic listened; and collected his thoughts, and understood. He arose and dressed, and his limbs seemed suddenly strong, and his mind strangely clear, as if his sickness had been but a dream. Again the nightingale trilled out, and again stopped. Alberic crept noiselessly out of his chamber, down the stairs and into the open. Opposite, the moon had just risen, immense and golden, and the pines and the cypresses of the hill, the furthest battlements of the castle walls, were printed upon it like delicate lace. It was so light that the roses were pink, and the pomegranate flower scarlet, and the lemons pale yellow, and the vines bright green, only differently coloured from how they looked by day, and as if washed over with silver. The orchard spread uphill, its twigs and separate leaves all glittering as if made of diamonds, and its tree-trunks and spalliers weaving strange black patterns of shadow. A little breeze shuddered up from the sea, bringing the scent of the irises grown for their root among the cornfields below. The nightingale was silent. But Prince Alberic did not stand waiting for its song. A spiral dance of fireflies, rising and falling like a thin gold fountain, beckoned him upwards through the dewy grass. The circuit of castle walls, jagged and battlemented, and with tufts of trees profiled here and there against the resplendent blue pallor of the moonlight, seemed twined and knotted like huge snakes around the world.

Suddenly, again, the nightingale sang – a throbbing, silver song. It was the same bird, Alberic felt sure; but it was in front of him now, and was calling him onwards. The fireflies wove their golden dance a few steps in front, always a few steps in front, and drew him uphill through the orchard.

As the ground became steeper, the long trellises, black and crooked, seemed to twist and glide through the blue moonlit grass like black gliding snakes, and, at the top, its marble pillarets clear in the light, slumbered the little Gothic palace of white marble. From the solitary sentinel pine broke the song of the nightingale. This was the place. A breeze had risen, and from the shining moonlit sea, broken into causeways and flotillas of smooth and fretted silver, came a faint briny smell, mingling with that of the irises and blossoming lemons, with the scent of vague ripeness and freshness. The moon hung like a silver lantern over the orchard; the wood of the trellises patterned the blue luminous heaven; the vine-leaves seemed to swim, transparent, in the shining air. Over the circular well, in the high grass, the fireflies rose and fell like a thin fountain of gold. And, from the sentinel pine, the nightingale sang.

Prince Alberic leant against the brink of the well, by the trough carved with antique designs of serpent-bearing maenads. He was wonderfully calm, and his heart sang within him. It was, he knew, the hour and place of his fate.

The nightingale ceased: and the shrill song of the crickets was suspended. The silvery luminous world was silent.

A quiver came through the grass by the well, a rustle through the roses. And, on the well’s brink, encircling its central blackness, glided the Snake.

“Oriana!” whispered Alberic. “Oriana!” She paused, and stood almost erect. The Prince put out his hand, and she twisted round his arm, extending slowly her chilly coil to his wrist and fingers.

“Oriana!” whispered Prince Alberic again. And raising his hand to his face, he leaned down and pressed his lips on the little flat head of the serpent. And the nightingale sang. But a coldness seized his heart, the moon seemed suddenly extinguished, and he slipped away in unconsciousness.

When he awoke the moon was still high. The nightingale was singing its loudest. He lay in the grass by the well, and his head rested on the knees of the most beautiful of ladies. She was dressed in cloth of silver which seemed woven of moon mists, and shimmering moonlit green grass. It was his own dear Godmother.

IX

When Duke Balthasar Maria had got through the rehearsals of the ballet called Daphne Transformed, and finally danced his part of Phoebus Apollo to the infinite delight and glory of his subjects, he was greatly concerned, being benignly humoured, on learning that he had very nearly lost his grandson and heir. The Dwarf, the Jesuit, and the Jester, whom he delighted in pitting against one another, had severally accused each other of disrespectful remarks about the dancing of that ballet; so Duke Balthasar determined to disgrace all three together and inflict upon them the hated presence of Prince Alberic. It was, after all, very pleasant to possess a young grandson, whom one could take to one’s bosom and employ in being insolent to one’s own favourites. It was time, said Duke Balthasar, that Alberic should learn the habits of a court and take unto himself a suitable princess.

The young Prince accordingly was sent for from Sparkling Waters, and installed at Luna in a wing of the Red Palace, overlooking the Court of Honour, and commanding an excellent view of the great rockery, with the Verde Antique Apes and the Porphyry Rhinoceros. He found awaiting him on the great staircase a magnificent staff of servants, a master of the horse, a grand cook, a barber, a hairdresser and assistant, a fencing-master, and four fiddlers. Several lovely ladies of the Court, the principal ministers of the Crown, and the Jesuit, the Dwarf, and the Jester, were also ready to pay their respects. Prince Alberic threw himself out of the glass coach before they had time to open the door, and bowing coldly, ascended the staircase, carrying under his cloak what appeared to be a small wicker cage. The Jesuit, who was the soul of politeness, sprang forward and signed to an officer of the household to relieve His Highness of this burden. But Alberic waved the man off; and the rumour went abroad that a hissing noise had issued from under the Prince’s cloak, and, like lightning, the head and forked tongue of a serpent.

Half an hour later the official spies had informed Duke Balthasar that his grandson and heir had brought from Sparkling Waters no apparent luggage save two swords, a fowling-piece, a volume of Virgil, a branch of pomegranate blossom, and a tame grass snake.

Duke Balthasar did not like the idea of the grass snake; but wishing to annoy the Jester, the Dwarf, and the Jesuit, he merely smiled when they told him of it, and said: “The dear boy! What a child he is! He probably, also, has a pet Iamb, white as snow, and gentle as spring, mourning for him in his old home! How touching is the innocence of childhood! Heigho! I was just like that myself not so very long ago.” Whereupon the three favourites and the whole Court of Luna smiled and bowed and sighed: “How lovely is the innocence of youth!” while the Duke fell to humming the well-known air, “Thyrsis was a shepherd-boy,” of which the ducal fiddlers instantly struck up the ritornel.

“But,” added Balthasar Maria, with that subtle blending of majesty and archness in which he excelled all living Princes, “but it is now time that the Prince, my grandson. should learn” – here he put his hand on his sword and threw back slightly one curl of his jet-black peruke – “the stern exercises of Mars; and also, let us hope, the freaks and frolics of Venus.”

Saying which, the old sinner pinched the cheek of a lady of the very highest quality, whose husband and father were instantly congratulated by the whole Court.

Prince Alberic was displayed next day to the people of Luna, standing on the balcony among a tremendous banging of mortars; while Duke Balthasar explained that he felt towards this youth all the fondness and responsibility of an elder brother. There was a grand ball, a gala opera, a review, a very high mass in the cathedral; the Dwarf, the Jesuit, and the Jester each separately offered his services to Alberic in case he wanted a loan of money, a love-letter carried, or in case even (expressed in more delicate terms) he might wish to poison his grandfather. Duke Balthasar Maria, on his side, summoned his ministers, and sent couriers, booted and liveried, to three great dukes of Italy, carrying each of them, in a morocco wallet emblazoned with the arms of Luna, an account of Prince Alberic’s lineage and person, and a request for particulars of any marriageable princesses and dowries to be disposed of.

X

Prince Alberic did not give his grandfather that warm satisfaction which the old Duke had expected. Balthasar Maria, entirely bent upon annoying the three favourites, had said, and had finally believed, that he intended to introduce his grandson to the delights and duties of life, and in the company of this beloved stripling, to dream that he, too, was a youth once more: a statement which the Court took with due deprecatory reverence, as the Duke was well known never to have ceased to be young.

But Alberic did not lend himself to so touching an idyll. He behaved, indeed, with the greatest decorum, and manifested the utmost respect for his grandfather. He was marvellously assiduous in the council chamber, and still more so in following the military exercises and learning the trade of a soldier. He surprised everyone by his interest and intelligence in all affairs of state; he more than surprised the Court by his readiness to seek knowledge about the administration of the country and the condition of the people. He was a youth of excellent morals, courage, and diligence; but, there was no denying it, he had positively no conception of sacrificing to the Graces. He sat out, as if he had been watching a review, the delicious operas and superb ballets which absorbed half the revenue of the duchy. He listened, without a smile of comprehension, to the witty innuendoes of the ducal table. But worst of all, he had absolutely no eyes, let alone a heart, for the fair sex. Now Balthasar Maria had assembled at Luna a perfect bevy of lovely nymphs, both ladies of the greatest birth, whose husbands received most honourable posts, military and civil, and young females of humbler extraction, though not less expensive habits, ranging from singers and dancers to slave-girls of various colours, all dressed in their appropriate costume: a galaxy of beauty which was duly represented by the skill of celebrated painters on all the walls of the Red Palace, where you may still see their faded charms, habited as Diana, or Pallas, or in the spangles of Columbine, or the turban of Sibyls. These ladies were the object of Duke Balthasar’s most munificently divided attentions; and in the delight of his new-born family affection, he had promised himself much tender interest in guiding the taste of his heir among such of these nymphs as had already received his own exquisite appreciation. Great, therefore, was the disappointment of the affectionate grandfather when his dream of companionship was dispelled, and it became hopeless to interest young Alberic in anything at Luna save despatches and cannons.

The Court, indeed, found the means of consoling Duke Balthasar for this bitterness by extracting therefrom a brilliant comparison between the unfading grace, the vivacious, though majestic, character of the grandfather, and the gloomy and pedantic personality of the grandson. But, although Balthasar Maria would only smile at every new proof of Alberic’s bearish obtuseness, and ejaculate in French, “Poor child! he was born old, and I shall die young!” the reigning Prince of Luna grew vaguely to resent the peculiarities of his heir.

In this fashion things proceeded in the Red Palace at Luna, until Prince Alberic had attained his twenty-first year.

He was sent, in the interval, to visit the principal courts of Italy, and to inspect its chief curiosities, natural and historical, as befitted the heir to an illustrious state. He received the golden rose from the Pope in Rome; he witnessed the festivities of Ascension Day from the Doge’s barge at Venice; he accompanied the Marquis of Montferrat to the camp under Turin; he witnessed the launching of a galley against the Barbary corsairs by the Knights of St. Stephen in the port of Leghorn, and a grand bullfight and burning of heretics given by the Spanish Viceroy at Palermo; and he was allowed to be present when the celebrated Dr. Borri turned two brass buckles into pure gold before the Archduke at Milan. On all of which occasions the heir-apparent of Luna bore himself with a dignity and discretion most singular in one so young. In the course of these journeys he was presented to several of the most promising heiresses in Italy, some of whom were of so tender age as to be displayed in jewelled swaddling clothes on brocade cushions; and a great many possible marriages were discussed behind his back. But Prince Alberic declared for his part that he had decided to lead a single life until the age of twenty-eight or thirty, and that he would then require the assistance of no ambassadors or chancellors, but find for himself the future Duchess of Luna.

All this did not please Balthasar Maria, as indeed nothing else about his grandson did please him much. But, as the old Duke did not really relish the idea of a daughter-in-law at Luna, and as young Alberic’s whimsicalities entailed no expense, and left him entirely free in his business and pleasure, he turned a deaf ear to the criticisms of his counsellors, and letting his grandson inspect fortifications, drill soldiers, pore over parchments, and mope in his wing of the palace, with no amusement save his repulsive tame snake, Balthasar Maria composed and practised various ballets, and began to turn his attention very seriously to the completion of the rockery grotto and of the sepulchral chapel, which, besides the Red Palace itself, were the chief monuments of his glorious reign.

It was the growing desire to witness the fulfilment of these magnanimous projects which led the Duke of Luna into unexpected conflict with his grandson. The wonderful enterprises above-mentioned involved immense expenses, and had periodically been suspended for lack of funds. The collection of animals in the rockery was very far from complete. A camelopard of spotted alabaster, an elephant of Sardinian jasper, and the entire families of a cow and sheep, all of correspondingly rich marbles, were urgently required to fill up the corners. Moreover, the supply of water was at present so small that the fountains were dry save for a couple of hours on the very greatest holidays; and it was necessary for the perfect naturalness of this ingenious work that an aqueduct twenty miles long should pour perennial streams from a high mountain lake into the grotto of the Red Palace.

The question of the sepulchral chapel was, if possible, even more urgent, for, after every new ballet, Duke Balthasar went through a fit of contrition, during which he fixed his thoughts on death; and the possibilities of untimely release, and of burial in an unfinished mausoleum, filled him with terrors. It is true that Duke Balthasar had, immediately after building the vast domed chapel, secured an effigy of his own person before taking thought for the monuments of his already buried ancestors, and the statue, twelve feet high, representing himself in coronation robes of green bronze brocaded with gold, holding a sceptre, and bearing on his head, of purest silver, a spiky coronet set with diamonds, was one of the curiosities which travellers admired most in Italy. But this statue was unsymmetrical, and moreover, had a dismal suggestiveness, so long as surrounded by empty niches; and the fact that only one-half of the pavement was inlaid with discs of sardonyx, jasper, and carnelian, and that the larger part of the walls were rough brick without a vestige of the mosaic pattern of lapislazuli, malachite, pearl, and coral, which had been begun round the one finished tomb, rendered the chapel as poverty-stricken in one aspect as it was magnificent in another. The finishing of the chapel was therefore urgent, and two more bronze statues were actually cast, those, to wit, of the Duke’s father and grandfather, and mosaic workmen called from the Medicean works in Florence. But, all of a sudden, the ducal treasury was discovered to be empty, and the ducal credit to be exploded.

State lotteries, taxes on salt, even a sham crusade against the Dey of Algiers, all failed to produce any money. The alliance, the right to pass troops through the duchy, the letting out of the ducal army to the highest bidder, had long since ceased to be a source of revenue either from the Emperor, the King of Spain, or the Most Christian One. The Serene Republics of Venice and Genoa publicly warned their subjects against lending a single sequin to the Duke of Luna; the Dukes of Mantua and Modena began to worry about bad debts; the Pope himself had the atrocious taste to make complaints about suppression of church dues and interception of Peter’s pence. There remained to the bankrupt Duke Balthasar Maria only one hope in the world – the marriage of his grandson.

There happened to exist at that moment a sovereign of incalculable wealth, with an only daughter of marriageable age. But this potentate, although the nephew of a recent Pope, by whose confiscations his fortunes were founded, had originally been a dealer in such goods as are comprehensively known as drysalting; and, rapacious as were the Princes of the Empire, each was too much ashamed of his neighbours to venture upon alliance with a family of so obtrusive an origin. Here was Balthasar Maria’s opportunity: the Drysalter Prince’s ducats should complete the rockery, the aqueduct, and the chapel; the drysalter’s daughter should be wedded to Alberic of Luna, that was to be third of the name.

XI

Prince Alberic sternly declined. He expressed his dutiful wish that the grotto and the chapel, like all other enterprises undertaken by his grandparent, might be brought to an end worthy of him. He declared that the aversion to drysalters was a prejudice unshared by himself. He even went so for as to suggest that the eligible princess should marry, not the heir-apparent, but the reigning Duke of Luna. But, as regarded himself, he intended, as stated, to remain for many years single. Duke Balthasar had never in his life before seen a man who was determined to oppose him. He felt terrified and became speechless in the presence of young Alberic.

Direct influence having proved useless, the Duke and his counsellors, among whom the Jesuit, the Dwarf, and the Jester had been duly reinstated, looked round for means of indirect persuasion or coercion. A celebrated Venetian beauty was sent for to Luna – a lady frequently employed in diplomatic missions, which she carried through by her unparalleled grace in dancing. But Prince Alberic, having watched her for half an hour, merely remarked to his equerry that his own tame grass snake made the same movements as the lady infinitely better and more modestly. Whereupon this means was abandoned. The Dwarf then suggested a new method of acting on the young Prince’s feelings. This, which he remembered to have been employed very successfully in the case of a certain Duchess of Malfi, who had given her family much trouble some generations back, consisted in dressing a number of domestics up as ghosts and devils, hiring some genuine lunatics from a neighbouring establishment, and introducing them at dead of night into Prince Alberic’s chamber. But the Prince, who was busy at his orisons, merely threw a heavy stool and two candlesticks at the apparitions; and, as he did so, the tame snake suddenly rose up from the floor, growing colossal in the act, and hissed so terrifically that the whole party fled down the corridor. The most likely advice was given by the Jesuit. This truly subtle diplomatist averred that it was useless trying to act upon the Prince by means which did not already affect him; instead of clumsily constructing a lever for which there was no fulcrum in the youth’s soul, it was necessary to find out whatever leverage there might already exist.

Now, on careful inquiry, there was discovered a fact which the official spies, who always acted by precedent and pursued their inquiries according to the rules of the human heart as taught by the Secret Inquisition of the Republic of Venice, had naturally failed to perceive. This fact consisted in a rumour, very vague but very persistent, that Prince Alberic did not inhabit his wing of the palace in absolute solitude. Some of the pages attending on his person affirmed to have heard whispered conversations in the Prince’s study, on entering which they had invariably found him alone; others maintained that, during the absence of the Prince from the palace, they had heard the sound of his private harpsichord, the one with the story of Orpheus and the view of Soracte on the cover, although he always kept its key on his person. A footman declared that he had found in the Prince’s study, and among his books and maps, a piece of embroidery certainly not belonging to the Prince’s furniture and apparel, moreover, half finished, and with a needle sticking in the canvas; which piece of embroidery the Prince had thrust into his pocket But, as none of the attendants had ever seen any visitor entering or issuing from the Prince’s apartments, and the professional spies had ransacked all possible hiding-places and modes of exit in vain, these curious indications had been neglected, and the opinion had been formed that Alberic being, as everyone could judge, somewhat insane, had a gift of ventriloquism, a taste for musical boxes, and a proficiency in unmanly handicrafts which he carefully secreted.

These rumours had at one time caused great delight to Duke Balthasar; but he had got tired of sitting in a dark cupboard in his grandson’s chamber, and had caught a bad chill looking through his keyhole; so he had stopped all further inquiries as officious fooling on the part of impudent lacqueys.

But the Jesuit foolishly adhered to the rumour. “Discover her,” he said, “and work through her on Prince Alberic” But Duke Balthasar, after listing twenty times to this remark with the most delighted interest, turned round on the twenty-first time and gave the Jesuit a look of Jove-like thunder. “My father,” he said, “I am surprised – I may say more than surprised – at a person of your cloth descending so low as to make aspersions upon the virtue of a young Prince reared in my palace and born of my blood. Never let me hear another word about ladies of light manners being secreted within these walls.” Whereupon the Jesuit retired, and was in disgrace for a fortnight, till Duke Balthasar woke up one morning with a strong apprehension of dying.

But no more was said of the mysterious female friend of Prince Alberic, still less was any attempt made to gain her intervention in the matter of the Drysalter Princess’s marriage.

XII

More desperate measures were soon resorted to. It was given out that Prince Alberic was engrossed in study; and he was forbidden to leave his wing of the Red Palace, with no other view than the famous grotto with the Verde Antique Apes and the Porphyry Rhinoceros. It was published that Prince Alberic was sick; and he was confined very rigorously to a less agreeable apartment in the rear of the Palacci where he could catch sight of the plaster laurels and draperies, and the rolling plaster eyeball of one of the Twelve Caesars under the cornice. It was judiciously hinted that the Prince had entered into religious retreat; and he was locked and bolted into the State prison, alongside of the unfinished sepulchral chapel, whence a lugubrious hammering came as the only sound of life. In each of these places the recalcitrant youth was duly argued with by some of his grandfather’s familiars, and even received a visit from the old Duke in person. But threats and blandishments were all in vain, and Alberic persisted in his refusal to marry.

It was now six months since he had seen the outer world, and six weeks since he had inhabited the State prison, every stage in his confinement, almost every day thereof, having systematically deprived him of some luxury, some comfort, or some mode of passing his time. His harpsichord and foils had remained in the gala wing overlooking the grotto. His maps and books had not followed him beyond the higher story with the view of the Twelfth Caesar. And now they had taken away from him his Virgil, his inkstand and paper, and left him only a book of hours.

Balthasar Maria and his counsellors felt intolerably baffled. There remained nothing further to do; for if Prince Alberic were publicly beheaded, or privately poisoned, or merely left to die of want and sadness, it was obvious that Prince Alberic could no longer conclude the marriage with the Drysalter Princess, and that no money to finish the grotto and the chapel, or to carry on Court expenses, would be forthcoming.

It was a burning day of August, a Friday, thirteenth of that month, and after a long prevalence of enervating sirocco, when the old Duke determined to make one last appeal to the obedience of his grandson. The sun, setting among ominous clouds, sent a lurid orange gleam into Prince Alberic’s prison chamber, at the moment that his ducal grandfather, accompanied by the Jester, the Dwarf, and the Jesuit, appeared on its threshold after prodigious clanking of keys and clattering of bolts. The unhappy youth rose as they entered, and making a profound bow, motioned his grandparent to the only chair in the place.

Balthasar Maria had never visited him before in this his worst place of confinement; and the bareness of the room, the dust and cobwebs, the excessive hardness of the chair, affected his sensitive heart; and, joined with irritation at his grandson’s obstinacy and utter depression about the marriage, the grotto, and the chapel, actually caused this magnanimous sovereign to burst into tears and bitter lamentations.

“It would indeed melt the heart of a stone,” remarked the Jester sternly, while his two companions attempted to soothe the weeping Duke, “to see one of the greatest, wisest, and most valorous Princes in Europe reduced to tears by the undutifulness of his child.”

“Princes, nay, kings and emperors’ sons,” exclaimed the Dwarf, who was administering Melissa water to the Duke, “have perished miserably for much less.”

“Some of the most remarkable personages of sacred history are stated to have incurred eternal perdition for far slighter offences,” added the Jesuit.

Alberic had sat down on the bed. The tawny sunshine fell upon his figure. He had grown very thin, and his garments were inexpressibly threadbare. But he was spotlessly neat, his lace band was perfectly folded, his beautiful blond hair flowed in exquisite curls about his pale face, and his whole aspect was serene and even cheerful. He might be twenty-two years old, and was of consummate beauty and stature.

“My Lord,” he answered slowly, “I entreat Your Serene Highness to believe that no one could regret more deeply than I do such a Spectacle as is offered me by the tears of a Duke of Luna. At the same time, I can only reiterate that I accept no responsibility …”

A distant growling of thunder caused the old Duke to start, and interrupted Alberic’s speech.

“Your obstinacy, my Lord,” exclaimed the Dwarf, who was an excessively choleric person, “betrays the existence of a hidden conspiracy most dangerous to the state.”

“It is an indication,” added the Jester, “of a highly deranged mind.”

“It seems to me,” whispered the Jesuit, “to savour most undoubtedly of devilry.”

Alberic shrugged his shoulders. He had risen from the bed to close the grated window, into which a shower of hail was suddenly blowing with unparalleled violence, when the old Duke jumped on his seat, and, with eyeballs starting with terror, exclaimed, as he tottered convulsively, “The serpent! the serpent!”

For there, in a corner, the tame grass snake was placidly coiled up, sleeping.

“The snake! the devil! Prince Alberic’s pet companion!” exclaimed the three favourites, and rushed towards that corner.

Alberic threw himself forward. But he was too late. The Jester, with a blow of his harlequin’s lath, had crushed the head of the startled creature; and, even while he was struggling with him and the Jesuit, the Dwarf had given it two cuts with his Turkish scimitar.

“The snake! the snake!” shrieked Duke Balthasar, heedless of the desperate struggle.

The warders and equerries waiting outside thought that Prince Alberic must be murdering his grandfather, and burst into prison and separated the combatants.

“Chain the rebel! the wizard! the madman!” cried the three favourites.

Alberic had thrown himself on the dead snake, which lay crushed and bleeding on the floor; and he moaned piteously.

But the Prince was unarmed and overpowered in a moment. Three times he broke loose, but three times he was recaptured, and finally bound and gagged, and dragged away. The old Duke recovered from his fright, and was helped up from the bed on to which he had sunk. As he prepared to leave, he approached the dead snake, and looked at it for some time. He kicked its mangled head with his ribboned shoe, and turned away laughing.

“Who knows,” he said, “whether you were not the Snake Lady? That foolish boy made a great fuss, I remember, when he was scarcely out of long clothes, about a tattered old tapestry representing that repulsive story.”

And he departed to supper.

XIII

Prince Alberic of Luna, who should have been third of his name, died a fortnight later, it was stated, insane. But those who approached him maintained that he had been in perfect possession of his faculties; and that if he refused all nourishment during his second imprisonment, it was from set purpose. He was removed at night from his apartments facing the grotto with the Verde Antique Monkeys and the Porphyry Rhinoceros, and hastily buried under a slab, which remained without any name or date, in the famous mosaic sepulchral chapel.

Duke Balthasar Maria survived him only a few months. The old Duke had plunged into excesses of debauchery with a view, apparently, to dismissing certain terrible thoughts and images which seemed to haunt him day and night, and against which no religious practices or medical prescription were of any avail. The origin of these painful delusions was probably connected with a very strange rumour, which grew to a tradition at Luna, to the effect that when the prison room occupied by Prince Alberic was cleaned, after that terrible storm of the 13th August of the year 1700, the persons employed found in a corner, not the dead grass snake, which they had been ordered to cast into the palace drains, but the body of a woman, naked, and miserably disfigured with blows and sabre cuts.

Be this as it may, history records as certain that the house of Luna became extinct in 1701, the duchy lapsing to the Empire. Moreover, that the mosaic chapel remained forever unfinished, with no statue save the green bronze and gold one of Balthasar Maria above the nameless slab covering Prince Alberic. The rockery also was never completed; only a few marble animals adorning it besides the Porphyry Rhinoceros and the Verde Antique Apes, and the water-supply being sufficient only for the greatest holidays. These things the traveller can report. Also that certain chairs and curtains in the porter’s lodge of the now long-deserted Red Palace are made of the various pieces of an extremely damaged arras, having represented the story of Alberic the Blond and the Snake Lady.

—

A Wedding Chest

No. 428.  A panel (five feet by two feet three inches) formerly the front of a cassone or coffer, intended to contain the garments and jewels of a bride. Subject: “The Triumph of Love.” “Umbrian School of the Fifteenth Century.” In the right-hand corner is a half-effaced inscription: Desider … de Civitate Lac … me … ectt. This valuable painting is unfortunately much damaged by damp and mineral corrosives, owing probably to its having contained at one time buried treasure. Bequeathed in 1878 by the widow of the Rev. Lawson Stone, late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
[Catalogue of the Smith Museum, Leeds.]

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By Ascension Day, Desiderio of Castiglione del Lago had finished the front panel of the wedding chest which Messer Troilo Baglioni had ordered of Ser Piero Bontempi, whose shop was situated at the bottom of the steps of St. Maxentius, in that portion of the ancient city of Perugia (called by the Romans Augusta in recognition of its great glory) which takes its name from the Ivory Gate built by Theodoric, King of the Goths. The said Desiderio had represented upon this panel the Triumph of Love, as described in his poem by Messer Francesco Petrarca of Arezzo, certainly, with the exception of that Dante, who saw the Vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, the only poet of recent times who can be compared to those doctissimi viri P. Virgilius, Ovidius of Sulmona, and Statius. And the said Desiderio had betaken himself in this manner. He had divided the panel into four portions or regions, intended to represent the four phases of the amorous passion: the first was a pleasant country, abundantly watered with twisting streams, of great plenty and joyousness, in which were planted many hedges of fragrant roses, both red and blue, together with elms, poplars, and other pleasant and profitable trees. The second region was somewhat mountainous, but showing large store of lordly castles and thickets of pine and oak, fit for hunting. which region, as being that of glorious love, was girt all round with groves of laurels. The third region – aspera ac dura regio – was barren of all vegetation save huge thorns and ungrateful thistles; and in it, on rocks, was shown the pelican, who tears his own entrails to feed his young, symbolical of the cruelty of love to true lovers. Finally, the fourth region was a melancholy cypress wood, among which roosted owls and ravens and other birds of evil omen, in order to display the fact that all earthly love leads but to death. Each of these regions was surrounded by a wreath of myrtles, marvellously drawn, and with great subtlety of invention divided so as to meet the carved and gilded cornice, likewise composed of myrtles, which Ser Piero executed with singular skill with his own hand. In the middle of the panel, Desiderio had represented Love, even as the poet has described: a naked youth, with wings of wondrous changing colours, enthroned upon a chariot, the axle and wheels of which were red gold, and covered with a cloth of gold of such subtle device that that whole chariot seemed really to be on fire; on his back hung a bow and a quiver full of dreadful arrows, and in his hands he held the reins of four snow-white coursers, trapped with gold, and breathing fire from their nostrils. Round his eyes was bound a kerchief fringed with gold, to show that Love strikes blindly; and from his shoulders floated a scroll inscribed with the words – “Saevus Amor hominum deorumque deliciae.” Round his car, some before, some behind, some on horseback, some on foot, crowded those who have been famous for their love. Here you might see, on a bay horse, with an eagle on his helmet, Julius Caesar, who loved Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt; Sophonisba and Massinissa, in rich and strange Arabian garments; Orpheus, seeking for Eurydice, with his lute; Phaedra, who died for love of Hippolytus, her stepson; Mark Antony; Rinaldo of Montalbano, who loved the beautiful Angelica; Socrates, Tibullus, Virgilius and other poets, with Messer Francesco Petrarca and Messer Giovanni Boccaccio; Tristram, who drank the love-potion, riding on a sorrel horse; and near him, Isotta, wearing a turban of cloth of gold, and these lovers of Rimini, and many more besides, the naming of whom would be too long, even as the poet has described. And in the region of happy love, among the laurels, he had painted his own likeness, red-haired, with a green hood falling on his shoulders, and this because he was to wed, next St. John’s Eve, Maddalena, the only daughter of his employer, Ser Piero. And among the unhappy lovers, he painted, at his request, Messer Troilo himself, for whom he was making this coffer. And Messer Troilo was depicted in the character of Troilus, the son of Priam, Emperor of Troy; he was habited in armour, covered with a surcoat of white cloth of silver embroidered with roses; by his side was his lance, and on his head a scarlet cap; behind him were those who carried his falcon and led his hack, and men-at-arms with his banner, dressed in green and yellow parti-coloured, with a scorpion embroidered on their doublet; and from his lance floated a pennon inscribed: “Troilus sum servus Amoris.”

But Desiderio refused to paint among the procession Monna Maddalena, Piero’s daughter, who was to be his wife; because he declared it was not fit that modest damsels should lend their face to other folk; and this he said because Ser Piero had begged him not to incense Messer Troilo; for in reality he had often portrayed Monna Maddalena (the which was marvellously lovely), though only, it is true, in the figure of Our Lady, the Mother of God.

And the panel was ready by Ascension Day, and Ser Piero had prepared the box, and the carvings and gildings, griffins and chimaeras, and acanthus leaves and myrtles, with the arms of Messer Troilo Baglioni, a most beautiful work. And Mastro Cavanna of the gate of St. Peter had made a lock and a key, of marvellous workmanship, for the same coffer. And Messer Troilo would come frequently, riding over from his castle of Fratta, and see the work while it was progressing, and entertain himself lengthily at the shop, speaking with benignity and wisdom wonderful in one so young, for he was only nineteen, which pleased the heart of Ser Piero; but Desiderio did not relish, for which reason he was often gruff to Messer Troilo, and had many disputes with his future father-in-law.

For Messer Troilo Baglioni, called Barbacane, to distinguish him from another Troilo, his uncle, who was bishop of Spello, although a bastard, had cast his eyes on Maddalena di Ser Piero Bontempi. He had seen the damsel for the first time on the occasion of the wedding festivities of his cousin Grifone Baglioni, son of Ridolfo the elder, with Deianira degli Orsini; on which occasion marvellous things were done in the city of Perugia, both by the magnificent House of Baglioni and the citizens, such as banquets, jousts, horse-races, balls in the square near the cathedral, bullfights, allegories, both Latin and vulgar, presented with great learning and sweetness (among which was the fable of Perseus, how he freed Andromeda, written by Master Giannozzo, Belli Rector venerabilis istae universitatis), and triumphal arches and other similar devices, in which Ser Piero Bontempi made many beautiful inventions, in company with Benedetto Bonfigli, Messer Fiorenzo di Lorenzo and Piero de Castro Plebis, whom the Holiness of our Lord Pope Sixtus IV. afterwards summoned to work in his chapel in Rome. On this occasion, I repeat, Messer Troilo Baglioni of Fratta, who was unanimiter declared to be a most beautiful and courteous youth, of singular learning and prowess, and well worthy of this magnificent Baglioni family, cast his eyes on Maddalena di Ser Piero, and sent her, through his squire, the knot of ribbons off the head of a ferocious bull, whom he had killed singulari vi ac virtute. Nor did Messer Troilo neglect other opportunities of seeing the damsel, such as at church and at her father’s shop, riding over from his castle at Fratta on purpose, but always honestis valde modibus, as the damsel showed herself very coy, and refused all . presents which he sent her. Neither did Ser Piero prevent his honestly conversing with the damsel, fearing the anger of the magnificent family of Baglioni. But Desiderio di Città del Lago, the which was affianced to Monna Maddalena, often had words with Ser Piero on the subject, and one day well-nigh broke the ribs of Messer Troilo’s squire, whom he charged with carrying dishonest messages.

Now it so happened that Messer Troilo, as he was the most beautiful, benign, and magnanimous of his magnificent family, was also the most cruel thereof, and incapable of brooking delay or obstacles. And being, as a most beautiful youth – he was only turned nineteen, and the first down had not come to his cheeks, and his skin was astonishingly white and fair like a woman’s – of a very amorous nature (of which many tales went, concerning the violence he had done to damsels and citizens’ wives of Gubbio and Spello, and evil deeds in the castle of Fratta in the Apennines, some of which it is more beautiful to pass in silence than to relate), being, as I say, of an amorous nature, and greatly magnanimous and ferocious of spirit, Messer Troilo was determined to possess himself of this Maddalena di Ser Piero. So, a week after having fetched away the wedding chest from Ser Piero’s workshop (paying for it duly in Florentine lilies), he seized the opportunity of the festivities of St. John’s Nativity, when it is the habit of the citizens to go to their gardens and vineyards to see how the country is prospering, and eat and drink in honest converse with their friends, in order to satisfy his cruel wishes. For it so happened that the said Ser Piero, who was rich and prosperous, possessing an orchard in the valley of the Tiber near San Giovanni, was entertaining his friends there, it being the eve of his daughter’s wedding, peaceful and unarmed. And a serving-wench, a Moor and a slave, who had been bribed by Messer Troilo, proposed to Monna Maddalena and the damsels of her company, to refresh themselves, after picking flowers, playing with hoops, asking riddles and similar girlish games, by bathing in the Tiber, which flowed at the bottom of the orchard. To this the innocent virgin, full of joyousness, consented. Hardly had the damsels descended into the river-bed, the river being low and easy to ford on account of the summer, when behold, there swept from the opposite bank a troop of horsemen, armed and masked, who seized the astonished Maddalena, and hurried off with her, vainly screaming, like another Proserpina, to her companions, who, surprised, and ashamed at being seen with no garments, screamed in return, but in vain. The horsemen galloped off through Bastia, and disappeared long before Ser Piero and his friends could come to the rescue. Thus was Monna Maddalena cruelly taken from her father and bridegroom, through the amorous passion of Messer Troilo.

Ser Piero fell upon the ground fainting for grief, and remained for several days like one dead; and when he came to he wept, and cursed wickedly, and refused to take food and sleep and to shave his beard. But being old and prudent, and the father of other children, he conquered his grief, well knowing that it was useless to oppose providence or fight, being but a handicraftsman, with the magnificent family of Baglioni, lords of Perugia since many years, and as rich and powerful as they were magnanimous and implacable. So that when people began to say that, after all, Monna Maddalena might have fled willingly with a lover, and that there was no proof that the masked horsemen came from Messer Troilo (although those of Bastia affirmed that they had seen the green and yellow colours of Fratta, and the said Troilo came not near the town for many months after), he never contradicted such words out of prudence and fear. But Desiderio of Castiglione del Lago, hearing these words, struck the old man on the mouth till he bled.

And it came to pass, about a year after the disappearance of Monna Maddalena, and when (particularly as there had been a plague in the city, and many miracles had been performed by a holy nun of the convent of Sant’ Anna, the which fasted seventy days, and Messer Ascanio Baglioni had raised a company of horse for the Florentine Signiory in their war against those Of Siena) people had ceased to talk of the matter, that certain armed men, masked, but wearing the colours of Messer Troilo, and the scorpion on their doublets, rode over from Fratta, bringing with them a coffer, wrapped in black baize, which they deposited overnight on Ser Piero Bontempi’s doorstep. And Ser Piero, going at daybreak to his workshop, found that coffer; and recognising it as the same which had been made, with a panel representing the Triumph of Love and many ingenious devices of sculpture and gilding, for Messer Troilo, called Barbacane, he trembled in all his limbs, and went and called Desiderio, and with him privily carried the chest into a secret chamber in his house, saying not a word to any creature. The key, a subtle piece of work of the smith Cavanna, was hanging to the lock by a green silk string, on to which was tied a piece of parchment containing these words: “To Master Desiderio; a wedding gift from Troilo Baglioni of Fratta” – an allusion, doubtless, ferox atque cruenta facetia, to the Triumph of Love, according to Messer Francesco Petrarca, painted upon the front of the coffer. The lid being raised, they came to a piece of red cloth, such as is used for mules; etiam, a fold of common linen; and below it, a coverlet of green silk, which, being raised, their eyes were met (heu! infandum patri sceleratumque donus) by the body of Monna Maddalena, naked as God had made it, dead with two stabs in the neck, the long golden hair tied with pearls but dabbed in blood; the which Maddalena was cruelly squeezed into that coffer, having on her breast the body of an infant recently born, dead like herself.

When he beheld this sight Ser Piero threw himself on the floor and wept, and uttered dreadful blasphemies. But Desiderio of Castiglione del Lago said nothing, but called a brother of Ser Piero, a priest and prior of Saint Severus, and with his assistance carried the coffer into the garden. This garden, within the walls of the city on the side of Porta Ebumea, was pleasantly situated, and abounding in flowers and trees, useful both for their fruit and their shade, and rich likewise in all such herbs as thyme, marjoram, fennel, and many others, that prudent housewives desire for their kitchen; all watered by stone canals, ingeniously constructed by Ser Piero, which were fed from a fountain where you might see a mermaid squeezing the water from her breasts, a subtle device of the same Piero, and executed in a way such as would have done honour to Phidias or Praxiteles, on hard stone from Monte Catria. In this place Desiderio of Castiglione del Lago dug a deep grave under an almond-tree, the which grave he carefully lined with stones and slabs of marble which he tore up from the pavement, in order to diminish the damp, and then requested the priest, Ser Piero’s brother, who had helped him in the work, to fetch his sacred vestments, and books, and all necessary for consecrating that ground. This the priest immediately did, being a holy man and sore grieved for the case of his niece. Meanwhile, with the help of Ser Piero, Desiderio tenderly lifted the body of Monna Maddalena out of the wedding chest, washed it in odorous waters, and dressed it in fine linen and bridal garments, not without much weeping over the poor damsel’s sad plight, and curses upon the cruelty of her ravisher; and having embraced her tenderly, they laid her once more in the box painted with the Triumph of Love, upon folds of fine damask and brocade, her hands folded, and her head decently placed upon a pillow of silver cloth, a wreath of roses, which Desiderio himself plaited, on her hair, so that she looked like a holy saint or the damsel Julia, daughter of the Emperor Augustus Caesar, who was discovered buried on the Appian Way, and incontinently fell into dust – a marvellous thing. They filled the chest with as many flowers as they could find, also sweet-scented herbs, bay-leaves, orris powder, frankincense, ambergris, and a certain gum called in Syrian fizelis, and by the Jews barach, in which they say that the body of King David was kept intact from earthly corruption, and which the priest, the brother of Ser Piero, who was learned in all alchemy and astrology, had bought of certain Moors. Then, with many alases! and tears, they covered the damsel’s face with an embroidered veil and a fold of brocade, and closing the chest, buried it in the hole, among great store of hay and straw and sand; and closed it up and smoothed the earth; and to mark the place Desiderio planted a tuft of fennel under the almond-tree. But not before having embraced the damsel many times, and taken a handful of earth from her grave; and eaten it, with many imprecations upon Messer Troilo, which it were terrible to relate. Then the priest, the brother of Ser Piero, said the service for the dead, Desiderio serving him as acolyte; and they all went their way, grieving sorely. But the body of the child, the which had been found in the wedding chest, they threw down a place near Saint Herculanus, where the refuse and offal and dead animals are thrown, called the Sardegna; because it was the bastard of Ser Troilo, et infamiae scelerisque partum.

Then, as this matter got abroad, and also Desiderio’s imprecations against Ser Troilo, Ser Piero, who was an old man and prudent, caused him to depart privily from Perugia, for fear of the wrath of the magnificent Orazio Baglioni, uncle of Messer Troilo and lord of the town.

Desiderio of Castiglione del Lago went to Rome, where he did wonderful things and beautiful, among others certain frescoes in Saints Cosmas and Damian, for the Cardinal of Ostia; and to Naples, where he entered the service of the Duke of Calabria, and followed his armies long, building fortresses and making machines and models for cannon, and other ingenious and useful things. And thus for seven years, until he heard that Ser Piero was dead at Perugia of a surfeit of eels; and that Messer Troilo was in the city, raising a company of horse with his cousin Astorre Baglioni for the Duke of Urbino; and this was before the plague, and the terrible coming to Umbria of the Spaniards and renegade Moors, under Caesar Borgia, Vicarius Sanctae Ecclesiae, seu Flagellum Dei et novus Attila. So Desiderio came back privily to Perugia, and put up his mule at a small inn, having dyed his hair black and grown his beard, after the manner of Easterns, saying he was a Greek coming from Ancona. And he went to the priest, prior of Saint Severus, and brother of Ser Piero, and discovered himself to him, who, although old, had great joy in seeing him and hearing of his intent. And Desiderio confessed all his sins to the priest and obtained absolution, and received the Body of Christ with great fervour and compunction; and the priest placed his sword on the altar, beside the gospel, as he said mass, and blessed it. And Desiderio knelt and made a vow never to touch food save the Body of Christ till he could taste of the blood of Messer Troilo.

And for three days and three nights he watched him and dogged him, but Messer Troilo rarely went unaccompanied by his men, because he had offended so many honourable citizens by his amorous fury, and he knew that his kinsmen dreaded him and would gladly be rid of him, on account of his ferocity and ambition, and their desire to unite the Fief of Fratta to the other lands of the main line of the magnificent House of Baglioni, famous in arms.

But one day, towards dusk, Desiderio saw Messer Troilo coming down a steep lane near Saint Herculanus, alone, for he was going to a woman of light fame, called Flavia Bella, the which was very lovely. So Desiderio threw some ladders, from a neighbouring house which was being built, and sacks across the road, and hid under an arch that spanned the lane, which was greatly steep and narrow. And Messer Troilo came down, on foot, whistling and paring his nails with a small pair of scissors. And he was dressed in grey silk hose, and a doublet of red cloth and gold brocade, pleated about the skirts, and embroidered with seed pearl and laced with gold laces; and on his head he had a hat of scarlet cloth with many feathers; and his cloak and sword he carried under his left arm. And Messer Troilo was twenty-six years old, but seemed much younger, having no beard, and a face like Hyacinthus or Ganymede, whom Jove stole to be his cup-bearer, on account of his beauty. And he was tall and very ferocious and magnanimous of spirit And as he went, going to Flavia the courtesan, he whistled.

And when he came near the heaped-up ladders and the sacks, Desiderio sprang upon him, and tried to run his sword through him. But although wounded, Messer Troilo grappled with him long, but he could not get at his sword, which was entangled in his cloak; and before he could free his hand and get at his dagger, Desiderio had him down, and ran his sword three times through his chest, exclaiming, “This is from Maddalena, in return for her wedding chest!”

And Messer Troilo, seeing the blood flowing out his chest, knew he must die, and merely said—

“Which Maddalena? Ah, I remember, old Piero’s daughter. She was always a cursed difficult slut,” and died.

And Desiderio stooped over his chest, and lapped up the blood as it flowed; and it was the first food he tasted since taking the Body of Christ, even as he had sworn.

Then Desiderio went stealthily to the fountain under the arch of Saint Proxedis, where the women wash linen in the daytime, and cleansed himself a little from that blood. Then he fetched his mule and hid it in some trees near Messer Piero’s garden. And at night he opened the door, the priest having given him the key, and went in, and with a spade and mattock he had brought dug up the wedding chest with the body of Monna Maddalena in it; the which, owing to those herbs and virtuous gums, had dried up and become much lighter. And he found the spot by looking for the fennel tuft under the almond-tree, which was then in flower, it being spring. He loaded the chest, which was mouldy and decayed, on the mule, and drove the mule before him till he got to Castiglione del Lago, where he hid. And meeting certain horsemen, who asked him what he carried in that box (for they took him for a thief), he answered his sweetheart; so they laughed and let him pass. Thus he got safely on to the territory of Arezzo, an ancient city of Tuscany, where he stopped.

Now when they found the body of Messer Troilo, there was much astonishment and wonder. And his kinsmen were greatly wroth; but Messer Orazio and Messer Ridolfo, his uncles, said: “’Tis as well; for indeed his courage and ferocity were too great, and he would have done some evil to us all had he lived.” But they ordered him a magnificent burial. And when he lay on the street dead, many folk, particularly painters, came to look at him for his great beauty; and the women pitied him on account of his youth, and certain scholars compared him to Mars, God of War, so great was his strength and ferocity even in death. And he was carried to the grave by eight men-at-arms, and twelve damsels and youths dressed in white walked behind, strewing flowers, and there was much splendour and lamentation, on account of the great power of the magnificent House of Baglioni.

As regards Desiderio of Castiglione del Lago, he remained at Arezzo till his death, preserving with him always the body of Monna Maddalena in the wedding chest painted with the Triumph of Love, because he considered she had died odore magnae sanctitatis.

—

The Lady and Death

A companion-piece to Dürer’s print

I

“Since the portrait of my ancestress Agnes seems to have struck you,” said Dr. Konrad Weber, “and since, even more, you seem to feel that our little town is still warm and living with the Past, I think I will tell you a very curious legend existing in our family: and of which Agnes Weberin, whom we call, after the Latin distich on her picture, Agnes Alkestis, is the heroine. But, before beginning, I had better show you the effigy of the other chief person in this story.”

He had been taking me the round, along the wooden causeway still intact, of the towers and gatehouses which give that little town of Erlach, high above its narrow valley, the air of a great city, say, Jerusalem, in one of Dürer’s backgrounds. And we were walking now in the wide principal street, the Herrengasse, planted with sweet-smelling lime-trees and set with big gabled houses, all with trim flowers behind their window gratings. The street is closed not by any buildings, nor even by the city walls, but by a glimpse of country opposite, of steep green pasture and distant compact fir woods. And against this view, as against a piece of blue-green tapestry, there stands a fountain surrounded by a statue. The fountain is of a pattern common in southern Germany and Switzerland, and not without a pleasant reminiscence of the original village drinking-trough of rough-hewn fir-trunks: an octagonal basin, like a tub, and, rising in its middle, a pillar, with iron spouts spurting four thin rills of water. But on the top of the pillar is a statue: a knight in armour leaning on his lance.

“This fountain,” said the Doctor, “was restored, as the inscription tells us, by Berchthold Weber in 1545; the husband of Agnes surnamed Alkestis. But the statue is, as you see, considerably earlier, and belongs to that interesting and insufficiently known school of Franconian stonemasons, who have left so many fine effigies of knights in our churches. It represents not St. George (you see the dragon is missing) but St. Theodulus, a holy warrior whom you have probably never heard of.”

“Do you know,” I answered, “it happens, by one of those coincidences which are perpetually surprising us, that I have heard of St. Theodulus, and not a month ago; and that, now you remind me of him, I am extremely interested in his legend?”

“His legend? Why, that was what I intended, so to speak, telling you,” replied the Doctor. “Pray tell me, first, how much you already know about St. Theodulus.”

“Has this to do with Agnes Alkestis?” I asked, for I did not want to lose her story.

“It has everything to do with her. I can tell you what St. Theodulus is reported to have done here at Erlach. But you shall tell me what he did elsewhere; for we are badly off for saints’ biographies in this Lutheran town.”

“Well,” I replied, “I can tell you only this much, that a few weeks ago, as I was taking a walk in one of the Tyrolese valleys, not far from the source of the Isar, I found, near some remote cottages, in a runnel of snow-water spurting across the path, one of those little water-wheels which the children make in those parts of the world. Only in this case the toy consisted not of a hammer merely hammering on an empty preserve can, but of two little wooden dolls, who, as the water turned the wheel, thumped unceasingly upon each other. The thing rather fascinated me; and on closer examination I found that one of the figures had horns, while the other, with a sort of helmet carved on to its head, was brandishing a wooden cross. A little girl came out of one of the chalets, and seeing me in contemplation of the toy, told me her big brother had made it, and that it represented St. Theodulus fighting with the Devil. That was all the information to be extracted on the subject But I often think of the two wooden manikins in the brook, and wonder how long they will go on hammering, without a pause, on each other, through fine weather and snowstorm.”

I was looking at the fountain while speaking, and for a moment the dark-green Alpine valley, its white glacier stream and meadows painted blue with crowsbill, rose up in my mind and made a background, instead of that mediaeval street, for the statue of the saint. The weather had given him the look of being made of rusty iron; and on his hip swung a real iron sword, and an iron pennon creaked like a weather-vane from his lance. He reminded me of the metal knights at Innsbruck round Maximilian’s tomb, but less barbaric and finer. The armour was rendered with every detail of strap and buckle; but the beardless face, surrounded by a nest or nimbus of wiry hair, was of archaic rigidity. Yet, doll-like though it was, it had an odd amount of expression – a tense, worn, pathetic resoluteness.

“What you say interests me very much,” answered the Doctor, his eye following mine along the fountain, “and I am rather struck by what you say about the saint and the devil going on thumping one another day and night forever and ever. That is the characteristic of all mythology: the saints, or gods, or whatever they are, never leave off from their especial act, however unnoticed, in the imagination of the people. It must have been the case with St. Theodulus. And the question arises, was the legend which you met in that Catholic Tyrolese valley an outcome of the story which purports really to have taken place in Protestant times in this Lutheran town of Erlach, but arranged to suit the requirements of Catholicism; or was our Erlach story merely an adaptation, connected with real dates and persons, of an old Catholic legend which Protestantism could not destroy?”

I felt bound to protest, “Upon my word,” I said, “you are too much of a German, dear Dr. Weber. Here am I waiting to be told the story of one of your own ancestors; and instead of telling it me, you launch out into scientific speculations about its mythological aspect!”

The Doctor smiled. “Perhaps you are right,” he answered, “and I will do my best to tell you the story like a real story – the more so, that I believe it is a true one. Well, to begin … but first let me draw your attention to the carvings on the base of the column and on the slabs of the fountain; they have to do with the business.”

I had noticed them already. Like the rest of the fountain, they were imitation Italian of the sixteenth century. They represented cupids, but cupids holding trophies of death’s heads and cross-bones.

“When you have told me the story,” I said, “I shall ask you to give the rein to your scientific instincts, and to tell me the reason why, throughout all your German art of the Renaissance, from Dürer and Holbein to the smallest Little Master, there is always Death skulking round the corner?”

“Ah, you have noticed that,” replied Dr. Weber, “the skeleton grinning behind the door, or looking down from the tree, or putting his hand in the pedlar’s pack, or waving his hour-glass at the lady and her gallant; everywhere Death, Herr Tod, as he is called in the ballad I shall tell you part of. My story bears precisely on that point. By the way, can you see in your mind’s-eye Dürer’s print of The Knight and Death?”

II

“My ancestor Berchthold,” began Dr. Weber, as we sat after early dinner in the little steep garden behind his ancestral house, “was the most remarkable physician of a family in which, as you know, we have practised medicine from father to son for four hundred years. And I think I may say, judging by contemporary accounts and his books and manuscripts, one of the most remarkable philosophers of his day, the forerunner of the chemists and anatomists of the seventeenth century. He had been born in 1480 of Konrad Weber and Barbara Perlacherin; and returned to his native town of Erlach about 1525, after years of study and travel in Italy and the East; returned not without a pretty bad reputation, already, for illicit knowledge. You must not imagine that Erlach, even in its greatest days, was a busy trading or manufacturing town like Nürnberg or Basel; it took its political importance from being on the crossroads from North Germany to Switzerland, and from Frankfort to Italy; but it was then, as now, an agricultural centre, and our forebears, burghers or knights, were merely the farmers of the neighbouring fertile districts, able to store forage and grain on their impregnable hillside, and thus to victual or to starve contending potentates. Such being the case, they were not accustomed to science and philosophy; and the fact of their having followed the Lutheran movement had merely given them a narrow-minded pietism. So that Berchthold Weber, a Catholic, but of the slack pattern of the wicked Italians, a friend of Erasmus, a hanger-on of godless worldly prelates, a philosopher, and a man who openly declared that diseases were not sent by Heaven – Dr. Berchthold, I say, was not looked on with favour. And the rumour of the strange laboratory he fitted up in his house, of the queer animals he kept, the bones and skeletons he collected (and they said even bought at the gallows on the town Ravenstone), did not improve his reputation. So that, although he was not openly molested, people fought shy of him, and the celebrated Dr. Stumpfius, in a sermon in the Wolfgangs Kirche, even went the length of blaming his eminent fellow-citizen, Councillor Heinrich Stoss, for giving his daughter Agnes in marriage to what he called a noted follower of Epicurus. This Agnes – the ‘little maid Agnes of the Stosses’ – was the one whose portrait you have seen, with the Latin, distich comparing her to Alkestis; and I suspect that the choice of the elderly and not very well-famed Doctor Berchthold was an only child’s wilful decision, reluctantly given into by her doting father. But for all the preacher’s insinuations, it was impossible for the burghers of Erlach to fall upon or exile so quiet and harmless a person as my learned ancestor, or one so often visited and sent for by the greatest princes. Moreover, it was certain that when the plague came to Franconia in 1525, and decimated all the neighbouring towns and villages, the city of Erlach was wonderfully little visited by the scourge, and many of those sick of plague were saved, owing ostensibly, at least, to the precautions taught the citizens by Berchthold Weber, and the newfangled remedies which he applied. But, of course, although this debt of gratitude made it impossible to molest the doctor’s person, the sense of it only increased the existing badness of his reputation. For it began to be whispered at every fountain and washing-trough, and hinted more openly in every wine-cellar frequented by the theologians and the more zealous burghers, that if Berchthold Weber had succeeded in stemming the tide of the plague, and saving his countrymen’s lives, this was owing not really to his nefarious learning, but to a compact he had made with the Prince of Terrors in person; promising his own life in return for those of his fellow-citizens, out of sinful curiosity and carnal vaingloriousness. Just the sort of disgraceful rubbish which our forefathers were always bandying about? I quite agree. But was the accusation false? There, my dear friend, I confess I do not feel so sure. People’s contemporaries often accuse them of things they haven’t done; but not so often of things which they themselves don’t think quite possible in others. Among all the thousand witches who were burnt in Germany – (a fair proportion in our town of Erlach, and the papers of the trials still exist) – I don’t suppose there were ten who didn’t believe in witchcraft; and a large proportion had been to the Brocken sabath, or thought they had. Apply this to the case of Dr. Berchthold Weber. Nonsense! you will exclaim – a learned man, a physician, a discoverer, who forestalled Leuwenhoeck and Haller!

“But in those days of Paracelsus and Cardan, one could be all that much, and yet believe in things which every modern schoolchild laughs at. For science consists merely in fitting a few facts which we discover or guess at, into a scheme given ready-made by tradition and by fancy; and this scheme varies perpetually. Ours, today, is full of unintelligible things called Laws, Forces, and so forth; theirs, in the days of Berchthold Weber, had other paraphernalia, more picturesque, and perhaps, after all, as reasonable. Essences, virtues, almost human in shape, spirits like those invoked by Faust, and drawn by Dürer in his Melancholia, bogies like the ones of Wohlgemuth and Kranach. Let us suppose that our ingenious and learned contemporary Dr. Weissmann had been brought up to think of Heredity, Evolution, etc. etc., not as ‘Laws,’ but as real Entities, sorting the world’s affairs from thrones up in the Empyrean. – Supposing Dr. Weissmann to think this, would he not be acting like a genuine man of science, if he took the necessary steps to meet, let us say, the Lady Panmixia, attired like a muse or sibyl, with attributes and fluttering ribbons, and ask her, face to face, the true history of her relations with the Spirit of Natural Selection, her honoured parent? You laugh! You laugh because, allow me to say so, you are a mere writer, and believe in science with a big S as something infallible and unchanging. We, men of science, are more humble, and therefore, more appreciative of our forerunners, and know that we should have thought exactly as they did. Dr. Weissmann, had he lived in the sixteenth century, would have acted – well, like my ancestor Berchthold; and my ancestor Berchthold acted like a genuine man of science when, thirsting to know the secrets of Death, he applied for information at headquarters – went to learn the how and why of disease and dissolution from Herr Tod himself.

“Learn from Death himself! You think perhaps that is a metaphor? It is a very fine one, and, like the finest metaphors, it is fine because it is literal. Learn from Death: not merely by standing by the bed of dying people and cutting up their bodies when once dead. No, my dear friend! But by going down to the Todesthal, to Death’s Valley, and making a tryst, a compact, with the Skeleton Herr in person, as the burgesses and theologians of Erlach, on the evidence of a certain woodcutter, asserted Berchthold Weber to have done at the time of the Black Death….”

III

“I believe he did it,” continued Dr. Weber, as we were walking up and down the narrow garden closed on all sides by gabled burghers’ houses, by high-roofed barns smelling deliciously of hay and cattle, and where, on the open side, framed by great walnut-trees, the valley slanted sheer, with another piece of old city, walls and towers, across it, “I believe he did it, because – well, because I believe she did it. But come and see her once more.”

Her portrait was hanging on the wide wooden staircase, which led up out of the big entrance hall where the swallows nested above the Doctor’s dogcart and the children’s latest withered Christmas-tree, surrounded by the portraits of bearded worthies in ruffs, and wigged worthies in bands, surrounded also by quaint mottoes in praise of God, of wine and of song, painted in red Gothic letters along the walls.

The portrait was by some humble imitator of Holbein; and, poor though it was, it had a research of rigid, delicate line, and pale and pure distinction of feature unmarred by shadows, which suited the lady’s person and history. She had the beauty so rare among the women which that school painted, but which, when it exists, no other school renders like that one. A beauty of extreme rareness, eminently exceptional; and, with its thin and perfect features and noble bearing, more than patrician, queenly. She was represented in a stiff bodice grown black with time, and just faintly showing a mixture of gold thread and gold loops; the pale hair hardly visible under the big, white, wing-like cap; a flower, something of the kind of the hyacinth, in the long thin hand. She was no longer young, yet you could hardly say she was old: emaciated not by years but by some tragedy inherent in her noble brows and delicate, loving mouth and great eyes looking from deep vaulted sockets far into the world – a world of mystery and pity.

“Is your ancestress – Frau Agnes Weber, daughter of Heinrich Stoss and wife to Berchthold Weber – is your ancestress really all she strikes me?” I asked the Doctor, “or has my fancy already taken the cue from the thing you have hinted at, and from that Latin distich comparing her for piety and fortitude to the Queen of Greek Admetos whom the poets write of? She certainly looks as if she might be some mediaeval Alkestis, years after her stay in the kingdom of Hades, but with the remembrance of it always in her eyes.”

“Agnes Alkestis – that is just it,” answered the doctor, reverently. “Well, yes, I believe she did it…. Historically,” he went on, as we still stood on that landing, “we know little about her. She came of a very old burgher family, the only child of Heinrich Stoss, who was town-councillor, and died a burgomaster of this town. There is an allusion to her, as I told you, in one of the famous Stumpfius’s letters, blaming Heinrich Stoss for giving his little maiden, only eighteen years old, to Berchthold Weber – a Catholic, though a ‘noted follower of the atheist Epicurus’ – a man who under cover of medicine cultivates vain practices and impious notions, teaching that health and sickness are in man’s hands, not God’s! Moreover, as Dr. Stumpfius, who perhaps had his own eye on this young heiress, tells us, a man no longer young, twenty years older than his bride, and taking advantage of the waywardness of a spoilt child’s fancy and the ungodly weakness of a widowed father – a sort of Desdemona story; one might imagine the little maid Agnes falling in love with the learned elderly Doctor for the sake of his wondrous learning, his strange accounts of travel and discovery and his devotion to the poor sick folk. Be this as it may, we know that they were married in 1530, and came three years later to settle in this house, where Berchthold died in January 1565, and Agnes eleven months later. Agnes bore Dr. Berchthold three children: Wernher, Barbara, and Ulrich, from which last we are descended. These three children all survived their parents; I want you to mark this fact, for it shows that Agnes Alkestis was saved one possible tragedy in her life. Neither does it appear from Berchthold’s carefully-kept family records that any of these children was ever dangerously ill; and as we find them all married early and safely established as prosperous citizens, we may conclude that they did not give their parents unnecessary trouble by their conduct. On the other hand, neither the family records nor the city archives mention any loss of fortune or danger from fire as was then so common, or destruction of property in warfare; so that on this score also Agnes Weberin was unusually fortunate. What circumstances, therefore, could have given rise to that comparison of the Doctor’s wife with Alkestis; what calamity could have left her with that look upon her face, in which, as you at once felt, there is the record of some great tragedy?

“Besides that Latin distich and the ballad I shall read to you later, only one indication still remains, and that is even more mysterious. Here it is.”

Doctor Weber had taken me downstairs again, and entered the long narrow room which was his study, as it had been, three hundred and fifty years ago, the study of his ancestor Berchthold. He took from a shelf a great Latin Bible, printed at Mainz in the fifteenth century, and turned to the manuscript leaves of the back.

“Here,” he said, “are Berchthold Weber’s family records put down year by year with laconic accuracy. See? ‘1531, February 3, our little son Ulrich is born. March 18th, my dear wife Agnes goes, to church the first time since childbirth, deep snow on the ground, but nothing to repine at, Laus Deo.

“‘July 1539. Our little daughter Barbara has measles, but of a benign form, and happily recovers. Laus Deo.’ Then, ‘October 1544, my wife Agnes and I decide upon restoring the fountain, much out of repair, of St. Theodulus from devotion to that saint, and ordering a painted window for our chapel in the Ulrich’s church, showing the saint in question, and ourselves kneeling in thanksgiving to God.’ Thanksgiving for what? For general prosperity and immunity from many evils? I scarcely think so. For immediately before this comes an enigmatic entry – try and spell it out – I fancy the handwriting is very unsteady.

“‘August 1544. This month it has pleased the Highest to search the heart and mind of Agnes my wife and myself, trying us both by different and unheard-of trials; and Agnes my wife especially as no woman of our times has ever been tried; wherefore let us bear forever a humble, contrite, and loving heart in dulci magno jublio.’

“That,” said Dr. Weber, after replacing the sheet of tissue paper over the faded minute writing, and putting the volume back upon its shelf, “is the third of the only three remaining genuine records – the fountain of St. Theodulus (for the painted window was destroyed when Erlach was sacked by Wallenstein), this entry of Dr. Berchthold’s, the portrait of Agnes Alkestis. They none of them tell us the meaning of each other or their own; and none explain in the least why Agnes Weberin should have been compared to the Greek Queen who went down to the kingdom of Death to save the life of her husband Admetos.”

Mechanically Dr. Weber had pushed open the study window, and we were in the garden once more, where the scent from the barns and the smell of the limeflowers filled the twilight

“The explanation,” he continued, is given by the legend, as we were all of us taught it as children; as, for the rest, every child in Erlach knows it; and as, until these cultured days, you could buy it in rough ballad form and printed on cartridge paper at every fair in Franconia. And that ballad is the story of Alkestis; Alkestis, the wife of Admetos, King of Pherae, became Alkestis, wife of Berchthold Weber, physician of Erlach.”

And Dr. Weber, walking up and down among the roses and stocks of his garden, the syringas and tall scarlet runners, suddenly stopped, and looked full at me through his round spectacles.

“Agnes Stoss,” he went on, after a minute, “a beautiful, imaginative, and self-willed girl, has married the man whom she had made her ideal; and she has learned that the reality is more interesting, fuller and better, even than the ideal; realising in detail the life of devotion to truth, of tenderness to suffering, of her husband. And Berchthold, to whom undreamed-of happiness has come just at the age when happiness begins no longer to be expected, expands, grows young and human in her love. Then there are the children. Well! after some time of this Agnes begins to notice a change come over her husband – a pervading, inscrutable sadness. He is, if anything, more restlessly active than before, spending days and nights in his laboratory; and he is, if possible, even more loving. But in his activity and in his love there is something frightening. She feels in it the hurry, the effort, the passionate desire to consummate and to clutch, of one who knows his days numbered. But he will make no answer to her inquiries and denies any change in himself. Is he ill? Has he recognised in himself the germ of some fatal disease? That is how we moderns understand the situation: the learned man is able to calculate, perhaps to a month, the moment when his heart will wear out, or his brain give way; he has spent his life too freely while it belonged only to himself and to science. That is not the mediaeval notion, the notion of Agnes Alkestis, who, unable to penetrate her husband’s secret, seeks, even like the Queen of Admetos, for heavenly aid. The ballad tells us that she prays to St. Theodulus, patron of those who suffer from cruel apprehension, and implores him to explain the riddle. And in a vision the riddle is explained: in the days of his loneliness Dr. Berchthold had promised to give himself over, on a fixed date, to King Death, in return for the secret of prolonging the life of the plague-stricken. And the date has approached. You remember Admetos in Euripides? Berchthold Weber is more of a king than he. Instead of bemoaning his fate, seeking a victim to replace him, he has kept his counsel and keeps it. Agnes never for a moment dreams of offering to die in his stead. The whole tragedy takes place unspoken. He, knowing his doom, thinks only how to hide the fearful fact to the last, how to make it fall as gently as possible on his wife. She, decided at once to give her useless woman’s life for the life of the man who can comfort and save so many others, lays her plans also in silence. It is the secret agony of these two souls, unable to seek for comfort in one another, which constitutes that unheard-of trial to which the entry in the family Bible is an allusion; and it is these days of unspoken reciprocal farewell, which have left their trace, methinks, far more than the hours spent in Death’s Valley, in Agnes Weberin; making her Agnes Alkestis.

“It is strange to think,” added Doctor Weber musingly, looking up at the steep gable of his ancestral house, at the white-washed beamed wall festooned with vines, “that it all took place here, within these walls, and sometimes I catch myself feeling as if I were seated in the castle of Lear, or Elsinore; or, in fact, the palace of Pherae where Herakles was a guest, and Apollo….”

Evening had come on; the upper sky, with swallows crossing and re-crossing it, was turning greenish; the slopes and fir woods far off were veiling themselves as in thin crape; and the high-pitched roof, the towers and gablehouses of the projecting part of Erlach were profiled above the ravine, like the twilit town in Dürer’s print of St. Anthony.

IV

“Todesthal, the Valley of Death – that also sounds merely an appropriate metaphor,” said Dr. Weber, as he took me a country walk the next morning – “well, it is not. It is a concrete reality. The Valley of Death lies north-east of Erlach, its opening where the Brook of Death – Todesbach – runs into the Erl, just a mile outside the Bamberg Gate. I can show it you all on the Ordnance map. And what is more, you are at present standing in the middle of it.”

He had led me across the high-lying cornfields and the thick fir woods, and then by a scrambling track along the rocks, suddenly into a narrow valley.

It was a corridor cut as with a knife out of the surrounding table-land, its steep walls of soft yellow stone, fringed at the top with trees and bushes, and barely wider than the shallow stream which stagnated in pools among its stones. In the rest of the world it was a sunny, breezy day, the green crops rustling like watered silk; but here, there penetrated neither a ray of sun nor a breath of wind; and the great hemlocks stood motionless amongst the oozy green stones of the sluggish silent stream. After a few yards the corridor widened into a kind of circular chamber; its floor of thick wet grass, its side more perpendicular still, with hardy little spruce firs and stunted pines striking their wedge-shaped roots into its top, and among them, high up like a hermitage in a Dürer print, was a tiny chapel with wooden extinguisher roof.

Dr. Weber sat down on the trunk of the old fir, which must have fallen ages ago, over the wall of the valley.

“The little chapel you see,” he said, “was served until the Reformation by a solitary friar, and to this fact we owe the knowledge that already in the early middle ages this valley took its name from Death. There seems no reason why. The Bamberg Road, indeed, which leads to near its mouth, passes alongside of the Ravenstone, the place of the permanent gallows and the wheel, from which the ghosts of malefactors used to descend, even in my great-grandfather’s time, and frighten belated travellers. But that is nearly a mile away, and could not account for the name of this valley. Perhaps, indeed, the name is merely a corruption of some word of wholly different meaning, but which changed in this way from a certain appropriate quality. Be this as it may, the Valley of Death, and more particularly this winding of it where we are seated, is the place of the last act of the story of Agnes Alkestis. I told you of the old ballad we used to buy at fairs. Listen to the beginning of it.

“‘It happened on a Sunday in the pleasant month of August, since our Lord Jesus’s Incarnation for our sins, one thousand years five hundred and forty-four. The good folk of Erlach, with all the town guard with their pikes and crossbows, and all the guilds with banners, many thousand men and women and children, all who could walk, or ride, or crawl, went forth outside the city walls to look down on the jousting in a certain valley. For you must know that in that place a Trusty Knight was going to challenge Death in person, and force him to restore Frau Agnes, Berchthold Weber’s wife, who was willing to die in her husband’s stead. And the town-crier has summoned the good folk of Erlach from the tower top; and they have gone outside the town, men, women, and children, many thousands, all who could walk, or ride, or crawl, to look down at the jousting in the Todesthal.’

“That is how the ballad begins,” went on Dr. Weber. “Then the Trusty Knight bids the herald blow his trumpet; and three times the herald blows, and three times calls on Death by name, ‘Herr Tod – Herr Tod – Herr Tod,’ and summons him to give back Frau Agnes or meet the Trusty Knight in single combat The third time the herald also throws down the Trusty Knight’s glove. Then Herr Tod appears, riding down the valley on a thin, pale horse; he has on a helmet wreathed with straw, and a gallant black sash embroidered with gold, but with no armour or other garments, for, says the ballad, he had on him no flesh to hurt and in him had he no blood that could be spilt. The ballad does not mention it, but I imagine my poor ancestress kneeling close by, like the poor Princess in the pictures of St. George. They spurred their horses on each other, and closed with a hideous shock – the lance of Herr Tod had struck in the pommel of the Trusty Knight, and very nearly thrown him off his horse; the Trusty Knight wheeled round his red roan horse and rushed upon his adversary; but alas! his lance merely shivered against the iron ribs of Herr Tod’s pale horse and fell on the Knight in splinters. But again the Trusty Knight wheeled round, letting go the reins on the neck of his red roan, and grasping his great sword with both hands. And as he came up with Herr Tod, who had also drawn, he let the great sword crash down on Herr Tod; and the skeleton, with dreadful screams as of vultures and a rattle of bones such as never was heard, fell backwards to the ground. Then the Trusty Knight took Frau Agnes behind him on his red roan horse and carried her back to Erlach, all the inhabitants following and the bells all ringing greeting, to where stood Berchthold Weber, with his three young children weeping on their doorstep.

“That is the end of the ballad,” said Dr. Weber, after a pause, rising from the tree trunk and preceding me along the narrow path and across the oozy stream – “but there are two versions of it, which differ in one important particular. The more recent version, written down when Erlach had turned completely Protestant and was smarting from its cruel treatment by Wallenstein, says that the Trusty Knight was one Dietrich von Kreglingen, whom the father of Agnes had hidden in his house during the persecution of the independent nobles by Kaiser Maximilian. But the earlier version of the ballad, dating from a time when Lutherans and Catholics still lived peaceably together in our town, and were not very clearly distinguishable, tells us that the Trusty Knight was no other than Theodulus, the heavenly patron of the Webers, and who had descended from his fountain to defend them. It seems rather difficult to decide at this distance of time, and I think you may safely choose whichever of the two champions you prefer.”

At a sudden bend we had come to the mouth of the narrow valley, and in front of us where its perpendicular sides and fringe of birches and firs ended, there rose, high up against the sunny sky, the distant walls, the towers, and high-pitched roofs of Erlach.

“As regards myself,” said Dr. Weber meditatively, “as I have learned from comparative mythology that nothing is more usual than to be two totally different persons at the same time, I am willing to accept both Dietrich von Kreglingen and St. Theodulus as the Herakles who released from the bonds of Death my ancestress Alkestis.”

—

St. Eudaemon
and His Orange-Tree

Here is the story of St. Eudaemon’s Orange-Tree. It is not among the Lives of the Blessed Fathers, by Brother Dominick Cavalca of Vico Pisano, still less in the Golden Legend compiled by James of Voragine; nor, very likely, in any other work of hagiography. I learned it on the spot of the miracle, and in the presence of its ever-blossoming witness, the orange-tree. The orchards of the Caelian and the Aventine spread all round, with their criss-cross of reeds carrying young vines, and you see on all sides great arches and vague ruins: Colosseum, Circus Maximus, House of Nero, and the rest; with, far beyond, modern Rome, St. Peter’s dome and the blue Sabine Mountains. There is a little church – one of a dozen like it – with chipped ionic columns, and a tesselated pavement lilac and russet like a worn-out precious rug, and a great cactus, like a python, winding round the apse. The orange-tree stands there, shedding its petals over vines and salads, immense and incredibly venerable; what seems the trunk, in reality merely the one surviving branch, the real trunk being hidden deep below the level of the garden. Here did I learn the legend; but from whom, and how, I must leave you to guess. Suffice that it be true.

•   •   •   •   •

Long, long ago, before the church was built, which has stood, however, over twelve hundred years, there settled on the Caslian slopes a certain saints by name Eudaemon. The old Pagan Rome was buried underground, great boulders and groups of columns only protruding; and the new Christian Rome was being built far off, of stones and brick quarried and carted from the ruins. Weeds and bushes, and great ilexes and elms, had grown up above the former city, and it was haunted of demons. Men never came near it, save to quarry for stone or seek for treasure with dreadful incantation; and it became a wilderness, surrounded, at uneven distances, by the long walls, and the storied square belfries of many monasteries.

The place to which this Eudaemon came – and no one can tell whence he came, nor anything of him save that he had had a bride, who died the eve of their wedding – the place to which Eudaemon came was in the heart of the ruins and the wilderness, very far from the abode of men; and indeed he had but two neighbouring saints like himself, a theologian who inhabited a ruined bath to avoid the noise of bell-ringing; and a stylite, who had contrived a platform of planks roofed over with reeds on the top of the column of the Emperor Philip.

Eudaemon, as above stated, was a saint; persons who did not molest their neighbours were mostly saints in those days; and so, of course, he could work miracles. Only, his miracles, in the opinion of other saints, particularly of the Theologian and the Stylite (whose names were Carpophorus and Ursicinus), were nothing very special, in fact, just barely within the limits of the miraculous. Eudaemon had planted a garden round about the ruins of the circular temple of Venus; and vines and lettuces, roses and peaches had replaced within a very few years the scrub of ilex and myrtle, and the mad vegetation of wild fennel and oats and wallflower which matted over the masonry; and this, of course, since he was a saint, must be a miracle. He had cleared out, also, the innermost cell of the temple, and turned it into a chapel, with a fair carved tomb of the pagans for an altar, and pictures of the Blessed Virgin and the Saviour, with big eyes and purple clothes, painted on the whitewash. And he had erected alongside a belfry, three stories high, circular and open with pillars quarried from the temple, and stuck about with discs of porphyry (out of the temple floor), and green Cretan bowls for ornament; which, of course, was also a miracle. Moreover, at the end of the orchard he had erected wattled huts for poor folk, to whom he taught gardening and other useful arts; also sheds for cows and goats, and a pigeon-cot; and he had constructed out of osier a cart, and broken in a donkey’s foal, in order to send his vegetables to distribute in Rome to the indigent, together with cans of milk and rounds of goat’s cheese. And to the wives of the poor whom he lodged he taught how to weave and cure skins, and to the children he taught the abacus and the singing of hymns. And for the poor folk, he made, near their wattled huts, a bowling-green, and instructed them to play at that game. And indeed the matter of the orange-tree arose out of the making of the bowling-green; all of which were plainly miracles. Meanwhile Eudaemon lived all alone in a shed closed with reeds, and roofed by one of the vaultings of that temple of the Pagans; and he was a laborious man, and abstemious, and possessed a knowledge of medicine, and was able, though but little, to read in the Scriptures; and Eudaemon was a saint, though but a small one.

But Carpophorus the theologian, and Ursicinus the stylite, did not think much of Eudaemon and his saintlings, nay, each thought even less of him than of the other. For Carpophorus, who had translated the books of Deuteronomy from the Hebrew, and the gospels of Nicodemus and of Enoch into Latin, and written six treatises against the Gnostics and Paulicians, and a book on the marriage of the Sons of God; and who, moreover, had a servant to wash his clothes and dust his rolls of manuscript, and cook his dinner, thought Ursicinus both ignorant and rustic, living untidily on that platform on the column, as shaggy and black as a bear, and constantly fixing his eyes on his own navel; while Ursicinus the stylite, who had not changed his tunic or touched cooked food for five years, and had frequently risen to the contemplation of the One, looked down upon the pedantry and luxurious habits of Carpophorus, and esteemed him a man of fleshly vanities.

But Carpophorus and Ursicinus agreed in having a very poor opinion of Eudaemon; and often met in brotherly discourse upon the likelihood of his being given over by Heaven to the Evil One. And this opinion they made freely manifest to himself, on the occasions when he would invite them to dinner in his orchard, regaling them on fruit, milk, wine, and the honey of his bees; and whenever either came singly to borrow a wax taper, or a piece of fair linen, or a basket, or a penno’rth of nails, he made it a point to warn Eudaemon very seriously against his dangerous ways of thinking and proceeding, and to promise intercession with the Powers above.

The two saints would have liked a fine theological set to. But Eudaemon only smiled. Eudaemon was always smiling; and that was one of the worst signs about him: for a man, let alone a saint, who smiles, expresses thereby satisfaction with this world and confidence in his salvation, both of which are slights to Heaven. Moreover, Eudaemon talked in a profane manner; and there was far too much marrying and giving in marriage among the poor folk he had gathered round him. He showed unseemly interest in women in labour, even assisting them with physic, and advising them on the rearing of infants; he rarely chastised young children, and allowed the lads and maidens to tell him their love-affairs, never exhorting either to a life of abstinence and celibacy. He attended to the ailments of animals, and was frequently heard to address speech to them as if they had been possessed of an immortal soul, and as if their likings and dislikings should be considered; thus he made brooding nests for the doves, and placed dishes of water for the swallows, and was surrounded by birds, allowing them to perch on his shoulders and hands, and calling them by name. Various things he said might almost have led you to suspect – had such suspicion not been too uncharitable – that he considered birds and beasts as the creatures of God and brethren to man; nay, that plants also had life, and recognised the Creator; but when he came to speak of such matters, calling the sun and moon brother and sister, and attributing Christian virtues, as humility, chastity, joyousness, to water, and fire, and clouds, and winds, his discourses were such that it was more charitable to consider them as ravings, and himself as one of the half-witted; and this, indeed, Eudaemon probably was, and not utterly damned, otherwise Carpophorus could scarcely have borrowed his altar clothes and tapers, or Ursicinus accepted his lettuces and honeycomb.

The two saints were devoured by curiosity to know what might be the secret relations of their fellow-saint with the world of devils. For these delicate matters gave a saint his position; and on these it was customary to show a subtle mixture of reticence and bragging. Had Eudaemon ever had encounters with the Prince of Darkness? Had he been tempted? had lovely ladies burst in upon his visions, or large stones been rained down through his roof? Carpophorus, feigning to speak of a third person, made some extraordinary statements concerning himself; and Ursicinus led to even more marvellous suppositions by refusal to go into details. But Eudaemon showed no interest in these discourses, neither courting nor evading them. He stated drily that he had undergone no temptations of an unusual sort, and no persecutions worth considering. As to encounters with devils, and with heathen divinities, upon which his fellow-saints insisted upon explicit answers, he had nothing to report that concerned anyone. He had, indeed, on the coast of Syria, once come across a creature who was half man, half horse, of the sort which the pagans called Centaur, of whom he had asked his way in the sand and grass, and who had answered with difficulty, making whinnying noises, and pawing, and cocking his ears; and some years later, among the oakwoods round the lake of Nemi, he had met a Faun, a rustic creature shaped like a man, but with goat’s horns and legs, who had entertained him pleasantly in a cool brake of reeds, and given him nuts and very succulent roots for a midday meal; and it was his opinion that such creatures, although denied human speech, were aware of the goodness of God, and possessed some way of their own, however different from ours, of expressing their joy therein. Indeed, was there aught in the Scriptures which affirmed or suggested that any one of God’s creatures was destitute of such sense of His loving-kindness? As regards the gods of the heathens, what manner of harm could they do to a Christian? Can false gods hurt any except their believers? Nay, Eudaemon actually seemed to hint that these Pagan divinities were deserving of compassion, and that they also, like the sun and moon, the wolves and the lambs, the grass and the trees, were God’s children and our brethren, if only they knew it….

Of course, however, Carpophorus and Ursicinus never allowed Eudaemon to become quite explicit on this point of doctrine, lest they should have to consider him damned beyond remission, and therefore, unfit for their society. As things stood, the two saints were comfortably persuaded that those little visits, with accompanying loans and gifts, were probably poor Eudaemon’s one chance of salvation.

And now for the miracle.

It happened that in digging the ground for a fresh piece of vineyard, a spade struck upon an uncommonly large round stone, which being uncovered, disclosed itself to be a full-length woman, carved in marble, and embedded in the clay, face upwards. The peasants fled in terror, some crying out that they had found an embalmed Pagan, and some, a sleeping female devil. But Eudaemon merely smiled, and wiped the earth off the figure, which was exceeding comely, and mended one of its arms with cement, and set it up on a carved tombstone of the ancients, at the end of the grass walk through the orchard, and close to the beehives.

Carpophorus and Ursicinus heard the news, and hastening to the spot, instantly offered Eudaemon their help in breaking the figure to bits and conveying it to a limekiln by the Tiber. For it was evidently an image of the goddess Venus, by far the wickedest of all the devils. The two saints examined the statue with holy curiosity, and quoted, respectively, several passages of Athenagoras and Lactantius, and many anecdotes of the Hermit St. Paul, and of other anchorites of the Thebais. But Eudaemon merely thanked them very sweetly for their exhortations, and sent them away with a pair of new sandals and a flask of oil as a gift. After this, the two saints did not consider themselves free to call upon him any longer, and took no notice of the presents he continued to send. They would greatly have liked to behold that idol again, not on account of its comeliness, which neither recognised, but from intense curiosity to see devils a little closer. But having preached openly against it, and having tried to stir the peasants to knock it down and break it, they were ashamed of entering the orchard; and merely sought for opportunities of looking across the narrow valley, and seeing the figure of the goddess, shining white among the criss-cross reeds and the big fig-trees of Eudaemon’s vineyard.

This being the case, judge of the joy of the two holy men when one June evening – and it was the vigil of the Birth of John Baptist – the news was brought that Eudaemon had at last been caught hold of by the Devil! All other considerations vanished; for brotherly charity required that they should fly to the spot and behold the catastrophe.

The two saints were rather disappointed. The Devil had not carried off Eudaemon, whom, indeed, they found peaceably watering some clove-pinks; but he had carried off, or at least appropriated, a notable piece of Eudaemon’s property. For Eudaemon, of all the worldly goods he had once enjoyed, had retained one only, but that surely the most sinful, a wedding-ring. It was quite useless to his neighbours, and a token of earthly affections, having been bought by him to stick on the hand of the girl he had been about to marry. The ring had been a subject of scandal to Carpophorus and Ursicinus, the more so that Eudaemon had flown into a rage (the only time in their experience), when they suggested he should exchange it in the city against a chapel bell; and it was highly satisfactory that the Devil should have opened his campaign by seizing this object above all others.

The way it had happened was this. It being the vigil of the Birth of John Baptist, Eudaemon had, according to a habit of his, which was far from commendable, allowed his peasant folk to make merry, nay, had spread tables for them in the vineyard, and arranged games for young and old; a way of celebrating the occasion the less desirable, that it was said that the vigil of John Baptist happened to coincide with the old feast of the devil Venus, and that the rustics still celebrated it with ceremonies connected with that evil spirit, and in themselves worthy of blame, such as picking bundles of lavender for their linen lockers, making garlands of clove-pinks and lighting bonfires, all of which were countenanced by Eudaemon. On this occasion Eudaemon thought fit to open the bowling-green, which he just finished building up of green sods, carefully jointed and beaten, with planks to keep the balls from straying. He was showing the rustics how to bowl their balls, and had, for this purpose, girt up his white woollen smock above his knees, when he was stung by a wasp, a creature, no doubt, of the Devil. Seeing his finger begin to swell, and unwilling to be prevented from continuing the game, he had, for the first time on record, removed that gold wedding-ring, and, after a minute’s hesitation how to dispose of it, stuck it on the extended right annular finger of the marble statue of the devil Venus; and then gone on playing.

But that rash action, so unworthy of a Christian saint, and in which so many blameable acts culminated – for there should have been neither ring to remove nor idol to stick it on – that altogether reprehensible action was punished as it deserved. After a few rounds of the game, Eudaemon bade the peasants fall to the dinner he had provided for them, while he himself retired to say his prayers. So doing, he sought his ring. But – O prodigy! O terror! it was in vain. The marble she-devil had bent her finger and closed her hand. She had accepted the ring (and with it, doubtless, his wretched sinful soul) and refused to relinquish it. No sooner had a single one of the rustics found out what had happened, than the whole crew of them, men, women, and children, fled in confusion, muttering prayers and shrieking exorcisms, and carrying away what victuals they could.

It was only when Carpophorus and Ursicinus arrived, armed with missals and holy-water brushes, that a few of the boldest rustics consented to return to the scene of the wonder. They found, as I have already mentioned, Eudaemon placidly watering some pots of clove-pinks, which he had prepared as gifts for the maidens. The tables were upset, the bunches of lavender lying about; the lettuces and rosebushes had been trampled. The frogs had begun to wail in the reed-brakes, and the crickets to lament in the ripe corn; bats were circling about and swallows, and the sun was sinking. The last rays fell upon the marble statue at the end of the bowling-green, making the ring glimmer on her finger; and suddenly, just as the two saints entered, reddening and gilding her nakedness into a semblance of life. Carpophorus and Ursicinus gave a yell of terror and nearly fell flat on the ground. Eudaemon looked up from his clove-pinks at them, and at the statue. He understood. “Foolish brothers,” he said, “did you not know that Brother Sun can make all things alive?”

And he continued watering the flowers and going to the well to re-fill his can.

Carpophorus and Ursicinus had not recovered from their terror; but it was spiced with a certain delight, for were they not about to witness some dreadful proceeding on the part of the Evil One? Meanwhile, they kept at a respectful distance from the idol, and splashing holy water right and left, and swinging censers backwards and forwards, they set up a hymn in a shaky voice, not without some lapses of grammar. But the idol took notice of none of it; she shone out white in the gathering twilight, and on her bent finger, on her closed hand, twinkled the little gold circlet.

When Eudaemon had finished his watering, he let the bucket once more down into the well, and took a deep drink of water. Then he dipped his hands, ungirt his white woollen robes, the day’s work being done, and walked leisurely down the bowling-green, calling the birds, who whirled round his head; but taking no notice of his fellow-saints and their exorcisms. Before the idol he stood still. He looked up, quite boldly, at her comely limbs and face, and even with a benign smile. “Sister Venus,” he said, “you were ever a lover of jests; but every jest has its end. Night is coming on, my outdoor work is over; it is fit I should retire to prayers and to rest. Give me therefore my ring, of which I bade you take charge in return for the hospitality I had shown you.”

Carpophorus and Ursicinus quickened the time of their hymn, and sang much at cross purposes, looking up at the idol with the corner of their eyes.

The statue did not move. There she stood, naked and comely, whiter and whiter as the daylight faded, and the moon rose up in the east “Sister Venus,” resumed Eudaemon, “you are not obliging. I fear, Sister Venus, that you nurture evil designs, such as mankind accounts to your blame. If this be, desist. Foolish persons have said you were wicked, nay a devil; and like enough you have got to believe it, and to glory, perhaps, in the notion. Cast it from you. Sister Venus, for I tell you it is false. And so, restore me my ring.”

But still the idol did not move, but grew only whiter, like silver, in the moonbeams, as she stood above the green grass, in the smoke of the incense. Carpophorus and Ursicinus fixed their eyes on her, wondering when she would break in two pieces, and a dragon smelling of brimstone issue from her with a hideous noise, as a result of their exorcism.

“Sister Venus,” Eudaemon repeated, and his voice, though gentle, grew commanding, “cease your foolish malice, and, inasmuch as one of God’s creatures, obey and restore to me my ring.”

A little breeze stirred the air. The white hand of the statue shifted from her white bosom, the finger slowly uncrooked and extended itself.

With incredible audacity Eudaemon ran into the trap of the Evil One. He advanced, and, rising on tiptoe, stretched forth his hand to the idol’s. Now indeed would that devil clasp him to her, and singe his flesh on the way to Hell!

But it was not so. Eudaemon took the ring, rubbed it tenderly on his white woollen sleeve, and stuck it slowly and pensively on his own finger.

“Sister Venus,” he then said, standing before the statue, with the finches and thrushes and ortolans perching on his shoulders, and the swallows circling round his head, “Sister Venus, I thank you. Forget the malice which foolish mankind have taught you to find in yourself. Remember you are a creature of God’s, and good. Teach the flowers to cross their seeds and vary their hues and scents; teach the doves and the swallows and the sheep and the kine and all our speechless brethren to pair and nurture their young; teach the youths and the maidens to love one another and their children. Make this orchard to bloom and these rustics to sing. But, since in this form you have foolishly tried to give scandal as foolish mortals had taught you to do, accept, Sister Venus, a loving punishment, and in the name of Christ, be a statue no longer, but a fair white tree with sweet-smelling blossoms and golden fruit.”

Eudaemon stood with his hand raised, and made the sign of the cross.

There was a faint sigh, as of the breeze, and a Sunt but gathering rustle. And behold, beneath the shining white moon, the statue of Venus changed its outline, put forth minute leaves and twigs, which grew apace, until, while Eudaemon still stood with raised hand, there was a statue no longer at the end of the bowling-green, but a fair orange-tree, with leaves and flowers shining silvery in the moonlight.

Then Eudaemon went in to his prayers; and Carpophorus and Ursicinus returned each in silence, one to his cavern and one to his column, and thought themselves much smaller saints forever in future.

As to the orange-tree, it still stands on the slope of the Caelian, opposite the criss-cross reeds of the Aventine vineyards, beside the little church with the fluted broken columns and the big cactus, like a python, on its apse. And the pigeons are most plentiful, and the figs and clove-pinks most sweet and fragrant all round; and there is always water in plenty in the well. And that is the story of St. Eudaemon and his Orange-Tree; but you will not find it in the Golden Legend nor in the Bollandists.

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The Featureless Wisdom

The manner in which Diotima, a wise woman of Mantineia, came to possess an effigy of Athena, conspicuous by the absence of all features, was as follows:

This Diotima was also a priestess, nobody knows exactly of what But the position gave her an opportunity of knowing a great variety of remarkable persons, as Socrates, Alcibiades, Zeno, Protagoras, Gorgias, and a number of highly-gifted youths who came to nothing. Their conversation dispelled all vain prejudices from the soul of the Priestess of Mantineia; and she felt that the only Wisdom to which she could possibly bring worship and service would have to be a Wisdom entirely and exclusively her own.

This being the case, she betook herself one day to the workshop of Pheidias, who, as is well known, received orders for divinities of all sorts and dimensions. And she requested him to make her an image of Athena of a size to fit into her hat-box, and with a set of features easily distinguishable from those of the idols handed down by the past and still adored by the common herd. Pheidias had heard his friend Socrates speak of Diotima, and had even suspected that, as may happen between ladies and philosophers, the wise man had attributed some of his own remarks to the Priestess of Mantineia. Pheidias undertook the commission with much pleasure. And, at the end of eight days, Diotima returned to his workshop. She was shown an image of Athena, most excellently carved out of a coconut, and uniting, in her finely-modelled limbs and graceful drapery, all the well-known merits of the Periklean school of sculpture. Diotima took the image in her hand and turned it round with admiration.

“There’s only one thing I don’t much like,” she said after a minute. “Isn’t that head you have given her a little of what archaeologists are going to call (for I have the gift of prophecy, you know) the type of the infernal goddesses?”

“Perhaps it is, a trifle,” answered Pheidias; “we’ll alter it by next Wednesday.”

Next Wednesday Diotima ordered her chariot and returned to the workshop.

“You must try and not think me too great a bore, cher maitre,” she said, after a pause, “but this new head is – isn’t it? – just a little bit too like that of an Aphrodite. Oh, I have no sort of prejudice against Aphrodite – only … well, you know, there are statues of her in the fish-market and horrid places like that, I believe, and the associations…. But you would be a dear to alter this.”

“All right,” answered Pheidias, “shall we say Monday week?”

But when that Monday had come and the Priestess of Mantineia had alighted at the workshop, there was a new surprise awaiting her. “Upon my word,” said Pheidias, “this, my dear lady, is really not my fault.” For his pupil (Kalamis, I believe; unless, indeed, Kalamis was his master!) had fitted on to the image of Athena a very neat and expressive little head of Silenus.

“Would you mind telling your workman,” said Diotima with exquisite politeness, “that when he takes to fitting heads onto my little Goddess of Wisdom it is just as well he should not be drunk?”

“My dear lady,” protested Pheidias, “you see before you the most humiliated of all your humble servants. Kalamis shall be kept on bread-and-water for ten days, and I will myself see to the new head of the figure which is to have the honour of presiding over your private devotions; and this time I will give myself the pleasure of calling in person upon you.”

At the end of a fortnight the butler of Diotima introduced, not without some disgust, the venerable but rather untidy sculptor of the Parthenon. “Let me have the pleasure myself, dear, dear old Pheidias,” exclaimed the Priestess of Mantineia, and proceeded to unwrap the tissue-paper from off the figure of Athena. But when she had done so there was an awful silence. For the effigy of the goddess, which Diotima held at arms-length to look at, had indeed a most becoming helmet with three chimaeras tastefully curled round the ostrich feathers; it had even a face, with finely-modelled chin and delicate, flat ear. But it had no features. No eyes, no nose, no mouth – nothing!

The silence was long, and, to any soul less serene than that of a sculptor of Antiquity, would have been exceedingly painful.

“I fear,” said Diotima, “I fear I have an engagement at half-past three, cher maitre; would you mind clapping your hands to know whether my litter is waiting?”

Pheidias rose.

“My dear young lady,” he said very gently, “I perceive that you are under the impression that I have intended a joke equally disrespectful to our Sovereign Mistress Athena and to your charming self. It is not so. You have asked for an impossibility – what your clever friends call a metaphysical miracle, I believe; and I have vainly endeavoured to satisfy you by a series of makeshifts which, I am bound to say, most ladies would not have detected. So there remains nothing for it but to impart to you a remarkable mystery which your ingenious mind (and the nimble tongues of the sophists of your acquaintance) will doubtless take much pleasure in expounding. To wit: That by a supreme and inscrutable decree, the features of Wisdom must always remain the same as we see them in the great images that are set up (that I may say I have helped to set up) in public places, in the temple of the citadel, by the lighthouse in the harbour, on the altars of the crossways. And any image differing essentially from these must, therefore, be that of some inferior divinity, ill-famed, or ill-favoured, or ill-omened; or else, like this one, a poor little sightless and speechless doll, very suitable as a plaything for persons of refinement.”

But Diotima remained with the image in her hand.

“It will be an interesting topic next time I have Socrates to dinner,” she remarked meditatively.

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