The Hidden Door and Other Strange Stories
Date: 1880-12-31T22:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Supernatural Fiction; Horror; Fantasy
Description: More unsettling tales of the fantastic by the incomparable Vernon Lee; some laced with just a bit of ironical humor. ~~~~ A secret chamber in the tower of old Hotspur Hall is opened… A young artist becomes obsessed by a century-old aria and its singer… A bric-a-brac collector is captivated by a life-size doll, the portrait of an old count’s dead wife… A sinful, lustful cavalier ventures to make a pact to obtain salvation from eternal damnation… And more……
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA

THE  HIDDEN  DOOR

AND  OTHER  STRANGE  STORIES

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.

Compilation by ECM. Contents were first published 1881 ~ 1913. The text is in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- The Hidden Door
- Winthrop’s Adventure
- The Doll
- The Virgin of the Seven Daggers
- The Legend of Madame Krasinska
- Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child
- Marsyas in Flanders
- The Gods and Ritter Tanhûser

The Hidden Door

(1896)

It seemed to Decimus Little that there could be no doubt left. His only wonder was whether anyone else had been near making that discovery. As he sat in a deep window of the big drawing-room, the light of the candles falling yellow upon the shining white arms and shoulders, the shining white expanses of shirt-front, the lustrous silks and lustrous black cloth within doors; the great wave of moor and fell unfurling greyish-green in the pale-blue twilight without; as he sat there alone in the window, he wondered how it would be if any of these creatures assembled for the coming of age of the heir of Hotspur Hall could guess that he knew. His eyes mechanically followed the tall figure of his host, as his broad shoulders and grey beard appeared and reappeared in the crowd; they sought out the yellow ridge of curls of the son and heir, as his head rose and fell while talking to the ladies in the corner. What if either of them could guess? If old Sir Hugh Hotspur could guess that there was in the world another creature beside himself who knew the position of that secret door; if young Hotspur could guess that there existed close by another man who might, any day, penetrate into that secret chamber to which, at the close of these merry-making days, the youth must be solemnly admitted, to lose, during that fatal hour among unspeakable mysteries, all lightness of heart forever?

Mr. Little was not at all surprised at the fact of having made this extraordinary discovery. Although in no way a conceited man, he was accustomed to think of himself as connected with extraordinary matters, and in some way destined for an extraordinary end. He was one of those men who, without ever having done, or even said, or perhaps even thought, anything especially remarkable, are yet remarkable men. Whenever he came into a room, he felt people’s eyes upon him, and knew that they were asking, “Who is that young man? ” And still Mr. Decimus Little did not consider himself handsome, nor did anyone else consider him so, to his knowledge. From the matter-of-fact point of view, all one could say was that he was of middle height, more inclined to be fat than thin, with small not irregular features, hair varying between yellow and grey, a slight stoop, a somewhat defective sight, and a preference for clothes of ample cut and of neutral tints. But then the matter-of-fact eye just missed that something indefinable which constituted the remarkable character of Mr. Little’s appearance. As it was with his person, so likewise was it with his history; there was more significance therein than could easily be defined. A distant relative, on the female side, of the illustrious border house of Hotspur, Mr. Little possessed a modest income and the education of a gentleman. He had never been to school, and had left college without taking his degree. He had begun reading for the law, and left off. He had tried writing for the magazines, but without success. He had at one time inclined to High-Church asceticism and the moralizing of Whitechapel; he had also been addicted to socialism, and spent six months learning to make a chest of drawers in a Birmingham co-operative workshop. He had begun writing a biography of Ninon de Lenclos, studying singing, and forming a collection of rare medals; and he was now considerably interested in Esoteric Buddhism and the Society for Psychical Research, although he felt by no means prepared to accept the new theosophy, nor to indorse the conclusions concerning thought transference.

And finally, and quite lately, Mr. Decimus Little had also been in love, and had become engaged to a cousin of his, a young lady studying at Girton College; but he was not quite sure whether the engagement was absolutely binding on either side, or whether marriage would be certainly conducive to the happiness of both parties. For Mr. Decimus Little was gradually maturing a theory to the effect of his being a person with a double nature, reflective and idealistic on the one hand, and capable, on the other, of extraordinary impulses of lawlessness; and it is notorious that such persons, and indeed, perhaps, all very complex and out-of-the-common personalities are not very fit for the marriage state.

It was consonant with what Mr. Little often lamented as the excessive scepticism of his temper, that he should not have made up his mind about the hidden chamber at Hotspur Hall, and the strange stories concerning it. He had often discussed the matter, which, as he remarked, was a crucial one in all questions of the supernatural. He had triumphantly argued with a physiologist at his club that mere delusion could not be a sufficient explanation for so old and diffused a belief, as, indeed, mere delusion could not account for any belief of any kind. He had argued equally triumphantly with a clergyman in the train against the notion that the occupant of the secret chamber was the Evil One, and had added that the existence of evil spirits offered serious, very serious, difficulties to a thoughtful mind. And Mr. Little, being, as he often remarked, open to arguments and evidence on all points, had elaborated various explanations of the mystery of the hidden chamber, and had even attempted to sound the inhabitants of Hotspur Hall on the subject. But the servants had not understood his polished but rather shadowy Oxford English, or he had not understood their thick Northumbrian, and the members of the family had dropped the subject with a somewhat disconcerting sharpness of manner; and Mr. Little was the last man in the world to rudely invade the secrets of others, by experiments of towels hung out of windows, and such like; indeed, the person capable of such courses would have inspired him with horror.

And by an irony of fate – Mr. Little believed in the irony of fate, and was occasionally ironical himself – it had been given to him, to this sceptical and unobtrusive man, to discover that room hidden in the thickness of the Norman wall, and whose position had baffled so much ingenious, pertinacious, and impertinent inquiry.

There could no longer be any doubt about it; this door, revealed only by its hollow sound and its rusty iron bolt, against which Mr. Little had accidentally leaned that day when the shame of having intruded upon a flirtation (and a flirtation, too, between the heir of Hotspur and the heiress of his hereditary foes the Bleukiusops) had made him rush, like a mad creature, along unknown passages and up the winding staircase of the peel tower – this door, whitewashed to look like stone and hidden just under the highest battlements of Hotspur, could only be that of the mysterious chamber. It had flashed across Mr. Little’s mind when first he had leaned, confused and panting, against the wall of the staircase, and the wall had yielded to his pressure and creaked perceptibly; and the certainty had grown with every subsequent examination of the spot, and of the exterior of the castle. People had hitherto wasted their ingenuity upon seeking a window in Hotspur Hall which should correspond with no ostensible room; accident had revealed to Mr. Little a room which corresponded with no window visible from without. It now seemed so simple that it was impossible to conceive how the secret could so long have been kept. The secret chamber was, could be, only in the oldest portion of the castle, in the peel tower, built for the protection of stock and goods from the Scottish raids; and it was, it could be, only under the very roof of the tower, taking air and light through some chimney or trapdoor from the battlements above. There could be no doubt about it; and as Mr. Decimus Little sat in the window-seat of the great drawing-room at Hotspur, with on the one side the crowd of guests brilliant in the yellow candlelight, and the great darkwave of fell and moor rising into the blue twilight on the other, he thought how strange it was that of all these people there was only one, besides the master of Hotspur,, who knew the position of the fatal room: only one besides the heir of Hotspur who might – who knows? – penetrate into its secrets, and that one person should be himself. Strange; and yet, somehow, it did not take him by surprise.

And, after all, what was the secret of that chamber? A monstrous creature, or race of creatures, hidden away by the unrightful heirs? An ancient ancestor, living on by diabolic arts throughout the centuries? A demon, a specter, some horror nameless because inconceivable to those who had not seen it, or perhaps some almost immaterial evil, some curse lurking in the very atmosphere of the place? It was notorious that the something, whatever it was, made it impossible for a Hotspur ever to marry a Blenkinsop; that the heir of Hotspur was introduced to this mystery on coming of age; and that no Hotspur, after coming of age, had ever been known to smile: these were well authenticated facts; but what mystery or horror upon earth or in hell could be sufficient cause for these well ascertained results, no one had ever discovered. Every explanation was futile and insufficient.

These were the thoughts which went on in Mr. Little’s mind throughout that week of coming of age at Hotspur Hall. All day and all night – at least, as much of the night as he could account for – these questions kept going round and round in his mind, presenting now one surface, now another, but ever present and ever active. He walked about, ate his dinner, talked, danced automatically, knowing that he did it all, but as one knows what another person is doing, or what one is reading in a book, without any sense of its being one’s self or its being real; nay, with a sense of being removed miles and miles from it all, living in a different time and place, to which this present is as the past and the distant. The secret chamber – its mystery; the door, the colour of the wall, the shape of the iron bolt, the slant of the corkscrew steps – these were reality in the midst of all this unrealness. And withal a strange longing: to stand again before that door, to handle once more that rusty bolt; a wish like that for some song, or some beloved presence, the desire for that ineffable consciousness, that overwhelming sense of concentrated life and feeling, of being there, of realizing the thing. No one, reflected Mr. Little, can know what strange joys are reserved for strange natures; how certain creatures, too delicate and unreal for the everyday interests and pleasures of existence to penetrate through the soul-atmosphere in which they wander, will vibrate, with almost agonized joy, live their full life on contact with certain mysteries.

Every day Mr. Little would seek that winding staircase in the peel tower; at first with hesitation and shyness, stealing up almost ashamed of himself; then secretly and stealthily, but excited, resolute, like a man seeking the woman he loves, bent upon the joy of his life. Once a day at first, then twice, then thrice, counting the hours between the visits, longing to go back as soon as he had left, as a drunkard longs to drink again when he has just drunk. He would watch for the moment when the way was clear, steal along the corridors and up the winding stairs. Then, having reached close to the top of the staircase, near a trapdoor in the ceiling which led on to the battlements of the tower, he would stop, and lean against the shelving turning wall opposite the door, or sit down on the steps, his eyes fixed on the tower wall, where a faint line and the rusty little bolt revealed the presence of the hidden chamber.

What he did it would be hard to say; indeed, he did nothing, he merely felt. There was nothing at all to see, in the material sense; and this piece of winding staircase was just like any other piece of winding staircase in the world: it was not anything external that he wanted, it was that ineffable something within himself. So at least Mr. Little imagined at first, frequently persuading himself that, to a nature like his, all baser satisfaction of curiosity was as nothing; telling himself that he did not care what was inside the room, that he did not even wish to know. Why, if by the pulling of that bolt he might see and know all, he would not pull it. And, saying this to himself, by way of proving it, he laid his fingers gently on the bolt. And in so doing he discovered the depth of his self-delusion. How different was this emotion when he felt – he actually felt – the bolt begin to slide in his hand, from what he had experienced before, while merely contemplating it! The blood seemed to rush through his veins, he felt almost faint. This was reality, this was possession. The mystery lay there, with the bolt, in the hollow of his hand; at any instant he might … Mr. Little had no intention of drawing the bolt. He never reasoned about it, but he knew that that bolt never must, never should, be drawn by him. But in proportion to this knowledge was the entrancing excitement of feeling that the bolt might be drawn, that he grasped it in his fingers, that a little electric current through some of his nerves, a little twitch in some of his muscles, and the mystery would be disclosed.

It was the last of the seven days’ revelry of the coming of age. All the other neighbouring properties of the Hotspurs had been visited in turn; tenants had been made to dine and dance on one lawn after another; innumerable grouse had been massacred on the moors; endless sets of Venetian lanterns had been lighted, had caught fire, and tumbled on to people’s heads; Sir Hugh’s old port and Johannisberg, and the strange honey-beer, called Morocco, brewed for centuries at Hotspur, had flowed like water, or rather like the rain, which freely fell, but did not quench that northern ardour. There was to be a grand ball that night, and a grand display of fireworks. But Mr. Little’s soul was not attuned to merriment, nor were the souls, as he suspected, of Sir Hugh Hotspur and his son. For, according to popular tradition, it was on this last night of the seven days’ merry-making that the heir of Hotspur must be introduced into the hidden chamber.

Throughout lunch Mr. Little kept his eyes on the face of his host and his host’s son. What might be passing in their mind? Was it hidden terror or a daredevil desperation at the thought of what the night must bring? But neither Sir Hugh nor young Harry showed the slightest emotion; their faces, it seemed to Mr. Little, were imperturbable like stone.

Mr. Little waited till the family and guests were safely assembled on the tennis-lawn, then hastened along the corridor and up the steps of the peel tower. The afternoon, after all the rain, was hot and steamy, clearly foreboding a storm; and as Mr. Little groped his way up the tower steps, he felt his heart moving slackly and irregularly, and a clamminess spread over his face and hands; he had to stop several times in order to take breath. As usual, he seated himself on the topmost step, holding his knees with his arms, and looking at the piece of wall opposite, which concealed the mysterious door.

Mr. Little sat there a long time, while the tower stairs grew darker and darker, the faint line betraying the door grew invisible, and even the bolt was lost in the general darkness. Tonight – the thought, nay, almost the sentence in which it was framed, went on like a bell in Mr. Little’s mind – tonight they would creep up those stairs, they would stand before that door. Sir Hugh’s hand would be upon that bolt: he saw it all so plainly, he felt every tingle and shudder that would pass through their bodies. Mr. Little rose and gently grasped the bolt; how easily it would move! Sir Hugh would not require the smallest effort. Or would it be young Harry Hotspur? No; it would doubtless be Sir Hugh. He would pause like that a moment, his hand on the bolt, whispering a few words of encouragement, perhaps a prayer. No; he would be silent. He would hold the bolt, little guessing how recently another hand had been upon it, little dreaming that, but a few hours before another member of the family of Hotspur (for Mr. Little always regarded himself in that light) had had it in his power to…

The thought remained unfinished in Mr. Little’s mind. With a cry he fell all of a heap upon the steps, a blinding light in his eyes, a deafening roar in his ears. He had opened the secret door.

He came slowly to his senses, and with life there returned an overwhelming, vague sense of horror. What he had done he did not know; but he knew he had done something terrible. He slid, it seemed to him that he almost trickled – for his limbs had turned to water – down the stairs. He ran, and yet seemed to be dragging himself, along the corridors and out of one of the many ivy-grown doorways of the old border castle. To the left hand of the gate, at a little distance, was the tennis-court; a long beam of sun, yellow among the storm-clouds, fell upon the grass, burnishing it into metallic green, and making the white, red, yellow, and blue of the players’ dresses stand out like coloured enamel. Some of them shouted to him, among others young Harry Hotspur; but Mr. Little rushed on, heedless of their shouts, scaling the banks of grass, breaking through the hedges, scrambling up hillside after hillside, until he had got to the top of the fells, where the short greyish-green grass began to be variegated with brown patches of bog and lilac and black patches of heather, and cut in all directions by the low walls of loose black stones. He stopped and looked back. But he started off again, as he saw in the distance below, among the ashes and poplars of the narrow valley which furrowed those treeless undulations of moorland, the chimney-stacks of Hotspur Hall, the battlements of the square, black peel tower, reddened by the low light.

On he went, slower, indeed, but still onward, until every vestige of Hotspur and of every other human habitation was out of sight, and the chain of fells had closed round him, billow upon billow, under the fading light. On he went, looking neither to the right nor to the left, save when he was startled by the bubbling of a brook, spurting from the brown moor bog on to the stony road; or by the bleating of the sheep who wandered, vague white specks, upon the greyish grass of the hillside. The clouds accumulated in grey masses, with an ominous yellow clearing in their midst, and across the fells there came the sound of distant thunder. Presently a few heavy drops began to fall; but Mr. Little did not heed them, but went quickly on, among the bleating of the sheep and the cry of the curlews, along the desolate road across the fells; raindrop succeeding raindrop, till the hilltops were enveloped in a sheet of rain.

But Mr. Little did not turn back. He was dazed, vacant, quite unconscious of all save one thing: he had opened the hidden door at Hotspur Hall.

At length the road made a turn, began to descend, and in a dip of the fells some light shone forth in the darkness and the mist. Mr. Little started, and very nearly ran back: he had thought for a moment that these must be the lights of Hotspur: but a second’s reflection told him that Hotspur must lie far behind, and presently, among the blinding rain which fell in cold sheets, he found himself among some low black cottages. In the window of one of them was a light, and over the door, in the darkness, swung an inn sign. He knocked, and entered the inn kitchen, a trickle of water following him wherever he went, and, in the tone and with the look of a sleep-walker, said something about having been overtaken by a storm during a walk on the moors, and wanting a night’s shelter. The innkeeper and his wife were evidently too pastoral-minded to reflect that gentlemen do not usually walk on the fells without a hat, and in blue silk socks and patent-leather shoes; and they heaped up the fire, by the side of which Mr. Little collapsed into an armchair, indifferent to the charms of bacon and beer and hot griddlecakes.

He tried to settle his ideas. Of what had passed he knew but this much for certain, that he had opened the secret door.

The following morning Mr. Little summoned up his courage, and, after a great argument with himself, turned his steps toward Hotspur Hall. The day was fresh and blowy; a delicate blue haze hung over the hills, out of which, larger and larger, emerged a brilliant blue sky. In the valley the towers of Hotspur and its tall chimneys rose among the trees. Soon Mr. Little could see the bright patches of geranium on the lawn. All this, he argued with himself, must have been a delusion, a result of over-psychological study and a thunderstorm upon a nervous and poetical temperament. He tried to remember what he had read about delusions in Carpenter’s “Mental Physiology,” and about that supposed robbery, or burglary, which Shelley believed himself to have witnessed. Mr. Little couldn’t remember the details, but he was pleased it should have been Shelley. He felt quite foolish and almost happy as he passed through the rose garden, among the strawberry nets, and in at the by-entrance of Hotspur. He walked straight into the dining-room, where he knew the family was assembled at breakfast, jauntily, and one hand in his pocket. “Why, Little, where the deuce have you spent the night?” cried Sir Hugh Hotspur; and the question was echoed in various forms by the rest of the company. “Why, Little, have you been in the horse-pond? ” cried young’ Harry, pointing to his guest’s clothes, which, drenched the previous night, did indeed suggest some such immersion. Mr. Little did not answer; he felt himself grow cold and pale, and grasped a chair-back. In making this rude remark, the heir of Hotspur had burst into a peal of laughter.

Mr. Little understood; they had found the mysterious chamber empty, its horror fled; he had really opened that door; the heir of Hotspur could still laugh. He explained automatically how he had been caught by a storm on the fells, and been obliged to pass the night at a wayside inn; but the whole time, while he pretended to be eating his breakfast, his brain was on fire with a thought—

“Where had it gone – it, the something which he had let loose?”

That night Mr. Little slept, or rather, as our ancestors more correctly expressed it, lay, at Hotspur. For the word sleep was but a mockery. There was a second storm, and all night the wind howled in the trees, the drops fell from the eaves, and the room was illumined by fitful gleams of lightning. It seemed to Mr. Little that the evil spirit, or whatever else it might be, which had once been safely locked up in the hidden chamber, was now loose in the house. On reflection he could not doubt it: when he had fallen senseless on the stairs, something had passed out of the door; he had heard and felt the wind of its passage. It had issued from the room; it must now be somewhere else, at loose, free to wreak its will with every flash of lightning. Mr. Little expected that the solid masonry of Hotspur would catch fire and burn like a match; with every crash of thunder he expected that the great peel tower would come rattling on to the roof. He realized for the first time the tales of the companions of Ulysses opening the bag of the winds; of the Arabian fisherman breaking Solomon’s seal on the flask which held the djinn; they no longer struck him as in the least ridiculous, these stories. He too had done alike. For, after all, was it not possible that there existed in Nature forces, beings, unknown to our ordinary everyday life? Did not all modern investigations point in that direction, and was it not possible, then, that by the mercy of Providence such a force or being, fatal to our weak humanity, might have been permitted to be enclosed within four walls – one family, or rather, one unhappy member of one family, being sacrificed for the good of mankind, and facing this terror alone, that the rest of his kind might not look upon that ineffable mystery? And now he, in the lawlessness of his scepticism, had stepped in and opened that sacred door…. He understood now why he had often felt that he was destined to commit some terrible crime. Mr. Little sat up in bed, and as the lightning fitfully lit up the antique furniture of his room, he began mechanically to mutter some prayers of his childhood, and some Latin formulae of exorcism which he had learned at the time of his offering to do the article “Incubus” for the “Encyclopaedia Britannica.” What should he do? Confess to Sir Hugh Hotspur? or to Sir Hugh’s son? He felt terrified at the mere notion; but he understood that his terror was no mere vulgar fear of being reprimanded for a gross breach of hospitality and honour – that it was due to the sense that, having this terrible secret, he had no right to ruin therewith the lives of innocent men. The Hotspurs would know but too soon!

Meanwhile Mr. Little felt an imperative need to confess what he had done, to ask advice and assistance. He wished for once that he had been able to go over to Rome that time that Monsignor Tassel had tried to convert him, instead of being deterred by the oleographs in Monsignor Tassel’s chapel. What would he not give to kneel down in a confessional, and pour out the horrible secret through the perforated brass plate!

All of a sudden he jumped out of bed, struck a light, and dragged his portmanteau into the middle of the room. He had remembered Esmé St. John, and the fact that Esmé St. John, his former chum at Oxford, was working in the slums of Newcastle, not three hours hence. How could he ever, in the lawless hardness of his heart, have thought Esmé ridiculous, have actually tried to reason him out of his High Church asceticism? This was indeed the just retribution, the fall of the proud, that he should now seek shelter and peace in Esmé’s spiritual arms, and bring to the man, nay, rather to the saint, at whom he had once scoffed, a story which he would himself have once ridiculed as the most childish piece of superstition. The mere thought of that act of humiliation did him good; and the terrors of the night seemed to diminish as Mr. Little stooped over his portmanteau and folded his clothes with neat but feverish hands. As soon as it was light, he stole out of the house, walked to the neighbouring village, knocked up the half-idiotic girl who had charge of the post-office, and sent off a sixpenny telegram telling the Reverend Esmé St. John that he would join him at Newcastle that afternoon.

Mr. Little was rather surprised, and in truth rather dashed, when he met his old friend. He had spent the hours in the train framing his confession: a terrible tale to tell, yet which he felt a sudden disappointment at being prevented from telling. Prevented he did feel. He found the Reverend Esmé St. John making a round among his parishioners; they had told him so at Mr. St. John’s chapel, and he had realized vividly the whole scene: Esmé, emaciated, hollow-voiced, fresh from some deathbed, leaving the rest of his flock to follow the call of this pale creature, in whom he would scarcely recognize an old friend, and the very touch of whose hand would tell him that things more terrible than death were at stake. But it was otherwise. After wandering about various black and grimy slums under the thick black Newcastle sky, and up various precipitous alleys and flights of steps strewed with eggshells and herring-heads, Mr. Little found his old friend in a back yard sheltered by the crumbling red roof of The Musician’s Rest inn (where the first bars of “Auld Lang Syne” swung over the door). By his side was a fat, tattered, but extremely jovial red-haired woman washing in a tub, and opposite, an unkempt ragamuffin with his hands in his pockets, singing at the top of his little voice a comic song in Northumbrian dialect. Mr. Esmé St. John was leaning against the doorway, laughing with all his might; he was fat, bald, had a red face, and a very humorous eye – in fact, did not resemble in the least the hollow-cheeked, flashing-eyed young fanatic of ten years before. He stretched out his broad hand to Mr. Little, and said: “Do listen to this song, it’s about the Board School man – it’s really too delicious, and the little chap sings it quite nicely!”

Mr. Little listened, not understanding sword, and thinking how little this man, laughing over a foolish song sung by a street-boy, guessed the terrible confession he was about to receive.

When the song was finished, the Reverend Esmé St. John took Little’s arm, and began to overwhelm him with futile questions while leading him down the steep streets of Old Newcastle, until they got to the door of a large and gorgeous eating-house.

“You must be hungry,” said Mr. St. John. “I’ve ordered dinner here for a treat, because my old housekeeper, although an excellent creature, does not rise above mutton chops and boiled potatoes, and one should do honour to an old friend.”

Mr. Little shook his head. “I am not hungry,” he answered, while his friend unfolded his napkin opposite him. He felt inclined to say, grimly, “When a man has let loose a mysterious unknown terror that has been locked up in Hotspur Hall for centuries, he doesn’t feel inclined for roast mutton and Bass’s beer.”

But the place, the tables, plates, napkins, the smell of cooking, stopped him, and he felt stopped also by the face – the jovial, red face – of his old friend. This was not the Esmé to whom he had longed to unbosom himself. And he felt very irritated.

Mr. Little’s irritation began to subside when he followed his friend to his lodgings.

“You asked for a bed, in your telegram,” said the Reverend Esmé St. John, as they left the eating-rooms, “and I have had a bed put in a spare room of mine, just to show my hospitable intentions. But I shan’t be the least bit offended if you prefer to go to the hotel, my dear fellow. You see, I think a clergyman, trying to reclaim the people of these slums, ought to live among his flock, and no better than they. But there is no reason why anyone else should live in this crazy old barrack.”

They walked, in the twilight, along some precipitous streets, lined with tinkers’ dens and old-clothes shops, under the high-level bridge, over whose colossal span the square old castle stood out black against the sky.

Mr. Little crept through a battered wooden gateway, and picked his way among the puddles, the fallen beams, and the refuse heaps of a courtyard. A light appeared at a window.

“Here we are,” said Esmé, and they followed an old, witch-like woman, herself following a thin, black cat, up some crazy wooden stairs, and into a suite of low, large rooms. Mr. St. John held up a lantern. The room in which they stood was utterly dismantled, the very wainscoting torn out, the ceiling gaping in rent lath and plaster. In a corner stood a bed, a crazy chest of drawers, and washing apparatus, a table, and chair; and in the next room, where the old woman’s light had preceded them, was a similar bed, a shelf of books, a large black cross nailed to the wall, and a wooden step for kneeling.

“That’s my room,” said the clergyman. “You may have it if you prefer. But here’s a fireplace in this one, so you’d better keep it.”

So saying, Mr. St. John applied a match to the faggots, and the gaunt apartment was flooded with a red light.

“I must make some arrowroot for an old woman of mine,” said the clergyman, producing a tin can and saucepan. “May I make it on your fire? ”

Mr. Little watched him in silence, then suddenly said; “Esmé, I thought at first you were changed from old days, but I see you are still a saint. Alas! I fear it is I who have changed but too sadly,” and he sighed.

“You are growing too fat,” answered Mr. St. John good-humouredly, but quite missing the fact that this was the exordium of a confession. Then, to Mr. Little’s annoyance, he asked him leave to carry the arrowroot to his old woman, who lived in a lane hard by. Mr. Little remained seated by the fire, while the housekeeper (since she must be dignified by such a title) unpacked his portmanteau. Yes, indeed, this was the man to whom he could make his confession, and this was the place – this dismantled, tumbledown old mansion, tenanted now only by a few poor bargees’ families and by countless generations of rats. And Mr. Little put another piece of coal on, in preparation of the nightly conference he was about to have.

Presently Mr. St. John returned.

“Esmé,” said Mr. Little, putting his hand on his friend’s sleeve, “I wish to speak to you.”

“About what?” asked Mr. St. John. “It’s very late to begin talking.”

“About myself,” answered Mr. Little, gravely.

“Do you want anything else? Would you like some brandy and water, or another pillow? You may have mine – or an additional blanket?” asked his friend.

Mr. Little shook his head. “I have all I want in the way of material comforts.”

“In that case,” replied the clergyman, “I shall leave you at once. If, as you imply, you want spiritual comforts, you must wait till tomorrow, for I am perfectly worn out, and have to be up tomorrow at half-past four. I’ve been nursing a man from the chemical works these five nights. Good-night!” and, taking his candle, Mr. St. John walked into his room, leaving his friend greatly disconcerted by this want of sympathy.

The following day Mr. Little accompanied his friend on one of his rounds. After visiting a number of squalid places, where Mr. Little would certainly have thought about measles and small-pox had he not been thinking about the mystery of Hotspur Hall, they returned to the row of houses, once fashionable mansions, with their fronts on the river, among which loomed, next to the black and crumbling former Town Hall, the shell of a family mansion in which they were lodged.

“This was once the fashionable part of Newcastle,” said Mr. St. John. “An old lady of ninety once told me she could remember the time when this street used to be crowded with coaches and footmen and link boys of a winter’s night. I want to show you my mission-room; I’m very proud of it.”

They entered a black passage, close to an inexpressibly shabby public-house, and ascended a wide stone staircase, unswept for ages, as was attested by the cabbage-stalks and herring-heads which lay about in various stages of decomposition. On the first landing a rope was stretched, and a line of clothes, or rather rags, drying after the washtub, formed a picturesque screen before several open doors, whence issued squealing of babies, grind of sewing machines, and various unsavoury odours. Mr. St. John unlocked a door and admitted his friend into a large hall, gracefully decorated with pastoral stucco mouldings, but filled with church seats, and whose raised extremity, suggestive of the dais for an orchestra, was occupied by an altar duly appointed according to ritualistic notions. The place smelt considerably of stale tobacco and damp straw.

“These were the former assembly rooms,” explained Mr. St. John; “and this, which is now my little chapel for the lowest scum of Newcastle slums, was once the ballroom. What would those ladies in hoops and powder think of the change, I wonder?”

Mr. Little saw his opportunity.

“This place must be haunted,” he said. “By-the-way, Esmé, what are your views on the subject of ghosts and the supernatural? I should be very interested to know.”

Mr. St. John had locked the door behind them.

“Never mention the word ghost before me,” he exclaimed; “it drives me perfectly wild to see all the tom-fooling that has been going on of late about apparitions, haunted houses, secret chambers, and all that blasphemous rubbish. It is really a retribution of Heaven to see you agnostic wiseacres taking up such contemptible twaddle. Pm very sorry to hear that you have been in correspondence with those people, Little.”

“But—” objected Mr. Little.

“No buts for me!” cried the Reverend Esmé St. John, hotly; “I can not conceive how any man of education and character can fiddle-faddle about idiotic superstitions which it is the duty of every Christian and every gentleman to pluck out of the minds of the vulgar.”

It was clear that this was not the moment to begin a confession about the mysterious room at Hotspur.

“How surprised he will be,” thought Mr. Little (and a vague sense of satisfaction mingled with the horror of the thought), “when he hears that I, even I, the sceptical, antinomian Little, have come in contact with mysteries more strange and awful than any ever examined into by any society for psychical research.”

Despite his old friend’s want of sympathy, Mr. Decimus Little continued to lodge with the Reverend Esmé St. John, in the grimy and crumbling old mansion by the Tyneside, following him about on his various errands of mercy. “A man situated like me,” Mr. Little had said to himself, “a great sinner (if you like the pious formula of former ages), a character predestined to evil (if you prefer the more modern phraseology of determinism), does well to live in the shadow of a truly good man: his saintliness is a bulwark against evil spirits; or, at all events, the sight of perfect serenity and purity of mind must calm a deeply troubled spirit.” Indeed, he more than once began to make this remark, in terms even more subtle, to his friend; but Mr. St. John, whether from fear of Mr. Little’s dialectic power, which might shake some of his most cherished beliefs, or from some other reason, invariably turned a deaf ear to all such beginnings of confession.

But either the serenity of the ritualistic philanthropist was inadequate to calm a brain so over-excited or the evil spirits let loose by Mr. Little made short work of the bulwarks of Esmé’s saintliness. The thought of that opened door began to haunt him like a nightmare: the effort at guessing what had been liberated when that door was opened wore out his energies. Was it a monster – a poor, loathsome, half-human thing, hiding, perhaps lying starving at this moment, in some corner of the castle: a thing without mind, or speech, or shape, but endowed with monstrous strength, starting forth in the night and throttling the unrightful owner or his young children with stupid glee? Or, more horrible almost, forcing by its presence that honourable and kindly old man into crime; tempting him, with the fear lest this hideousness should become known to the world, into spilling the blood of what seemed but a loathly reptile, but might be his third cousin, or his great-uncle? Mr. Little buried his face in his pillow at the thought. But it might be worse still – in that room might have been enclosed some ghastly mediaeval plague, some crumbling long-dead corpse, whose every particle was ready to take wing and spread forgotten diseases over the country. Or was it something less tangible, less conceivable – a ghost, a demon, some fearful supernatural evil?

Every morning, when his tea was set down by the housekeeper upon the rickety table in his dismantled bedroom, Mr. Little would unfold, with trembling fingers, the local newspaper, half expecting that his eye would fall upon a notice headed “Hotspur Hall.” And there were moments when he could scarce resist the impulse of rushing to the station, and buying a ticket for the village nearest Hotspur.

But a stop was put to such fears about a week after his arrival at Newcastle; alas! only to be succeeded by fears much more terrible. Returning home one day he saw a letter on his table; a presentiment told him it was about that. Yet he shook all over when he saw the address on the back of the envelope, “Hotspur Hall, Northumberland.” He sank on to a chair, and was for some time unable to open the letter. It was from Sir Hugh – Sir Hugh writing to the guest, the cousin who had betrayed all the sacred laws of hospitality, to inform him of all the horrors in which his act had involved an innocent, honourable, and happy household. Mr. Little groaned, and held the letter unopened. Then suddenly he opened it, tore it open madly. It ran as follows:

My dear Little: – I have been too busy of late to let you know that Edwardes discovered in your room here, two days after your sudden departure from Hotspur, a whole outfit which you had apparently forgotten. It consists of a shirt, a pair of check breeches, two white ties, a coloured silk handkerchief, a sponge, and a razor-strop. Let us know where you wish all this to be sent. I write to relieve your mind on the subject, as you have doubtless missed these valuables. Lady Hotspur and Harry unite in hoping that you are enjoying yourself, and that we may see you soon again.

Yours, sincerely,

Hugh North Hotspur.

P.S. – I may tell you – but in strict confidence – a piece of news that will doubtless give you pleasure. Our Hal is engaged since the day before yesterday to the Honourable Cynthia Blenkinsop, whom you admired the evening of the Yeomanry ball. The wedding is for next May.

What did this mean? They did not suspect him, that was clear; and nothing terrible had occurred, that was clear also. What then? Was it possible that… But Mr. Little’s eyes rested on the postscript. Harry Hotspur engaged to the Honourable Cynthia Blenkinsop: a marriage between the two hereditary enemies, whose enmity dated from the time of Chevy Chase! And there returned to his mind the ancient Northumbrian prophecy (he could not quite pronounce it in the original), that as long as the fell is green and the moor is purple, as long as deer haunt the woods (they don’t, thought Mr. Little) and the sea-mew the rocks, as long as the secret door at the Hall remains closed, so long will never a Hotspur wed a Blenkinsop.

The secret door had been opened, they knew it, and with its opening the curse had been removed from the family. The heir might laugh, though he had come of age (he had laughed at Mr. Little’s wet clothes, if you remember); he might marry a Miss Blenkinsop; the door had been opened, and he had opened it!

Mr. Little jumped up from his chair and rushed to his friend’s door.

“Esmé,” he cried, “we’ll dine at the Kafe” (that being the local pronunciation of the word Café) “tonight; and here’s a sovereign for the poor woman who broke her leg…. Harry Hotspur is going—” But he stopped himself, and when the clergyman opened the door, astounded at these high spirits, and asking why this sudden launching into festivities and lavish charities, he could only answer, “Only a letter I’ve had from Sir Hugh Hotspur. It seems – it seems I left quite a lot of things behind; a pair of check trousers among others. Quite valuable, you know – quite valuable!”

But Mr. Little’s happiness – nay, self-congratulation – came to a speedy end. That night, as he lay awake, owing to the unwonted luxury of coffee after dinner, a thought struck him. If the – the thing, the mystery, the whatever it was, had been liberated from the secret chamber, as was proved beyond doubt, not only by his consciousness of having opened the door, but by the news in Sir Hugh’s letter; and if, at the same time, it had not manifested itself to the inhabitants of the Hall, as was likewise clearly the case from the cheerful tone in which the master of Hotspur wrote, why, then what had become of it? Mr. Little, who believed in the indestructibility of force, could not have imagined it to have come to an end; and, if still existing, it must be somewhere…

At this moment a sound – a moan, which made his blood run cold – issued from the darkness of the room. Mr. Little struck a light. The bare, dismantled room, with its unwainscoted walls and torn lath ceiling, was empty, and its bareness admitted of no hiding-place anywhere.

“It is the wind in the chimney!” he said to himself, and extinguished his candle.

But the ghastly moan, this time ending in a sort of gurgling laugh, was repeated, and with it a horrible thought flashed across Mr. Little’s mind: What if that mysterious something should attach itself to the man who had disturbed its long seclusion – if the Terror of Hotspur Hall should have fastened upon the rash creature who had let it loose!

And again there issued from the darkness of that dismantled room the moan, the gurgling laugh. In what shape would it reveal itself? Mr. Little, in the course of his studies, had read M. Maury’s “Magie an Moyen Age”; a similar work by the Rev. Baring Gould; the valuable “Essay on Superstition in the Middle Ages,” by Dr. Schindler, Royal Prussian Sanitary Councillor and Man-midwife at Greiffenberg; he had also once bought the works of Theophrastus Bombastes of Hohenheim, called “Paracelsus,” but found them too boring to read. So that his mind was well stocked with alternatives among which a mediaeval mystery could select. His suspicions were one day aroused by a strange-looking man, dark and grimy, who got on to the Tyne steamer one evening at Wallsend, kept his hat over his face and his eyes fixed upon Mr. Little, and then dodged him up and down Newcastle to the very door of his house. “Who are you?” suddenly exclaimed Mr. Little, stopping short and facing him. He half expected the man to unmask – that is, to take off his hat, and, displaying the face of a corpse, to answer, like the mysterious stranger in Calderon’s play, “I am thyself.” But the man muttered something about its being very hard on a fellow; that since Mr. St. John had been good to the wife, he ought also to be good to the husband; that he had never touched a drop of liquor till after his marriage with that woman – he hadn’t, etc. Mr. Little turned away in disgust. On another occasion, his suspicions were awakened by a large black dog, which insisted upon following him, and even walked into his room, but he proved to have his master’s address on his collar, and was consequently sent home next morning.

One day, again, as Mr. Little was leaning out of the lattice window, looking at the red roofs of Gateshead, the solitary black church on the green mound, surrounded by cinder-heaps and chemical refuse, above the Tyne, his eyes fell upon the grey mass of water which rolled slowly below him; and it seemed to him as if, suddenly, in the curl of a heavy-laden wave, he had seen – a face, upturned eyes staring at him. “Pooh!” said Esmé St. John, whom slumming had made slightly cynical, “it’s only some wretched creature who’s drowned himself. They’ll take him up at the next dead-house.”

But Mr. Little shook his head: those eyes had looked at him.

Mr. Little had wondered whether he would be haunted: he soon began to be so, or very nearly. He scarcely ventured to enter his room alone, lest he should find waiting for him, he knew not what; or to approach his own bed, lest, on raising the sheet, he should find it already horribly occupied. Every knock made him start; and it was only by an effort that he could induce himself to cry “Come in!” to the old woman who brought him his hot water. But the day was serene compared with the night. He would lie awake for hours listening to the sullen lapping of the Tyne under the windows, to the scurrying of the rats round the walls, the creaking of broken woodwork in the wind, the rattling of the incessant trains over the high-level bridge close by: lie awake breathless, feeling a presence in the room, but never daring to open his eyes; feeling it coming nearer and nearer, and at the same time expanding, filling the place, choking him, yet never daring to look; until the horrible consciousness would die away as it had come, and there remain only the sickening terror it had brought, and the speculations, while listening to the strokes of the Gateshead clock, as to what the terror might be. Yet, was it something visible, definable, or was it merely a vague curse?

“Esmé,” said Mr. Little one day, “do you consider – do you consider – that a man who knows his life to be under a curse; well, suppose something like insanity, you know: but not that – nothing really hereditary, merely a personal thing, a curse, a something making life quite unbearable to him and everyone else – do you think that such a man would have a right to marry?”

Mr. St. John looked at him long and fixedly. “Such a man, in my humble opinion, ought to have a good course of iron, or phosphorus, or, best of all, of whipping, to take down his conceit; and he certainly oughtn’t to get married, unless he knew for certain that the lady would administer some such treatment to him.”

“You have grown very coarse, Esmé!” exclaimed Mr. Little, “I admit that you do a great deal of good to others, but I sometimes question whether a man of refinement by associating wholesale with laundresses and bargees does much good to himself.”

“Very likely not,” replied the clergyman, dryly. “Happily, some men aren’t always thinking all day long whether they are doing good to themselves or not.”

“He is right, all the same, he is right,” said Mr. Little to himself.

Whatever the coarseness of fibre of Mr. St. John, and his lack of all power of sympathy and intuition, there was no denying that he had given expression to a very sound ethical view.

No; a man in the position of Decimus Little must not marry. He must not drag another life into the atmosphere of horror with which, in one second of lawlessness, he had surrounded himself. It was impossible to conceive a happy home with the mysterious horror of Hotspur Hall constantly in the background. No; he must never marry. But had he not foreseen this answer before putting the question to his friend? Nay, had he not always felt, long before setting his foot in Hotspur Hall, that some dark fate would come between him and happiness; that the joys of wife and children were not for a creature like him, unreal and lawless, marked for some strange and horrible destiny? All this had not been mere silly despondency, or, as his friend Esmé would have thought, morbid self-importance.

He determined to write to his cousin and break off at once. But how convey to this charming, buoyant, and decidedly positivistic and positive young student of Girton a fact so contrary to all her beliefs and tendencies, as that an unknown terror, enclosed for centuries in the secret chamber of a border castle, had suddenly, through his fault, shunted itself upon him? Mr. Little revolved the matter in his mind, and found a melancholy little pleasure in so doing. He determined at last upon merely telling the young lady that this marriage had become impossible, and hinting dimly to her that this was due to no diminution of affection, no want of duty on his part, but to a terrible and mysterious curse (not insanity, nor consumption – he would underline that) under which he was labouring, and which forbade his ever sharing a life which meant unspeakable horror.

Mr. Little sat for a long time before his writing-case, resting his chin on his hand, and jotting down half sentences at intervals.

Yes, he could see it all: the surprise and mystification of the dear girl, her tears of rage (he knew she would rage), her feeling of faintness and sickness, her sudden calling upon her bosom friend, Miss Hopper (the student of political economy, with the cropped hair and divided skirts) – he had always disliked Miss Hopper, an unwomanly young person – to shed light upon it. And even Miss Hopper, who, he knew, had once said she was surprised her Gwendolen could love any man, and least of all a little, grey-haired man – even Miss Hopper would have to admit that her friend’s unhappy lover was marvellously magnanimous. And then Gwendolen would write imploringly to know what had happened; nay, rather (he knew her well), she would come herself, arrive at Newcastle, drive to his house, and then there would be a grand explanation. Esmé St. John would be present, that would make everything proper, and Esmé would be so astounded; and Gwendolen would go on her knees to him and he on his knees to Gwendolen, and finally they would bid each other farewell, and Esmé would take her hand, and bid her kiss Decimus, and then lead her away to the nearest sisterhood, where she would immediately proceed to turn hospital nurse for the rest of her days, and wear a lock of Decimus’s hair round her neck under a scapular.

Mr. Little covered his eyes with his hands, and began to cry. For the first time since opening that door he felt quite peaceable and pleased with himself.

He was startled by the entrance of Martha, Mr. St. John’s old housekeeper.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” she said, making a violent effort over a strong northern accent, “but would you mind my dusting a little?”

“Dust away,” answered Mr. Little, sadly, implying that he, too, was dust and ashes.

In a room as scantily furnished as was Mr. Little’s, the operation of dusting would, one might imagine, be necessarily a brief one; but Martha contrived to prolong it singularly. She was passing the duster for the fourth or fifth time over the lid of Mr. Little’s portmanteau, when she suddenly turned round, and said—

“I beg your pardon, sir.”

“I did not say anything,” answered Mr. Little, gloomily.

“No, sir, no more you did, sir. But I was a-saying, sir, if as I might take the liberty, sir, as I see – but there was no prying, sir, I assure you, for I’m greatly averse to prying into folks’ concerns, especially the gentry’s, and it was all casual like, as we say. I was a-saying, sir, seeing how you received a letter from Sir Hugh Hotspur the other day; if you would just put in a word for me now as they’ve got a new butler, for it would indeed be a charity, let alone all the injustice, to get a body back into her rights, and a widow, too, as I’ve been these fifteen years, and with only a third cousin in the world.”

“My good woman,” interrupted Mr. Little, “explain yourself. I fail to comprehend a word.”

“Well, then, sir,” proceeded Martha, resuming the violent efforts to get the better of her Northumbrian accent, “you should know that I was once in a better place than this, as good a place as any of them have, … for I was laundress at Hotspur Hall, and a better laundress you never seed, sir, nor linen better kept than mine was. And then, as Heaven would have it, on account of the wickedness of men, I lost my place through no fault of mine, but merely all along of that room in the peel tower, the room as is lit from the top and as has no windows, as perhaps, sir, you know.”

“Hush! ” cried Mr. Little, with a gesture like that of a man fainting, “for mercy’s sake, woman … explain … that room … the room on the topmost landing of the peel tower…”

“Yes, sir, with a door as is hidden in the wall – secret like.”

“You opened that door? You were sent away for opening that door? Answer me – for Heaven’s sake, Martha, answer me!” and Mr. Little clutched the old lady’s arm.

“Lor, sir! there was no harm meant. I did not mean to be prying into other folks’ concerns, as I always says is best left alone. Although there is such as is always a-prying into everything—”

“You opened that door? Yes, or no? ”

“Well, yes, sir, I did, as I was a-going to tell you, sir,” cried Martha, terrified at Mr. Little’s face, and trying to extricate her arm from his hand. “I beg your pardon, sir, as you’re a-tearing of my sleeve.”

Mr. Little let her go.

“That door – the last door in the peel tower, on the left; a door hidden in the wall; the door of a room without a window; a room lit from the battlements above?”

“Yes, sir,” answered Martha, beginning to quake all over; “exactly as you says, sir. The topmost door in the peel tower, on the left; a door hidden in the wall. It was all along of opening that, as you says, sir.”

“Then, Martha,” said Mr. Little, solemnly, sitting upright, and fixing his eyes on the old woman’s, “you were sent away from Hotspur Hall for opening that door – the door of the secret chamber!”

“Well, sir, it may be called the secret chamber, for all as I know now, and the butler would have had me keep it a secret what I saw there, sure enough – all them bottles of wine as he had hidden away to sell to the Blue Bull at Blenkinsop; but of my time there was no one as had a right to call it a secret room, seeing as it was the room as we used to put the drying lines in o’ winter, when it was too damp to dry the clothes out of doors, as maybe it still is, on account of that draught from the skylight in the roof.”

“Enough!” cried Mr. Little. “Woman, not one word more!”

•   •   •   •   •

Visitors at Hotspur Hall still continue to look for the secret room, to hang out towels from the windows, and pump the servants, all in vain. Young Harry Hotspur was never known to laugh quite as much as that time that Mr. Little appeared at breakfast in the clothes which he had worn that night on the fell; at least, he rarely laughed except when he chanced to see Mr. Little. As to the marriage question, and the difficulty of reconciling it to the prophecy that so long as the fell was green and the moor purple, and the deer haunted the woods and the sea-mew the rocks, as long as the secret chamber at Hotspur Hall remained undiscovered, so long would never a Hotspur wed a Blenkinsop, it might be interesting to examine into this incongruity in a serious psychological spirit. Such persons as are destitute of any taste for serious psychology merely answer to any objection of the kind, that the Honourable Cynthia Blenkinsop was possessed not merely of a charming person but of sixty thousand a year; and that a secret chamber inhabited by an unspecified horror, although a very delightful heirloom in an ancient family, is not sufficient capital in these days of ostentatious living and riotous luxury. As regards Mr. Decimus Little, he is at present in Turkey, on a trial trip with his cousin Gwendolen and her mother, which will decide whether or not he shall be married to her next January by the Reverend Esmé St. John.

—

Winthrop’s Adventure

(1881)

I

All the intimates at the villa S——— knew Julian Winthrop to be an odd sort of creature, but I am sure no one ever expected from him such an eccentric scene as that which took place on the first Wednesday of last September.

Winthrop had been a constant visitor at the Countess S———’s villa ever since his arrival in Florence, and the better we knew, the more we liked, his fantastic character. Although quite young, he had shown very considerable talent for painting, but everyone seemed to agree that this talent would never come to anything. His nature was too impressionable, too mobile, for steady work; and he cared too much for all kinds of art to devote himself exclusively to any one; above all, he had too ungovernable a fancy, and too uncontrollable a love of detail, to fix and complete any impression in an artistic shape; his ideas and fancies were constantly shifting and changing like the shapes in a kaleidoscope, and their instability and variety were the chief sources of his pleasure. All that he did and thought and said had an irresistible tendency to become arabesque, feelings and moods gliding strangely into each other, thoughts and images growing into inextricable tangles, just as when he played he passed insensibly from one fragment to another totally incongruous, and when he drew one form merged into another beneath his pencil. His head was like his sketch-book – full of delightful scraps of colour, and quaint, graceful forms, none finished, one on the top of the other: leaves growing out of heads, houses astride on animals, scraps of melodies noted down across scraps of verse, gleanings from all quarters – all pleasing, and all jumbled into a fantastic, useless, but very delightful whole. In short, Winthrop’s artistic talent was frittered away by his love of the picturesque, and his career was spoiled by his love of adventure; but, such as he was, he was almost a work of art, a living arabesque himself.

On this particular Wednesday we were all seated out on the terrace of the villa Siat Bellosguardo, enjoying the beautiful serene yellow moonlight, and the delightful coolness, after an intensely hot day. The Countess S———, who was a great musician, was trying over a violin sonata with one of her friends in the drawing-room, of which the doors opened on to the terrace. Winthrop, who had been particularly gay all the evening, had cleared away the plates and cups from the tea-table, had pulled out his sketch-book and begun drawing in his drowsy, irrelevant fashion – acanthus-leaves uncurling into sirens’ tails, satyrs growing out of passion-flowers, little Dutch manikins in tail coats and pigtails peeping out of tulip-leaves under his whimsical pencil, while he listened partly to the music within, partly to the conversation without.

When the violin sonata had been tried over, passage by passage, sufficiently often, the Countess, instead of returning to us on the terrace, addressed us from the drawing-room:

“Remain where you are,” she said; “I want you to hear an old air which I discovered last week among a heap of rubbish in my father-in-law’s lumber-room. I think it quite a treasure, as good as a wrought-iron ornament found among a heap of old rusty nails, or a piece of Gubbio majolica found among cracked coffee-cups. It is very beautiful to my mind. Just listen.”

The Countess was an uncommonly fine singer, without much voice, and not at all emotional, but highly delicate and refined in execution, and with a great knowledge of music. The air which she deemed beautiful could not fail really to be so; but it was so totally different from all we moderns are accustomed to, that it seemed, with its exquisitely finished phrases, its delicate vocal twirls and spirals, its symmetrically ordered ornaments, to take one into quite another world of musical feeling, of feeling too subdued and artistic, too subtly and cunningly balanced, to move us more than superficially – indeed, it could not move at all, for it expressed no particular state of feeling; it was difficult to say whether it was sad or cheerful; all that could be said was that it was singularly graceful and delicate.

This is how the piece affected me, and I believe, in less degree, all the rest of our party; but, turning toward Winthrop, I was surprised at seeing how very strong an impression its very first bars had made on him. He was seated at the table, his back turned toward me, but I could see that he had suddenly stopped drawing, and was listening with intense eagerness. At one moment I almost fancied I saw his hand tremble as it lay on his sketch-book, as if he were breathing spasmodically. I pulled my chair near his; there could be no doubt, his whole frame was quivering.

“Winthrop,” I whispered.

He paid no attention to me, but continued listening intently, and his hand unconsciously crumpled up the sheet he had drawn on.

“Winthrop,” I repeated, touching his shoulder.

“Be quiet,” he answered, quickly, as if shaking me off; “let me listen.”

There was something almost fierce in his manner; and this intense emotion, caused by a piece which did not move any of the rest of us, struck me as being very odd.

He remained with his head between his hands till the end. The piece concluded with a very intricate and beautiful passage of execution, and with a curious sort of sighing fall from a high note on to a lower one, short and repeated at various intervals, with lovely effect.

“Bravo! beautiful!” cried everyone. “A real treasure; so quaint and so elegant, and so admirably sung!”

I looked at Winthrop. He had turned round; his face was flushed, and he leaned against his chair as if oppressed by emotion.

The Countess returned to the terrace. “I am glad you like the piece,” she said; “it is a graceful thing. Good Heavens! Mr. Winthrop!” she suddenly interrupted herself; “what is the matter? are you ill?”

For ill he certainly did look. He rose and, making an effort, answered in a husky, uncertain voice:

“It’s nothing; I suddenly felt cold. I think I’ll go in – or rather, no, I’ll stay. What is – what is that air you have just sung?”

“That air?” she answered, absently, for the sudden change in Winthrop’s manner put everything else out of her thoughts. “That air? Oh! it is by a very forgotten composer of the name of Barbella, who lived somewhere about the year 1780.” It was evident that she considered this question as a sort of mask to his sudden emotion.

“Would you let me see the score?” he asked, quickly.

“Certainly. Will you come into the drawing-room? I left it on the piano.”

The piano-candles were still lit; and as they stood there she watched his face with as much curiosity as myself. But Winthrop took no notice of either of us; he had eagerly snatched the score, and was looking at it in a fixed, vacant way. When he looked up, his face was ashy; he handed me the score mechanically. It was an old, yellow, blurred manuscript, in some now disused clef, and the initial words, written in a grand, florid style, were: “Sei Regina, io son pastore.” The Countess was still under the impression that Winthrop was trying to hide his agitation by pretending great interest in the song; but I, having seen his extraordinary emotion during its performance, could not doubt of the connection between them.

“You say the piece is very rare,” said Winthrop; “do you – do you then think that no one besides yourself is acquainted with it at present?”

“Of course I can’t affirm that,” answered the Countess, “but this much I know, that Professor G———, who is one of the most learned of musical authorities, and to whom I showed the piece, had heard neither of it nor of its composer, and that he positively says it exists in no musical archives in Italy or in Paris.”

“Then how,” I asked, “do you know that it is of about the year 1780?”

“By the style; Professor G——— compared it at my request with some compositions of that day, and the style perfectly coincides.”

“You think, then,” continued Winthrop, slowly, but eagerly – “you think, then, that no one else sings it at present?”

“I should say not; at least, it seems highly unlikely.”

Winthrop was silent, and continued looking at the score, but, as it seemed to me, mechanically.

Some of the rest of the party had meanwhile entered the drawing-room.

“Did you notice Mr. Winthrop’s extraordinary behaviour?” whispered a lady to the Countess. “What has happened to him?”

“I can’t conceive. He is excessively impressionable, but I don’t see how that piece could impress him at all; it is a sweet thing, but so unemotional,” I answered.

“That piece!” replied the Countess; “you don’t suppose that piece has anything to do with it?”

“Indeed I do; it has everything to do with it. In short, I noticed that from the very first notes it violently affected him.”

“Then all these inquiries about it—”

“Are perfectly genuine.”

“It can not be the piece itself which has moved him, and he can scarcely have heard it before. It’s very odd. There certainly is something the matter with him.”

There certainly was; Winthrop was excessively pale and agitated, all the more so as he perceived that he had become an object of universal curiosity. He evidently wished to make his escape, but was afraid of doing so too suddenly. He was standing behind the piano, looking mechanically at the old score.

“Have you ever heard that piece before, Mr. Winthrop?” asked the Countess, unable to restrain her curiosity.

He looked up, much discomposed, and answered after a moment’s hesitation, “How can I have heard it, since you are the sole possessor of it?”

“The sole possessor? Oh! I never said that. I thought it unlikely, but perhaps there is some other. Tell me, is there another? Where did you hear that piece before?”

“I did not say I had heard it before,” he rejoined, hurriedly.

“But have you, or have you not?” persisted the Countess.

“I never have,” he answered, decidedly, but immediately reddened as if conscious of prevarication. “Don’t ask me any questions,” he added, quickly; “it worries me,” and in a minute he was off.

We looked at each other in mute astonishment. This astonishing behaviour, this mixture of concealment and rudeness, above all, the violent excitement in which Winthrop had evidently been, and his unaccountable eagerness respecting the piece which the Countess had sung – all this entirely baffled our efforts at discovery.

“There is some mystery at the bottom of it,” we said, and further we could not get.

Next evening, as we were seated once more in the Countess’s drawing-room, we of course reverted to Winthrop’s extraordinary behaviour.

“Do you think he will return soon?” asked one of us.

“I should think he would rather let the matter blow over, and wait till we had forgotten his absurdity,” answered the Countess.

At that moment the door opened, and Winthrop entered.

He seemed confused and at a loss what to say; he did not answer our trivial remarks, but suddenly burst out, as if with a great effort: “I have come to beg you to forgive my last night’s behaviour. Forgive my rudeness and my want of openness; but I could not have explained anything then: that piece, you must know, had given me a great shock.”

“A great shock? And how could it give you a shock?” we all exclaimed.

“You surely don’t mean that so prim a piece as that could have affected you?” asked the Countess’s sister.

“If it did,” added the Countess, “it is the greatest miracle music ever worked.”

“It is difficult to explain the matter,” hesitated Winthrop; “but – in short – that piece gave me a shock, because as soon as I heard the first bars I recognized it.”

“And you told me you had never heard it before!” exclaimed the Countess, indignantly.

“I know did; it was not true, but neither was it quite false. All I can say is, that I knew the piece; whether I had heard it before, or not, I knew it – in fact,” he dashed out, “you will think me mad, but I had long doubted whether the piece existed at all, and I was so moved just because your performance proved that it did exist. Look here,” and pulling a sketch-book from his pocket he was just about to open it when he stopped – “Have you got the notes of that piece?” he asked hurriedly.

“Here they are,” and the Countess handed him the old roll of music.

He did not look at it, but turned over the leaves of his sketch-book.

“See,” he said, after a minute; “look at this,” and he pushed the open sketch-book across the table to us. On it, among a lot of sketches, were some roughly ruled lines, with some notes scrawled in pencil, and the words, “Sei Regina, io Pastor sono.”

“Why, this is the beginning of the very air!” exclaimed the Countess. “How did you get this?”

We compared the notes in the sketch-book with those on the score; they were the same, but in another clef and tone.

Winthrop sat opposite, looking doggedly at us. After a moment he remarked:

“They are the same notes, are they not? Well, this pencil-scrawl was done in July of last year, while the ink of this score has been dry ninety years; yet when I wrote down these notes, I swear I did not know that any such score existed, and until yesterday I disbelieved it.”

“Then,” remarked one of the party, “there are only two explanations: either you composed this melody yourself, not knowing that someone else had done so ninety years ago; or, you heard that piece without knowing what it was.”

“Explanation!” cried Winthrop, contemptuously; “why, don’t you see, that it is just what needs explaining! Of course, I either composed it myself or heard it, but which of the two was it?”

We remained much humbled and silenced.

“This is a very astonishing puzzle,” remarked the Countess, “and I think it useless to rack our brains about it since Mr. Winthrop is the only person who can explain it. We don’t and can’t understand; he can and must explain it himself. I don’t know,” she added, “whether there is any reason for not explaining the mystery to us; but if not, I wish you would.”

“There is no reason,” he answered, “except that you would set me down as a maniac. The story is so absurd a one – you will never believe me – and yet—”

“Then there is a story at the bottom of it!” exclaimed the Countess; “what is it? Can’t you tell it us?”

Winthrop gave a sort of deprecatory shrug, and trifled with the paper-cutters and dog’s-eared the books on the table. “Well,” he said at last, “if you really wish to know – why – perhaps I might as well tell it you; only don’t tell me afterward that I am mad. Nothing can alter the fact of the real existence of that piece; and, as long as you continue to regard it as unique, I can not but regard my adventure as being true.”

We were afraid lest he might slip away through all these deprecatory premisings, and that after all we might hear no story whatever; so we summoned him to begin at once, and he, keeping his head well in the shadow of the lampshade, and scribbling as usual on his sketchbook, began his narrative, at first slowly and hesitatingly, with plentiful interruptions, but, as he grew more interested in it, becoming extremely rapid and dramatic, and exceedingly minute in details.

II

You must know, (said Winthrop) that about a year and a half ago I spent the autumn with some cousins of mine, rambling about Lombardy. In poking into all sorts of odd nooks and corners, we made the acquaintance at M——— of a highly learned and highly snuffy old gentleman (I believe he was a count or a marchese), who went by the nickname of Maestro Fa Diesis (Master F-Sharp), and who possessed a very fine collection of things musical, a perfect museum. He had a handsome old palace, which was literally tumbling to pieces, and of which the whole first floor was taken up by his collections. His old manuscripts, his precious missals, his papyri, his autographs, his blackletter books, his prints and pictures, his innumerable ivory-inlaid harpsichords and ebony-fretted lutes and viols, lived in fine, spacious rooms, with carved oaken ceilings and painted window-frames, while he lived in some miserable little garret to the back, on what I can’t say, but I should judge, by the spectral appearance of his old woman-servant and of a half-imbecile boy who served him, on nothing more substantial than bean-husks and warm water. They seemed to suffer from this diet; but I suspect that their master must have absorbed some mysterious vivifying fluid from his manuscripts and old instruments, for he seemed to be made of steel, and was the most provokingly active old fellow, keeping one’s nerves in perpetual irritation by his friskiness and volubility. He cared for nothing in the wide world save his collections; he had cut down tree after tree, he had sold field after field and farm after farm; he had sold his furniture, his tapestries, his plate, his family papers, his own clothes. He would have taken the tiles off his roof and the glass out of his windows to buy some score of the sixteenth century, some illuminated mass-book or some Cremonese fiddle. For music itself I firmly believe he cared not a jot, and regarded it as useful only inasmuch as it had produced the objects of his passion, the things which he could spend all his life in dusting, labelling, counting, and cataloguing, for not a chord, not a note was ever heard in his house, and he would have died rather than spend a soldino on going to the opera.

My cousin, who is music-mad after a fashion, quickly secured the old gentleman’s good will by accepting a hundred commissions for the obtaining of catalogues and the attending of sales, and we were consequently permitted daily to enter that strange, silent house, full of musical things, and to examine its contents at our leisure, always, however, under old Fa Diesis’s vigilant supervision. The house, its contents, and proprietor formed a grotesque whole, which had a certain charm for me. I used often to fancy that the silence could be only apparent; that, as soon as the master had drawn his bolts and gone off to bed, all this slumbering music would awake, that the pictures of dead musicians would slip out of their frames, the glass cases fly open, the big-paunched, inlaid lutes turn into stately Flemish burghers, with brocaded doublets; the yellow, faded sides of the Cremonese bass-viols expand into the stiff satin hoops of powdered ladies; and the little ribbed mandolins put forth a particoloured leg and a bushy-haired head, and hop about as Provençal court dwarfs or Renaissance pages, while the Egyptian sistrum and fife-players would slip from off the hieroglyphics of the papyrus, and all the parchment palimpsests of Greek musicians turn into chlamys-robed auletes, and citharoedi; then the kettledrums and tam-tams would strike up, the organ-tubes would suddenly be filled with sound, the old gilded harpsichords would jingle like fury, the old chapel-master yonder, in his peruke and furred robe, would beat time on his picture-frame, and the whole motley company set to dancing; until all of a sudden old Fa Diesis, awakened by the noise, and suspecting thieves, would rush in wildly in his dressing-gown, a three-wicked kitchen lamp in one hand and his great-grandfather’s court sword in the other, when all the dancers and players would start and slide back into their frames and cases.

I should not, however, have gone so often to the old gentleman’s museum had not my cousin extorted from me the promise of a water-colour sketch of a picture of Palestrina, which, for some reason or other, she (for the cousin was a lady, which explains my docility) chose to consider as particularly authentic. It was a monster, a daub, which I shuddered at, and my admiration for Palestrina would have rather induced me to burn the hideous, blear-eyed, shoulderless thing; but musical folk have their whims, and hers was to hang a copy of this monstrosity over her grand piano. So I acceded, took my drawing-block and easel, and set off for Fa Diesis’s palace. This palace was a queer old place, full of ups and downs and twistings and turnings, and in going to the only tolerably lighted room of the house, whither the delightful subject for my brush had been transported for my convenience, we had to pass through a narrow and wriggling corridor somewhere in the heart of the building. In doing so we passed by a door up some steps.

“By the way,” exclaimed old Fa Diesis, “have I shown you this? ’Tis of no great value, but still, as a painter, it may interest you.” He mounted the steps, pushed open the door, which was ajar, and ushered me into a small, bleak, whitewashed lumber-room, peopled with broken bookshelves, crazy music-desks, and unsteady chairs and tables, the whole covered by a goodly layer of dust. On the walls were a few time-stained portraits in corselets and bob-wigs, the senatorial ancestors of Fa Diesis, who had had to make room for the bookshelves and instrument-cases filling the staterooms. The old gentleman opened a shutter, and threw the full light upon another old picture, from whose cracked surface he deliberately swept away the dust with the lusty sleeve of his fur-lined coat.

I approached it. “This is not a bad picture,” I said at once; “by no means a bad picture.”

“Indeed,” exclaimed Fa Diesis. “Oh, then, perhaps, I may sell it. What do you think? Is it worth much?”

I smiled. “Well, it is not a Raphael,” I answered; “but, considering its date and the way people then smeared, it is quite creditable.”

“Ah!” sighed the old fellow, much disappointed.

It was a half-length, life-size portrait of a man in the costume of the latter part of the last century – a pale lilac silk coat, a pale pea-green satin waistcoat, both extremely delicate in tint, and a deep, warm-tinted amber cloak; the voluminous cravat was loosened, the large collar flapped back, the body slightly turned, and the head somewhat looking over the shoulder, Cenci-fashion.

The painting was uncommonly good for an Italian portrait of the eighteenth century, and had much that reminded me, though, of course, vastly inferior technically, of Greuze – a painter I detest, and who yet fascinates me. The features were irregular and small, with intensely red lips and a crimson flush beneath the transparent bronzed skin; the eyes were slightly upturned, and looking sideward, in harmony with the turn of the head and the parted lips, and they were beautiful, brown, soft, like those of some animals, with a vague, wistful depth of look. The whole had the clear greyness, the hazy, downy touch of Greuze, and left that strange, mixed impression which all the portraits of his school do. The face was not beautiful; it had something at once sullen and effeminate, something odd and not entirely agreeable; yet it attracted and riveted your attention with its dark, warm colour, rendered all the more striking for the light, pearly, powdered locks, and the general lightness and haziness of touch.

“It is a very good portrait in its way,” I said, “though not of the sort that people buy. There are faults of drawing here and there, but the colour and touch are good. By whom is it?”

Old Fa Diesis, whose vision of heaps of banknotes to be obtained in exchange for the picture had been rudely cut short, seemed rather sulky.

“I don’t know by whom it is,” he grumbled. “If it’s bad it’s bad, and may remain here.”

“And whom does it represent?”

“A singer. You see he has got a score in his hand. A certain Rinaldi, who lived about a hundred years ago.”

Fa Diesis had rather a contempt for singers, regarding them as poor creatures, who were of no good, since they left nothing behind them that could be collected, except, indeed, in the case of Madame Banti, one of whose lungs he possessed in spirits of wine.

We went out of the room, and I set about my copy of that abominable old portrait of Palestrina. At dinner that day I mentioned the portrait of the singer to my cousins, and somehow or other I caught myself using expressions about it which I should not have used in the morning. In trying to describe the picture, my recollection of it seemed to differ from the original impression. It returned to my mind as something strange and striking. My cousin wished to see it, so the next morning she accompanied me to old Fa Diesis’s palace. How it affected her I don’t know; but for me it had a queer sort of interest, quite apart from that in the technical execution. There was something peculiar and unaccountable in the look of that face, a yearning, half-pained look, which I could not well define to myself. I became gradually aware that the portrait was, so to speak, haunting me. Those strange red lips and wistful eyes rose up in my mind. I instinctively, and without well knowing why, reverted to it in our conversation.

“I wonder who he was?” I said, as we sat in the square behind the cathedral apse, eating our ices in the cool autumn evening.

“Who?” asked my cousin.

“Why, the original of that portrait at old Fa Diesis’s; such a weird face! I wonder who he was?”

My cousins paid no attention to my speech, for they did not share that vague, unaccountable feeling with which the picture had inspired me, but as we walked along the silent porticoed streets, where only the illuminated sign of an inn or the chestnut-roasting brazier of a fruit-stall flickered in the gloom, and crossed the vast desolate square, surrounded by Oriental-like cupolas and minarets, where the green bronze condottiere rode on his green bronze charger – during our evening ramble through the quaint Lombard city my thoughts kept reverting to the picture, with its hazy, downy colour, and curious, unfathomed expression.

The next day was the last of our stay at M———, and I went to Fa Diesis’s palace to finish my sketch, to take leave, present thanks for his civility toward us, and inquire whether we could execute any commission for him. In going to the room where I had left my easel and painting-things, I passed through the dark, wriggling lobby, and by the door up the three steps. The door was ajar, and I entered the room where the portrait was. I approached and examined it carefully. The man was apparently singing, or rather about to sing, for the red, well-cut lips were parted; and in his hand – a beautiful, plump, white, blue-veined hand, strangely out of keeping with the brown, irregular face – he held an open roll of notes. The notes were mere unintelligible blotches, but I made out, written on the score, the name – Ferdinando Rinaldi, 1782; and above, the words, “Sei Regina, io Pastor sono.” The face had a beauty, a curious, irregular beauty, and in those deep, soft eyes there was something like a magnetic power, which I felt, and which others must have felt before me. I finished my sketch, strapped up my easel and paintbox, gave a parting snarl at the horrible, blear-eyed, shoulderless Palestrina, and prepared to leave. Fa Diesis, who, in his snuffy, fur-lined coat, the tassel of his tarnished blue skullcap bobbing over his formidable nose, was seated at a desk hard by, rose also, and politely escorted me through the passage.

“By the way,” I asked, “do you know an air called ‘Sei Regina, io Pastor sono?’”

“Sei Regina, io Pastor sono? No, such an air doesn’t exist.” All airs not in his library had no business to exist, even if they did.

“It must exist,” I persisted; “those words are written on the score held by the singer on that picture of yours.”

“That’s no proof,” he cried, peevishly; “it may be merely some fancy title, or else – or else it may be some rubbishy trunk air (aria di baule).”

“What is a trunk air?” I asked in amazement.

“A trunk air,” he explained, “was a wretched air – merely a few trumpery notes and lots of pauses, into which great singers used formerly to make their own variations. They used to insert them in every opera they sang in, and drag them all over the world; that was why they were called trunk airs. They had no merit of their own – no one ever cared to sing them except the singer to whom they belonged – no one ever kept such rubbish as that! It all went to wrap up sausages or make curl-papers.” And old Fa Diesis laughed his grim, little cackling laugh.

He then dropped the subject, and said:

“If I had an opportunity, or one of my illustrious family, of obtaining any catalogues of musical curiosities or attending any sales” – he was still searching for the first printed copy of Guido of Arezzo’s “Micrologus”; he had copies of all the other editions, a unique collection – there was also one specimen wanting to complete his set of Amati’s fiddles, one with fleurs-de-lis on the sounding-board, constructed for Charles IX of France – alas! he had spent years looking for that instrument – he would pay, yes, he, as I saw him there, he standing before me, would pay five hundred golden marenghi  [a Lombard coin struck by Napoleon after the battle of Marengo, and by which elderly people still occasionally count.]  for that violin with the fleurs-de-lis….

“Pardon me,” I interrupted, rather rudely; “may I see this picture again?”

We had come to the door, up the three steps.

“Certainly,” he answered, and continued his speech about the Amati violin with the fleurs-de-lis, getting more and more frisky and skippery every moment.

That strange face, with its weird, yearning look! I remained motionless before it, while the old fellow jabbered and gesticulated like a maniac. What a deep, incomprehensible look in those eyes!

“Was he a very famous singer?” I asked, by way of saying something.

“He? Eh altro! I should think so! Do you think, perhaps, the singers of that day were like ours? Pooh! Look at all they did in that day. Their paper made of linen rag, no tearing that; and how they built their violins! Oh, what times those were!”

“Do you know anything about this man?” I asked.

“About this singer, this Rinaldi? Oh, yes; he was a very great singer, but he ended badly.”

“Badly? In what way?”

“Why – you know what such people are, and then youth! we have all been young, all young!” – and old Fa Diesis shrugged his shrivelled person.

“What happened to him?” I persisted, continuing to look at the portrait; it seemed as if there were life in those soft, velvety eyes, and as if those red lips were parting in a sigh – a long, weary sigh.

“Well,” answered Fa Diesis, “this Ferdinando Rinaldi was a very great singer. About the year 1780 he took service with the Court of Parma. There, it is said, he obtained too great notice from a lady in high favour at court, and was consequently dismissed. Instead of going to a distance, he kept hanging about the frontier of Parma, now here, now there, for he had many friends among the nobility. Whether he was suspected of attempting to return to Parma, or whether he spoke with less reserve than he should, I don’t know. Basta! one fine morning he was found lying on the staircase landing of our Senator Negri’s house, stabbed.”

Old Fa Diesis pulled out his horn snuff-box.

“Who had done it, no one ever knew or cared to know. A packet of letters, which his valet said he always carried on his person, was all that was found missing. The lady left Parma and entered the Convent of the Clarisse here; she was my father’s aunt, and this portrait belonged to her. A common story – a common story in those days.”

And the old gentleman rammed his long nose with snuff.

“You really don’t think I could sell the picture?” he asked.

“No!” I answered, very decidedly, for I felt a sort of shudder. I took leave, and that evening we set off for Rome.

•   •   •   •   •

Winthrop paused, and asked for a cup of tea. He was flushed and seemed excited, but, at the same time, anxious to end his story. When he had taken his tea, he pushed back his irregular hair with both hands, gave a little sigh of recollection, and began again as follows:

III

I returned to M——— the next year, on my way to Venice, and stopped a couple of days in the old place, having to bargain for certain Renaissance carved work, which a friend wished to buy. It was midsummer; the fields which I had left planted with cabbages and covered with white frost were tawny with ripe corn, and the vine-garlands drooped down to kiss the tall, compact green hemp; the dark streets were reeking with heat, the people were all sprawling about under colonnade and awning; it was the end of June in Lombardy, God’s own orchard on earth. I went to old Fa Diesis’s palace to ask whether he had any commissions for Venice; he might, indeed, be in the country, but the picture, the portrait was at his palace, and that was enough for me. I had often thought of it in the winter, and wondered whether now, with the sun blazing through every chink, I should still be impressed by it as I had been in the gloomy autumn. Fa Diesis was at home, and overjoyed to see me; he jumped and frisked about like a figure in the “Dance of Death,” in intense excitement about certain manuscripts he had lately seen. He narrated, or rather acted, for it was all in the present tense and accompanied by appropriate gestures, a journey he had recently made to Guastalla to see a psaltery at a monastery; how he had bargained for a post-chaise; how the post-chaise had upset half-way; how he had sworn at the driver; how he had rung – drling, drling – at the monastery-door; how he cunningly pretended to be in quest of an old, valueless crucifix; how the monks had had the impudence to ask a hundred and fifty francs for it; how he had hummed and hah’d, and, pretending suddenly to notice the psaltery, had asked what it was, etc., as if he did not know; and finally struck the bargain for both crucifix and psaltery for a hundred and fifty francs – a psaltery of the year 1310 for a hundred and fifty francs! “And those idiots of monks were quite overjoyed! They thought they had cheated me – cheated me!” And he frisked about in an ecstasy of pride and triumph. We had got to the well-known door; it was open; I could see the portrait. The sun streamed brightly on the brown face and light powdered locks. I know not how; I felt a momentary giddiness and sickness, as if of long-desired, unexpected pleasure; it lasted but an instant, and I was ashamed of myself.

Fa Diesis was in splendid spirits.

“Do you see that?” he said, forgetting all he had previously told me; “that is a certain Ferdinando Rinaldi, a singer, who was assassinated for making love to my great-aunt;” and he stalked about in great glee, thinking of the psaltery at Guastalla, and fanning himself complacently with a large green fan.

A thought suddenly struck me:

“It happened here at M———, did it not?”

“To be sure.”

And Fa Diesis continued shuffling to and fro in his old red-and-blue dressing-gown, with parrots and cherry-branches on it.

“Did you never know anyone who had seen him – heard him?”

“I? Never. How could I? He was killed ninety-four years ago.”

Ninety-four years ago! I looked up at the portrait; ninety-four years ago! and yet – The eyes seemed to me to have a strange, fixed, intent look.

“And where—” I hesitated despite myself – “where did it happen?”

“That, few people know; no one, probably, except me, nowadays,” he answered with satisfaction. “But my father pointed out the house to me when I was little; it had belonged to a Marchese Negri, but, somehow or other, after that affair, no one would live there any longer, and it was left to rot; already, when I was a child, it was all deserted and falling to pieces. A fine house, though! A fine house! and one which ought to have been worth something. I saw it again some years ago – I rarely go outside the gates now – outside Porta San Vitale – about a mile.”

“Outside Porta San Vitale? the house where this Rinaldi was – it is still there?”

Fa Diesis looked at me with intense contempt.

“Bagatella!” (fiddlestick) he exclaimed. “Do you think a villa flies away like that?”

“You are sure?”

“Per Bacco! as sure as that I see you – outside Porta San Vitale, an old tumbledown place with obelisks and vases, and that sort of thing.”

We had come to the head of the staircase. “Goodbye,” I said; “I’ll return tomorrow for your parcels for Venice,” and I ran down the stair. “Outside Porta San Vitale!” I said to myself; “outside Porta San Vitale!” It was six in the afternoon, and the heat still intense; I hailed a crazy old cab, a sky-blue carriage of the year ’20, with a cracked hood and emblazoned panels. “Dove commanda?” (whither do you command?) asked the sleepy driver. “Outside Porta San Vitale!” I cried. He touched his bony, long-maned, white horse, and off we jolted over the uneven pavement, past the red Lombard cathedral and baptistery, through the long, dark Via San Vitale, with its grand old palaces; under the red gate with the old word “Libertas” still on it, along a dusty road bordered by acacias, out into the rich Lombard plain. On we rattled through the fields of corn, hemp, and glossy, dark maize, ripening under the rich evening sun. In the distance the purple walls and belfries and shining cupolas gleaming in the light; beyond, the vast blue and gold and hazy plain, bounded by the far-off Alps. The air was warm and serene, everything quiet and solemn. But I was excited. I sought out every large country-house; I went wherever a tall belvedere tower peeped from behind the elms and poplars; I crossed and recrossed the plain, taking one lane after another, as far as where the road branched off to Crevalcuore; passed villa after villa, but found none with vases and obelisks, none crumbling and falling, none that could have been the villa. What wonder, indeed? Fa Diesis had seen it, but Fa Diesis was seventy, and that – that had happened ninety-four years ago! Still I might be mistaken; I might have gone too far or not far enough – there was lane within lane and road within road. Perhaps the house was screened by trees, or perhaps it lay toward the next gate. So I went again, through the cyclamen-lined lanes, overhung by gnarled mulberries and oaks; I looked up at one house after another: all were old, many dilapidated, some seeming old churches with walled-up colonnades, others built up against old watch-towers; but of what old Fa Diesis had described I could see nothing. I asked the driver, and the driver asked the old women and the fair-haired children who crowded out of the little farms. Did anyone know of a large deserted house with obelisks and vases – a house that had once belonged to a Marchese Negri? Not in that neighbourhood; there was the Villa Montecasignoli with the tower and the sundial, which was dilapidated enough, and the Casino Fava crumbling in yonder cabbage-field, but neither had vases nor obelisks, neither had ever belonged to a Marchese Negri.

At last I gave it up in despair. Ninety-four years ago! The house no longer existed; so I returned to my inn, where the three jolly mediaeval pilgrims swung over the door-lamp; took my supper, and tried to forget the whole matter.

Next day I went and finally settled with the owner of the carved work I had been commissioned to buy, and then I sauntered lazily about the old town. The next day there was to be a great fair, and preparations were being made for it; baskets and hampers being unloaded, and stalls put up everywhere in the great square; festoons of tinware and garlands of onions were slung across the Gothic arches of the townhouse and to its massive bronze torch-holders; there was a quack already holding forth on the top of his stage-coach, with a skull and many bottles before him, and a little bespangled page handing about his bills; there was a puppet-show at a corner, with a circle of empty chairs round it, just under the stone pulpit where the monks of the middle ages had once exhorted the Montagus and Capulets of M——— to make peace and embrace. I sauntered about among the crockery and glassware, picking my way among the packing-cases and hay, and among the vociferating peasants and townsfolk. I looked at the figs and cherries and red peppers in the baskets, at the old ironwork, rusty keys, nails, chains, bits of ornament on the stalls; at the vast blue and green glazed umbrellas, at the old prints and images of saints tied against the church-bench, at the whole moving, quarrelling, gesticulating crowd. I bought an old silver death’s-head trinket at the table of a perambulating watch-maker, and some fresh sweet-peas and roses from a peasant-woman selling fowls and turkeys; then I turned into the maze of quaint little paved streets, protected by chains from carts and carriages, and named after mediaeval hostelries and labelled on little slabs, “Scimmia” (monkey), “Alemagna” (Germany), “Venetia,” and, most singular of all, “Brocca in dosso” (jug on the Back). Behind the great, red, time-stained, castle-like townhouse were a number of tinkers’ dens; and beneath its arches hung cauldrons, pitchers, saucepans, and immense pudding-moulds with the imperial eagle of Austria on them, capacious and ancient enough to have contained the puddings of generations of German Caesars. Then I poked into some of those wondrous curiosity-shops of M———, little black dens, where oaken presses contain heaps and heaps of brocaded dresses and embroidered waistcoats, and yards of lace, and splendid chasubles, the spoils of centuries of magnificence. I walked down the main street and saw a crowd collected round a man with an immense white crested owl; the creature was such a splendid one I determined to buy him and keep him in my studio at Venice, but, when I approached him, he flew at me, shaking his wings and screeching so that I beat an ignominious retreat. At length I returned to the square and sat down beneath an awning, where two bare-legged urchins served me excellent snow and lemon-juice, at the price of a sou the glass. In short, I enjoyed my last day at M——— amazingly; and, in this bright, sunny square, with all the bustle about me, I wondered whether the person who, the previous evening, had scoured the country in search of a crazy villa where a man had been assassinated ninety-four years ago, could really and truly have been myself.

So I spent the morning; and the afternoon I passed indoors, packing up the delicate carved work with my own hands, although the perspiration ran down my face, and I gasped for air. At length, when evening and coolness were approaching, I took my hat and went once more to Fa Diesis’s palace.

I found the old fellow in his many-coloured dressing-gown, seated in his cool, dusky room, among his inlaid lutes and Cremonese viols, carefully mending the tom pages of an illuminated missal, while his old, witch-like housekeeper was cutting out and pasting labels on to a heap of manuscript scores on the table. Fa Diesis got up, jumped about ecstatically, made magnificent speeches, and said that, since I insisted on being of use to him, he had prepared half a dozen letters, which I might kindly leave on various correspondents of his at Venice, in order to save the twopenny stamp for each. The grim, lank, old fellow, with his astounding dressing-gown and cap, his lantern-jawed housekeeper, his old, morose, grey cat, and his splendid harpsichords and lutes and missals, amused me more than usual. I sat with him for some time while he patched away at his missal, Mechanically I turned over the yellow pages of a music-book that lay, waiting for a label, under my hand, and mechanically my eye fell on the words, in faded, yellow ink, at the top of one of the pieces, the indication of its performer:

Rondò di Cajo Gracco, “Mille pene mio tesoro,”
per il Signor Ferdinando Rinaldi. Parma, 1782.

I positively started, for somehow that whole business had gone out of my mind.

“What have you got there?” asked Fa Diesis, perhaps a little suspiciously, and, leaning across the table, he twitched the notes toward him:

“Oh, only that old opera of Cimarosa’s – Ah, by the way, per Bacco, how could I have made such a mistake yesterday? Didn’t I tell you that Rinaldi had been stabbed in a villa outside Porta San Vitale?”

“Yes,” I cried, eagerly. “Why?”

“Why, I can’t conceive how, but I must have been thinking about that blessed psaltery at San Vitale, at Guastalla. The villa where Rinaldi was killed is outside Porta San Zaccaria, in the direction of the river, near that old monastery where there are those frescoes by – I forget the fellow’s name – that all the foreigners go to see. Don’t you know?”

“Ah!” I exclaimed, “I understand.” And I did understand, for Porta San Zaccaria happens to be at exactly the opposite end of the town to Porta San Vitale, and here was the explanation of my unsuccessful search of the previous evening. So, after all, the house might still be standing; and the desire to see it again seized hold of me. I rose, took the letters, which I strongly suspected contained other letters whose postage was to be saved in the same way, by being delivered by the original correspondent, and prepared to depart.

“Goodbye, goodbye,” said old Fa Diesis, with effusion, as we passed through the dark passage in order to get to the staircase. “Continue, my dear friend, in those paths of wisdom and culture which the youth of our days has so miserably abandoned, in order that the sweet promise of your happy silver youth be worthily accomplished in your riper – Ah, by the way,” he interrupted himself, “I have forgotten to give you a little pamphlet of mine on the manufacture of violin-strings, which I wish to send as an act of reverence to my old friend the commander of the garrison of Venice”; and off he scuddled. I was near the door up the three steps, and could not resist the temptation of seeing the picture once more. I pushed open the door and entered; a long ray of the declining sunlight, reflected from the neighbouring red church-tower, fell across the face of the portrait, playing in the light, powdered hair, and on the downy, well-cut lips, and ending in a tremulous crimson stain on the boarded floor. I went close up to the picture; there was the name “Ferdinando Rinaldi, 1782,” on the roll of music he was holding; but the notes themselves were mere imitative, meaningless smears and blotches, although the title of the piece stood distinct and legible – “Sei Regina, io Pastor sono.”

“Why, where is he?” cried Fa Diesis’s shrill voice in the passage. “Ah, here you are;” and he handed me the pamphlet, pompously addressed to the illustrious General S———, at Venice. I put it in my pocket.

“You won’t forget to deliver it?” he asked, and then went on with the speech he had before begun: “Let the promise of your happy silver youth be fulfilled in a golden manhood, in order that the world may mark down your name albo lapillo. Ah.” he continued, “perhaps we shall never meet again. I am old, my dear friend – I am old!” and he smacked his lips. “Perhaps, when you return to M———, I may have gone to rest with my immortal ancestors, who, as you know, intermarried with the ducal family of Sforza, A. D. 1490!”

The last time! This might be the last time I saw the picture! What would become of it after old Fa Diesis’s death? I turned once more toward it, in leaving the room; the last flicker of light fell on the dark, yearning face, and it seemed, in the trembling sunbeam, as if the head turned and looked toward me. I never saw the portrait again.

I walked along quickly through the darkening streets, on through the crowd of loiterers and pleasure-seekers, on toward Porta San Zaccaria. It was late, but if I hastened I might still have an hour of twilight; and next morning I had to leave M———. This was my last opportunity, I could not relinquish it; so on I went, heedless of the ominous puffs of warm, damp air, and of the rapidly clouding sky.

It was St. John’s eve, and bonfires began to appear on the little hills round the town; fire-balloons were let up, and the great bell of the cathedral boomed out in honour of the coming holiday. I threaded my way through the dusty streets and out by Porta San Zaccaria. I walked smartly along the avenues of poplars along the walls, and then cut across into the fields by a lane leading toward the river. Behind me were the city walls, all crenelated and jagged; in front the tall belfry and cypresses of the Carthusian monastery; above, the starless, moonless sky, overhung by heavy clouds. The air was mild and relaxing; every now and then there came a gust of hot, damp wind, making a shudder run across the silver poplars and trailed vines; a few heavy drops fell, admonishing me of the coming storm, and every moment some of the light faded away. But I was determined: was not this my last opportunity? So on I stumbled over the rough lane, on through the fields of corn and sweet, fresh-scented hemp, the fire-flies dancing in fantastic spirals before me. Something dark wriggled across my path; I caught it on my stick: it was a long, slimy snake, which slipped quickly off. The frogs roared for rain, the cicadas sawed with ominous loudness, the fire-flies crossed and recrossed before me; yet on I went, quicker and quicker in the fast-increasing darkness. A broad sheet of pink lightning and a distant rumble: more drops fell; the frogs roared louder, the cicadas sawed faster and faster, the air got heavier and the sky yellow and lurid where the sun had set; yet on I went toward the river. Suddenly down came a tremendous stream of rain, as if the heavens had opened, and with it down came the darkness, complete though sudden; the storm had changed evening into the deepest night. What should I do? Return? How? I saw a light glimmering behind a dark mass of trees; I would go on; there must be a house out there, where I could take shelter till the storm was over; I was too far to get back to the town. So on I went in the pelting rain. The lane made a sudden bend, and I found myself in an open space in the midst of the fields, before an iron gate, behind which, surrounded by trees, rose a dark, vast mass; a rent in the clouds permitted me to distinguish a gaunt, grey villa, with broken obelisks on its triangular front. My heart gave a great thump; I stopped, the rain continuing to stream down. A dog began to bark furiously from a little peasant’s house on the other side of the road, whence issued the light I had perceived. The door opened, and a man appeared holding a lamp.

“Who’s there?” he cried.

I went up to him. He held up the light and surveyed me.

“Ah!” he said, immediately, “a stranger – a foreigner. Pray enter, illustrissimo.” My dress and my sketch-book had immediately revealed what I was; he took me for an artist, one of the many who visited the neighbouring Carthusian Abbey, who had lost his way in the maze of little lanes.

I shook the rain off me and entered the low room, whose whitewashed walls were lit yellow by the kitchen fire. A picturesque group of peasants stood out in black outline on the luminous background: an old woman was spinning on her classic distaff, a young one was unravelling skeins of thread on a sort of rotating star; another was cracking pea-pods; an old, close-shaven man sat smoking with his elbows on the table, and opposite to him sat a portly priest in a three-cornered hat, knee-breeches, and short coat. They rose and looked at me, and welcomed me with the familiar courtesy of their class; the priest offered me his seat; the girl took my soaking coat and hat, and hung them over the fire; the young man brought an immense hempen towel, and proceeded to dry me, much to the general hilarity. They had been reading their usual stories of Charlemagne in their well-thumbed “Reali di Francia,” that encyclopaedia of Italian peasants, but they put by their books on my entrance and began talking, questioning me on every possible and impossible subject. Was it true that it always rained in England? (at that rate, remarked the old man, shrewdly, how could the English grow grapes; and if they did not make wine, what could they live on?) Was it true that one could pick up lumps of gold somewhere in England? Was there any town as large as M——— in that country? etc., etc. The priest thought these questions foolish, and inquired with much gravity after the health of Milord Vellingtone, who, he understood, had been seriously unwell of late. I scarcely listened; I was absent and preoccupied. I gave the women my sketch-book to look over; they were delighted with its contents; mistook all the horses for oxen and all the men for women, and exclaimed and tittered with much glee. The priest, who prided himself on superior education, gave me the blandest encouragement; asked me whether I had been to the picture-gallery, whether I had been to the neighbouring Bologna (he was very proud of having been there last St. Petronius’s day); informed me that that city was the mother of all art, and that the Caracci especially were her most glorious sons, etc., etc. Meanwhile, the rain continued coming down in a steady pour.

“I don’t think I shall be able to get home tonight,” said the priest, looking through the window into the darkness. “My donkey is the most wonderful donkey in the world – quite a human being. When you say ‘Leone, Leone’ to him, he kicks up his heels and stands on his hind legs like an acrobat; indeed he does, upon my honour; but I don’t believe even he could find his way through this darkness, and the wheels of my gig would infallibly stick in some rut, and where should I be then? I must stay here overnight, no help for that; but I’m sorry for the Signore here, who will find these very poor quarters.”

“Indeed,” I said, “I shall be but too happy to stay, if I be sure that I shall be in no one’s way.”

“In our way! What a notion!” they all cried.

“That’s it,” said the priest, particularly proud of the little vehicle he drove, after the droll fashion of Lombard clergymen. “And I’ll drive the Signore into town tomorrow morning, and you can bring your cart with the vegetables for the fair.”

I paid but little attention to all this; I felt sure I had at length found the object of my search; there, over the way, was the villa; but I seemed almost as far from it as ever, seated in this bright, whitewashed kitchen, among these country-folk. The young man asked me timidly, and as a special favour, to make a picture of the girl who was his bride, and very pretty, with laughing, irregular features, and curly, crisp, golden hair. I took out my pencil and began, I fear not as conscientiously as these good people deserved; but they were enchanted, and stood in a circle round me, exchanging whispered remarks, while the girl sat all giggling and restless on the large wooden settle.

“What a night!” exclaimed the old man. “What a bad night, and St. John’s eve, too!”

“What has that to do with it?” I asked.

“Why,” he answered, “they say that on St. John’s night they permit dead people to walk about.”

“What rubbish!” cried the priest, indignantly; “who ever told you that? What is there about ghosts in the mass-book, or in the Archbishop’s pastorals, or in the Holy Fathers of the Church?” and he raised his voice to inquisitorial dignity.

“You may say what you like,” answered the old man, doggedly; “it’s true, none the less. I’ve never seen anything myself, and perhaps the Archbishop hasn’t either, but I know people who have.”

The priest was about to fall upon him with a deluge of arguments in dialect, when I interrupted.

“To whom does that large house over the way belong?” I waited with anxiety for an answer.

“It belongs to the Avvocato Bargellini,” said the woman with great deference, and they proceeded to inform me that they were his tenants, his contadini having charge of all the property belonging to the house; that the Avvocato Bargellini was immensely rich and immensely learned.

“An encyclopedic man!” burst out the priest; “he knows everything, law, art, geography, mathematics, numismatics, gymnastics!” and he waved his hand between each branch of knowledge. I was disappointed.

“Is it inhabited?” I asked.

“No,” they answered, “no one has ever lived in it. The Avvocato bought it twenty years ago from the heir of a certain Marchese Negri, who died very poor.”

“A Marchese Negri?” I exclaimed; then, after all, I was right. “But why is it not inhabited, and since when?”

“Oh, since – since always – no one has ever lived in it since the Marchese Negri’s grandfather. It is all going to pieces; we keep our garden-tools and a few sacks there, but there is no living there – there are no windows or shutters.”

“But why doesn’t the Avvocato patch it up?” I persisted. “It seems a very fine house.”

The old man was going to answer, but the priest glanced at him and answered, quickly:

“The position in these fields is unhealthy.”

“Unhealthy!” cried the old man, angrily, much annoyed at the priest’s interference. “Unhealthy! why, haven’t I lived here these sixty years, and not one of us has had a headache? Unhealthy, indeed! No, the house is a bad house to live in, that’s what it is!”

“This is very odd,” I said; “surely there must be ghosts?” and I tried to laugh.

The word ghosts acted like magic; like all Italian peasants, they loudly disclaimed such a thing when questioned, although they would accidentally refer to it themselves.

“Ghosts! ghosts!” they cried, “surely the Signore does not believe in such trash? Rats there are and in plenty. Do ghosts gnaw the chestnuts and steal the Indian corn?”

Even the old man, who had seemed inclined to be ghostly from rebellion to the priest, was now thoroughly on his guard, and not a word on the subject could be extracted from him. They did not wish to talk about ghosts, and I, for my part, did not want to hear about them; for, in my present highly wrought, imaginative mood, an apparition in a winding-sheet, a clanking of chains, and all the authorized ghostly manifestations seemed in the highest degree disgusting; my mind was too much haunted to be intruded on by vulgar spectres, and, as I mechanically sketched the giggling, blushing little peasant-girl, and looked up at her healthy, rosy, sunburned face, peeping from beneath a gaudy silk kerchief, my mental eyes were fixed on a very different face, which I saw as distinctly as hers – that dark, yearning face, with the strange red lips and the lightly powdered locks. The peasants and the priest went on chattering gaily, running from one topic to another – the harvest, the vines, the next day’s fair; politics the most fantastic, scraps of historical lore even more astounding, rattling on unceasingly, with much good humour, the most astonishing ignorance of facts, infantine absurdity, perfect seriousness, and much shrewd sceptical humour. I did my best to join in this conversation, and laughed and joked to the best of my power. The fact is, I felt quite happy and serene, for I had little by little made up my mind to an absurd step, either babyish in the extreme or foolhardy to the utmost, but which I contemplated with perfect coolness and assurance, as one sometimes does hazardous or foolish courses which gratify a momentary whim. I had at length found the house; I would pass the night there.

I must have been in violent mental excitement, but the excitement was so uniform and unimpeded as to seem almost regular; I felt as if it were quite natural to live in an atmosphere of weirdness and adventure, and I was firm in my purpose. At length came the moment for action: the women put by their work, the old man shook the ashes out of his pipe; they looked at each other as if not knowing how to begin. The priest, who had just re-entered from giving his wondrous donkey some hay, made himself their spokesman.

“Ahem!” he cleared his throat; “the Signore must excuse the extreme simplicity of these uneducated rustics, and bear in mind that, as they are unaccustomed to the luxuries of cities, and have, moreover, to be up by daybreak in order to attend to their agricultural—”

“Yes, yes,” I answered, smiling; “I understand. They want to go to bed, and they are quite right. I must beg you all to forgive my having thoughtlessly kept you up so late.” How was I now to proceed? I scarcely understood.

“Keep them up late? Oh, not at all; they had been but too much honoured,” they cried.

“Well,” said the priest, who was growing sleepy, “of course there is no returning through this rain; the lanes are too unsafe; besides, the city gates are locked. Come, what can we do for the Signore? Can we make him up a bed here? I will go and sleep with our old Maso,” and he tapped the young man’s shoulder.

The women were already starting off for pillows, and mattresses, and what not; but I stopped them.

“On no account,”I said. “I will not encroach upon your hospitality. I can sleep quite comfortably over the way – in the large house.”

“Over the way? In the big house?” they cried, all together. “The Signore sleep in the big house? Oh, never, never! Impossible!”

“Rather than that, I’ll harness my donkey and drive the Signore through the mud, and rain, and darkness; that I will, corpo di Bacco,” cried the little, red-faced priest.

“But why not?” I answered, determined not to be baulked. “I can get a splendid night’s rest over the way. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Never, never!” they answered, in a chorus of expostulation.

“But, since there are no ghosts there,” I protested, trying to laugh, “what reason is there against it?”

“Oh, as to ghosts,” put in the priest, “I promise you there are none. I snap my fingers at ghosts!”

“Well,” I persisted, “you won’t tell me that the rats will mistake me for a sack of chestnuts and eat me up, will you? Come, give me the key.” I was beginning to believe in the use of a little violence. “Which is it?” I asked, seeing a bunch hanging on a nail; “is it this one? – or this one? Via! tell me which it is.”

The old man seized hold of the keys. “You must not sleep there,” he said, very positively. “It’s no use trying to hide it. That house is no house for a Christian to sleep in. A bad thing happened there once – someone was murdered; that is why no one will live in it. It’s no use to say No, Abate,” and he turned contemptuously toward the priest. “There are evil things in that house.”

“Ghosts?” I cried, laughing, and trying to force the keys from him.

“Not exactly ghosts,” he answered; “but – the devil is sometimes in that house.”

“Indeed!” I exclaimed, quite desperate. “That is just what I want. I have to paint a picture of him fighting with a saint of ours who once pulled his nose with a pair of tongs, and I am overjoyed to do his portrait from the life.”

They did not well understand; they suspected I was mad, and so, truly, I was.

“Let him have his way,” grumbled the old man; “he is a headstrong boy – let him go and see and hear all he will.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Signore!” entreated the women.

“Is it possible, Signor Forestiere, that you can be serious?” protested the priest, with his hand on my arm.

“Indeed I am,” I answered; “you shall hear all I have seen tomorrow morning. I’ll throw my black paint at the devil if he won’t sit still while I paint him.”

“Paint the devil! is he mad?” whispered the women, aghast.

I had got hold of the keys. “Is this it?” I asked, pointing to a heavy, handsomely wrought, but very rusty key.

The old man nodded.

I took it off the ring. The women, although extremely terrified by my daring, were secretly delighted at the prospect of a good story the next morning. One of them gave me a large, two-wicked kitchen lamp, with snuffers and tweezers chained to its tall stand; another brought an immense rose-coloured umbrella; the young man produced a large mantle lined with green and a thick horse-cloth; they would have brought a mattress and blankets if I had let them.

“You insist on going?” asked the priest. “Think how wretchedly cold and damp it must be over there!”

“Do, pray, reflect, Signore!” entreated the young woman.

“Haven’t I told you I am engaged to paint the devil’s portrait?” I answered, and, drawing the bolt, and opening the umbrella, I dashed out of the cottage.

“Gesù Maria!” cried the women; “to go there on such a night as this!”

“To sleep on the floor!” exclaimed the priest; “what a man, what a man!”

“E matto, è matto! he is mad!” they all joined, and shut the door.

I dashed across the flood before the door, unlocked the iron gate, walked quickly through the dark and wet up the avenue of moaning poplars. A sudden flash of lightning, broad, pink, and enduring, permitted me to see the house, like an immense stranded ship or huge grim skeleton looming in the darkness.

I ran up the steps, unlocked the door, and gave it a violent shake.

IV

I gave a vigorous push to the old, rotten door; it opened, creaking, and I entered a vast, lofty hall, the entrance saloon of the noble old villa. As I stepped forward cautiously, I heard a cutting, hissing sound, and something soft and velvety brushed against my cheek. I stepped backward and held up the lamp: it was only an owl whom the light had scared; it hooted dismally as it regained its perch. The rain fell sullen and monotonous; the only other sound was that of my footsteps waking the echoes of the huge room. I looked about as much as the uncertain light of my two-wicked lamp permitted; the shiny marble pavement was visible only in a few places; dust had formed a thick crust over it, and everywhere yellow maize-seed was strewed about. In the middle were some broken chairs – tall, gaunt chairs, with remains of gilding and brocade, and some small wooden ones with their ragged straw half pushed out. Against a large oaken table rested some sacks of corn; in the corners were heaps of chestnuts, and of green and yellow silkworm-cocoons, hoes, spades, and other garden implements; roots and bulbs strewed the floor; the whole place was full of a vague, musty smell of decaying wood and plaster, of earth, of drying fruit, and silkworms. I looked up; the rain battered in through the unglazed windows and poured in a stream over some remains of tracery and fresco; I looked higher, at the bare, mouldering rafters. Thus I stood while the rain fell heavy and sullen, and the water splashed down outside from the roof; there I stood in the desolate room, in a stupid, unthinking condition. All this solemn, silent decay impressed me deeply, far more than I had expected; all my excitement seemed over, all my whims seemed to have fled.

I almost forgot why I had wished to be here; indeed, why had I? That mad infatuation seemed wholly aimless and inexplicable; this strange, solemn scene was enough in itself. I felt at a loss what to do, or even how to feel; I had the object of my wish, all was over. I was in the house; further I neither ventured to go nor dared to think of; all the daredevil courting of the picturesque and the supernatural which had hitherto filled me was gone; I felt like an intruder, timid and humble – an intruder on solitude and ruin.

I spread the horse-cloth on the floor, placed the lamp by my side, wrapped myself in the peasant’s cloak, leaned my head on a broken chair, and looked up listlessly at the bare rafters, listening to the dull falling rain and to the water splashing from the roof; thoughts or feelings I appeared to have none.

How long I remained thus I can not tell; the minutes seemed hours in this vigil, with nothing but the spluttering and flickering of the lamp within, the monotonous splash without; lying all alone, awake but vacant, in the vast, crumbling hall.

I can scarcely tell whether suddenly or gradually I began to perceive, or thought I perceived, faint and confused sounds issuing, I knew not whence. What they were I could not distinguish; all I knew was that they were distinct from the drop and splash of the rain. I raised myself on my elbow and listened; I took out my watch and pressed the repeater to assure myself I was awake: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve tremulous ticks. I sat up and listened more intently, trying to separate the sounds from those of the rain outside. The sounds – silvery, sharp, but faint – seemed to become more distinct. Were they approaching, or was I awaking? I rose and listened, holding my breath. I trembled; I took up the lamp and stepped forward; I waited a moment, listening again. There could be no doubt the light, metallic sounds proceeded from the interior of the house; they were notes, the notes of some instrument. I went on cautiously. At the end of the hall was a crazy, gilded, battered door up some steps; I hesitated before opening it, for I had a vague, horrible fear of what might be behind it. I pushed it open gently and by degrees, and stood on the threshold, trembling and breathless. There was nothing save a dark, empty room, and then another; they had the cold, damp feeling and smell of a crypt. I passed through them slowly, startling the bats with my light; and the sounds – the sharp, metallic chords – became more and more distinct; and, as they did so, the vague, numbing terror seemed to gain more and more hold on me.

I came to a broad spiral staircase, of which the top was lost in the darkness, my lamp shedding a flickering light on the lower steps. The sounds were now quite distinct, the light, sharp, silvery sounds of a harpsichord or spinet; they fell clear and vibrating into the silence of the cryptlike house. A cold perspiration covered my forehead; I seized hold of the banisters of the stairs and little by little dragged myself up them like an inert mass. There came a chord, and delicately, insensibly there glided into the modulations of the instrument the notes of a strange, exquisite voice. It was of a wondrous sweet, thick, downy quality, neither limpid nor penetrating, but with a vague, drowsy charm, that seemed to steep the soul in enervating bliss; but, together with this charm, a terrible cold seemed to sink into my heart. I crept up the stairs, listening and panting. On the broad landing was a folding, gilded door, through whose interstices issued a faint glimmer of light, and from behind it proceeded the sounds. By the side of the door, but higher up, was one of those oval, ornamented windows called in French aeil de boeuf – an old broken table stood beneath it. I summoned up my courage and, clambering on to the unsteady table, raised myself on tiptoe to the level of the window, and, trembling, peeped through its dust-dimmed glass. I saw into a large, lofty room, the greater part of which was hidden in darkness, so that I could distinguish only the outline of the heavily curtained windows, and of a screen, and of one or two ponderous chairs. In the middle was a small, inlaid harpsichord, on which stood two wax-lights, shedding a bright reflection on the shining marble floor, and forming a pale, yellowish mass of light in the dark room. At the harpsichord, turned slightly away from me, sat a figure in the dress of the end of the last century – a long, pale lilac coat, and pale-green waistcoat, and lightly powdered hair gathered into a black-silk bag; a deep amber-coloured silk cloak was thrown over the chair-back. He was singing intently, and accompanying himself on the harpsichord, his back turned toward the window at which I was. I stood spellbound, incapable of moving, as if all my blood were frozen and my limbs paralysed, almost insensible, save that I saw and I heard, saw and heard him alone. The wonderful sweet, downy voice glided lightly and dexterously through the complicated mazes of the song; it rounded off ornament after ornament, it swelled imperceptibly into glorious, hazy magnitude, and diminished, dying gently away from a high note to a lower one, like a weird, mysterious sigh; then it leaped into a high, clear, triumphant note, and burst out into a rapid, luminous shake.

For a moment he took his hands off the keys, and turned partially round. My eyes caught his: they were the deep, soft, yearning eyes of the portrait at Fa Diesis’s.

At that moment a shadow was interposed between me and the lights, and instantly, by whom or how I know not, they were extinguished, and the room left in complete darkness; at the same instant the modulation was broken off unfinished; the last notes of the piece changed into a long, shrill, quivering cry; there was a sound of scuffling and suppressed voices, the heavy dead thud of a falling body, a tremendous crash, and another long, vibrating, terrible cry. The spell was broken: I started up, leaped from the table, and rushed to the closed door of the room; I shook its gilded panels twice and thrice in vain; I wrenched them asunder with a tremendous effort, and entered.

The moonlight fell in a broad, white sheet through a hole in the broken roof, filling the desolate room with a vague, greenish light. It was empty. Heaps of broken tiles and plaster lay on the floor; the water trickled down the stained wall and stagnated on the pavement; a broken fallen beam lay across the middle; and there, solitary and abandoned in the midst of the room, stood an open harpsichord, its cover incrusted with dust and split from end to end, its strings rusty and broken, its yellow keyboard thick with cobweb; the greenish-white light falling straight upon it.

I was seized with an irresistible panic; I rushed out, caught up the lamp which I had left on the landing, and dashed down the staircase, never daring to look behind me, nor to the right or the left, as if something horrible and undefinable were pursuing me, that long, agonized cry continually ringing in my ears. I rushed on through the empty, echoing rooms and tore open the door of the large entrance-hall – there, at least, I might be safe – when, just as I entered it, I slipped, my lamp fell and was extinguished, and I fell down, down, I knew not where, and lost consciousness.

When I came to my senses, gradually and vaguely, I was lying at the extremity of the vast entrance-hall of the crumbling villa, at the foot of some steps, the fallen lamp by my side. I looked round all dazed and astonished; the white morning light was streaming into the hall. How had I come there? What had happened to me? Little by little I recollected, and, as the recollection returned, so also returned my fear, and I rose quickly. I pressed my hand to my aching head, and drew it back stained with a little blood. I must, in my panic, have forgotten the steps and fallen, so that my head had struck against the sharp base of a column. I wiped off the blood, took the lamp and the cloak and horse-cloth, which lay where I had left them, spread on the dust-incrusted marble floor, amid the sacks of flour and the heaps of chestnuts, and staggered through the room, not well aware whether I was really awake. At the doorway I paused and looked back once more on the great bare hall, with its mouldering rafters and decaying frescoes, the heaps of rubbish and garden implements, its sad, solemn ruin. I opened the door and went out on to the long flight of steps before the house, and looked wonderingly at the serenely lovely scene. The storm had passed away, leaving only a few hazy white clouds in the blue sky; the soaking earth steamed beneath the already strong sun; the yellow corn was beaten down and drenched; the maize and vine-leaves sparkled with raindrops; the tall green hemp gave out its sweet, fresh scent. Before me lay the broken-up garden, with its overgrown box hedges, its immense decorated lemon-vases, its spread-out silkworm mats, its tangle of weeds and vegetables and flowers; farther, the waving green plain, with its avenues of tall poplars stretching in all directions, and from its midst rose the purple and grey walls and roofs and towers of the old town; hens were cackling about in search of worms in the soft, moist earth, and the deep, clear sounds of the great cathedral-bell floated across the fields. Looking down on all this fresh, lovely scene, it struck me, more vividly than ever before, how terrible it must be to be cut off forever from all this, to lie blind and deaf and motionless mouldering underground. The idea made me shudder and shrink from the decaying house; I ran down to the road; the peasants were there, dressed in their gayest clothes, red, blue, cinnamon, and pea-green, busy piling vegetables into a light cart, painted with vine-wreaths and souls in the flames of purgatory. A little farther, at the door of the white, arcaded farmhouse, with its sundial and vine-trellis, the jolly little priest was buckling the harness of his wonderful donkey, while one of the girls, mounted on a chair, was placing a fresh wreath of berries and a fresh, dripping nosegay before the little faded Madonna shrine. When they saw me, they all cried out, and came eagerly to meet me.

“Well!” asked the priest, “did you see any ghosts?”

“Did you do the devil’s picture?” laughed the girl.

I shook my head with a forced smile.

“Why!” exclaimed the lad, “the Signore has hurt his forehead. How could that have happened?”

“The lamp went out and I stumbled against a sharp corner,” I answered, hastily.

They noticed that I seemed pale and ill, and attributed it to my fall. One of the women ran into the house and returned with a tiny, bulb-shaped glass bottle, filled with some greenish fluid.

“Rub some of this into the cut,” she directed; “this is infallible, it will cure any wound. It is some holy oil, more than a hundred years old, left us by our grandmother.”

I shook my head, but obeyed, and rubbed some of the queer-smelling green stuff on to the cut, without noticing any particularly miraculous effect.

They were going to the fair; when the cart was well stocked, they all mounted on its benches, till it tilted upward with the weight; the lad touched the shaggy old horse and off they rattled, waving their hats and handkerchiefs at me. The priest courteously offered me a seat beside him in his gig; I accepted mechanically, and off we went, behind the jingling cart of the peasants, through the muddy lanes, where the wet boughs bent over us, and we brushed the drops off the green hedges. The priest was highly talkative, but I scarcely heard what he said, for my head ached and reeled. I looked back at the deserted villa, a huge, dark mass in the shining green fields of hemp and maize, and shuddered.

“You are unwell,” said the priest; “you must have taken cold in that confounded damp old hole.”

We entered the town, crowded with carts and peasants, passed through the market-place, with its grand old buildings all festooned with tinware and onions and coloured stuffs, and what not; and he set me down at my inn, where the sign of the three pilgrims swings over the door.

“Goodbye, goodbye! a rivederci! to our next meeting!” he cried.

“A rivederci!” I answered, faintly. I felt numb and sick; I paid my bill and sent off my luggage at once. I longed to be out of M———; I knew instinctively that I was on the eve of a bad illness, and my only thought was to reach Venice while I yet could.

I proved right; the day after my arrival at Venice the fever seized me and kept fast hold of me many a week.

“That’s what comes of remaining in Rome until July!” cried all my friends, and I let them continue in their opinion.

•   •   •   •   •

Winthrop paused, and remained for a moment with his head between his hands; none of us made any remark, for we were at a loss what to say.

“That air – the one I had heard that night,” he added, after a moment, “and its opening words, those on the portrait, ‘Sei Regina, io Pastor sono,’ remained deep in my memory. I took every opportunity of discovering whether such an air really existed; I asked lots of people, and ransacked half a dozen musical archives. I did find an air, even more than one, with those words, which appear to have been set by several composers; but, on trying them over at the piano, they proved totally different from the one in my mind. The consequence naturally was that, as the impression of the adventure grew fainter, I began to doubt whether it had not been all a delusion, a nightmare phantasm, due to over-excitement and fever, due to the morbid, vague desire for something strange and supernatural. Little by little I settled down in this idea, regarding the whole story as an hallucination. As to the air, I couldn’t explain that – I shuffled it off half unexplained and tried to forget it. But now, on suddenly hearing that very same air from you – on being assured of its existence outside my imagination – the whole scene has returned to me in all its vividness, and I feel compelled to believe. Can I do otherwise? Tell me? Is it reality or fiction? At any rate,” he added, rising and taking his hat, and trying to speak more lightly, “will you forgive my begging you never to let me hear that piece again?”

“Be assured you shall not,” answered the Countess, pressing his hand; “it makes even me feel a little uncomfortable now; besides, the comparison would be too much to my disadvantage. Ah! my dear Mr. Winthrop, do you know, I think I would almost spend a night in the Villa Negri in order to hear a song of Cimarosa’s time sung by a singer of the last century?”

“I knew you wouldn’t believe a word of it,” was Winthrop’s only reply.

—

The Doll

(1896)

I believe that’s the last bit of bric-a-brac I shall ever buy in my life (she said, closing the Renaissance casket) – that and the Chinese dessert set we have just been using. The passion seems to have left me utterly. And I think I can guess why. At the same time as the plates and the little coffer I bought a thing – I scarcely know whether I ought to call it a thing – which put me out of conceit with ferreting about among dead people’s properties. I have often wanted to tell you all about it, and stopped for fear of seeming an idiot. But it weighs upon me sometimes like a secret; so, silly or not silly, I think I should like to tell you the story. There, ring for some more logs, and put that screen before the lamp.

It was two years ago, in the autumn, at Foligno, in Umbria. I was alone at the inn, for you know my husband is too busy for my bric-a-brac journeys, and the friend who was to have met me fell ill and came on only later. Foligno isn’t what people call an interesting place, but I liked it. There are a lot of picturesque little towns all round; and great savage mountains of pink stone, covered with ilex, where they roll faggots down into the torrent beds, within a drive. There’s a full, rushing little river round one side of the walls, which are covered with ivy; and there are fifteenth-century frescoes, which I dare say you know all about. But, what of course I care for most, there are a number of fine old palaces, with gateways carved in that pink stone, and courts with pillars, and beautiful window gratings, mostly in good enough repair, for Foligno is a market town and a junction, and altogether a kind of metropolis down in the valley.

Also, and principally, I liked Foligno because I discovered a delightful curiosity-dealer. I don’t mean a delightful curiosity shop, for he had nothing worth twenty francs to sell; but a delightful, enchanting old man. His Christian name was Orestes, and that was enough for me. He had a long white beard and such kind brown eyes, and beautiful hands; and he always carried an earthenware brazier under his cloak. He had taken to the curiosity business from a passion for beautiful things, and for the past of his native place, after having been a master mason. He knew all the old chronicles, lent me that of Matarazzo, and knew exactly where everything had happened for the last six hundred years. He spoke of the Trincis, who had been local despots, and of St. Angela, who is the local saint, and of the Baglionis and Caesar Borgia and Julius II, as if he had known them; he showed me the place where St. Francis preached to the birds, and the place where Propertius – was it Propertius or Tibullus? – had had his farm; and when he accompanied me on my rambles in search of bric-a-brac he would stop at corners and under arches and say, “This, you see, is where they carried off those Nuns I told you about; that’s where the Cardinal was stabbed. That’s the place where they razed the palace after the massacre, and passed the ploughshare through the ground and sowed salt.” And all with a vague, far-off, melancholy look, as if he lived in those days and not these. Also he helped me to get that little velvet coffer with the iron clasps, which is really one of the best things we have in the house. So I was very happy at Foligno, driving and prowling about all day, reading the chronicles Orestes lent me in the evening; and I didn’t mind waiting so long for my friend who never turned up. That is to say, I was perfectly happy until within three days of my departure. And now comes the story of my strange purchase.

Orestes, with considerable shrugging of shoulders, came one morning with the information that a certain noble person of Foligno wanted to sell me a set of Chinese plates. “Some of them are cracked,” he said; “but at all events you will see the inside of one of our finest palaces, with all its rooms as they used to be – nothing valuable; but I know that the signora appreciates the past wherever it has been let alone.”

The palace, by way of exception, was of the late seventeenth century, and looked like a barracks among the neat little carved Renaissance houses. It had immense lions’ heads over all the windows, a gateway in which two coaches could have met, a yard where a hundred might have waited, and a colossal staircase with stucco virtues on the vaultings. There was a cobbler in the lodge and a soap factory on the ground floor, and at the end of the colonnaded court a garden with ragged yellow vines and dead sunflowers. “Grandiose, but very coarse – almost eighteenth-century,” said Orestes as we went up the sounding, low-stepped stairs. Some of the dessert set had been placed, ready for my inspection, on a great gold console in the immense escutcheoned anteroom. I looked at it, and told them to prepare the rest for me to see the next day. The owner, a very noble person, but half ruined – I should have thought entirely ruined, judging by the state of the house – was residing in the country, and the only occupant of the palace was an old woman, just like those who raised the curtains for you at church doors.

The palace was very grand. There was a ballroom as big as a church, and a number of reception rooms, with dirty floors and eighteenth-century furniture, all tarnished and tattered, and a gala room, all yellow satin and gold, where some emperor had slept; and there were horrible racks of faded photographs on the walls, and twopenny screens, and Berlin wool cushions, attesting the existence of more modern occupants.

I let the old woman unbar one painted and gilded shutter after another, and open window after window, each filled with little greenish panes of glass, and followed her about passively, quite happy, because I was wandering among the ghosts of dead people. “There is the library at the end here,” said the old woman, “if the signora does not mind passing through my room and the ironing-room; it’s quicker than going back by the big hall.” I nodded, and prepared to pass as quickly as possible through an untidy-looking servants’ room, when I suddenly stepped back. There was a woman in 1820 costume seated opposite, quite motionless. It was a huge doll. She had a sort of Canova classic face, like the pictures of Mme. Pasta and Lady Blessington. She sat with her hands folded on her lap and stared fixedly.

“It is the first wife of the Count’s grandfather,” said the old woman. “We took her out of her closet this morning to give her a little dusting.”

The Doll was dressed to the utmost detail. She had on open-work silk stockings, with sandal shoes, and long silk embroidered mittens. The hair was merely painted, in flat bands narrowing the forehead to a triangle. There was a big hole in the back of her head, showing it was cardboard.

“Ah,” said Orestes, musingly, “the image of the beautiful countess! I had forgotten all about it. I haven’t seen it since I was a lad,” and he wiped some cobweb off the folded hands with his red handkerchief, infinitely gently. “She used still to be kept in her own boudoir.”

“That was before my time,” answered the housekeeper. “I’ve always seen her in the wardrobe, and I’ve been here thirty years. Will thee care to see the old Count’s collection of medals?”

Orestes was very pensive as he accompanied me home.

“That was a very beautiful lady,” he said shyly, as we came within sight of my inn; “I mean the first wife of the grandfather of the present Count. She died after they had been married a couple of years. The old count, they say, went half crazy. He had the Doll made from a picture, and kept it in the poor lady’s room, and spent several hours in it every day with her. But he ended by marrying a woman he had in the house, a laundress, by whom he had had a daughter.”

“What a curious story!” I said, and thought no more about it.

But the Doll returned to my thoughts, she and her folded hands, and wide open eyes, and the fact of her husband’s having ended by marrying the laundress. And next day, when we returned to the palace to see the complete set of old Chinese plates, I suddenly experienced an odd wish to see the Doll once more. I took advantage of Orestes, and the old woman, and the Count’s lawyer being busy deciding whether a certain dish cover which my maid had dropped, had or had not been previously chipped, to slip off and make my way to the ironing-room.

The Doll was still there, sure enough, and they hadn’t found time to dust her yet. Her white satin frock, with little ruches at the hem, and her short bodice, had turned grey with ingrained dirt; and her black fringed kerchief was almost red. The poor white silk mittens and white silk stockings were, on the other hand, almost black. A newspaper had fallen from an adjacent table on to her knees, or been thrown there by someone, and she looked as if she were holding it. It came home to me then that the clothes which she wore were the real clothes of her poor dead original. And when I found on the table a dusty, unkempt wig, with straight bands in front and an elaborate jug handle of curls behind, I knew at once that it was made of the poor lady’s real hair.

“It is very well made,” I said shyly, when the old woman, of course, came creaking after me.

She had no thought except that of humouring whatever caprice might bring her a tip. So she smirked horribly, and, to show me that the image was really worthy of my attention, she proceeded in a ghastly way to bend the articulated arms, and to cross one leg over the other beneath the white satin skirt.

“Please, please, don’t do that!” I cried to the old witch. But one of the poor feet, in its sandalled shoe, continued dangling and wagging dreadfully.

I was afraid lest my maid should find me staring at the Doll. I felt I couldn’t stand my maid’s remarks about her. So, though fascinated by the fixed dark stare in her Canova goddess or Ingres Madonna face, I tore myself away and returned to the inspection of the dessert set.

I don’t know what that Doll had done to me; but I found that I was thinking of her all day long. It was as if I had just made a new acquaintance of a painfully interesting kind, rushed into a sudden friendship with a woman whose secret I had surprised, as sometimes happens, by some mere accident. For I somehow knew everything about her, and the first items of information which I gained from Orestes – I ought to say that I was irresistibly impelled to talk about her with him – did not enlighten me in the least, but merely confirmed what I was aware of.

The Doll – for I made no distinction between the portrait and the original – had been married straight out of the convent, and, during her brief wedded life, been kept secluded from the world by her husband’s mad love for her, so that she had remained a mere shy, proud, inexperienced child.

Had she loved him? She did not tell me that at once. But gradually I became aware that in a deep, inarticulate way she had really cared for him more than he cared for her. She did not know what answer to make to his easy, overflowing, garrulous, demonstrative affection; he could not be silent about his love for two minutes, and she could never find a word to express hers, painfully though she longed to do so. Not that he wanted it; he was a brilliant, will-less, lyrical sort of person, who knew nothing of the feelings of others and cared only to welter and dissolve in his own. In those two years of ecstatic, talkative, all-absorbing love for her, he not only forswore all society and utterly neglected his affairs, but he never made an attempt to train this raw young creature into a companion, or showed any curiosity as to whether his idol might have a mind or a character of her own. This indifference she explained by her own stupid, inconceivable incapacity for expressing her feelings; how should he guess at her longing to know, to understand, when she could not even tell him how much she loved him? At last the spell seemed broken: the words and the power of saying them came; but it was on her deathbed. The poor young creature died in childbirth, scarcely more than a child herself.

There now! I know even you would think it all silliness. I know what people are – what we all are – how impossible it is ever really to make others feel in the same way as ourselves about anything. Do you suppose I could have ever told all this about the Doll to my husband? Yet I tell him everything about myself; and I know he would have been quite kind and respectful. It was silly of me ever to embark on the story of the Doll with anyone; it ought to have remained a secret between me and Orestes. He, I really think, would have understood all about the poor lady’s feelings, or known it already as well as I. Well, having begun, I must go on, I suppose.

I knew all about the Doll when she was alive – I mean about the lady – and I got to know, in the same way, all about her after she was dead. Only I don’t think I’ll tell you. Basta: the husband had the Doll made, and dressed it in her clothes, and placed it in her boudoir, where not a thing was moved from how it had been at the moment of her death. He allowed no one to go in, and cleaned and dusted it all himself, and spent hours every day weeping and moaning before the Doll. Then, gradually, he began to look at his collection of medals, and to resume his rides; but he never went into society, and never neglected spending an hour in the boudoir with the Doll. Then came the business with the laundress. And then he sent the Doll into a wardrobe? Oh no; he wasn’t that sort of man. He was an idealizing, sentimental, feeble sort of person, and the amour with the laundress grew up quite gradually in the shadow of the inconsolable passion for the wife. He would never have married another woman of his own rank, given her son a stepmother (the son was sent to a distant school and went to the bad); and when he did marry the laundress it was almost in his dotage, and because she and the priests bullied him so fearfully about legitimating that other child. He went on paying visits to the Doll for a long time, while the laundress idyl went on quite peaceably. Then, as he grew old and lazy, he went less often; other people were sent to dust the Doll, and finally she was not dusted at all. Then he died, having quarrelled with his son and got to live, like a feeble old boor, mostly in the kitchen. The son – the Doll’s son – having gone to the bad, married a rich widow. It was she who refurnished the boudoir and sent the Doll away. But the daughter of the laundress, the illegitimate child, who had become a kind of housekeeper in her half-brother’s palace, nourished a lingering regard for the Doll, partly because the old Count had made such a fuss about it, partly because it must have cost a lot of money, and partly because the lady had been a real lady. So when the boudoir was refurnished she emptied out a closet and put the Doll to live there; and she occasionally had it brought out to be dusted.

Well, while all these things were being borne in upon me there came a telegram saying my friend was not coming on to Foligno, and asking me to meet her at Perugia. The little Renaissance coffer had been sent to London; Orestes and my maid and myself had carefully packed every one of the Chinese plates and fruit dishes in baskets of hay. I had ordered a set of the “Archivio Storico” as a parting gift for dear old Orestes – I could never have dreamed of offering him money, or cravat pins, or things like that – and there was no excuse for staying one hour more at Foligno. Also I had got into low spirits of late – I suppose we poor women cannot stay alone six days in an inn, even with bric-a-brac and chronicles and devoted maids – and I knew I should not get better till I was out of the place. Still I found it difficult, nay, impossible, to go. I will confess it outright: I couldn’t abandon the Doll. I couldn’t leave her, with the hole in her poor cardboard head, with the Ingres Madonna features gathering dust in that filthy old woman’s ironing-room. It was just impossible. Still go I must. So I sent for Orestes. I knew exactly what I wanted; but it seemed impossible, and I was afraid, somehow, of asking him. I gathered up my courage, and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, I said—

“Dear Signor Oreste, I want you to help me to make one last purchase. I want the Count to sell me the – the portrait of his grandmother; I mean the Doll.”

I had prepared a speech to the effect that Orestes would easily understand that a life-size figure so completely dressed in the original costume of a past epoch would soon possess the highest historical interest, etc. But I felt that I neither needed nor ventured to say any of it. Orestes, who was seated opposite me at table – he would only accept a glass of wine and a morsel of bread, although I had asked him to share my hotel dinner – Orestes nodded slowly, then opened his eyes out wide, and seemed to frame the whole of me in them. It wasn’t surprise. He was weighing me and my offer.

“Would it be very difficult?” I asked. “I should have thought that the Count—”

“The Count,” answered Orestes drily, “would sell his soul, if he had one, let alone his grandmother, for the price of a new trotting pony.”

Then I understood.

“Signor Oreste,” I replied, feeling like a child under the dear old man’s glance, “We have not known one another long, so I cannot expect you to trust me yet in many things. Perhaps also buying furniture out of dead people’s houses to stick it in one’s own is not a great recommendation of one’s character. But I want to tell you that I am an honest woman according to my lights, and I want you to trust me in this matter.”

Orestes bowed. “I will try and induce the Count to sell you the Doll,” he said.

I had her sent in a closed carriage to the house of Orestes. He had, behind his shop, a garden which extended into a little vineyard, whence you could see the circle of great Umbrian mountains; and on this I had had my eye.

“Signor Oreste,” I said, “will you be very kind, and have some faggots – I have seen some beautiful faggots of myrtle and bay in your kitchen – brought out into the vineyard; and may I pluck some of your chrysanthemums?” I added.

We stacked the faggots at the end of the vineyard, and placed the Doll in the midst of them, and the chrysanthemums on her knees. She sat there in her white satin Empire frock, which, in the bright November sunshine, seemed white once more, and sparkling. Her black fixed eyes stared as in wonder on the yellow vines and reddening peach trees, the sparkling dewy grass of the vineyard, upon the blue morning sunshine, the misty blue amphitheatre of mountains all round.

Orestes struck a match and slowly lit a pine cone with it; when the cone was blazing he handed it silently to me. The dry bay and myrtle blazed up crackling, with a fresh resinous odour; the Doll was veiled in flame and smoke. In a few seconds the flame sank, the smouldering faggots crumbled. The Doll was gone. Only, where she had been, there remained in the embers something small and shiny. Orestes raked it out and handed it to me. It was a wedding ring of old-fashioned shape, which had been hidden under the silk mitten. “Keep it, signora,” said Orestes; “you have put an end to her sorrows.”

—

The Virgin
of the Seven Daggers

(1889)

I

In a grass-grown square of the city of Grenada, with the snows of the Sierra staring down on it all winter, and the sunshine glaring on its coloured tiles all summer, stands the yellow free-stone Church of Our Lady of the Seven Daggers. Huge garlands of pears and melons hang, carved in stone, about the cupolas and windows; and monstrous heads with laurel wreaths and epaulets burst forth from all the arches. The roof shines barbarically, green, white, and brown, above the tawny stone; and on each of the two balconied and staircased belfries, pricked up like ears above the building’s monstrous front, there sways a weather-vane, figuring a heart transfixed with seven long-hilted daggers. Inside, the church presents a superb example of the pompous, pedantic, and contorted Spanish architecture of the reign of Philip IV.

On colonnade is hoisted colonnade, pilasters climb upon pilasters, bases and capitals jut out, double and threefold, from the ground, in mid-air and near the ceiling; jagged lines everywhere as of spikes for exhibiting the heads of traitors; dizzy ledges as of mountain precipices for dashing to bits Morisco rebels; line warring with line and curve with curve; a place in which the mind staggers bruised and half-stunned. But the grandeur of the church is not merely terrific – it is also gallant and ceremonious: everything on which labour can be wasted is laboured, everything on which gold can be lavished is gilded; columns and architraves curl like the curls of a peruke; walls and vaultings are flowered with precious marbles and fretted with carving and gilding like a gala dress; stone and wood are woven like lace; stucco is whipped and clotted like pastry-cooks’ cream and crust; everything is crammed with flourishes like a tirade by Calderon, or a sonnet by Gongora. A golden retablo closes the church at the end; a black-and-white rood screen, of jasper and alabaster, fences it in the middle; while along each aisle hang chandeliers as for a ball; and paper flowers are stacked on every altar.

Amidst all this gloomy yet festive magnificence, and surrounded, in each minor chapel, by a train of waxen Christs with bloody wounds and spangled loincloths, and madonnas of lesser fame weeping beady tears and carrying bewigged infants, thrones the great Madonna of the Seven Daggers.

Is she seated or standing? ’Tis impossible to decide. She seems, beneath the gilded canopy and between the twisted columns of jasper, to be slowly rising, or slowly sinking, in a solemn court curtsy, buoyed up by her vast farthingale. Her skirts bulge out in melon-shaped folds, all damasked with minute heart’s-ease, and brocaded with silver roses; the reddish shimmer of the gold wire, the bluish shimmer of the silver floss, blending into a strange melancholy hue without a definite name. Her body is cased like a knife in its sheath, the mysterious russet and violet of the silk made less definable still by the network of seed pearl, and the veils of delicate lace which fall from head to waist. Her face, surmounting rows upon rows of pearls, is made of wax, white with black glass eyes and a tiny coral mouth; she stares steadfastly forth with a sad and ceremonious smile. Her head is crowned with a great jewelled crown; her slippered feet rest on a crescent moon, and in her right hand she holds a lace pocket-handkerchief. In her bodice, a little clearing is made among the brocade and the seed pearl, and into this are stuck seven gold-hilted knives.

Such is Our Lady of the Seven Daggers; and such her church. One winter afternoon, more than two hundred years ago, Charles the Melancholy being King of Spain and the New World, there chanced to be kneeling in that church, already empty and dim save for the votive lamps, and more precisely on the steps before the Virgin of the Seven Daggers, a cavalier of very great birth, fortune, magnificence, and wickedness, Don Juan Gusman del Pulgar, Count of Miramor.

“O great Madonna, star of the sea, tower of ivory, ungathered flower, cedar of Lebanon, Empress of Heaven” – thus prayed that devout man of quality – “look down benignly on thy knight and servant, accounted judiciously one of the greatest men of this kingdom, in wealth and honours, fearing neither the vengeance of foes, nor the rigour of laws, yet content to stand foremost among thy slaves. Consider that I have committed every crime without faltering, both murder, perjury, blasphemy, and sacrilege, yet have I always respected thy name, nor suffered any man to give greater praise to other Madonnas, neither her of Good Counsel, nor her of Swift Help, nor our Lady of Mount Carmel, nor our Lady of St. Luke of Bologna in Italy, nor our Lady of the Slipper of Famagosta, in Cyprus, nor our Lady of the Pillar of Saragossa, great Madonnas every one, and revered throughout the world for their powers, and by most men preferred to thee; yet has thy servant, Juan Gusman del Pulgar, ever asserted, with words and blows, their infinite inferiority to thee.

“Give me, therefore. O Great Madonna of the Seven Daggers, O Snow Peak untrodden of the Sierras, O Sea unnavigated of the tropics, O Gold Ore unhandled by the Spaniard, O New Minted Doubloon unpocketed by the Jew, give unto me therefore, I pray thee, the promise that thou wilt save me ever from the clutches of Satan, as thou hast wrested me ever on earth from the King, Alguazils and the Holy Officer’s delators, and let me never burn in eternal fire in punishment of my sins. Neither think that I ask too much, for I swear to be provided always with absolution in all rules, whether by employing my own private chaplain or using violence thereunto to any monk, priest, canon, dean, bishop, cardinal, or even the Holy Father himself.

“Grant me this boon, O Burning Water and Cooling Fire, O Sun that shineth at midnight, and Galaxy that resplendeth at noon – grant me this boon, and I will assert always with my tongue and my sword, in the face of His Majesty and at the feet of my latest love, that although I have been beloved of all the fairest women of the world, high and low, both Spanish, Italian, German, French, Dutch, Flemish, Jewish, Saracen, and Gypsy, to the number of many hundreds, and by seven ladies, Dolores, Fatma, Catalina, Elvira, Violante, Azahar, and Sister Seraphita, for each of whom I broke a commandment and took several lives (the last, moreover, being a cloistered nun, and therefore a case of inexpiable sacrilege), despite all this I will maintain before all men and all the Gods of Olympus that no lady was ever so fair as our Lady of the Seven Daggers of Grenada.”

The church was filled with ineffable fragrance, exquisite music, among which Don Juan seemed to recognize the voice of Syphax, His Majesty’s own soprano singer, murmured amongst the cupolas, and the Virgin of the Seven Daggers, slowly dipped in her lace and silver brocade hoop, rising as slowly again to her full height, and inclined her white face imperceptibly towards her jewelled bosom.

The Count of Miramor clasped his hands in ecstasy to his breast; then he rose, walked quickly down the aisle, dipped his fingers in the black marble holy water stoop, threw a sequin to the beggar who pushed open the leathern curtain, put his black hat covered with black feathers on his head, dismissed a company of bravos and guitar players who awaited him in the square, and, gathering his black cloak about him, went forth, his sword tucked under his arm, in search of Baruch, the converted Jew of the Albaycin.

Don Juan Gusman del Pulgar, Count of Miramor, Grandee of the First Class, Knight of Calatrava, and of the Golden Fleece, and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, was thirty-two and a great sinner. This cavalier was tall, of large bone, his forehead low and cheekbones high, chin somewhat receding, aquiline nose, white complexion, and black hair; he wore no beard, but mustachios cut short over the lip and curled upwards at the corners leaving the mouth bare; and his hair flat, parted through the middle and falling nearly to his shoulders. His clothes, when bent on business or pleasure, were most often of black satin, slashed with black. His portrait has been painted by Domingo Zurbaran of Seville.

II

All the steeples of Grenada seemed agog with bell-ringing; the big bell on the tower of the Sail clanging irregularly into the more professional tinklings and roarings, under the vigorous but flurried pulls of the elderly damsels, duly accompanied by their well-ruffed duennas, who were ringing themselves a husband for the newly begun year, according to the traditions of the city. Green garlands decorated the white glazed balconies, and banners with the arms of Castile and Aragon, and the pomegranate of Grenada, waved or drooped alongside the hallowed palm-branches over the carved escutcheons on the doors. From the barracks arose a practising of fifes and bugles; and from the little wine-shops on the outskirts of the town a sound of guitar strumming and castanets. The coming day was a very solemn feast for the city, being the anniversary of its liberation from the rule of the Infidels.

But although all Grenada felt festive, in anticipation of the grand bullfight of the morrow, and the grand burning of heretics and relapses in the square of Bibrambla, Don Juan Gusman del Pulgar, Count of Miramor, was fevered with intolerable impatience, not for the following day but for the coming and tediously lagging night.

Not, however, for the reason which had made him a thousand times before upbraid the Sun God, in true poetic style, for showing so little of the proper anxiety to hasten the happiness of one of the greatest cavaliers of Spain. The delicious heart-beating with which he had waited, sword under his cloak, for the desired rope to be lowered from a mysterious window, or the muffled figure to loom from round a corner; the fierce joy of awaiting, with a band of gallant murderers, some inconvenient father, or brother, or husband on his evening stroll; the rapture even, spiced with awful sacrilege, of stealing in amongst the lemon-trees of that cloistered court, after throwing the Sister Portress to tell-tale in the convent well – all, and even this, seemed to him trumpery and mawkish.

Don Juan sprang from the great bed, covered and curtained with dull, blood-coloured damask, on which he had been lying dressed, vainly courting sleep, beneath a painted hermit, black and white in his lantern-jawedness, fondling a handsome skull. He went to the balcony, and looked out of one of its glazed windows. Below a marble goddess shimmered among the myrtle hedges and the cypresses of the tiled garden, and the pet dwarf of the house played at cards with the chaplain, the chief bravo, and a threadbare poet who was kept to make the odes and sonnets required in the course of his master’s daily courtships.

“Get out of my sight, you lazy scoundrels, all of you!” cried Don Juan, with a threat and an oath alike terrible to repeat, which sent the party, bowing and scraping as they went, scattering their cards, and pursued by his lordship’s jack-boots, guitar, and missal.

Don Juan stood at the window rapt in contemplation of the towers of the Alhambra, their tips still reddened by the departing sun, their bases already lost in the encroaching mists, on the hill yon side of the river.

He could just barely see it, that Tower of the Cypresses, where the magic hand held the key engraven on the doorway, about which, as a child, his nurse from the Morisco village of Andarax had told such marvellous stories of hidden treasures and slumbering infantas. He stood long at the window, his lean, white hands clasped on the rail as on the handle of his sword, gazing out with knit brows and clenched teeth, and that look which made men hug the wall and drop aside on his path.

Ah, how different from any of his other loves! the only one, decidedly, at all worthy of lineage as great as his, and a character as magnanimous. Catalina, indeed, had been exquisite when she danced, and Elvira was magnificent at a banquet, and each had long possessed his heart, and had cost him, one many thousands of doubloons for a husband, and the other the death of a favourite fencing-master, killed in a fray with her relations. Violante had been a Venetian worthy of Titian, for whose sake he had been imprisoned beneath the ducal palace, escaping only by the massacre of three jailers; for Fatma, the Sultana of the King of Fez, he had well-nigh been impaled, and for shooting the husband of Dolores he had very nearly been broken on the wheel; Azahar, who was called so because of her cheeks like white jessamine, he had carried off at a church door, out of the arms of her bridegroom – without counting that he had cut down her old father, a Grandee of the First Class; and as to Sister Seraphita – ah! she had seemed worthy of him, and Seraphita had nearly come up to his idea of an angel.

But oh, what had any of these ladies cost him compared with what he was about to risk tonight? Letting alone the chance of being roasted by the Holy Office (after all, he had already run that, and the risk of more serious burning hereafter also, in the ease of Sister Seraphita), what if the business proved a swindle of that Jewish hound, Baruch ? – Don Juan put his hand on his dagger and his black mustachios bristled up at the bare thought – letting alone the possibility of imposture (though who could be so bold as to venture to impose upon him?) the adventure was full of dreadful things. It was terrible, after all, to have to blaspheme the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church, and all her saints and inconceivably odious to have to be civil to that dog of a Mahomet of theirs; also, he had not much enjoyed a previous experience of calling up devils, who had smelled most vilely of brimstone and assafoetida, besides using most impolite language; and he really could not stomach that Jew Baruch, whose trade among others consisted in procuring for the archbishop a batch of renegade Moors, who were solemnly dressed in white and baptised afresh every year. It was odious that this fellow should even dream of obtaining the treasure buried under the Tower of the Cypresses.

Then there were the traditions of his family, descended in direct line from the Cid, and from that Fernan del Pulgar who had nailed the Ave Maria to the Mosque; and half his other ancestors were painted with their foot on a Moor’s discollated head, much resembling a hairdresser’s block, and their very title, Miramor, was derived from a castle which had been built in full Moorish territory to stare the Moor out of countenance.

But, after all, this only made it more magnificent, more delicious, more worthy of so magnanimous and high-born a cavalier…. “Ah, princess … more exquisite than Venus, more noble than Juno, and infinitely more agreeable than Minerva” … sighed Don Juan at his window. The sun had long since set, making a trail of blood along the distant river reach, among the sere spiderlike poplars, turning the snows of Mulhacen a livid, bluish blood-red, and leaving all along the lower slopes of the Sierra wicked russet stains, as of the rust of blood upon marble. Darkness had come over the world, save where some illuminated courtyard or window suggested preparations for next day’s revelry; the air was piercingly cold, as if filled with minute snowflakes from the mountains. The joyful singing had ceased; and from a neighbouring church there came only a casual death toll, executed on a cracked and lugubrious bell. A shudder ran through Don Juan. “Holy Virgin of the Seven Daggers, take me under thy benign protection,” he murmured mechanically.

A discreet knock aroused him.

“The Jew Baruch – I mean his worship, Senor Don Bonaventura,” announced the page.

III

The Tower of the Cypresses, destroyed in our times by the explosion of a powder magazine, formed part of the inner defences of the Alhambra. In the middle of its horseshoe arch was engraved a huge hand holding a flag-shaped key, which was said to be that of the subterranean and enchanted palace; and the two great cypress trees, uniting their shadows into one tapering cone of black, were said to point, under a given position of the moon, to the exact spot where the wise King Yahya, of Cordova, had judiciously buried his jewels, his plate, and his favourite daughter many hundred years ago.

At the foot of this tower, and in the shade of the cypresses, Don Juan ordered his companion to spread out his magic paraphernalia. From a neatly packed basket, beneath which he had staggered up the steep hillside in the moonlight, the learned Jew produced a book, a variety of lamps, some packets of frankincense, a pound of dead man’s fat, the bones of a stillborn child who had been boiled by the witches, a live cock that had never crowed, a very ancient toad, and sundry other rarities, all of which he proceeded to dispose in the latest necromantic fashion, while the Count of Miramor mounted guard, sword in hand. But when the fire was laid, the lamps lit, and the first layer of ingredients had already been placed in the cauldron; nay, when he had even borrowed Don Juan’s embroidered pocket-handkerchief to envelop the cock that had never crowed, Baruch the Jew suddenly flung himself down before his patron and implored him to desist from the terrible enterprise for which they had come.

“I have come hither,” wailed the Jew, “lest your lordship should possibly entertain doubts of my obligingness. I have run the risk of being burned alive in the Square of Bibrambla tomorrow morning before the bullfight; I have imperilled my eternal soul and laid out large sums of money in the purchase of the necessary ingredients, all of which are abomination in the eyes of a true Jew – I mean of a good Christian; but now I implore your lordship to desist. You will see things so terrible that to mention them is impossible; you will be suffocated by the vilest stenches, and shaken by earthquakes and whirlwinds, besides having to listen to imprecations of the most horrid sort; you will have to blaspheme our holy Mother Church and invoke Mahomet – may he roast everlastingly in hell; you will infallibly go to hell yourself in due course; and all this for the sake of a paltry treasure of which it will he most difficult to dispose to the pawnbrokers; and of a lady, about whom, thanks to my former medical position in the harem of the Emperor of Tetuan, I may assert with confidence that she is fat, ill-favoured, stained with henna, and most disagreeably redolent of camphor….”

“Peace, villain!” cried Don Juan, snatching him by the throat and pulling him violently on to his feet. “Prepare thy messes and thy stinks, begin thy antics, and never dream of offering advice to a cavalier like me. And remember, one other word against her royal highness, my bride, against the princess whom her own father has been keeping three hundred years for my benefit, and by the Virgin of the Seven Daggers, thou shalt be hurled into yonder precipice; which, by the way, will be a very good move, in any case, when thy services are no longer required.” So saying, he snatched from Baruch’s hand the paper of responses, which the necromancer had copied out from his book of magic; and began to study it by the light of a supernumerary lamp.

“Begin!” he cried. “I am ready, and thou, great Virgin of the Seven Daggers, guard me!”

“Jab, jam, jam – Credo in Grilgoth, Astaroth et Rappatun; trish, trash, trum,” began Baruch in faltering tones, as he poked a flame-tipped reed under the cauldron.

“Patapol, Valde Patapol,” answered Don Juan from his paper of responses.

The flame of the cauldron leaped up with a tremendous smell of brimstone. The moon was veiled, the place was lit up crimson, and a legion of devils with the bodies of apes, the talons of eagles, and the snouts of pigs suddenly appeared in the battlements all round.

“Credo,” again began Baruch; but the blasphemies he gabbled out, and which Don Juan indignantly echoed, were such as cannot possibly be recorded. A hot wind rose, whirling a desertful of burning sand that stung like gnats; the bushes were on fire, each flame turned into a demon like a huge locust or scorpion, who uttered piercing shrieks and vanished, leaving a choking atmosphere of melted tallow.

“Fal lal Polychronicon Nebuzaradon,” continued Baruch.

“Leviathan! Esto nobis!” answered Don Juan.

The earth shook, the sound of millions of gongs filled the air, and a snowstorm enveloped everything like a shuddering cloud. A legion of demons, in the shape of white elephants, but with snakes for their trunks and tails, and the bosoms of fair women, executed a frantic dance round the cauldron, and, holding hands, balanced on their hind legs.

At this moment the Jew uncovered the Black Cock who had never crowed before.

“Osiris! Apollo! Balshazar!” he cried, and flung the cock with superb aim into the boiling cauldron. The cock disappeared; then rose again, shaking his wings, and clawing the air, and giving a fearful piercing crow.

“O Sultan Yahya, Sultan Yahya,” answered a terrible voice from the bowels of the earth.

Again the earth shook; streams of lava bubbled from beneath the cauldron, and a flame, like a sheet of green lightning, leaped up from the fire.

As it did so a colossal shadow appeared on the high palace wall, and the great hand, shaped like a glover’s sign, engraven on the outer arch of the tower gateway, extended its candle-shaped fingers, projected a wrist, an arm to the elbow, and turned slowly in a secret lock the flag-shaped key engraven on the inside vault of the portal.

The two necromancers fell on their faces, utterly stunned.

The first to revive was Don Juan, who roughly brought the Jew back to his senses. The moon made serene daylight. There was no trace of earthquake, volcano, or simoon; and the devils had disappeared without traces; only the circle of lamps was broken through, and the cauldron upset among the embers. But the great horseshoe portals of the tower stood open; and, at the bottom of a dark corridor, there shone a speck of dim light.

“My lord,” cried Baruch, suddenly grown bold, and plucking Don Juan by the cloak, “we must now, if you please, settle a trifling business matter. Remember that the treasure was to he mine provided the Infanta were yours. Remember also, that the smallest indiscretion on your part, such as may happen to a gay young cavalier, will result in our being burned, with the batch of heretics and relapses, in Bibrambla tomorrow, immediately after high mass and just before people go to early dinner, on account of the bullfight.”

“Business! Discretion! Bibrambla! Early dinner!” exclaimed the Count of Miramor. “Thinkest thou I shall ever go hack to Grenada and its frumpish women once I am married to my Infanta, or let thee handle my late father-in-law, King Yahya’s treasure! Execrable renegade, take the reward of thy blasphemies.” And having rapidly run him through the body, he pushed Baruch into the precipice hard by. Then, covering his left arm with his cloak, and swinging his bare sword horizontally in his right hand, he advanced into the darkness of the tower.

IV

Don Juan Gusman del Pulgar plunged down a narrow corridor, as black as the shaft of a mine, following the little speck of reddish light which seemed to advance before him. The air was icy damp and heavy with a vague choking mustiness, which Don Juan imagined to be the smell of dead bats. Hundreds of these creatures fluttered all round; and hundreds more, apparently hanging head downwards from the low roof, grazed his face with their claws, their damp furry coats, and clammy leathern wings. Underfoot, the ground was slippery with innumerable little snakes, who, instead of being crushed, just wriggled under the thread. The corridor was rendered even more gruesome by the fact that it was a strongly inclined plane, and that one seemed to be walking straight into a pit.

Suddenly a sound mingled itself with that of his footsteps, and of the drip-drop of water from the roof, or, rather, detached itself as a whisper from it.

“Don Juan, Don Juan,” it murmured.

“Don Juan, Don Juan,” murmured the walls and roof a few yards farther – a different voice this time.

“Don Juan Gusman del Pulgar!” a third voice took up, clearer and more plaintive than the others.

The magnanimous cavalier’s blood began to run cold, and icy perspiration to clot his hair. He walked on nevertheless.

“Don Juan,” repeated a fourth voice, a little buzz close to his ear.

But the bats set up a dreadful shrieking which drowned it.

He shivered as he went; it seemed to him he had recognized the voice of the jasmine-cheeked Azahar, as she called on him from her deathbed.

The reddish speck had meanwhile grown large at the bottom of the shaft, and he had understood that it was not a flame but the light of some place beyond. Might it be hell? he thought. But he strode on nevertheless, grasping his sword and brushing away the bats with his cloak. “Don Juan! Don Juan!” cried the voices issuing faintly from the darkness. He began to understand that they tried to detain him; and he thought he recognized the voices of Dolores and Patina, his dead mistresses

“Silence, you sluts!” he cried. But his knees were shaking, and great drops of sweat fell from his hair onto his cheek.

The speck of light had now become quite large, and turned from red to white. He understood that it represented the exit from the gallery. But he could not understand why, as he advanced, the light, instead of being brighter, seemed filmed over and fainter.

“Juan, Juan,” wailed a new voice at his ear. He stood still half a second; a sudden faintness came over him.

“Seraphita,” he murmured – “it is my little nun Seraphita.” But he felt that she was trying to call him back.

“Abominable witch!” he cried. “Avaunt!”

The passage had grown narrower and narrower; so narrow that now he could barely squeeze along beneath the clammy walls, and had to bend his head lest he should hit the ceiling with its stalactites of bats.

Suddenly there was a great rustle of wings, and a long shriek. A night bird had been startled by his tread and had whirled on before him, tearing through the veil of vagueness that dimmed the outer light. As the bird tore open its way, a stream of dazzling light entered the corridor: it was as if a curtain had suddenly been drawn.

“Too-hoo! Too-hoo!” shrieked the bird, and Don Juan, following its flight, brushed his way through the cobwebs of four centuries and issued, blind and dizzy, into the outer world.

V

For a long while the Count of Miramor stood dazed and dazzled, unable to see anything save the whirling flight of the owl, which circled in what seemed a field of waving, burning red. He closed his eyes; but through the singed lids he still saw that waving red atmosphere, and the black creature whirling about him.

Then, gradually, he began to perceive and comprehend: lines and curves arose shadowy before him, and the faint plash of waters cooled his ringing ears.

He found that he was standing in a lofty colonnade, with a deep tank at his feet, surrounded by high hedges of flowering myrtles, whose jade-coloured water held the reflection of Moorish porticoes, shining orange in the sunlight, of high walls covered with shimmering blue and green tiles, and of a great red tower, raising its battlements into the cloudless blue. From the tower waved two flags, a white one and one of purple with a gold pomegranate. As he stood there, a sudden breath of air shuddered through the myrtles, wafting their fragrance towards him; the fountain began to bubble; and the reflection of the porticoes and hedges and tower to vacillate in the jade-green water, furling and unfurling like the pieces of a fan; and, above, the two banners unfolded themselves slowly, and little by little began to stream in the wind.

Don Juan advanced. At the farther end of the tank a peacock was standing by the myrtle hedge, immovable as if made of precious enamels; but as Don Juan went by the short blue-green feathers of his neck began to ruffle; he moved his tail, and, swelling himself out, he slowly unfolded it in a dazzling wheel. As he did so, some blackbirds and thrushes in gilt cages hanging within an archway, began to twitter and to sing.

From the court of the tank, Don Juan entered another and smaller court, passing through a narrow archway. On its marble steps lay three warriors, clad in long embroidered surcoats of silk, beneath which gleamed their armour, and wearing on their heads strange helmets of steel mail, which hung loose on to their gorgets and were surmounted by gilded caps; beneath them – for they had seemingly leaned on them in their slumbers – lay round targes or shields, and battleaxes of Damascus work. As he passed they began to stir and breathe heavily. He strode quickly by, and at the entrance of the smaller court, from which issued a delicious scent of full-blown Persian roses, another sentinel was leaning against a column, his hands clasped round his lance, his head bent on his breast. As Don Juan passed he slowly raised his head, and opened one eye, then the other. Don Juan rushed past, a cold sweat on his brow.

Low beams of sunlight lay upon the little inner court, in whose midst, surrounded by rose hedges, stood a great basin of alabaster, borne on four thickset pillars; a skin, as of ice, filmed over the basin; but, as if someone should have thrown a stone on to a frozen surface, the water began to move and to trickle slowly into the other basin below.

“The waters are flowing, the nightingales singing,” murmured a figure which lay by the fountain, grasping, like one just awakened, a lute that lay by his side. From the little court Don Juan entered a series of arched and domed chambers, whose roofs were hung as with icicles of gold and silver, or encrusted with mother-of-pearl constellations that twinkled in the darkness, while the walls shone with patterns that seemed carved of ivory and pearl and beryl and amethyst where the sunbeam grazed them, or imitated some strange sea caves, filled with flitting colours, where the shadow rose fuller and higher. In these chambers Don Juan found a number of sleepers, soldiers and slaves, black and white, all of whom sprang to their feet and rubbed their eyes and made obeisance as he went. Then he entered a long passage, lined on either side by a row of sleeping eunuchs, dressed in robes of honour, each leaning, sword in hand, against the wall, and of slave-girls with stuff of striped silver about their loins, and sequins at the end of their long hair, and drums and tumbrels in their hands.

At regular intervals stood great golden cressets, in which burned sweet-smelling wood, casting a reddish light over the sleeping faces. But as Don Juan approached the slaves inclined their bodies to the ground, touching it with their turbans, and the girls thumped on their drums and jingled the brass bells of their tumbrels. Thus he passed on from chamber to chamber till he came to a great door formed of stars of cedar and ivory studded with gold nails, and bolted by a huge gold bolt, on which ran mystic inscriptions. Don Juan stopped. But, as he did so, the bolt slowly moved in its socket, retreating gradually, and the immense portals swung slowly back, each into its carved hinge column.

Behind them was disclosed a vast circular hall, so vast that you could not possibly see where it ended, and filled with a profusion of lights, wax candles held by rows and rows of white maidens, and torches held by rows and rows of white-robed eunuchs, and cressets burning upon lofty stands, and lamps dangling from the distant vault, through which here and there entered, blending strangely with the rest, great beams of white daylight. Don Juan stopped short, blinded by this magnificence, and as he did so the fountain in the midst of the hail arose and shivered its cypress-like crest against the topmost vault, and innumerable voices of exquisite sweetness burst forth in strange, wistful chants, and instruments of all kinds, both such as are blown and such as are twanged and rubbed with a bow, and such as are shaken and thumped, united with the voices and filled the hall with sound, as it was already filled with light.

Don Juan grasped his sword and advanced. At the extremity of the hall a flight of alabaster steps led up to a dais or raised recess, overhung by an archway whose stalactites shone like beaten gold, and whose tiled walls glistened like precious stones. And on the dais, on a throne of sandalwood and ivory, encrusted with gems and carpeted with the product of the Chinese loom, sat the Moorish Infanta, fast asleep.

To the right and the left, but on a step beneath the princess, stood her two most intimate attendants, the Chief Duenna and the Chief Eunuch, to whom the prudent King Yahya had entrusted his only child during her sleep of four hundred years. The Chief Duenna was habited in a suit of sad-coloured violet weeds, with many modest swathings of white muslin round her yellow and wrinkled countenance. The Chief Eunuch was a portly negro, of a fine purple hue, with cheeks like an allegorical wind, and a complexion as shiny as a well-worn door-knocker: he was enveloped from top to toe in marigold-coloured robes, and on his head he wore a towering turban of embroidered cashmere.

Both these great personages held, beside their especial insignia of office, namely, a Mecca rosary in the hand of the Duenna, and a silver wand in the hand of the Eunuch, great fans of white peacock’s tails wherewith to chase away from their royal charge any ill-advised fly. But at this moment all the flies in the place were fast asleep, and the Duenna and the Eunuch also. And between them, canopied by a parasol of white silk on which were embroidered, in figures which moved like those in dreams, the histories of Jusuf and Zuleika, of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and of many other famous lovers, sat the Infanta, erect, but veiled in gold-starred gauzes, as an unfinished statue is veiled in the roughness of the marble.

Don Juan walked quickly between the rows of prostrate slaves, and the singing dancing girls, and those holding tapers and torches; and stopped only at the very foot of the throne steps.

“Awake!” he cried. “My princess, my bride, awake!”

A faint stir arose in the veils of the muffled form; and Don Juan felt his temples throb, and, at the same time, a deathly coldness steal over him.

“Awake!” he repeated boldly. But instead of the Infanta, it was the venerable Duenna who raised her withered countenance and looked round with a startled jerk, awakened not so much by the voices and instruments as by the tread of a masculine boot. The Chief Eunuch also awoke suddenly; but with the grace of one grown old in the antechamber of kings he quickly suppressed a yawn, and, laying his hand on his embroidered vest, made a profound obeisance.

“Verily,” he remarked, “Allah (who alone possesses the secrets of the universe) is remarkably great, since he not only—”

“Awake, awake, princess!” interrupted Don Juan ardently, his foot on the lowest step of the throne.

But the Chief Eunuch waved him back with his wand, continuing his speech – “since he not only gave unto his servant King Yahya (may his shadow never be less!) power and riches far exceeding that of any of the kings of the earth or even of Solomon the son of David—”

“Cease, fellow!” cried Don Juan, and pushing aside the wand and the negro’s dimpled chocolate hand, he rushed up the steps and flung himself at the foot of the veiled Infanta, his rapier clanging strangely as he did so.

“Unveil, my beloved, more beautiful than Oriana, for whom Amadis wept in the Black Mountain, than Gradasilia whom Felixmarte sought on the winged dragon, than Helen of Sparta who fired the towers of Troy, than Cahixto whom Jove was obliged to change into a female bear, than Venus herself on whom Paris bestowed the fatal apple. Unveil and arise, like the rosy Aurora from old Tithonus’ couch, and welcome the knight who has confronted every peril for thee, Juan Gusman del Pulgar, Count of Miramor, who is ready, for thee, to confront every other peril of the world or of hell; and to fix upon thee alone his affections, more roving hitherto than those of Prince Galaor or of the many-shaped god Proteus!”

A shiver ran through the veiled princess. The Chief Eunuch gave a significant nod, and waved his white wand thrice. Immediately a concert of voices and instruments, as numerous as those of the forces of the air when mustered before King Solomon, filled the vast hall. The dancing girls raised their tambourines over their heads and poised themselves on tiptoe. A wave of fragrant essences passed through the air filled with the spray of innumerable fountains. And the Duenna, slowly advancing to the side of the throne, took in her withered fingers the topmost fold of shimmering gauze, and, slowly gathering it backwards, displayed the Infanta unveiled before Don Juan’s gaze.

The breast of the princess heaved deeply; her lips opened with a little sigh, and she languidly raised her long-fringed lids; then cast down her eyes on the ground and resumed the rigidity of a statue. She was most marvellously fair. She sat on the cushions of the throne with modestly crossed legs; her hands, with nails tinged violet with henna, demurely folded in her lap. Through the thinness of her embroidered muslins shone the magnificence of purple and orange vests, stiff with gold and gems, and all subdued into a wondrous opalescent radiance. From her head there descended on either side of her person a diaphanous veil of shimmering colours, powdered over with minute glittering spangles. Her breast was covered with rows and rows of the largest pearls, a perfect network reaching from her slender throat to her waist, among which flashed diamonds embroidered in her vest.

Her face was oval, with the silver pallor of the young moon; her mouth, most subtly carmined, looked like a pomegranate flower among tuberoses, for her cheeks were painted white, and the orbits of her great long-fringed eyes were stained violet. In the middle of each cheek, however, was a delicate spot of pink, in which an exquisite art had painted a small pattern of pyramid shape, so naturally that you might have thought that a real piece of embroidered stuff was decorating the maiden’s countenance. On her head she wore a high tiara of jewels, the ransom of many kings, which sparkled and blazed like a lit-up altar. The eyes of the princess were decorously fixed on the ground.

Don Juan stood silent in ravishment.

“Princess!” he at length began.

But the Chief Eunuch laid his wand gently on his shoulder.

“My Lord,” he whispered, “it is not etiquette that your Magnificence should address her Highness in any direct fashion; let alone the fact that her Highness does not understand the Castilian tongue, nor your Magnificence the Arabic. But through the mediumship of this most respectable lady, her Discretion the Principal Duenna, and my unworthy self, a conversation can be carried on equally delicious and instructive to both parties.”

“A plague upon the old brute!” thought Don Juan; but he reflected upon what had never struck him before, that they had indeed been conversing, or attempting to converse, in Spanish, and that the Castilian spoken by the Chief Eunuch was, although correct, quite obsolete, being that of the sainted King Ferdinand. There was a whispered consultation between the two great dignitaries; and the Duenna approached her lips to the Infanta’s ear. The princess moved her pomegranate lips in a faint smile, but without raising her eyelids, and murmured something which the ancient lady whispered to the Chief Eunuch, who bowed thrice in answer. Then turning to Don Juan with most mellifluous tones, “Her Highness the Princess,” he said, bowing thrice as he mentioned her name, “is, like all princesses, but to an even more remarkable extent, endowed with the most exquisite modesty. She is curious, therefore, despite the superiority of her charms – so conspicuous even to those born blind – to know whether your Magnificence does not consider her the most beautiful thing you have ever beheld.”

Don Juan laid his hand upon his heart with an affirmative gesture more eloquent than any words.

Again an almost invisible smile hovered about the pomegranate mouth, and there was a murmur and a whispering consultation.

“Her Highness,” pursued the Chief Eunuch blandly, “has been informed by the judicious instructors of her tender youth, that cavaliers are frequently fickle, and that your Lordship in particular has assured many ladies in succession that each was the most beautiful creature you had ever beheld. Without admitting for an instant the possibility of a parallel, she begs your Magnificence to satisfy her curiosity on the point. Does your Lordship consider her as infinitely more beautiful than the Lady Catalina?”

Now Catalina was one of the famous seven for whom Don Juan had committed a deadly crime.

He was taken aback by the exactness of the Infanta’s information; he was rather sorry they should have told her about Catalina.

“Of course,” he answered hastily; “pray do not mention such a name in her Highness’s presence.”

The princess bowed imperceptibly.

“Her Highness,” pursued the Chief Eunuch, “still actuated by the curiosity due to her high birth and tender youth, is desirous of knowing whether your Lordship considers her far more beautiful than the Lady Violante?”

Don Juan made an impatient gesture. “Slave! Never speak of Violante in my princess’s presence!” he exclaimed, fixing his eyes upon the tuberose cheeks and the pomegranate mouth which bloomed among that shimmer of precious stones.

“Good. And may the same be said to apply to the ladies Dolores and Elvira?”

“Dolores and Elvira and Patina and Azahar,” answered Don Juan, greatly provoked at the Chief Eunuch’s want of tact, “and all the rest of womankind.”

“And shall we add also, than Sister Seraphita of the Convent of Santa Isabel la Real?”

“Yes,” cried Don Juan, “than Sister Seraphita, for whom I committed the greatest sin which can be committed by living man.”

As he said these words, Don Juan was about to fling his arms about the princess and cut short this rather too elaborate courtship.

But again he was waved back by the white wand.

“One question more, only one, my dear Lord,” whispered the Chief Eunuch. “I am most concerned at your impatience, but the laws of etiquette and the caprices of young princesses must go before everything, as you will readily admit. Stand back, I pray you.”

Don Juan felt sorely inclined to thrust his sword through the yellow holster of the great personage’s vest; but he choked his rage, and stood quietly on the throne steps, one hand on his heart, the other on his sword-hilt, the boldest cavalier in all the kingdom of Spain.

“Speak, speak!” he begged.

The princess, without moving a muscle of her exquisite face, or unclosing her flower-like mouth, murmured some words to the Duenna, who whispered them mysteriously to the Chief Eunuch.

At this moment also the Infanta raised her heavy eyelids, stained violet with henna, and fixed upon the cavalier a glance long, dark, and deep, like that of the wild antelope.

“Her Highness,” resumed the Chief Eunuch, with a sweet smile, “is extremely gratified with your Lordship’s answers, although, of course, they could not possibly have been at all different. But there remains yet another lady—”

Don Juan shook his head impatiently.

“Another lady concerning whom the Infanta desires some information. Does your Lordship consider her more beautiful also than the Virgin of the Seven Daggers?”

The place seemed to swim about Don Juan. Before his eyes rose the throne, all vacillating in its splendour, and on the throne the Moorish Infanta with the triangular patterns painted on her tuberose cheeks, and the long look in her henna’d eyes; and the image of her was blurred, and imperceptibly it seemed to turn into the effigy, black and white in her stiff puce frock and seed-pearl stomacher, of the Virgin of the Seven Daggers staring blankly into space.

“My Lord,” remarked the Chief Eunuch, “methinks that love has made you somewhat inattentive, a great blemish in a cavalier, when answering the questions of a lovely princess. I therefore venture to repeat: do you consider her more beautiful than the Virgin of the Seven Daggers?”

“Do you consider her more beautiful than the Virgin of the Seven Daggers?” repeated the Duenna, glaring at Don Juan.

“Do you consider me more beautiful than the Virgin of the Seven Daggers?” asked the princess, speaking suddenly in Spanish, or, at least, in language perfectly intelligible to Don Juan. And, as she spoke the words, all the slave-girls and eunuchs and singers and players, the whole vast hallful, seemed to echo the same question.

The Count of Miramor stood silent for an instant; then raising his hand and looking around him with quiet decision, he answered in a loud voice:

“No!”

“In that case,” said the Chief Eunuch, with the politeness of a man desirous of cutting short an embarrassing silence, “in that case I am very sorry it should be my painful duty to intimate to your Lordship that you must undergo the punishment usually allotted to cavaliers who are disobliging to young and tender princesses.”

So saying, he clapped his black hands, and, as if by magic, there arose at the foot of the steps a gigantic Berber of the Rif, his brawny sunburned limbs left bare by a scanty striped shirt fastened round his waist by a wisp of rope, his head shaven blue except in the middle, where, encircled by a coronet of worsted rag, there flamed a topknot of dreadful orange hair.

“Decapitate that gentleman,” ordered the Chief Eunuch in his most obliging tones. Don Juan felt himself collared, dragged down the steps, and forced into a kneeling posture on the lowest landing, all in the twinkling of an eye.

From beneath the bronzed left arm of the ruffian he could see the milk-white of the alabaster steps, the gleam of an immense scimitar, the mingled blue and yellow of the cressets and tapers, the daylight filtering through the constellations in the dark cedar vault, the glitter of the Infanta’s diamonds, and, of a sudden, the twinkle of the Chief Eunuch’s eye.

Then all was black, and Don Juan felt himself, that is to say, his own head, rebound three times like a ball upon the alabaster steps.

VI

It had evidently all been a dream – perhaps a delusion induced by the vile fumigations of that filthy ruffian of a renegade Jew. The infidel dogs had certain abominable drugs which gave them vismons of paradise and hell when smoked or chewed – nasty brutes that they were – and this was some of their devilry. But he should pay for it, the cursed old grey-beard, the Holy Office should keep him warm, or a Miramor was not a Miramor. For Don Juan forgot, or disbelieved, not only that he himself had been beheaded by a Rif Berber the evening before, but that he had previously run poor Baruch through the body and hurled him down the rocks near the Tower of the Cypresses.

This confusion of mind was excusable on the part of the cavalier. For, on opening his eyes, he had found himself lying in a most unlikely resting-place, considering the time and season, namely, a heap of old bricks and rubbish, half-hidden in withered reeds and sprouting weeds, on a ledge of the precipitous hillside that descends into the River Darro. Above him rose the dizzy red-brick straightness of the tallest tower of the Alhamhra, pierced at its very top by an arched and pillared window, and scantily overgrown with the roots of a dead ivy tree. Below, at the bottom of the precipice, dashed the little Darro, brown and swollen with melted snows, between its rows of leafless poplars; beyond it, the roofs and balconies and orange trees of the older part of Grenada; and above that, with the morning sunshine and mists fighting among its hovels, its square belfries and great masses of prickly pear and aloe, the Albaycin, whose highest convent tower stood out already against a sky of winter blue. The Albaycin – that was the quarter of that villain Baruch, who dared to play practical jokes on grandees of Spain of the very first class.

This thought caused Don Juan to spring up, and, grasping his sword, to scramble through the sprouting elder-bushes and the heaps of broken masonry, down to the bridge over the river. It was a beautiful winter morning, sunny, blue, and crisp through the white mists; and Don Juan sped along as with wings to his feet, for having remembered that it was the anniversary of the Liberation, and that he, as descendant of Fernan Perez del Pulgar, would be expected to carry the banner of the city at High Mass in the cathedral, he had determined that his absence from the ceremony should raise no suspicions of his ridiculous adventure. For ridiculous it had been – and the sense of its being ridiculous filled the generous breast of the Count of Miramor with a longing to murder every man, woman, or child he encountered as he sped through the streets. “Look at his Excellency the Count of Miramor; look at Don Juan Gusman del Pulgar! He’s been made a fool of by old Baruch the renegade Jew!” he imagined everybody to be thinking.

But, on the contrary, no one took the smallest notice of him. The muleteers, driving along their beasts laden with heather and myrtle for the bakehouse ovens, allowed their loads to brush him as if he had been the merest errand-boy; the stout black housewives, going to market with their brass braziers tucked under their cloaks, never once turned round as he pushed them rudely on the cobbles; nay, the very beggars, armless and legless and shameless, who were alighting from their go-carts and taking up their station at the church doors, did not even extend a hand towards the passing cavalier. Before a popular barber’s some citizens were waiting to have their topknots plaited into tidy tails, discussing the while the olive harvest, the price of spart-grass and the chances of the bull-ring. This, Don Juan expected, would be a fatal spot, for from the barber’s shop the news must go about that Don Juan del Pulgar, hatless and covered with mud, was hurrying home with a discomfited countenance, ill-befitting the hero of so many nocturnal adventures. But, although Don Juan had to make his way right in front of the barber’s, not one of the clients did so much as turn his head, perhaps out of fear of displeasing so great a cavalier. Suddenly, as Don Juan hurried along, he noticed for the first time, among the cobbles and the dry mud of the street, large drops of blood, growing larger as they went, becoming an almost uninterrupted line, then, in the puddles, a little red stream. Such were by no means uncommon vestiges in those days of duels and town broils; besides, some butcher or early sportsman, a wild boar on his horse, might have been passing.

But somehow or other this track of blood exerted an odd attraction over Don Juan; and unconsciously to himself, instead of taking the short cut to his palace, he followed it along some of the chief streets of Grenada. The bloodstains, as was natural, led in the direction of the great hospital, founded by St. John of God, to which it was customary to carry the victims of accidents and street fights. Before the monumental gateway, where St. John of God knelt in effigy before the Madonna, a large crowd was collected, above whose heads oscillated the black-and-white banners of a mortuary confraternity, and the flame and smoke of their torches. The street was blocked with carts, and with riders rising in their stirrups to look over the crowd, and even by gaily trapped mules and gilded coaches, in which veiled ladies were anxiously questioning their lackeys and outriders. The throng of idle and curious citizens, of monks and brothers of mercy, reached up the steps and right into the cloistered court of the hospital.

“Who is it?” asked Don Juan, with his usual masterful manner pushing his way into the crowd. The man whom he addressed, a stalwart peasant with a long tail pinned under his hat, turned round vaguely, but did not answer.

“Who is it?” repeated Don Juan louder.

But no one answered, although he accompanied the question with a good push, and even a thrust with his sheathed sword.

“Cursed idiots! Are you all deaf and dumb that you cannot answer a cavalier?” he cried angrily, and taking a portly priest by the collar he shook him roughly.

“Jesus Maria Joseph!” exclaimed the priest; but turning round he took no notice of Don Juan, and merely rubbed his collar, muttering, “Well, if the demons are to be allowed to take respectable canons by the collar, it is time that we should have a good witch-burning.”

Don Juan took no heed of his words, but thrust onward, upsetting, as he did so, a young woman who was lifting her child to let it see the show. The crowd parted as the woman fell, and people ran to pick her up, but no one took any notice of Don Juan. Indeed, he himself was struck by the way in which he passed through its midst, encountering no opposition from the phalanx of robust shoulders and hips.

“Who is it?” asked Don Juan again.

He had got into a clearing of the crowd. On the lowest step of the hospital gate stood a little knot of black penitents, their black linen cowls flung back on their shoulders, and of priests and monks muttering together. Some of them were beating back the crowd, others snuffing their torches against the paving-stones, and letting the wax drip off their tapers. In the midst of them, with a standard of the Virgin at its head, was a light wooden bier, set down by its bearers. It was covered with coarse black serge, on which were embroidered in yellow braid a skull and cross-bones, and the monogram I.H.S. Under the bier was a little red pool.

“Who is it?” asked Don Juan one last time; but instead of waiting for an answer, he stepped forward, sword in hand, and rudely pulled aside the rusty black pall.

On the bier was stretched a corpse dressed in black velvet, with lace cuffs and collar, loose boots, buff gloves, and a blood-clotted dark matted head, lying loose half an inch above the mangled throat.

Don Juan Gusman del Pulgar stared fixedly. It was himself.

•   •   •   •   •

The church into which Don Juan had fled was that of the Virgin of the Seven Daggers. It was deserted, as usual, and filled with chill morning light, in which glittered the gilded cornices and altars, and gleamed, like pools of water, the many precious marbles. A sort of mist seemed to hang about it all and dim the splendour of the high altar.

Don Juan del Pulgar sank down it the midst of the nave; not on his knees, for (O horror!) he felt that he had no longer any knees, nor indeed any back, any arms, or limbs of any kind, and he dared not ask himself whether he was still in possession of a head: his only sensations were such as might be experienced by a slowly trickling pool, or a snow-wreath in process of melting, or a cloud fitting itself on to a flat surface of rock.

He was disembodied. He now understood why no one had noticed hum in the crowd, why he had been able to penetrate through its thickness, and why, when he struck people and pulled them by the collar and knocked them down, they had taken no more notice of him than of a blast of wind. He was a ghost. He was dead. This was the afterlife; and he was infallibly within a few minutes of hell.

“O Virgin, Virgin of the Seven Daggers,” he cried with hopeless bitterness, “is this the way you recompense my faithfulness? I have died unshriven, in the midst of mortal sin, merely because I would not say you were less beautiful than the Moorish Infanta; and is this all my reward?”

But even as he spoke these words an extraordinary miracle took place. The white winter light broke into wondrous iridescences; the white mist collected into shoals of dim palm-bearing angels; the cloud of stale incense, still hanging over the high altar, gathered into fleecy halls, which became the heads and backs of well-to-do cherubs; and Don Juan, reeling and fainting, felt himself rise, higher and higher, as if borne up on clusters of soap-bubbles. The cupola began to rise and expand; the painted clouds to move and blush a deeper pink; the painted sky to recede and turn into deep holes of real blue. As he was borne upwards, the allegorical virtues in the lunettes began to move and brandish their attributes; the colossal stucco angels on the cornices to melt him with flowers no longer of plaster of Paris; the place was filled with delicious fragrance of incense, and with sounds of exquisitely played lutes and viols, and of voices, among which he distinctly recognized Syphax, his Majesty’s chief soprano. And, as Don Juan floated upwards through the cupola of the church, his heart suddenly filled with a consciousness of extraordinary virtue; the gold transparency at the top of the dome expanded; its rays grew redder and more golden, and there burst from it at last a golden moon crescent, on which stood, in her farthingale of puce and her stomacher of seed-pearl, her big black eyes fixed mildly upon him, the Virgin of the Seven Daggers.

•   •   •   •   •

“Your story of the late noble Count of Miramor, Don Juan Gusman del Pulgar,” wrote Don Pedro Calderon de la Barca, in March 1666, to his friend, the Archpriest Morales, at Grenada, “so veraciously revealed in a vision to the holy prior of St. Nicholas, is indeed such as must touch the heart of the most stubborn. Were it presented in the shape of a play, adorned with graces of style and with flowers of rhetoric, it would be indeed (with the blessing of heaven) well calculated to spread the glory of our holy church. But alas, my dear friend, the snows of age are as thick on my head as the snows of winter upon your Mulhacen; and who knows whether I shall ever be able to write again?”

The forecast of the illustrious dramatic poet proved, indeed, too true; and hence it is that unworthy modern hands have sought to frame the veracious and moral history of Don Juan and the Virgin of the Seven Daggers.

—

The Legend
of Madame Krasinska

(1890)

It is a necessary part of this story to explain how I have come by it, or rather, how it has chanced to have me for its writer.

I was very much impressed one day by a certain nun of the order calling themselves Little Sisters of the Poor. I had been taken to these sisters to support the recommendation of a certain old lady, the former doorkeeper of his studio, whom my friend Cecco Bandini wished to place in the asylum. It turned out, of course, that Cecchino was perfectly able to plead his case without my assistance; so I left him blandishing the Mother Superior in the big, cheerful kitchen, and begged to be shown over the rest of the establishment. The sister who was told off to accompany me was the one of whom I would speak.

This lady was tall and slight; her figure, as she preceded me up the narrow stairs and through the whitewashed wards, was uncommonly elegant and charming; and she had a girlish rapidity of movement, which caused me to experience a little shock at the first real sight which I caught of her face. It was young and remarkably pretty, with a kind of refinement peculiar to American women; but it was inexpressibly, solemnly tragic; and one felt that under her tight linen cap, the hair must be snow white. The tragedy, whatever it might have been, was now over; and the lady’s expression, as she spoke to the old creatures scraping the ground in the garden, ironing the sheets in the laundry, or merely huddling over their braziers in the chill winter sunshine, was pathetic only by virtue of its strange present tenderness, and by that trace of terrible past suffering.

She answered my questions very briefly, and was as taciturn as ladies of religious communities are usually loquacious. Only, when I expressed my admiration for the institution which contrived to feed scores of old paupers on broken victuals begged from private houses and inns, she turned her eyes full upon me and said, with an earnestness which was almost passionate, “Ah, the old! The old! It is so much, much worse for them than for any others. Have you ever tried to imagine what it is to be poor and forsaken and old?”

These words and the strange ring in the sister’s voice, the strange light in her eyes, remained in my memory. What was not, therefore, my surprise when, on returning to the kitchen, I saw her start and lay hold of the back of the chair as soon as she caught sight of Cecco Bandini. Cecco, on his side also, was visibly startled, but only after a moment; it was clear that she recognised him long before he identified her. What little romance could there exist in common between my eccentric painter and that serene but tragic Sister of the Poor?

A week later, it became evident that Cecco Bandini had come to explain the mystery; but to explain it (as I judged by the embarrassment of his manner) by one of those astonishingly elaborate lies occasionally attempted by perfectly frank persons. It was not the case. Cecchino had come indeed to explain that little dumb scene which had passed between him and the Little Sister of the Poor. He had come, however, not to satisfy my curiosity, or to overcome my suspicions, but to execute a commission which he had greatly at heart; to help, as he expressed it, in the accomplishment of a good work by a real saint.

Of course, he explained, smiling that good smile under his black eyebrows and white moustache, he did not expect me to believe very literally the story which he had undertaken to get me to write. He only asked, and the lady only wished, me, to write down her narrative without any comments, and leave to the heart of the reader the decision about its truth or falsehood.

For this reason, and the better to attain the object of appealing to the profane, rather than to the religious, reader, I have abandoned the order of narrative of the Little Sister of the Poor; and attempted to turn her pious legend into a worldly story, as follows:

I

Cecco Bandini had just returned from the Maremma, to whose solitary marshes and jungles he had fled in one of his fits of fury at the stupidity and wickedness of the civilised world. A great many months spent among buffaloes and wild boars, conversing only with those wild cherry-trees, of whom he used whimsically to say, “they are such good little folk,” had sent him back with an extraordinary zest for civilisation, and a comic tendency to find its products, human and otherwise, extraordinary, picturesque, and suggestive. He was in this frame of mind when there came a light rap on his door-slate; and two ladies appeared on the threshold of his studio, with the shaven face and cockaded hat of a tall footman over-topping them from behind. One of them was unknown to our painter; the other was numbered among Cecchino’s very few grand acquaintances.

“Why haven’t you been round to me yet, you savage?” she asked, advancing quickly with a brusque handshake and a brusque bright gleam of eyes and teeth, well-bred but audacious and a trifle ferocious. And dropping on to a divan she added, nodding first at her companion and then at the pictures all round, “I have brought my friend, Madame Krasinska, to see your things,” and she began poking with her parasol at the contents of a gaping portfolio.

The Baroness Fosca – for such was her name – was one of the cleverest and fastest ladies of the place, with a taste for art and ferociously frank conversation. To Cecco Bandini, as she lay back among her furs on that shabby divan of his, she appeared in the light of the modern Lucretia Borgia, the tamed panther of fashionable life. “What an interesting thing civilisation is!” he thought, watching her every movement with the eyes of the imagination; “why, you might spend years among the wild folk of the Maremma without meeting such a tremendous, terrible, picturesque, powerful creature as this!”

Cecchino was so absorbed in the Baroness Fosca, who was in reality not at all a Lucretia Borgia, but merely an impatient lady bent upon amusing and being amused, that he was scarcely conscious of the presence of her companion. He knew that she was very young, very pretty, and very smart, and that he had made her his best bow, and offered her his least rickety chair; for the rest, he sat opposite to his Lucretia Borgia of modern life, who had meanwhile found a cigarette, and was puffing away and explaining that she was about to give a fancy ball, which should be the most crâne, the only amusing thing, of the year.

“Oh,” he exclaimed, kindling at the thought, “do let me design you a dress all black and white and wicked green – you shall go as Deadly Nightshade, as Belladonna Atropa—”

“Belladonna Atropa! why, my ball is in comic costume…” The Baroness was answering contemptuously, when Cecchino’s attention was suddenly called to the other end of the studio by an exclamation on the part of his other visitor.

“Do tell me all about her – has she a name? Is she really a lunatic?” asked the young lady who had been introduced as Madame Krasinska, keeping a portfolio open with one hand, and holding up in the other a coloured sketch she had taken from it.

“What have you got there? Oh, only the Sora Lena!” and Madame Fosca reverted to the contemplation of the smoke-rings she was making.

“Tell me about her – Sora Lena, did you say?” asked the younger lady eagerly.

She spoke French, but with a pretty little American accent, despite her Polish name. She was very charming, Cecchino said to himself, a radiant impersonation of youthful brightness and elegance as she stood there in her long, silvery furs, holding the drawing with tiny, tight-gloved hands, and shedding around her a vague, exquisite fragrance – no, not a mere literal perfume, that would be far too coarse but something personal akin to it.

“I have noticed her so often,” she went on, with that silvery young voice of hers; “she’s mad, isn’t she? And what did you say her name was? Please tell me again.”

Cecchino was delighted. “How true it is,” he reflected, “that only refinement, high-breeding, luxury can give people certain kinds of sensitiveness, of rapid intuition! No woman of another class would have picked out just that drawing, or would have been interested in it without stupid laughter.”

“Do you want to know the story of poor old Sora Lena?” asked Cecchino, taking the sketch from Madame Krasinska’s hand, and looking over it at the charming, eager young face.

The sketch might have passed for a caricature; but anyone who had spent so little as a week in Florence those six or seven years ago would have recognised at once that it was merely a faithful portrait. For Sora Lena – more correctly Signora Maddalena – had been for years and years one of the most conspicuous sights of the town. In all weathers you might have seen that hulking old woman, with her vague, staring, reddish face, trudging through the streets or standing before shops, in her extraordinary costume of thirty years ago, her enormous crinoline, on which the silk skirt and ragged petticoat hung limply, her gigantic coal-scuttle bonnet, shawl, prunella boots, and great muff or parasol; one of several outfits, all alike, of that distant period, all alike inexpressibly dirty and tattered. In all weathers you might have seen her stolidly going her way, indifferent to stares and jibes, of which, indeed, there were by this time comparatively few, so familiar had she grown to staring, gibing Florence. In all weathers, but most noticeably in the worst, as if the squalor of mud and rain had an affinity with that sad, draggled, soiled, battered piece of human squalor, that lamentable rag of half-witted misery.

“Do you want to know about Sora Lena?” repeated Cecco Bandini, meditatively. They formed a strange, strange contrast, these two women, the one in the sketch and the one standing before him. And there was to him a pathetic whimsicalness in the interest which the one had excited in the other. “How long has she been wandering about here? Why, as long as I can remember the streets of Florence, and that,” added Cecchino sorrowfully, “is a longer while than I care to count up. It seems to me as if she must always have been there, like the olive-trees and the paving stones; for after all, Giotto’s tower was not there before Giotto, whereas poor old Sora Lena – But, by the way, there is a limit even to her. There is a legend about her; they say that she was once sane, and had two sons, who went as Volunteers in ’59, and were killed at Solferino, and ever since then she has sallied forth, every day, winter or summer, in her best clothes, to meet the young fellows at the Station. May be. To my mind it doesn’t matter much whether the story be true or false; it is fitting,” and Cecco Bandini set about dusting some canvases which had attracted the Baroness Fosca’s attention. When Cecchino was helping that lady into her furs, she gave one of her little brutal smiles, and nodded in the direction of her companion.

“Madame Krasinska,” she said laughing, “is very desirous of possessing one of your sketches, but she is too polite to ask you the price of it. That’s what comes of our not knowing how to earn a penny for ourselves, doesn’t it, Signor Cecchino?”

Madame Krasinska blushed, and looked more young, and delicate, and charming.

“I did not know whether you would consent to part with one of your drawings,” she said in her silvery, childlike voice, “it is – this one – which I should so much have liked to have … to have … bought.” Cecchino smiled at the embarrassment which the word “bought” produced in his exquisite visitor. Poor, charming young creature, he thought; the only thing she thinks people one knows can sell, is themselves, and that’s called getting married. “You must explain to your friend,” said Cecchino to the Baroness Fosca, as he hunted in a drawer for a piece of clean paper, “that such rubbish as this is neither bought nor sold; it is not even possible for a poor devil of a painter to offer it as a gift to a lady – but,” – and he handed the little roll to Madame Krasinska, making his very best bow as he did so – “it is possible for a lady graciously to accept it.”

“Thank you so much,” answered Madame Krasinska, slipping the drawing into her muff; “it is very good of you to give me such a … such a very interesting sketch,” and she pressed his big, brown fingers in her little grey-gloved hand.

“Poor Sora Lena!” exclaimed Cecchino, when there remained of the visit only a faint perfume of exquisiteness; and he thought of the hideous old draggle-tailed madwoman, reposing, rolled up in effigy, in the delicious daintiness of that delicate grey muff.

II

A fortnight later, the great event was Madame Fosca’s fancy ball, to which the guests were bidden to come in what was described as comic costume. Some, however, craved leave to appear in their ordinary apparel, and among these was Cecchino Bandini, who was persuaded, moreover, that his old-fashioned swallow-tails, which he donned only at weddings, constituted quite comic costume enough.

This knowledge did not interfere at all with his enjoyment. There was even, to his whimsical mind, a certain charm in being in a crowd among which he knew no one; unnoticed or confused, perhaps, with the waiters, as he hung about the stairs and strolled through the big palace rooms. It was as good as wearing an invisible cloak, one saw so much just because one was not seen; indeed, one was momentarily endowed (it seemed at least to his fanciful apprehension) with a faculty akin to that of understanding the talk of birds; and, as he watched and listened he became aware of innumerable charming little romances, which were concealed from more notable but less privileged persons.

Little by little the big white and gold rooms began to fill. The ladies, who had moved in gorgeous isolation, their skirts displayed as finely as a peacock’s train, became gradually visible only from the waist upwards; and only the branches of the palm-trees and tree ferns detached themselves against the shining walls. Instead of wandering among variegated brocades and iridescent silks and astonishing arrangements of feathers and flowers, Cecchino’s eye was forced to a higher level by the thickening crowd; it was now the constellated sparkle of diamonds on neck and head which dazzled him, and the strange, unaccustomed splendour of white arms and shoulders. And, as the room filled, the invisible cloak was also drawn closer round our friend Cecchino, and the extraordinary faculty of perceiving romantic and delicious secrets in other folk’s bosoms became more and more developed. They seemed to him like exquisite children, these creatures rustling about in fantastic dresses, powdered shepherds and shepherdesses with diamonds spurting fire among their ribbons and top-knots; Japanese and Chinese embroidered with sprays of flowers; mediaeval and antique beings, and beings hidden in the plumage of birds, or the petals of flowers; children, but children somehow matured, transfigured by the touch of luxury and good-breeding, children full of courtesy and kindness. There were, of course, a few costumes which might have been better conceived or better carried out, or better – not to say best – omitted altogether. One grew bored, after a little while, with people dressed as marionettes, champagne bottles, sticks of sealing-wax, or captive balloons; a young man arrayed as a female ballet dancer, and another got up as a wet nurse, with baby obligato might certainly have been dispensed with. Also, Cecchino could not help wincing a little at the daughter of the house being mummed and painted to represent her own grandmother, a respectable old lady whose picture hung in the dining-room, and whose spectacles he had frequently picked up in his boyhood. But these were mere trifling details. And, as a whole, it was beautiful, fantastic. So Cecchino moved backward and forward, invisible in his shabby black suit, and borne hither and thither by the well-bred pressure of the many-coloured crowd; pleasantly blinded by the innumerable lights, the sparkle of chandelier pendants, and the shooting flames of jewels; gently deafened by the confused murmur of innumerable voices, of crackling stuffs and soughing fans, of distant dance music; and inhaling the vague fragrance which seemed less the decoction of cunning perfumers than the exquisite and expressive emanation of this exquisite bloom of personality. Certainly, he said to himself, there is no pleasure so delicious as seeing people amusing themselves with refinement: there is a transfiguring magic, almost a moralising power, in wealth and elegance and good-breeding.

He was making this reflection, and watching between two dances, a tiny fluff of down sailing through the warm draught across the empty space, the sort of whirlpool of the ballroom – when a little burst of voices came from the entrance saloon. The multi-coloured costumes fluttered like butterflies toward a given spot, there was a little heaping together of brilliant colours and flashing jewels. There was much craning of delicate, fluffy young necks and heads, and shuffle on tiptoe, and the crowd fell automatically aside. A little gangway was cleared; and there walked into the middle of the white and gold drawing-room, a lumbering, hideous figure, with reddish, vacant face, sunk in an immense, tarnished satin bonnet; and draggled, faded, lilac silk skirts spread over a vast dislocated crinoline. The feet dabbed along in the broken prunella boots; the mangy rabbit-skin muff bobbed loosely with the shambling gait; and then, under the big chandelier, there came a sudden pause, and the thing looked slowly round, a gaping, mooning, blear-eyed stare.

It was the Sora Lena.

There was a perfect storm of applause.

III

Cecchino Bandini did not slacken his pace till he found himself, with his thin overcoat and opera hat all drenched, among the gas reflections and puddles before his studio door; that shout of applause and that burst of clapping pursuing him down the stairs of the palace and all through the rainy streets. There were a few embers in his stove; he threw a faggot on them, lit a cigarette, and proceeded to make reflections, the wet opera hat still on his head. He had been a fool, a savage. He had behaved like a child, rushing past his hostess with that ridiculous speech in answer to her inquiries: “I am running away because bad luck has entered your house.”

Why had he not guessed it at once? What on earth else could she have wanted his sketch for?

He determined to forget the matter, and, as he imagined, he forgot it. Only, when the next day’s evening paper displayed two columns describing Madame Fosca’s ball, and more particularly “that mask,” as the reporter had it, “which among so many which were graceful and ingenious, bore off in triumph the palm for witty novelty,” he threw the paper down and gave it a kick towards the wood-box. But he felt ashamed of himself, picked it up, smoothed it out and read it all – foreign news and home news, and even the description of Madame Fosca’s masked ball, conscientiously through. Last of all he perused, with dogged resolution, the column of petty casualties: a boy bit in the calf by a dog who was not mad; the frustrated burgling of a baker’s shop; even to the bunches of keys and the umbrella and two cigar-cases picked up by the police, and consigned to the appropriate municipal limbo; until he came to the following lines: “This morning the Guardians of Public Safety, having been called by the neighbouring inhabitants, penetrated into a room on the top floor of a house situate in the Little Street of the Gravedigger (Viccolo del Beccamorto), and discovered, hanging from a rafter, the dead body of Maddalena X. Y. Z. The deceased had long been noted throughout Florence for her eccentric habits and apparel.” The paragraph was headed, in somewhat larger type: “Suicide of a female lunatic.”

Cecchino’s cigarette had gone out, but he continued blowing at it all the same. He could see in his mind’s eye a tall, slender figure, draped in silvery plush and silvery furs, standing by the side of an open portfolio, and holding a drawing in her tiny hand, with the slender, solitary gold bangle over the grey glove.

IV

Madame Krasinska was in a very bad humour. The old Chanoiness, her late husband’s aunt, noticed it; her guests noticed it; her maid noticed it: and she noticed it herself. For, of all human beings, Madame Krasinska – Netta, as smart folk familiarly called her – was the least subject to bad humour. She was as uniformly cheerful as birds are supposed to be, and she certainly had none of the causes for anxiety or sorrow which even the most proverbial bird must occasionally have. She had always had money, health, good looks; and people had always told her – in New York, in London, in Paris, Rome, and St. Petersburg – from her very earliest childhood, that her one business in life was to amuse herself. The old gentleman whom she had simply and cheerfully accepted as a husband, because he had given her quantities of bonbons, and was going to give her quantities of diamonds, had been kind, and had been kindest of all in dying of sudden bronchitis when away for a month, leaving his young widow with an affectionately indifferent recollection of him, no remorse of any kind, and a great deal of money, not to speak of the excellent Chanoiness, who constituted an invaluable chaperon. And, since his happy demise, no cloud had disturbed the cheerful life or feelings of Madame Krasinska. Other women, she knew, had innumerable subjects of wretchedness; or if they had none, they were wretched from the want of them. Some had children who made them unhappy, others were unhappy for lack of children, and similarly as to lovers; but she had never had a child and never had a lover, and never experienced the smallest desire for either. Other women suffered from sleeplessness, or from sleepiness, and took morphia or abstained from morphia with equal inconvenience; other women also grew weary of amusement. But Madame Krasinska always slept beautifully, and always stayed awake cheerfully; and Madame Krasinska was never tired of amusing herself. Perhaps it was all this which culminated in the fact that Madame Krasinska had never in all her life envied or disliked anybody; and that no one, apparently, had ever envied or disliked her. She did not wish to outshine or supplant anyone; she did not want to be richer, younger, more beautiful, or more adored than they. She only wanted to amuse herself, and she succeeded in so doing.

This particular day – the day after Madame Fosca’s ball – Madame Krasinska was not amusing herself. She was not at all tired: she never was; besides, she had remained in bed till midday: neither was she unwell, for that also she never was; nor had anyone done the slightest thing to vex her. But there it was. She was not amusing herself at all. She could not tell why; and she could not tell why, also, she was vaguely miserable. When the first batch of afternoon callers had taken leave, and the following batches had been sent away from the door, she threw down her volume of Gyp, and walked to the window. It was raining: a thin, continuous spring drizzle. Only a few cabs, with wet, shining backs, an occasional lumbering omnibus or cart, passed by with wheezing, straining, downcast horses. In one or two shops a light was appearing, looking tiny, blear, and absurd in the grey afternoon. Madame Krasinska looked out for a few minutes; then, suddenly turning round, she brushed past the big palms and azaleas, and rang the bell.

“Order the brougham at once,” she said.

She could by no means have explained what earthly reason had impelled her to go out. When the footman had inquired for orders she felt at a loss: certainly she did not want to go to see anyone, nor to buy anything, nor to inquire about anything.

What did she want? Madame Krasinska was not in the habit of driving out in the rain for her pleasure; still less to drive out without knowing whither. What did she want? She sat muffled in her furs, looking out on the wet, grey streets as the brougham rolled aimlessly along. She wanted – she wanted – she couldn’t tell what. But she wanted it very much. That much she knew very well – she wanted. The rain, the wet streets, the muddy crossings – oh, how dismal they were! and still she wished to go on.

Instinctively, her polite coachman made for the politer streets, for the polite Lung’ Arno. The river quay was deserted, and a warm, wet wind swept lazily along its muddy flags. Madame Krasinska let down the glass. How dreary! The foundry, on the other side, let fly a few red sparks from its tall chimney into the grey sky; the water droned over the weir; a lamp-lighter hurried along.

Madame Krasinska pulled the check-string.

“I want to walk,” she said.

The polite footman followed behind along the messy flags, muddy and full of pools; the brougham followed behind him. Madame Krasinska was not at all in the habit of walking on the embankment, still less walking in the rain.

After some minutes she got in again, and bade the carriage drive home. When she got into the lit streets she again pulled the check-string and ordered the brougham to proceed at a foot’s pace. At a certain spot she remembered something, and bade the coachman draw up before a shop. It was the big chemist’s.

“What does the Signora Contessa command?” and the footman raised his hat over his ear. Somehow she had forgotten. “Oh,” she answered, “wait a minute. Now I remember, it’s the next shop, the florist’s. Tell them to send fresh azaleas tomorrow and fetch away the old ones.”

Now the azaleas had been changed only that morning. But the polite footman obeyed. And Madame Krasinska remained for a minute, nestled in her fur rug, looking on to the wet, yellow, lit pavement, and into the big chemist’s window. There were the red, heart-shaped chest protectors, the frictioning gloves, the bath towels, all hanging in their place. Then boxes of eau-de-Cologne, lots of bottles of all sizes, and boxes, large and small, and variosities of indescribable nature and use, and the great glass jars, yellow, blue, green, and ruby red, with a spark from the gas lamp behind in their heart. She stared at it all, very intently, and without a notion about any of these objects. Only she knew that the glass jars were uncommonly bright, and that each had a ruby, or topaz, or emerald of gigantic size, in its heart. The footman returned.

“Drive home,” ordered Madame Krasinska. As her maid was taking her out of her dress, a thought – the first since so long – flashed across her mind, at the sight of certain skirts, and an uncouth cardboard mask, lying in a corner of her dressing-room. How odd that she had not seen the Sora Lena that evening…. She used always to be walking in the lit streets at that hour.

V

The next morning Madame Krasinska woke up quite cheerful and happy. But she began, nevertheless, to suffer, ever since the day after the Fosca ball, from the return of that quite unprecedented and inexplicable depression. Her days became streaked, as it were, with moments during which it was quite impossible to amuse herself; and these moments grew gradually into hours. People bored her for no accountable reason, and things which she had expected as pleasures brought with them a sense of vague or more distinct wretchedness. Thus she would find herself in the midst of a ball or dinner-party, invaded suddenly by a confused sadness or boding of evil, she did not know which. And once, when a box of new clothes had arrived from Paris, she was overcome, while putting on one of the frocks, with such a fit of tears that she had to be put to bed instead of going to the Tornabuoni’s party.

Of course, people began to notice this change; indeed, Madame Krasinska had ingenuously complained of the strange alteration in herself. Some persons suggested that she might be suffering from slow blood-poisoning, and urged an inquiry into the state of the drains. Others recommended arsenic, morphia, or antipyrine. One kind friend brought her a box of peculiar cigarettes; another forwarded a parcel of still more peculiar novels; most people had some pet doctor to cry up to the skies; and one or two suggested her changing her confessor; not to mention an attempt being made to mesmerise her into cheerfulness.

When her back was turned, meanwhile, all the kind friends discussed the probability of an unhappy love affair, loss of money on the Stock Exchange, and similar other explanations. And while one devoted lady tried to worm out of her the name of her unfaithful lover and of the rival for whom he had forsaken her, another assured her that she was suffering from a lack of personal affections. It was a fine opportunity for the display of pietism, materialism, idealism, realism, psychological lore, and esoteric theosophy.

Oddly enough, all this zeal about herself did not worry Madame Krasinska, as she would certainly have expected it to worry any other woman. She took a little of each of the tonic or soporific drugs; and read a little of each of those sickly sentimental, brutal, or politely improper novels. She also let herself be accompanied to various doctors; and she got up early in the morning and stood for an hour on a chair in a crowd in order to benefit by the preaching of the famous Father Agostino. She was quite patient even with the friends who condoled about the lover or absence of such. For all these things became, more and more, completely indifferent to Madame Krasinska – unrealities which had no weight in the presence of the painful reality.

This reality was that she was rapidly losing all power of amusing herself, and that when she did occasionally amuse herself she had to pay for what she called this good time by an increase of listlessness and melancholy.

It was not melancholy or listlessness such as other women complained of. They seemed, in their fits of blues, to feel that the world around them had got all wrong, or at least was going out of its way to annoy them. But Madame Krasinska saw the world quite plainly, proceeding in the usual manner, and being quite as good a world as before. It was she who was all wrong. It was, in the literal sense of the words, what she supposed people might mean when they said that So-and-so was not himself; only that So-and-so, on examination, appeared to be very much himself – only himself in a worse temper than usual. Whereas she… Why, in her case, she really did not seem to be herself any longer. Once, at a grand dinner, she suddenly ceased eating and talking to her neighbour, and surprised herself wondering who the people all were and what they had come for. Her mind would become, every now and then, a blank; a blank at least full of vague images, misty and muddled, which she was unable to grasp, but of which she knew that they were painful, weighing on her as a heavy load must weigh on the head or back. Something had happened, or was going to happen, she could not remember which, but she burst into tears none the less. In the midst of such a state of things, if visitors or a servant entered, she would ask sometimes who they were. Once a man came to call, during one of these fits; by an effort she was able to receive him and answer his small talk more or less at random, feeling the whole time as if someone else were speaking in her place. The visitor at length rose to depart, and they both stood for a moment in the midst of the drawing-room.

“This is a very pretty house; it must belong to some rich person. Do you know to whom it belongs?” suddenly remarked Madame Krasinska, looking slowly round her at the furniture, the pictures, statuettes, knicknacks, the screens and plants. “Do you know to whom it belongs?” she repeated.

“It belongs to the most charming lady in Florence,” stammered out the visitor politely, and fled.

“My darling Netta,” exclaimed the Chanoiness from where she was seated crocheting benevolently futile garments by the fire; “you should not joke in that way. That poor young man was placed in a painful, in a very painful position by your nonsense.”

Madame Krasinska leaned her arms on a screen, and stared her respectable relation long in the face.

“You seem a kind woman,” she said at length. “You are old, but then you aren’t poor, and they don’t call you a madwoman. That makes all the difference.”

Then she set to singing – drumming out the tune on the screen – the soldier song of ’59, Addio, mia bella, addio.

“Netta!” cried the Chanoiness, dropping one ball of worsted after another. “Netta!”

But Madame Krasinska passed her hand over her brow and heaved a great sigh. Then she took a cigarette off a cloisonné tray, dipped a spill in the fire and remarked,

“Would you like to have the brougham to go to see your friend at the Sacré Coeur, Aunt Thérèse? I have promised to wait in for Molly Wolkonsky and Bice Forteguerra. We are going to dine at Doney’s with young Pomfret.”

VI

Madame Krasinska had repeated her evening drives in the rain. Indeed she began also to walk about regardless of weather. Her maid asked her whether she had been ordered exercise by the doctor, and she answered yes. But why she should not walk in the Cascine or along the Lung’ Arno, and why she should always choose the muddiest thoroughfares, the maid did not inquire. As it was, Madame Krasinska never showed any repugnance or seemly contrition for the state of draggle in which she used to return home; sometimes when the woman was unbuttoning her boots, she would remain in contemplation of their muddiness, murmuring things which Jefferies could not understand. The servants, indeed, declared that the Countess must have gone out of her mind. The footman related that she used to stop the brougham, get out and look into the lit shops, and that he had to stand behind, in order to prevent lady-killing youths of a caddish description from whispering expressions of admiration in her ear. And once, he affirmed with horror, she had stopped in front of a certain cheap eating-house, and looked in at the bundles of asparagus, at the uncooked chops displayed in the window. And then, added the footman, she had turned round to him slowly and said,

“They have good food in there.”

And meanwhile, Madame Krasinska went to dinners and parties, and gave them, and organised picnics, as much as was decently possible in Lent, and indeed a great deal more.

She no longer complained of the blues; she assured everyone that she had completely got rid of them, that she had never been in such spirits in all her life. She said it so often, and in so excited a way, that judicious people declared that now that lover must really have jilted her, or gambling on the Stock Exchange have brought her to the verge of ruin.

Nay, Madame Krasinska’s spirits became so obstreperous as to change her in sundry ways. Although living in the fastest set, Madame Krasinska had never been a fast woman. There was something childlike in her nature which made her modest and decorous. She had never learned to talk slang, or to take up vulgar attitudes, or to tell impossible stories; and she had never lost a silly habit of blushing at expressions and anecdotes which she did not reprove other women for using and relating. Her amusements had never been flavoured with that spice of impropriety, of curiosity of evil, which was common in her set. She liked putting on pretty frocks, arranging pretty furniture, driving in well got up carriages, eating good dinners, laughing a great deal, and dancing a great deal, and that was all.

But now Madame Krasinska suddenly altered. She became, all of a sudden, anxious for those exotic sensations which honest women may get by studying the ways, and frequenting the haunts, of women by no means honest. She made up parties to go to the low theatres and music-halls; she proposed dressing up and going, in company with sundry adventurous spirits, for evening strolls in the more dubious portions of the town. Moreover, she, who had never touched a card, began to gamble for large sums, and to surprise people by producing a folded green roulette cloth and miniature roulette rakes out of her pocket. And she became so outrageously conspicuous in her flirtations (she who had never flirted before), and so outrageously loud in her manners and remarks, that her good friends began to venture a little remonstrance….

But remonstrance was all in vain; and she would toss her head and laugh cynically, and answer in a brazen, jarring voice.

For Madame Krasinska felt that she must live, live noisily, live scandalously, live her own life of wealth and dissipation, because…

She used to wake up at night with the horror of that suspicion. And in the middle of the day, pull at her clothes, tear down her hair, and rush to the mirror and stare at herself, and look for every feature, and clutch for every end of silk, or bit of lace, or wisp of hair, which proved that she was really herself. For gradually, slowly, she had come to understand that she was herself no longer.

Herself – well, yes, of course she was herself. Was it not herself who rushed about in such a riot of amusement; herself whose flushed cheeks and over-bright eyes, and cynically flaunted neck and bosom she saw in the glass, whose mocking loud voice and shrill laugh she listened to? Besides, did not her servants, her visitors, know her as Netta Krasinska; and did she not know how to wear her clothes, dance, make jokes, and encourage men, afterwards to discourage them? This, she often said to herself, as she lay awake the long nights, as she sat out the longer nights gambling and chaffing, distinctly proved that she really was herself. And she repeated it all mentally when she returned, muddy, worn out, and as awakened from a ghastly dream, after one of her long rambles through the streets, her daily walks towards the station.

But still…. What of those strange forebodings of evil, those muddled fears of some dreadful calamity … something which had happened, or was going to happen … poverty, starvation, death – whose death, her own? or someone else’s? That knowledge that it was all, all over; that blinding, felling blow which used every now and then to crush her…. Yes, she had felt that first at the railway station. At the station? but what had happened at the station? Or was it going to happen still? Since to the station her feet seemed unconsciously to carry her every day. What was it all? Ah! she knew. There was a woman, an old woman, walking to the station to meet…. Yes, to meet a regiment on its way back. They came back, those soldiers, among a mob yelling triumph. She remembered the illuminations, the red, green, and white lanterns, and those garlands all over the waiting-rooms. And quantities of flags. The bands played. So gaily! They played Garibaldi’s hymn, and Addio, Mia Bella. Those pieces always made her cry now. The station was crammed, and all the boys, in tattered, soiled uniforms, rushed into the arms of parents, wives, friends. Then there was like a blinding light, a crash… An officer led the old woman gently out of the place, mopping his eyes. And she, of all the crowd, was the only one to go home alone. Had it really all happened? and to whom? Had it really happened to her, had her boys…. But Madame Krasinska had never had any boys.

It was dreadful how much it rained in Florence; and stuff boots do wear out so quick in mud. There was such a lot of mud on the way to the station; but of course it was necessary to go to the station in order to meet the train from Lombardy – the boys must be met.

There was a place on the other side of the river where you went in and handed your watch and your brooch over the counter, and they gave you some money and a paper. Once the paper got lost. Then there was a mattress, too. But there was a kind man – a man who sold hardware – who went and fetched it back. It was dreadfully cold in winter, but the worst was the rain. And having no watch one was afraid of being late for that train, and had to dawdle so long in the muddy streets. Of course one could look in at the pretty shops. But the little boys were so rude. Oh, no, no, not that – anything rather than be shut up in an hospital. The poor old woman did no one any harm – why shut her up?

“Faites votre jeu, messieurs,” cried Madame Krasinska, raking up the counters with the little rake she had had made of tortoise-shell, with a gold dragon’s head for a handle – “Rien ne va plus – vingt-trois – Rouge, impair et manque.”

VII

How did she come to know about this woman? She had never been inside that house over the tobacconist’s, up three pairs of stairs to the left; and yet she knew exactly the pattern of the wallpaper. It was green, with a pinkish trellis-work, in the grand sitting-room, the one which was opened only on Sunday evenings, when the friends used to drop in and discuss the news, and have a game of tresette. You passed through the dining-room to get through it. The dining-room had no window, and was lit from a skylight; there was always a little smell of dinner in it, but that was appetising. The boys’ rooms were to the back. There was a plaster Joan of Arc in the hall, close to the clothes-peg. She was painted to look like silver, and one of the boys had broken her arm, so that it looked like a gas-pipe. It was Momino who had done it, jumping on to the table when they were playing. Momino was always the scapegrace; he wore out so many pairs of trousers at the knees, but he was so warm-hearted! and after all, he had got all the prizes at school, and they all said he would be a first-rate engineer. Those dear boys! They never cost their mother a farthing, once they were sixteen; and Momino bought her a big, beautiful muff out of his own earnings as a pupil-teacher. Here it is! Such a comfort in the cold weather, you can’t think, especially when gloves are too dear. Yes, it is rabbit-skin, but it is made to look like ermine, quite a handsome article. Assunta, the maid of all work, never would clean out that kitchen of hers – servants are such sluts! and she tore the moreen sofa-cover, too, against a nail in the wall. She ought to have seen that nail! But one mustn’t be too hard on a poor creature, who is an orphan into the bargain. Oh, God! oh, God! and they lie in the big trench at San Martino, without even a cross over them, or a bit of wood with their name. But the white coats of the Austrians were soaked red, I warrant you! And the new dye they call magenta is made of pipe-clay – the pipe-clay the dogs clean their white coats with – and the blood of Austrians. It’s a grand dye, I tell you!

Lord, Lord, how wet the poor old woman’s feet are! And no fire to warm them by. The best is to go to bed when one can’t dry one’s clothes; and it saves lamp-oil. That was very good oil the parish priest made her a present of…. Aï, aï, how one’s bones ache on the mere boards, even with a blanket over them! That good, good mattress at the pawn-shop! It’s nonsense about the Italians having been beaten. The Austrians were beaten into bits, made cats’-meat of; and the volunteers are returning tomorrow. Temistocle and Momino – Momino is Girolamo, you know – will be back tomorrow; their rooms have been cleaned, and they shall have a flask of real Montepulciano…. The big bottles in the chemist’s window are very beautiful, particularly the green one. The shop where they sell gloves and scarves is also very pretty; but the English chemist’s is the prettiest, because of those bottles. But they say the contents of them is all rubbish, and no real medicine…. Don’t speak of San Bonifazio! I have seen it. It is where they keep the mad folk and the wretched, dirty, wicked, wicked old women…. There was a handsome book bound in red, with gold edges, on the best sitting-room table; the Aeneid, translated by Caro. It was one of Temistocle’s prizes. And that Berlin-wool cushion … yes, the little dog with the cherries looked quite real….

“I have been thinking I should like to go to Sicily, to see Etna, and Palermo, and all those places,” said Madame Krasinska, leaning on the balcony by the side of Prince Mongibello, smoking her fifth or sixth cigarette.

She could see the hateful hooked nose, like a nasty hawk’s beak, over the big black beard, and the creature’s leering, languishing black eyes, as he looked up into the twilight. She knew quite well what sort of man Mongibello was. No woman could approach him, or allow him to approach her; and there she was on that balcony alone with him in the dark, far from the rest of the party, who were dancing and talking within. And to talk of Sicily to him, who was a Sicilian too! But that was what she wanted – a scandal, a horror, anything that might deaden those thoughts which would go on inside her…. The thought of that strange, lofty whitewashed place, which she had never seen, but which she knew so well, with an altar in the middle, and rows and rows of beds, each with its set-out of bottles and baskets, and horrid slobbering and gibbering old women. Oh … she could hear them!

“I should like to go to Sicily,” she said in a tone that was now common to her, adding slowly and with emphasis, “but I should like to have someone to show me all the sights….”

“Countess,” and the black beard of the creature bent over her – close to her neck – “how strange – I also feel a great longing to see Sicily once more, but not alone – those lovely, lonely valleys….”

Ah! – there was one of the creatures who had sat up in her bed and was singing, singing “Casta Diva!”  “No, not alone” – she went on hurriedly, a sort of fury of satisfaction, of the satisfaction of destroying something, destroying her own fame, her own life, filling her as she felt the man’s hand on her arm – “not alone, Prince – with someone to explain things – someone who knows all about it – and in this lovely spring weather. You see, I am a bad traveller – and I am afraid … of being alone….” The last words came out of her throat loud, hoarse, and yet cracked and shrill – and just as the Prince’s arm was going to clasp her, she rushed wildly into the room, exclaiming—

“Ah, I am she – I am she – I am mad!”

For in that sudden voice, so different from her own, Madame Krasinska had recognised the voice that should have issued from the cardboard mask she had once worn, the voice of Sora Lena.

VIII

Yes, Cecchino certainly recognised her now. Strolling about in that damp May twilight among the old, tortuous streets, he had mechanically watched the big black horses draw up at the posts which closed that labyrinth of black, narrow alleys; the servant in his white waterproof opened the door, and the tall, slender woman got out and walked quickly along. And mechanically, in his wool-gathering way, he had followed the lady, enjoying the charming note of delicate pink and grey which her little frock made against those black houses, and under that wet, grey sky, streaked pink with the sunset. She walked quickly along, quite alone, having left the footman with the carriage at the entrance of that condemned old heart of Florence; and she took no notice of the stares and words of the boys playing in the gutters, the pedlars housing their barrows under the black archways, and the women leaning out of window. Yes; there was no doubt. It had struck him suddenly as he watched her pass under a double arch and into a kind of large court, not unlike that of a castle, between the frowning tall houses of the old Jews’ quarter; houses escutcheoned and stanchioned, once the abode of Ghibelline nobles, now given over to rag-pickers, scavengers and unspeakable trades.

As soon as he recognised her he stopped, and was about to turn: what business has a man following a lady, prying into her doings when she goes out at twilight, with carriage and footman left several streets back, quite alone through unlikely streets? And Cecchino, who by this time was on the point of returning to the Maremma, and had come to the conclusion that civilisation was a boring and loathsome thing, reflected upon the errands which French novels described ladies as performing, when they left their carriage and footman round the corner…. But the thought was disgraceful to Cecchino, and unjust to this lady – no, no! And at this moment he stopped, for the lady had stopped a few paces before him, and was staring fixedly into the grey evening sky. There was something strange in that stare; it was not that of a woman who is hiding disgraceful proceedings. And in staring round she must have seen him; yet she stood still, like one wrapped in wild thoughts. Then suddenly she passed under the next archway, and disappeared in the dark passage of a house. Somehow Cecco Bandini could not make up his mind, as he ought to have done long ago, to turn back. He slowly passed through the oozy, ill-smelling archway, and stood before that house. It was very tall, narrow, and black as ink, with a jagged roof against the wet, pinkish sky. From the iron hook, made to hold brocades and Persian carpets on gala days of old, fluttered some rags, obscene and ill-omened in the wind. Many of the window panes were broken. It was evidently one of the houses which the municipality had condemned to destruction for sanitary reasons, and whence the inmates were gradually being evicted.

“That’s a house they’re going to pull down, isn’t it?” he inquired in a casual tone of the man at the corner, who kept a sort of cookshop, where chestnut pudding and boiled beans steamed on a brazier in a den. Then his eye caught a half-effaced name close to the lamp-post, “Little Street of the Grave-digger.”  “Ah,” he added quickly, “this is the street where old Sora Lena committed suicide – and – is – is that the house?”

Then, trying to extricate some reasonable idea out of the extraordinary tangle of absurdities which had all of a sudden filled his mind, he fumbled in his pocket for a silver coin, and said hurriedly to the man with the cooking brazier,

“See here, that house, I’m sure, isn’t well inhabited. That lady has gone there for a charity – but – but one doesn’t know that she mayn’t be annoyed in there. Here’s fifty centimes for your trouble. If that lady doesn’t come out again in three-quarters of an hour – there! it’s striking seven – just you go round to the stone posts – you’ll find her carriage there – black horses and grey liveries – and tell the footman to run upstairs to his mistress – understand?” And Cecchino Bandini fled, overwhelmed at the thought of the indiscretion he was committing, but seeing, as he turned round, those rags waving an ominous salute from the black, gaunt house with its irregular roof against the wet, twilight sky.

IX

Madame Krasinska hurried though the long black corridor, with its slippery bricks and typhoid smell, and went slowly but resolutely up the black staircase. Its steps, constructed perhaps in the days of Dante’s grandfather, when a horn buckle and leathern belt formed the only ornaments of Florentine dames, were extraordinarily high, and worn off at the edges by innumerable generations of successive nobles and paupers. And as it twisted sharply on itself, the staircase was lighted at rare intervals by barred windows, overlooking alternately the black square outside, with its jags of overhanging roof, and a black yard, where a broken well was surrounded by a heap of half-sorted chickens’ feathers and unpicked rags. On the first landing was an open door, partly screened by a line of drying tattered clothes; and whence issued shrill sounds of altercation and snatches of tipsy song. Madame Krasinska passed on heedless of it all, the front of her delicate frock brushing the unseen filth of those black steps, in whose crypt-like cold and gloom there was an ever-growing breath of charnel. Higher and higher, flight after flight, steps and steps. Nor did she look to the right or to the left, nor ever stop to take breath, but climbed upward, slowly, steadily. At length she reached the topmost landing, on to which fell a flickering beam of the setting sun. It issued from a room, whose door was standing wide open. Madame Krasinska entered. The room was completely empty, and comparatively light. There was no furniture in it, except a chair, pushed into a dark corner, and an empty bird-cage at the window. The panes were broken, and here and there had been mended with paper. Paper also hung, in blackened rags, upon the walls.

Madame Krasinska walked to the window and looked out over the neighbouring roofs, to where the bell in an old black belfry swung tolling the Ave Maria. There was a porticoed gallery on the top of a house some way off; it had a few plants growing in pipkins, and a drying line. She knew it all so well.

On the windowsill was a cracked basin, in which stood a dead basil plant, dry, grey. She looked at it some time, moving the hardened earth with her fingers. Then she turned to the empty bird-cage. Poor solitary starling! how he had whistled to the poor old woman! Then she began to cry.

But after a few moments she roused herself. Mechanically, she went to the door and closed it carefully. Then she went straight to the dark corner, where she knew that the staved-in straw chair stood. She dragged it into the middle of the room, where the hook was in the big rafter. She stood on the chair, and measured the height of the ceiling. It was so low that she could graze it with the palm of her hand. She took off her gloves, and then her bonnet – it was in the way of the hook. Then she unclasped her girdle, one of those narrow Russian ribbons of silver woven stuff, studded with niello. She buckled one end firmly to the big hook. Then she unwound the strip of muslin from under her collar. She was standing on the broken chair, just under the rafter. “Pater noster qui es in caelis,” she mumbled, as she still childishly did when putting her head on the pillow every night.

The door creaked and opened slowly. The big, hulking woman, with the vague, red face and blear stare, and the rabbit-skin muff, bobbing on her huge crinolined skirts, shambled slowly into the room. It was the Sora Lena.

X

When the man from the cook-shop under the archway and the footman entered the room, it was pitch dark. Madame Krasinska was lying in the middle of the floor, by the side of an overturned chair, and under a hook in the rafter whence hung her Russian girdle. When she awoke from her swoon, she looked slowly round the room; then rose, fastened her collar and murmured, crossing herself, “O God, thy mercy is infinite.” The men said that she smiled.

Such is the legend of Madame Krasinska, known as Mother Antoinette Marie among the Little Sisters of the Poor.

—

Sister Benvenuta
and the Christ Child

(1905)

Some sixty years ago, and shortly before its total extinction, the illustrious Venetian family of Loredan began taking steps towards the beatification of one of its members, a nun, who had died at Cividale in the year 1740.

The inhabitants of Cividale had indeed waited for no official confirmation of the blessedness of Sister Benvenuta Loredan; and a regular cultus, as well as an appropriate legend, were well known to exist in connexion with her. Indeed, it would appear that the beatification of this young lady who, during her worldly life, had been the third daughter of Almoro IV Loredan Count of Teolo and Suave, and Fiordispina Badoer, his wife, had become advisable not only in recognition of her saintliness and miracles, but also to direct popular piety into authorized channels, and to prune away sundry fanciful beliefs and practices which had grown up unnoticed. For tactfully conducted ecclesiastical enquiries established that the Beata Benvenuta, as she was prematurely designated, had become the chief object of devotion to young children and their fond mothers in the town of Cividale.

In this capacity she had usurped the credit, and even part of the legend, of some of the oldest and best accredited saints in the Calendar. Thus it was proved beyond doubt that the children of Cividale had ceased considering the three holy kings –Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar – as the purveyors of their yearly gifts, and laid out their shoes and stockings for the Beata Benvenuta to fill.

What was even graver, there had come to be attributed to her some of those venerable familiarities with the Infant Christ which are known for a certainty of St Catherine, St Anthony of Padua, and (according to certain worshipful hagiographers) of the seraphic St Francis himself. While, on the other hand, she was credited with personal encounters with the Great Enemy of Mankind, such as are authoritatively ascertained only of St Antony, St Nicholas of Bari, St Dunstan, St Theodora, St Anaximander, St Rodwald, St Nilus, and a small number of well-known celestial champions flourishing in more remote periods of history. To this manifest disorder must be added that the yearly procession in honour of the Beata Benvenuta, so called, was conducted by children, mainly little girls, without any ecclesiastical guidance, and consisted in parading the town in wreaths and fanciful dresses of tinsel and variegated bits of stuff, singing childish songs and, it is even rumoured, taking hands and dancing, and eating certain small dough nuts made for the occasion. A similar kind of hard cake, stuck with toasted almonds, was sold throughout the streets of Cividale on May 15th, the anniversary of the so-called Beata Benvenuta’s birth; which cakes were supposed to have the shape of the Infant Saviour in the arms of the young nun above-mentioned. And this day was also celebrated by an unusual display of puppet shows, whose owners claimed the Beata Benvenuta as their heavenly advocate, a statement requiring to be taken with the greatest circumspection. But the circumstance most characteristic of the whole questionable business, and surely sufficient to warrant the introduction of supreme ecclesiastical authority, was that (as no one in Cividale could deny) the children were wont to employ in their games a rhyme for the purpose of counting, of which the first line contained the name of the Beata Benvenuta Loredan, and the last that of the Devil.

Such were some of the reasons, besides the uncontested holiness of her life, and a respectable number of well-ascertained miraculous cures and deliverances, which rendered it urgent that steps should be taken towards the beatification of Sister Benvenuta Loredan of Cividale.

His Holiness Pope Gregory XVI lent a favourable ear to these reasons and to the commendable desires both of the noble house of Loredan (who defrayed all expenses) and of the few remaining nuns of the Convent of St Mary of the Rosebush, both legitimately proud of so glorious a member respectively of their temporal and spiritual families.

But after some years of diligent enquiry, and much research into public and private archives, the matter of the beatification of Sister Benvenuta Loredan was allowed to drop, nor ever taken up subsequently. The perusal of the diary of Sister Benvenuta Loredan, contained amongst the documents of the case, may perhaps shed some light both on her real claims to beatification and on the reason why these claims were not officially admitted.

•   •   •   •   •

Convent of St Mary of the Rosebush
of Cividale in Friuli

Day of the Holy Name of Jesus
January, 1740

I have been thinking and thinking how dreadfully dull it must be for our dear little Child Christ, always locked up in that Sacristy cupboard, which smells so of old wood and stale incense whenever it is opened. Except from Christmas Eve till Epiphany, when He lies in the manger under the High Altar, between the Ox and the Ass, and one or two great feasts when He is carried in procession, He is always in that press between the bits of saints’ bones in cotton-wool, the spare vestments and packets of waxlights; and the Sister Sacristan is always so careful to close everything! Once, soon after Corpus Christi, she had omitted to lock the press, and I seized the opportunity to put a big bunch of damask roses in for the dear Bambino; I watched her take it out some weeks later, hold it at arm’s length with a sniff, and throw it into the dustpan. And then I was glad I had not also put in one of those little round cakes, of fine flour and vinsanto, which Sister Rosalba, who is so proud of her uncle the Doge, baked for that holiday, according to a recipe of His Serenity’s household.

If only I could get appointed Sacristan! But I am too young, and being lame prevents my getting onto the stepladders. For all these reasons I have resolved that, being unable to talk freely to the dear Great Little One, I would write down the things which may divert Him, and put the sheets in the big hollow silver arm containing a finger-bone of St Pantaleo, Bishop of Baalbek, whenever I have an opportunity of getting to that cupboard.

St Agnes’ day

I have considered very earnestly, dear little Child Christ, whether it may not be carnal pride to suppose that I can amuse you at all, and whether I ought not to confess it. But our Confessor is a learned man; he has written a big treatise on the language spoken in Paradise before Adam’s disobedience (it seems it was a dialect of Turkish), and makes fine sonnets whenever there is a new nun, all printed on yellow silk, and handed round with the ices; our Confessor already thinks me such a silly person, and would only take snuff impatiently and cry, “Tut, tut! Pray for a little wisdom, Sister Benvenuta.” And then it is not vaingloriousness, nor a sin, for I do not in the least think I shall tell these things amusingly, with nobility of style, as the Mother Abbess would, or wittily, like old Sister Grimana Emo, who always makes me blush. It is simply that, however dull I am (and I was always a dunce) it will be less dull for the dear Little Great One than living always alone in that cupboard, with no company but the worms in the wood and these holy bits of bone in cotton-wool under glass bells.

4th Sunday after Epiphany

It cannot really be sinful vaingloriousness; for Heaven would not have sent me so very soon something quite wonderfully interesting to tell my dear Great Little One. Oh, it’s really wonderfully exciting! There is going to be a great entertainment on Shrove Tuesday. All the nobility of the town are invited, and there is to be a puppet show in the parlour! We have to pretend not to know it until the Mother Superior tells us in Chapter. But we are talking of nothing else. And so I must tell the Great Little Child Christ.

St Dorothy’s Day

The showman had a long audience from the Mother Abbess the day before yesterday. They say he asked an extortionate price because this convent is so famous, and the sisters all required to have sixteen quarterings and at least a thousand ducats of dowry. But the Mother Abbess, who is a widow of the house of Morosini, beat him down with great dignity. I caught a glimpse of the showman: he is an ill-favoured person, with a Bolognese accent, a cast in his eye, a red wig, and his stockings badly drawn. But Sister Rosalba, who has much worldly wisdom, says he is not excommunicate, though he looks as if he were. We discussed whether the puppets of an excommunicated person would therefore be excommunicated puppets, and might or might not be introduced into a convent. The Sister Sacristan said that, at any rate, the Mother Superior had treated him with consummate dignity, and had warned him to try no tricks upon her.

St Scholastica’s Day

Oh, dearest Bambino, if only I could show you the puppets! The man has brought them, against the performance next week, in order to give time for any changes, in case the Mother Abbess or our reverend Father Confessor should discover something sinful about any of them. The Mother Superior had them all in her private parlour to examine through a magnifying glass. Sister Grimana says our Confessor took exception to some of the ladies showing so much of their bosom; but our Mother Superior, who is a woman of the world, answered that she was astonished that His Reverence did not know that a Venetian lady is allowed by the laws of the Serene Republic to show exactly one-half of her bosom and no more, there being no immodesty in this proceeding. I do not understand much about such things; but it appears the Mother Abbess pointed out that it would be an unwarrantable criticism on the wisdom of the Republic and also on the noble ladies invited to the representation, if the puppets representing the parts of queens, princesses, and heroines had pieces of tissue paper arranged round their shoulders as the Reverend Father suggested. I do not know about the bodices of the ladies; I only know how beautiful they are, and how I should like to show them to my dear Little Great One.

For, after the examination in the Abbess’s private parlour, the puppets were all brought back and hung on sorts of towel-horses in the corridor of St Mary Magdalen, and all we sisters were allowed to look at them. Oh, dearest Bambino, if only I could bring you one or two! They have wires through their heads and strings to their hands and feet, ending in a big bobbin by which they are hung up. And when you pull the strings their little wooden hands move like forks, and their chins go down and their mouths open; and their arms and legs fling out and they clatter. That is not the proper way of using them, of course, but I can’t do anything else. Sister Rosalba and old Sister Grimana hold them in the right way, with their heels, which are leaded (and some have lovely shoes with rosettes and some embroidered slippers like Turks), firmly against the floor, so that they are erect, and move along hitting the ground, and making wonderful movements with their arms, sometimes even across their back, which cannot be quite right, but, of course, I do not know. Some of them, a terrible Sclavonian, with a sash full of knives, big horsehair whiskers, and a servant wench, particularly, got their strings entangled, and always would spin round and turn their backs to each other. But there was a Shepherdess and a Hero with a blonde wig and a Roman dress, who were quite easy to manage, and the two sisters made them dance a minuet, Sister Grimana singing in a cracked voice, until Atalanta Badoer, a novice and my cousin, fetched a lute which had remained over from Sunday’s musical Mass, and began to play a furlana beautifully. I thought, “Does my Bambino hear the music in His cupboard?” But some of the elder sisters reprimanded her and took the lute away. How I should like to bring the Shepherdess to show my dear Great Little One! I do not really like the puppets representing ladies, though they have lovely skirts of flowered cloth of silver and andriennes making their hips stick out, and bodices full of seed pearl, and patches on their cheeks and red paint, just like the real ladies who used to come and drink chocolate with my mother and my aunts. And some of them have light cloaks and big hats tied with black kerchiefs and white masks like snouts, just like the ladies I used to see during carnival on the big staircase at Venice, with their servant cavaliers; and those white snouts and black kerchiefs, and the way they swayed in their great hoops covered with dominoes, used to frighten me and make me cry. I would not show you any of those, dearest Little Great One; nor the wicked Sclavonians and Turks, nor the Ogre, nor the horrid old Doctor with the long red nose, nor the Harlequin striped like a villainous snake, not even the Spaniard, Don Matamoros, in black slashed clothes and boots, with whiskers on end and a mouth that would swallow you. But I would show you the kind, gentle, Blackamoor King, and the Beautiful Hero in Roman costume and a blonde wig, who looks as if he were singing “Mio Ben!” and “Amor Mio,” like the famous soprano I was carried to hear at the opera just before I took the veil. But above all, I would show my Bambino that lovely, modest Shepherdess, and try to make her dance for him! Oh, I shall commit a sin someday, and steal the cupboard key, and creep out to show that Shepherdess to my Bambino!

St Juliana’s Day
February 16th

I am a great simpleton. When we were looking again at the puppets today (for we contrive, at least a few of us, to look at them on their towel-horses every day) there was one which made me burst out laughing, till I nearly cried; and it was very foolish and wrong, as Sister Grimana told me, for I knew the whole time that puppet represented the Devil. I have never been afraid of the Devil, I who am afraid of so many things (for instance, of those people in dominoes and hats tied with black kerchiefs and white snouty masks, who used to come and play cards and drink Samos wine at my father’s house). I know it is wrong, and I have often prayed that I might learn to fear the Evil One, but I never could, and all the pictures of him, and the things they tell (and which we read in the Spicilegium Sanctorum) have always made me laugh. And so from foolishness and a bad heart, I burst out laughing at this Puppet-Devil; and it was very wicked. But oh, dear Bambino, you would have laughed also!

St Cunegunda’s Day

The Mother Abbess said there must be less fooling about with puppets in the Convent of St Mary of the Rosebush; so we have all become very busy, and I have barely time to write to my dearest Bambino. This convent is so noble, only patricians of the Serene Republic and Princes and Counts of the Holy Roman Empire being able to propose their daughters, that we are allowed to do no useful work, there being lay sisters for that purpose. I am often sorry (for I have not a noble mind befitting my birth, as my nurses often complained) it should be so. I should like to shell peas and wash rice and slice tomatoes in the kitchen. I have often envied the lay sisters turning up the garden mould, which smells so good, and pruning and planting while we walk round the cloisters: and I feel that my unskillful fingers would be happier sewing woollen shifts of winters for the poor women and children, than embroidering, which I do so badly! But I suppose this is all mere wicked spirit of indiscipline and grumbling (the sin of Accidia which our Confessor talks about), and I pray hard to have a more humble and thankful heart. Be this as it may, we sisters have all been very busy; some making candied peel and rosolios in the Mother Abbess’s silver saucepans; others sewing altar cloths, embroidering, making lace, and making all manner of ingenious and pious ornaments and devices out of plaited straws, strips of coloured and gilt paper and variegated beads. I have been among those who have the honour of manufacturing the pleated and crinkled and goffered linen for His Eminence the Patriarch’s surplices. Here, again, I have committed a little sin of arrogance, thinking that His Eminence had quite surplices enough to spare, and wishing I could give some of this folded lawn, looking like sea foam or the blossoms of our almond trees, to my dear Little Great One, so chilly in that Sacristy cupboard, with only a hard purple and gold sash tickling His poor little middle.

St Frances’ Day

I really must tell you, dear Little Great One, about the puppet representing the Devil, because if I can make you smile I shall feel it is not mere wickedness always to want to laugh whenever I see or even think of that puppet. He is labelled Beelzebubb Satanasso, Prince of all Devils, and is hung up, by the hook in the bobbin above his head, on the clothes-horse in the Corridor of St Eusebius, under a picture of Sebastian Ricci, representing the martyrdom of St Agatha; the puppets on either side of him are labelled “Pulcinella” and “Sophonisba.” But actually next to him, so as to look as if they were all of one piece, is a very terrible monster labelled “Basilisk.” The Devil wears a black dressing-gown fastened with a pale blue scarf; he has an ebony wand in his hand, and his legs, where the robe ends, are of ebony also, like those of a horse, with beautiful carved hoofs. He has also got long ears and little scarlet horns. He seems to have the other hand on the Basilisk, and ought to be very frightening – or, rather, I ought to be very frightened of him! For it is dreadful to have hoofs and horns like that, and a hand on a dragon, and be labelled “Beelzebubb Satanasso, Prince of all Devils.” But he makes me laugh, dearest Bambino, laugh and only laugh; and I am sure you would laugh also, although you are the Verb incarnate and all the great things we learned in the Catechism. How I wish you could see him, or I could tell you! He has a wide face, bearded like a Capuchin, with black goggle eyes; and the eyes seem starting out to understand something he can’t; and the mouth with the beard round it is gaping also to understand what he can’t, and his whole face is puckered trying to make out what’s wanted. He reminds me of my brother’s tutor, into whose bed (he was a priest of the Oratory) the bad boys used to put hedgehogs, and he would prick himself, and cry out all in Latin. Only I was sorry for the tutor; and I am not a bit sorry for the Devil, but only amused at his being all stiff and agape with his responsibilities – his responsibilities of being the Devil. Oh, dearest Bambino, what fun it would be if you and I could only play him a good enough trick! It wouldn’t be unkind like the hedgehogs in the Reverend’s bed, because you see he has hoofs and horns, and he is the Devil. How I wish I had a better memory and were less of a dunce! I should like to remember some of the tricks which the Holy Fathers in the Desert, and the other glorious ones in the Golden Legend, played upon him – not on the puppet, of course, I mean.

Ash Wednesday

The performance is over. It was the story of Judith; how she slew Holophernes and delivered her people, written in Alexandrine verses by our Reverend Father Confessor, called Corydon Melpomeneus among the Arcadian Shepherds. The head of Holophernes really came off, and quantities of red Berlin wool out of it, most naturally and terribly. There was a Triumph of Judith, dressed like the Parisian fashion doll near the Clock Tower in Venice; with a gold car, a transparency, and Time appearing with his scythe and Religion out of clouds, to sing a compliment to our Reverend Mother Abbess and the illustrious house of Morosini (including Morosini Peloponnesiacus of undying memory), and there was a dance of Turks, very elegant, and a most diverting scene after Holophernes’s death between the servant wench of Judith and Harlequin his valet. The puppets were like alive, hitting the floor with their feet, snapping through the middle when they bowed, and striking out their arms and letting down their jaws with a click in the most lifelike way, and talking in wonderful voices like bagpipes and Jews’ harps. And there was an immense company of noble ladies and cavaliers, and prelates and monks, and officers, and his Excellency the Proveditor of the Republic, and the Head Spy, and ices and sherbet and chocolate, and card-tables set out later for the nobility, and at least one thousand waxlights in the Murano chandeliers, usually kept for the sepulchres on Maunday Thursday. And when it was over there was a free fight between the chair-carriers of the Patriarch’s niece and the Bravoes of His Excellency the Count of Gradisca, and a man was left for dead, and the police put a cobbler on the rack next day in order to obtain information and do justice.

We sisters were all behind a gilded grating, and, as the youngest, I sat with the novices, and was unable to constrain them to a religious demeanour or to prevent their pelting their brothers and cousins with macaroons. I ought to have enjoyed it, and I did nothing but reproach myself bitterly for my ingratitude towards Providence and our Mother Superior, who allowed me to be present at so noble and delicious an entertainment, whereas I was filled only with bitterness and a wish to put a jug of water on the top of the Sister Sacristan’s door, so that she should be cruelly soused and frightened, and made to shriek ridiculously when she went back to her cell. For I had laid a plot, which was certainly no sin (nor shall I confess it on any account), to steel the key of that cupboard and take out my dear little Child Christ, and hide Him in a cardboard vase with artificial roses just opposite the stage, so that He might enjoy the performance. And the Sister Sacristan double-locked the cupboard after Matins, and counted the keys, and hung the bunch at her waist with a most defiant look at me. And I hate her, and feel sure she will never go to Heaven, because of her arrogance and her unkindness to my dear Holy Bambino.

St Praxed’s Day

I fear I am letting myself go to the deadly sin of hatred and uncharitableness; but how is it possible not to hate the Sister Sacristan and think she looks like a cock, when she loses no opportunity of being unkind to my dear little Child Christ, who, after all, is the King of Heaven, and deserving of consideration even from a Venetian noble. The way of it is this: our Mother Abbess, fearing that the novices and younger sisters should have become a little worldly over that puppet show and all the ladies and cavaliers who were present, has ordered that the entire convent should give four hours daily, between Matins and Vespers, to pious work, fit to nourish religious thoughts and conversation full of compunction. All the reliquaries are to be furbished with plate powder and the holy relics to have their cotton-wool and little ribbons renewed before Christmas. It is a long piece of work, for the bits of bone are brittle and so small that they get lost among the heaps of wadding and the bobbins of ribbon on the worktable. Also, such sisters as are skilful workwomen are to mend the dresses of the various sacred images and put aside such of their lace and embroidery as will take careful repairs. All the various Madonnas have been taken down and their wardrobes examined; the Mother Abbess has been very angry at finding so much moth; moreover, the number of shoes and stockings and lace pocket-handkerchiefs were found by no means complete, and some of the men who work in the garden gravely suspected and handed over to the Holy Office. My cousin Badoer, the most unruly of the novices, says that it’s the continuation of the puppet show in the Mother Abbess’s head; whereupon I have exhorted her to greater piety of thought, but could not, like the sinful dunce I am, refrain from laughing. Of course my thought leapt at once to my dear Great Little One, in that damp, musty cupboard, with nothing but a prickly crimson and gold sash round his middle. Knowing our Mother Abbess favourably inclined to me (partly on account of my lameness, and partly on account of our family reaching to the beginnings of the Serene Republic, and issuing originally from Lars Parsenna, King of Rome), I ventured to suggest the fittingness of preparing for Him a little coat of soft silk over fine linen against the moment of His exposure at Christmas in that draughty manger. Our Mother Abbess looked at me long, smiled, and even pinched my cheek, saying, “Truly our Sister Benvenuta Loredan was made to be the nursery-maid of Heaven.” But at that moment, just as she was going to give permission, who should come in but (oh, hatred is sinful, but I do hate her!) the Sister Sacristan, who immediately poured cold water on my proposal; said that it should be taking time and money from re-dressing the skeleton of St Prodoscimus, which was a most creditable relic, with real diamond hoops in his eye-holes, and ought really to be made fit to exhibit to pious veneration. And added that the Bambino never had had any clothes on, that the sash even was a concession to modesty, but that no one had ever heard of His wanting to be dressed; the proposal being newfangled and (did it not come from a sister notoriously prayed for as a simpleton) almost such as to suggest dangerous heresies. So the Abbess turned to me, wagging her ringed finger and saying, “Fie, fie, Sister Benvenuta, the Sacred Bambino is not your Cavalier Servant that you should wish to cover Him with velvet and gold lace;” and turned to inquire how many fat carp had been taken to the kitchen for the dinner offered to Monsignor the Eleemosynary of Saint Patrick.

St Mary of the Snows.
5th August

But my dearest Bambino shall have His little coat; and one softer, warmer, and more gallant than any which the Sister Sacristan can stick upon the skeleton, with the diamond hoops for eyes, of her St Prodoscimus! I have been sorely assailed by bitterness and despair these last weeks. I have bribed the lay sister to buy me silk and gold thread, and fine lawn; and every night I have sat upon my bed in my little white cell, and tried to make my dear Little Great One’s coat. But whenever I begin, the horrid eyes, the look of a cock of the Sister Sacristan, seem to be upon me. The scissors tremble in my hand; I cut and chop at random into the stuff; the back and front never, never have anything to say to one another, and as to the sleeves—! Then I borrowed a little shift of one of the gardener’s children, and cut against that. No matter how awkward the shape. My Bambino will forgive that, even if it look more fit for a little bear than for Him. For it shall be covered with scrolleries and devices like the Saints’ dresses in the old pictures on gold ground in our chapel, all telling the glory of the Bambino in verse and in symbols – fishes and suns and moons, and little daisies and rabbits running, and birds pecking. And every fold will be stitched with a little throb of my loving heart.

St Ursula’s Day

Oh foolish and vainglorious little Sister Benvenuta! How is thy pride fallen! My fingers, in these chilly autumn nights, are numb. The needle goes into the stuff crooked and comes out where least expected; the stitches are sometimes wide, like matting, and sometimes all climbing over each other. And the thread gets into knots, and then the needle unthreads, and I crane over my candle, holding the stiffened thread against my eye; and it is in the eye, and I push; and behold, it runs alongside the needle and will have nothing to do with it. And why did people ever invent thimbles? Oh Holy Martha, patroness of all good housewives, why was I taught to dance minuets, and curtsey, and sing madrigals to the spinet, and say, “Oui, Monsieur,”  “Votre servante, Madame,” and never, never taught to sew?

St Crescens, Virgin and Martyr

I shall not put these sheets into the silver arm in the Sacristy cupboard. My dearest Little One shall read them, but only later, when He shall have got His coat, that He may rejoice at it and at the price I have paid for it. Yes, beloved Bambino, a greater price than silver florins and gold ducats, the sequins and doubloons which have ever paid for the silk and satin, and lace and embroidery of any Madonna or Saint in Christendom. The only price worthy of being paid to please Him: the price of a soul, very foolish and simple no doubt, but full as a grape is of sweetness, or a rose of perfume, of unmixed love and devotion.

1st Sunday in Advent

They must have mislaid that one after the puppet show, and it has remained behind, forgotten in some corner. Or else… I was forgetting that there are words always heard, at whatsoever distance, and which the Evil One answers almost before they are spoken. Anyhow, I felt a sudden draught, there was an odd little noise against the flags of my cell, a clatter, a series of short, sharp thumps, as when the Mother Abbess crosses the cloisters leaning on her Malacca cane: something that made my heart leap and stop, and my forehead become moist and cold. And when I turned from my praying stool, there he was, in the mixed light, bright and yet sickly, of my taper and of the full moon. He seemed, somehow, bigger – as big as myself; but otherwise just the same. The same black dressing-gown, girt round with a pale blue scarf, with the thin, straight horse’s legs and neat ebony hoofs where it ended; the same Capuchin’s beard, and long ears and little red horns, and just the same expression, rigid, goggle, agape, and very anxious to understand what it was all about and do whatever was expected. He bent his body in two with a bow, touching the floor with his hand like a fork (the other on his breast); he let his articulated underjaw down with an uncertain jerk, leaving a great round mouth with a tongue in it, and prepared to speak. I remember noticing the time that passed between the dropping of the jaw and his speech; also saying to myself, “I would have arranged his eyes to roll from side to side,” but I cannot tell whether or not he had any wires and strings about him. I laughed; but as I did so I felt my breath quite cold, and my cut hair, under my cap, prick and grow stiff. It seemed endless till he spoke, and when he did, with a Jew’s harp voice like a mask’s, and called me by my name, I felt suddenly relieved, my heart released and quite calm. He asked me whether I knew who he was, and pointed to a label over his shoulder, with written on it: “Beelzebubb Satanasso, Prince of all Devils.” He seemed rather hard of understanding and given to unnecessary explanations and provisos, but uncommon civil spoken, and used a number of very long words, of which he declared the meaning as he went along. He wanted to know the exact measurements, according to the new principles of cutting out mentioned in the Lady’s Encyclopaedia of Useful Knowledge; and was very particular whether the saint in the picture who had on the model of the coat was the second or third saint on the right-hand corner counting from the middle, although I had said he was red-haired and wore green boots (which he wouldn’t take heed of), and then whether the picture was on the left of the altar, although I repeated it represented the Magi. Also fumbled a long time to find the place where I was to sign my name on the parchment, and worried lest I should begin it too large and cramp the last syllable; he apologized for making me prick my finger, as if one had never pricked one’s finger before, and said, when it was done, “My dear young lady,” and forgot the rest. He pulled up his jaw with a snap, bent his body again in two, clattered his arms, and as he vanished with a series of little knocks, there was again a cold draught. This morning Sister Rosalba, coming to my cell, asked why I had dropped sulphur into my hand brazier, whether against moth. I never crossed myself nor ejaculated any form of exorcism, because, you see, I had told him to come, and it was a piece of business.

Christmas Eve, 1740

For the first time so far as I can recollect, I have been thinking about my own life, living through bits of it all at once, as the old lay sister says she did when she fell into the river Natisone and thought to be drowned. And since I have not written for so long to my dear Great Little One (though I scarce know why) I will tell Him what manner of little girl I was, and how I came to love Him more than anything.

Of course I was going to be a nun from the first, because our family possesses a benefice in this noble convent; and of us three sisters I was the youngest, and a little lame. Our parents were very wise and virtuous, and ordered it so; just as they settled that one of my brothers was to marry and carry our illustrious name, and the others to be a Monsignor and a Knight of Malta. When we were taken to the great villa by the Brenta, I was put to lie by myself in a big room, all hung round with coloured prints of nuns of various orders, and with an alcove representing the grotto of a holy anchorite, full of owls, and death’s heads, and allegorical figures, most beautifully made of cardboard among plaster rocks. When I was little it used sometimes to frighten me to see those pious figures at dawn, and to know that behind my bed was a window, with a curtain one could draw, looking down into the chapel where many of my ancestors lie buried. I often cried and sobbed from fear, but the servant wenches said it would give me a vocation. And no doubt they were right, for I was an uncommon worldly little girl, greatly addicted to playing about in the gardens, and rolling on the grass, and smelling flowers; and loved to see the barges sailing in front of the terrace, and peacocks strutting and pigeons cooing; and my mother’s beautiful dresses, and the paint and patches on her face, when her maid led two or three of us to her of a forenoon, while she was having her hair powdered and curled, with a black page bringing her chocolate, and her serving cavalier snuff alongside of her mirror; and merchants and Jews bringing her embroideries and jewels to buy; and a monkey perched on her shoulder, which frightened me, for it screamed and snatched at me.

And when I was three or four years old, I was consecrated to the Mother of God; and I had a little dress like a nun’s, black and white, with a rosary and cap to my size; and there was one for everyday and one for Sundays, and a new one for every Ascension Feast and every Christmas to do honour to our illustrious family. But my sisters wore ragged lace night-clothes of my mother’s, cut to their size, except when they were shown to company; and then they had beautifully embroidered bodices and farthingales over hoops, and pearls and artificial flowers. I used to see my father once a week, and was much frightened of him, because he was so noble and just. And when he received me he had a handkerchief like a turban round his head, and horn spectacles on his nose, and a black chin, and he was usually making gold with an astrologer, and putting devils in retorts, though I do not believe that was true. For when he went out in his gondola he had a black domino and a half-mask like everyone else; and when there was gala in our palace at Venice, he stood at the head of the stairs in silk robes like a peony, and a big white peruke, and he smiled.

I was taught with my sisters to dance and play the spinet a little, and talk French; and I taught myself to read – beyond mere spelling like the others – because I wanted to read the beautiful legends and prayers on the back of the pictures of saints which the wandering Capuchins, and the priest who said Mass in our chapel, used to give to us children. And there were blue hills beyond the tree-tops by the Brenta; and a strip of sea shining, with yellow sails moving between towers and cupolas, from the place where they dried the linen on our roof at Venice. And I was a very happy little girl, and thanked Heaven for such wise, good parents. But what made me happiest was the picture over the altar of our chapel; and whensoever my serving wench wanted to talk to the gondoliers (which our housekeeper had forgiven) she used to take me into the chapel, help me to climb on the altar, and leave me there for hours, knowing I should be quite quiet and want no dinner. The picture was the most beautiful picture in the world. It was divided by columns, with garlands of fruit about them; and in the middle, on a ground of gold, all divided into rows and all variegated with russet and orange, like the sunset, was the Madonna’s throne, with the Madonna on it, a beautiful lady, though not so beautifully dressed as my mother, and with no paint on her face, and not showing her teeth in a smile. And on the steps of her throne were little angels crowned with flowers, some playing pipes and lutes, some bringing fruit and flowers, and a little bullfinch with red feathers, just like those my brothers snared with lime. And on the Virgin’s knee who should be lying, asleep, fast asleep, but You – You, my dearest Great Little One – quite small and naked, with fat little limbs and red little mouth, drowsy from sucking. The Virgin bent over you, praying; the angels brought You apples and sang You lullabies; the little bird held a cherry in its beak ready to carry to You when You opened your eye-peeps. The whole of Paradise waited for you to awake and smile; and I sat and waited also, perched on the altar, till it was too dark to see anything save the glimmering gold.

I did not know what I waited for; nor did I know when I was in the convent, a novice; nor even after I had taken the veil. I did not know what I waited for, for years and years, and yet the waiting made me as happy as the angels and the little bird. I did not know what it was I was waiting for till that terrible last week. But now I know; and am happy once more in my waiting. I am waiting for You to awake, my Little Great One, and stretch out Your arms, and step upon my knees, and put Your little mouth to my cheek, and fill my embrace and my soul with unspeakable glory.

•   •   •   •   •

Postscript by Sister Atalanta Badoer, of the Convent of St Mary of the Rosebush at Cividale in Friuli

May 15th, 1785

It was I who saved from destruction the diary of my cousin and dear sister in Christ, Sister Benvenuta Loredan. I had watched her putting papers in the silver reliquary, shaped like an arm, and removed them from that place and hid them in my cell, lest they should fall into the hands of the Sister Sacristan. In accordance with my vow of obedience I later showed some of these papers to the Mother Abbess, who, after a few glances, bade me take and destroy them, as showing (what indeed she had always thought) that Sister Benvenuta had been half-witted, and no credit either to our illustrious convent or to the noble family of Loredan, although there was no denying that she had died in seeming odour of sanctity. But finding myself unable to share the view of our mother, although only a novice and fifteen years of age, I kept the aforesaid papers, feeling sure that they would one day redound to the glory of God and of that blessed one my cousin. And as this expectation has indeed come true, and the holiness and miracles of Sister Benvenuta have filled the city of Cividale and the world with pious wonder even in this our impious century, I have carefully put together those papers of her writing, and desire, before following her into happier realm, to add a few words of what I witnessed now forty-five years ago, at the demise of Sister Benvenuta Loredan, on Christmas Eve of the year of grace seventeen hundred and forty, the noble Giustina Morosini Valmarana being Abbess of our convent.

I was at the time fifteen years of age, and in the first year of my novitiate. My cousin was five years my elder, and had been four years a nun. Despite her illustrious birth and her many virtues, she was but little esteemed in our convent, being accounted a simpleton and little better than a child. But among us novices there prevailed a different opinion, owing to her great gentleness and loving kindness towards us in moments of home-sickness and youthful melancholy; and her pleasant humours and fancies, in which indeed she resembled a child, greatly loving music and such tales as nurses repeat, and flowers and small animals, even to the point of taming lizards and mice. And particularly did we love her for her especial devotion to the Child Christ, although she spoke but little thereof, being persuaded that she was a simpleton, and having no inkling of her own grace and holiness. It so happened that my vocation was but tardy in showing itself, and that being but fifteen years old I was often unhappy at the thought of abandoning the world, and very lonely in the sense of my rebellion and unworthiness. Then it was that my cousin, the Blessed Benvenuta, would take and console me with loving kindness and discourses of the love of God; and hers were the consolations my rebellious heart could endure. And a familiarity grew up between us, or, at least, on my part, for my cousin never spoke of herself, and gave rather than took kindness.

This being the case, it so happened that on Christmas Eve of the year of grace 1740, when we had all descended into the chapel room to proceed to the Mass of Midnight, the Mother Abbess, perceiving that Sister Benvenuta Loredan was missing from amongst the sisters, despatched me, as her cousin and the youngest novice, to seek her in her cell, lest any sudden ailment should have overcome her. For it had been a matter of common talk that, for the last weeks, this sister had grown thin, pale, and her eyes taken a very strange look, whereupon it was supposed (and our Abbess had even remonstrated with her) that she had undertaken some special penance, although she always denied it. While, therefore, the whole convent, headed by our Abbess in Pontificalibus (for she was mitred and a Princess of the Empire), proceeded in solemn procession to the illuminated chapel, I ran upstairs to the cell of Sister Benvenuta Loredan. It was at the end of a long corridor; and as I advanced, I noticed a very brilliant light streaming from under the door. It seemed to me also that I heard voices and sounds, which filled me with astonishment. I stopped and knocked, calling on Sister Benvenuta, but getting no answer. Meanwhile, those sounds were quite clear and unmistakable, and were, in fact, such as mothers and nurses make while rocking and embracing young children, and broken with loving exclamations and kissings. I bethought me that our Mother Abbess had always said that Sister Benvenuta was a simpleton and mad; but somehow these sounds did not move me to ridicule or anger, but, on the contrary, filled me with a loving awe such as I have never felt and find no words to describe, so that with difficulty I resisted the impulse to prostrate myself before the door, streaming in every chink with light, as before some holy mystery. However, bethinking myself to my duty, I knocked again and in vain; and then very gently lifted the latch and opened the door. But I immediately fell on my knees on the threshold, unable to stir or even to utter a sound for the wonder and glory of what met my poor sinner’s eyes. The cell was streaming with light, as of hundred of tapers; and in the midst of it, the centre of this fountain of radiance, was seated Sister Benvenuta, and on her knees, erect, stood no other but the Child Christ. He had a little naked foot on each of her knees, and was craning His little bare body to reach her face, and seeking to throw His little arms round her neck, and raise His little mouth to hers. And the Blessed Benvenuta clasped Him most gently, as if fearing to crush His small limbs; and they kissed and uttered sounds which were not human words, but like those of doves, and full of divine significance. Now when I saw this sight and heard these sounds, my knees were loosened; I dropped silently on the ground, my eyes blinded by glory, my lips vainly trying to pray; time seemed to come at a standstill. Then suddenly I felt myself touched and made to rise, and understood that the Mother Abbess had sent some other sisters to inquire after Sister Benvenuta and me.

The great light had faded, and the cell was lit only by a candle on the praying desk; but there seemed to me (and to those sisters whom I inquired of) as if there lingered a faint radiance in the air, together with strange sounds as of distant lutes and viol d’amor, and a marvellous fragrance as of damask roses and big white lilies in the sun. Sister Benvenuta was seated as I had seen her, holding clasped to her the waxen image of the Little Saviour from out of the Sacristy; and a beautiful garment, of threads of gold and silver interwoven, had slipped to her feet and lay there. And Sister Benvenuta’s mouth and eyes were open with rapture. And she was stone dead and already cold. What no one could understand was that near the cell’s window, on the floor, lay one of the puppets of a puppet show that had performed in our convent some months before, a bearded and horned figure, with hoofs, labelled “Beelzebubb Satanasso.” And its wires were wrenched and twisted, its articulated jaw crushed to bits, and its garments singed all round it.

[End of the Postscript by Sister Atalanta Badoer, at that time a novice in the Convent of St Mary of the Rosebush, and cousin of the Blessed Bevenuta Loredan.]

—

Marsyas in Flanders

(1900)

I

“You are right. This is not the original crucifix at all. Another one has been put instead. Il y a eu substitution,” and the little old Antiquary of Dunes nodded mysteriously, fixing his ghostseer’s eyes upon mine.

He said it in a scarce audible whisper. For it happened to be the vigil of the Feast of the Crucifix, and the once famous church was full of semi-clerical persons decorating it for the morrow, and of old ladies in strange caps, clattering about with pails and brooms. The Antiquary had brought me there the very moment of my arrival, lest the crowd of faithful should prevent his showing me everything next morning.

The famous crucifix was exhibited behind rows and rows of unlit candles, and surrounded by strings of paper flowers and coloured muslin, and garlands of sweet resinous maritime pine; and two lighted chandeliers illumined it.

“There has been an exchange,” he repeated, looking round that no one might hear him. “Il y a eu substitution.”

For I had remarked, as anyone would have done, at the first glance, that the crucifix had every appearance of French work of the thirteenth century, boldly realistic, whereas the crucifix of the legend, which was a work of St Luke, which had hung for centuries in the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem and been miraculously cast ashore at Dunes in 1195, would surely have been a more or less Byzantine image, like its miraculous companion of Lucca.

“But why should there have been a substitution?” I inquired innocently.

“Hush, hush,” answered the Antiquary, frowning, “not here – later, later—”

He took me all over the church, once so famous for pilgrimages; but from which, even like the sea which has left it in a salt marsh beneath the cliffs, the tide of devotion has receded for centuries. It is a very dignified little church, of charmingly restrained and shapely Gothic, built of a delicate pale stone, which the sea damp has picked out, in bases and capitals and carved foliation, with stains of a lovely bright green. The Antiquary showed me where the transept and belfry had been left unfinished when the miracles had diminished in the fourteenth century. And he took me up to the curious warder’s chamber, a large room up some steps in the triforium; with a fireplace and stone seats for the men who guarded the precious crucifix day and night. There had even been beehives in the window, he told me, and he remembered seeing them still as a child.

“Was it usual, here in Flanders, to have a guardroom in churches containing important relics?” I asked, for I could not remember having seen anything similar before.

“By no means,” he answered, looking round to make sure we were alone, “but it was necessary here. You have never heard in what the chief miracles of this church consisted?”

“No,” I whispered back, gradually infected by his mysteriousness, “unless you allude to the legend that the figure of the Saviour broke all the crosses until the right one was cast up by the sea?”

He shook his head but did not answer, and descended the steep stairs into the nave, while I lingered a moment looking down into it from the warder’s chamber. I have never had so curious an impression of a church. The chandeliers on either side of the crucifix swirled slowly round, making great pools of light which were broken by the shadows of the clustered columns, and among the pews of the nave moved the flicker of the sacristan’s lamp. The place was full of the scent of resinous pine branches, evoking dunes and mountainsides; and from the busy groups below rose a subdued chatter of women’s voices, and a splash of water and clatter of pattens. It vaguely suggested preparations for a witches’ sabbath.

“What sort of miracles did they have in this church?” I asked, when we had passed into the dusky square, “and what did you mean about their having exchanged the crucifix – about a substitution?”

It seemed quite dark outside. The church rose black, a vague lopsided mass of buttresses and high-pitched roofs, against the watery, moonlit sky; the big trees of the churchyard behind wavering about in the sea wind; and the windows shone yellow, like flaming portals, in the darkness.

“Please remark the bold effect of the gargoyles,” said the Antiquary pointing upwards.

They jutted out, vague wild beasts, from the roof-line; and, what was positively frightening, you saw the moonlight, yellow and blue through the open jaws of some of them. A gust swept through the trees, making the weathercock clatter and groan.

“Why, those gargoyle wolves seem positively to howl,” I exclaimed.

The old Antiquary chuckled. “Aha,” he answered, “did I not tell you that this church has witnessed things like no other church in Christendom? And it still remembers them! There – have you ever known such a wild, savage church before?”

And as he spoke there suddenly mingled with the sough of the wind and the groans of the weather-vane, a shrill quavering sound as of pipers inside.

“The organist trying his vox humana for tomorrow,” remarked the Antiquary.

II

Next day I bought one of the printed histories of the miraculous crucifix which they were hawking all round the church; and next day also, my friend the Antiquary was good enough to tell me all that he knew of the matter. Between my two informants, the following may be said to be the true story.

In the autumn of 1195, after a night of frightful storm, a boat was found cast upon the shore of Dunes, which was at that time a fishing village at the mouth of the Nys, and exactly opposite a terrible sunken reef.

The boat was broken and upset; and close to it, on the sand and bent grass, lay a stone figure of the crucified Saviour, without its cross and, as seems probable, also without its arms, which had been made of separate blocks. A variety of persons immediately came forward to claim it; the little church of Dunes, on whose glebe it was found; the Barons of Cröy, who had the right of jetsam on that coast, and also the great Abbey of St Loup of Arras, as possessing the spiritual over-lordship of the place. But a holy man who lived close by in the cliffs, had a vision which settled the dispute. St Luke in person appeared and told him that he was the original maker of the figure; that it had been one of three which had hung round the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem; that three knights, a Norman, a Tuscan, and a man of Arras, had with the permission of Heaven stolen them from the Infidels and placed them on unmanned boats; that one of the images had been cast upon the Norman coast near Salenelles; that the second had run aground not far from the city of Lucca, in Italy, and that this third was the one which had been embarked by the knight from Artois. As regarded its final resting place, the hermit, on the authority of St Luke, recommended that the statue should be left to decide the matter itself. Accordingly, the crucified figure was solemnly cast back into the sea. The very next day it was found once more in the same spot, among the sand and bent grass at the mouth of the Nys. It was therefore deposited in the little church of Dunes; and very soon indeed the flocks of pious persons who brought it offerings from all parts made it necessary and possible to rebuild the church thus sanctified by its presence.

The Holy Effigy of Dunes – Sacra Dunarum Effigies as it was called – did not work the ordinary sort of miracles. But its fame spread far and wide by the unexampled wonders which became the constant accompaniment of its existence. The Effigy, as above mentioned, had been discovered without the cross to which it had evidently been fastened, nor had any researches or any subsequent storms brought the missing blocks to light, despite the many prayers which were offered for the purpose. After some time therefore, and a deal of discussion, it was decided that a new cross should be provided for the effigy to hang upon. And certain skilful stonemasons of Arras were called to Dunes for this purpose. But behold! the very day after the cross had been solemnly erected in the church, an unheard of and terrifying fact was discovered. The Effigy, which had been hanging perfectly straight the previous evening, had shifted its position, and was bent violently to the right, as if in an effort to break loose.

This was attested not merely by hundreds of laymen, but by the priests of the place, who notified the fact in a document, existing in the episcopal archives of Arras until 1790, to the Abbot of St Loup their spiritual overlord.

This was the beginning of a series of mysterious occurrences which spread the fame of the marvellous crucifix all over Christendom. The Effigy did not remain in the position into which it had miraculously worked itself: it was found, at intervals of time, shifted in some other manner upon its cross, and always as if it had gone through violent contortions. And one day, about ten years after it had been cast up by the sea, the priests of the church and the burghers of Dunes discovered the Effigy hanging in its original outstretched, symmetrical attitude, but O wonder! with the cross, broken in three pieces, lying on the steps of its chapel.

Certain persons, who lived in the end of the town nearest the church, reported to have been roused in the middle of the night by what they had taken for a violent clap of thunder, but which was doubtless the crash of the cross falling down; or perhaps, who knows? the noise with which the terrible Effigy had broken loose and spurned the alien cross from it. For that was the secret: the Effigy, made by a saint and come to Dunes by miracle, had evidently found some trace of unholiness in the stone to which it had been fastened. Such was the ready explanation afforded by the Prior of the church, in answer to an angry summons of the Abbot of St Loup, who expressed his disapproval of such unusual miracles. Indeed, it was discovered that the piece of marble had not been cleaned from sinful human touch with the necessary rites before the figure was fastened on; a most grave, though excusable oversight. So a new cross was ordered, although it was noticed that much time was lost about it; and the consecration took place only some years later.

Meanwhile the Prior had built the warder’s chamber, with the fireplace and recess, and obtained permission from the Pope himself that a clerk in orders should watch day and night, on the score that so wonderful a relic might be stolen. For the relic had by this time entirely cut out all similar crucifixes, and the village of Dunes, through the concourse of pilgrims, had rapidly grown into a town, the property of the now fabulously wealthy Priory of the Holy Cross.

The Abbots of St Loup, however, looked upon the matter with an unfavourable eye. Although nominally remaining their vassals, the Priors of Dunes had contrived to obtain gradually from the Pope privileges which rendered them virtually independent, and in particular, immunities which sent to the treasury of St Loup only a small proportion of the tribute money brought by the pilgrims. Abbot Walterius in particular, showed himself actively hostile. He accused the Prior of Dunes of having employed his warders to trump up stories of strange movements and sounds on the part of the still crossless Effigy, and of suggesting, to the ignorant, changes in its attitude which were more credulously believed in now that there was no longer the straight line of the cross by which to verify. So finally the new cross was made, and consecrated, and on Holy Cross Day of the year, the Effigy was fastened to it in the presence of an immense concourse of clergy and laity. The Effigy, it was now supposed, would be satisfied, and no unusual occurrences would increase or perhaps fatally compromise its reputation for sanctity.

These expectations were violently dispelled. In November, 1293, after a year of strange rumours concerning the Effigy, the figure was again discovered to have moved, and continued moving, or rather (judging from the position on the cross) writhing; and on Christmas Eve of the same year, the cross was a second time thrown down and dashed in pieces. The priest on duty was, at the same time, found, it was thought, dead, in his warder’s chamber. Another cross was made and this time privately consecrated and put in place, and a hole in the roof made a pretext to close the church for a while, and to perform the rites of purification necessary after its pollution by workmen. Indeed, it was remarked that on this occasion the Prior of Dunes took as much trouble to diminish and if possible to hide away the miracles, as his predecessor had done his best to blazon the preceding ones abroad. The priest who had been on duty on the eventful Christmas Eve disappeared mysteriously, and it was thought by many persons that he had gone mad and was confined in the Prior’s prison, for fear of the revelations he might make. For by this time, and not without some encouragement from the Abbots at Arras, extraordinary stories had begun to circulate about the goings-on in the church of Dunes. This church, be it remembered, stood a little above the town, isolated and surrounded by big trees. It was surrounded by the precincts of the Priory and, save on the water side, by high walls. Nevertheless, persons there were who affirmed that, the wind having been in that direction, they had heard strange noises come from the church of nights. During storms, particularly, sounds had been heard which were variously described as howls, groans, and the music of rustic dancing. A master mariner affirmed that one Halloween, as his boat approached the mouth of the Nys, he had seen the church of Dunes brilliantly lit up, its immense windows flaming. But he was suspected of being drunk and of having exaggerated the effect of the small light shining from the warder’s chamber. The interest of the townsfolk of Dunes coincided with that of the Priory, since they prospered greatly by the pilgrimages, so these tales were promptly hushed up. Yet they undoubtedly reached the ear of the Abbot of St Loup. And at last there came an event which brought them all back to the surface.

For, on the Vigil of All Saints, 1299, the church was struck by lightning. The new warder was found dead in the middle of the nave, the cross broken in two; and oh, horror! the Effigy was missing. The indescribable fear which overcame everyone was merely increased by the discovery of the Effigy lying behind the high altar, in an attitude of frightful convulsion, and, it was whispered, blackened by lightning.

This was the end of the strange doings at Dunes.

An ecclesiastical council was held at Arras, and the church shut once more for nearly a year. It was opened this time and re-consecrated by the Abbot of St Loup, whom the Prior of Holy Cross served humbly at mass. A new chapel had been built, and in it the miraculous crucifix was displayed, dressed in more splendid brocade and gems than usual, and its head nearly hidden by one of the most gorgeous crowns ever seen before; a gift, it was said, of the Duke of Burgundy.

All this new splendour, and the presence of the great Abbot himself, was presently explained to the faithful, when the Prior came forward to announce that a last and greatest miracle had now taken place. The original cross, on which the figure had hung in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and for which the Effigy had spurned all others made by less holy hands, had been cast on the shore of Dunes, on the very spot where, a hundred years before, the figure of the Saviour had been discovered in the sands. “This,” said the Prior, “was the explanation of the terrible occurrences which had filled all hearts with anguish. The Holy Effigy was now satisfied, it would rest in peace and its miraculous powers would be engaged only in granting the prayers of the faithful.” One half of the forecast came true: from that day forward the Effigy never shifted its position; but from that day forward also, no considerable miracle was ever registered; the devotion of Dunes diminished, other relics threw the Sacred Effigy into the shade; and the pilgrimages dwindling to mere local gatherings, the church was never brought to completion.

What had happened? No one ever knew, guessed, or perhaps even asked. But, when in 1790 the Archiepiscopal palace of Arras was sacked, a certain notary of the neighbourhood bought a large portion of the archives at the price of waste paper, either from historical curiosity, or expecting to obtain thereby facts which might gratify his aversion to clergy. These documents lay unexamined for many years, till my friend the Antiquary bought them. Among them taken helter skelter from the Archbishop’s palace, were sundry papers referring to the suppressed Abbey of St Loup of Arras, and among these latter, a series of notes concerning the affairs of the church of Dunes; they were, so far as their fragmentary nature explained, the minutes of an inquest made in 1309, and contained the deposition of sundry witnesses. To understand their meaning it is necessary to remember that this was the time when witch trials had begun, and when the proceedings against the Templars had set the fashion of inquests which could help the finances of the country while furthering the interests of religion.

What appears to have happened is that after the catastrophe of the Vigil of All Saints, October, 1299, the Prior, Urbain de Luc, found himself suddenly threatened with a charge of sacrilege and witchcraft, of obtaining miracles of the Effigy by devilish means, and of converting his church into a chapel of the Evil One.

Instead of appealing to high ecclesiastical tribunals, as the privileges obtained from the Holy See would have warranted, Prior Urbain guessed that this charge came originally from the wrathful Abbot of St Loup, and, dropping all his pretensions in order to save himself, he threw himself upon the mercy of the Abbot whom he had hitherto flouted. The Abbot appears to have been satisfied by his submission, and the matter to have dropped after a few legal preliminaries, of which the notes found among the archiepiscopal archives of Arras represented a portion. Some of these notes my friend the Antiquary kindly allowed me to translate from the Latin, and I give them here, leaving the reader to make what he can of them.

“Item. The Abbot expresses himself satisfied that His Reverence the Prior has had no personal knowledge of or dealings with the Evil One (Diabolus). Nevertheless, the gravity of the charge requires …” – here the page is torn.

“Hugues Jacquot, Simon le Couvreur, Pierre Denis, burghers of Dunes, being interrogated, witness:

“That the noises from the Church of the Holy Cross always happened on nights of bad storms, and foreboded shipwrecks on the coast; and were very various, such as terrible rattling, groans, howls as of wolves, and occasional flute playing. A certain Jehan, who has twice been branded and flogged for lighting fires on the coast and otherwise causing ships to wreck at the mouth of the Nys, being promised immunity, after two or three slight pulls on the rack, witnesses as follows: That the band of wreckers to which he belongs always knew when a dangerous storm was brewing, on account of the noises which issued from the church of Dunes. Witness has often climbed the walls and prowled round in the churchyard, waiting to hear such noises. He was not unfamiliar with the howlings and roarings mentioned by the previous witnesses. He has heard tell by a countryman who passed in the night that the howling was such that the countryman thought himself pursued by a pack of wolves, although it is well known that no wolf has been seen in these parts for thirty years. But the witness himself is of the opinion that the most singular of all the noises, and the one which always accompanied or foretold the worst storms, was a noise of flutes and pipes (quod vulgo dicuntur flustes er musettes) so sweet that the King of France could not have sweeter at his Court. Being interrogated whether he had ever seen anything? the witness answers:

“That he has seen the church brightly lit up from the sands; but on approaching found all dark, save the light from the warder’s chamber. That once, by moonlight, the piping and fluting and howling being uncommonly loud, he thought he had seen wolves, and a human figure on the roof, but that he ran away from fear, and cannot be sure.”

“Item. His Lordship the Abbot desires the Right Reverend Prior to answer truly, placing his hand on the Gospels, whether or not he had himself heard such noises.

“The Right Reverend Prior denies ever having heard anything similar. But, being threatened with further proceedings (the rack?) acknowledges that he had frequently been told of these noises by the Warder on duty.

“Query: Whether the Right Reverend Prior was ever told anything else by the Warder?

“Answer: Yes; but under the seal of confession. The last Warder, moreover, the one killed by lightning, had been a reprobate priest, having committed the greatest crimes and obliged to take asylum, whom the Prior had kept there on account of the difficulty of finding a man sufficiently courageous for the office.

“Query: Whether the Prior has ever questioned previous Warders?

“Answer: That the Warders were bound to reveal only in confession whatever they had heard; that the Prior’s predecessors had kept the seal of confession inviolate, and that though unworthy, the Prior himself desired to do alike.

“Query: What had become of the Warder who had been found in a swoon after the occurrences of Halloween?

“Answer: That the Prior does not know. The Warder was crazy. The Prior believes he was secluded for that reason.”

A disagreeable surprise had been, apparently, arranged for Prior Urbain de Luc. For the next entry states that:

“Item. By order of His Magnificence the Lord Abbot, certain servants of the Lord Abbot aforesaid introduce Robert Baudouin, priest, once Warder in the Church of the Holy Cross, who has been kept ten years in prison by His Reverence the Prior, as being of unsound mind. Witness manifests great terror on finding himself in the presence of their Lordships, and particularly of His Reverence the Prior. And refuses to speak, hiding his face in his hands and uttering shrieks. Being comforted with kind words by those present, nay even most graciously by My Lord the Abbot himself, etiam threatened with the rack if he continue obdurate, this witness deposes as follows, not without much lamentation, shrieking and senseless jabber after the manner of madmen.

“Query: Can he remember what happened on the Vigil of All Saints, in the church of Dunes, before he swooned on the floor of the church?

“Answer: He cannot. It would be sin to speak of such things before great spiritual Lords. Moreover he is but an ignorant man, and also mad. Moreover his hunger is great.

“Being given white bread from the Lord Abbot’s own table, witness is again cross-questioned.

“Query: What can he remember of the events of the Vigil of All Saints?

“Answer: Thinks he was not always mad. Thinks he has not always been in prison. Thinks he once went in a boat on sea, etc.

“Query: Does witness think he has ever been in the church of Dunes?

“Answer: Cannot remember. But is sure that he was not always in prison.

“Query: Has witness ever heard anything like that? (My Lord the Abbot having secretly ordered that a certain fool in his service, an excellent musician, should suddenly play the pipes behind the Arras.)

“At which sound witness began to tremble and sob and fall on his knees, and catch hold of the robe even of My Lord the Abbot, hiding his head therein.

“Query: Wherefore does he feel such terror, being in the fatherly presence of so clement a prince as the Lord Abbot?

“Answer: That witness cannot stand that piping any longer. That it freezes his blood. That he has told the Prior many times that he will not remain any longer in the warder’s chamber. That he is afraid for his life. That he dare not make the sign of the Cross nor say his prayers for fear of the Great Wild Man. That the Great Wild Man took the Cross and broke it in two and played at quoits with it in the nave. That all the wolves trooped down from the roof howling, and danced on their hind legs while the Great Wild man played the pipes on the high altar. That witness had surrounded himself with a hedge of little crosses, made of broken rye straw, to keep off the Great Wild Man from the warder’s chamber. Ah – ah – ah! He is piping again! The wolves are howling! He is raising the tempest.

“Item: That no further information can be extracted from witness, who falls on the floor like one possessed and has to be removed from the presence of His Lordship the Abbot and His Reverence the Prior.”

III

Here the minutes of the inquest break off. Did those great spiritual dignitaries ever get to learn more about the terrible doings in the church of Dunes? Did they ever guess at their cause?

“For there was a cause,” said the Antiquary, folding his spectacles after reading me these notes, “or more strictly the cause still exists. And you will understand, though those learned priests of six centuries ago could not.”

And rising, he fetched a key from a shelf and preceded me into the yard of his house, situated on the Nys, a mile below Dunes.

Between the low steadings one saw the salt marsh, lilac with sea lavender, the Island of Birds, a great sandbank at the mouth of the Nys, where every kind of sea fowl gathers; and beyond, the angry white-crested sea under an angry orange afterglow. On the other side, inland, and appearing above the farm roofs, stood the church of Dunes, its pointed belfry and jagged outlines of gables and buttresses and gargoyles and wind-warped pines black against the easterly sky of ominous livid red.

“I told you,” said the Antiquary, stopping with the key in the lock of a big outhouse, “that there had been a substitution; that the crucifix at present at Dunes is not the one miraculously cast up by the storm of 1195. I believe the present one may be identified as a life-size statue, for which a receipt exists in the archives of Arras, furnished to the Abbot of St Loup by Estienne Le Mas and Guillaume Pernel, stonemasons, in the year 1299, that is to say the year of the inquest and of the cessation of all supernatural occurrences at Dunes. As to the original effigy, you shall see it and understand everything.”

The Antiquary opened the door of a sloping, vaulted passage, lit a lantern and led the way. It was evidently the cellar of some mediaeval building; and a scent of wine, of damp wood, and of fir branches from innumerable stacked up faggots, filled the darkness among thickset columns.

“Here,” said the Antiquary, raising his lantern, “he was buried beneath this vault and they had run an iron stake through his middle, like a vampire, to prevent his rising.”

The Effigy was erect against the dark wall, surrounded by brush-wood. It was more than life-size, nude, the arms broken off at the shoulders, the head, with stubbly beard and clotted hair, drawn up with an effort, the face contracted with agony; the muscles dragged as of one hanging crucified, the feet bound together with a rope. The figure was familiar to me in various galleries. I came forward to examine the ear: it was leaf-shaped.

“Ah, you have understood the whole mystery,” said the Antiquary.

“I have understood,” I answered, not knowing how far his thought really went, “that this supposed statue of Christ is an antique satyr, a Marsyas awaiting his punishment.”

The Antiquary nodded. “Exactly,” he said drily, “that is the whole explanation. Only I think the Abbot and the Prior were not so wrong to drive the iron stake through him when they removed him from the church.”

—

The Gods
and Ritter Tanhûser

(1913)

CHAPTER I

The Absentee Immortals

It was in what we call the thirteenth century of the Christian era, of which chronological arrangement, as of the lapse of time and the need for salvation, they were naturally unaware, that the Olympian Divinities blundered once more into our world’s history, in connection with the Thuringian Minnesinger Tanhûser, who thereby acquired a species of immortality, or (as Christian theologians put it) incurred a kind of damnation, not entirely unlike their own.

The truth about this matter is the following:

The Gods, as usual, were engaged in active enjoyment of their divine lot, and more especially of the serene bliss which they had tasted ever since their dismissal, several hundreds of years before, from all concern with mortal men, and their retirement to those spheres beyond the Flaming Bounds of Space and Time to which Lucretius had always suggested their relegation. The precise whereabouts of those regions it is, of course, quite hopeless to determine; and perhaps the most enlightening fact we may mention about them is that, while uniting the charms of every possible earthly climate and locality, what they most thoroughly resembled was no place nowhere. Howsoever this may be, the Reader should picture the Gods there assembled, in a landscape just a trifle autumnal in the serenity of its skies, and whose rustling leaves and murmurous waters might, to an attentive mortal ear, have seemed faintly musical with the Elysian dances and the woodwind solos of Gluck. Let the Reader further recall the solemn yet amiable company of Celestial Beings who are seated, in shapely, but nowise incommodious, Empire chairs on the frieze of the Parthenon, and he will have an adequate though not erroneous notion of the aspect of the banished, or more correctly speaking, the released Olympians. Ceasing to receive at the hands of mortal superstition the gross tribute requiring absorption by tissues and organs of earthly vileness, they had become, in philosophical phrase, pure ideas vested in pure forms, exquisite semblances whose Parian translucency hid no baser parts, and which emitted from an ivory surface just becomingly softened by time, a mild ineffable radiance; their wide-opened eyes beneath smooth brows and their flowerlike lips, nay even the ambrosial curls on their filleted dome-shaped heads uniting (like the instruments of a symphony) in the expression of wise, satisfied and yet just a trifle wistful enjoyment. And they seemed, indeed, to draw in, inhale and taste with every divinely perfect sense the loveliness of themselves and of their surroundings.

With the more than mortal monotony of pure ideas and consummate forms they were discussing the perpetual and ever new subject of their present blessedness; contrasting it (since contrast is essential to all thought and all form) with the imperfections of the Past.

Apollo, the God of lyrism and rhetoric was indeed just a little exaggerating both aspects of the case. He contrasted with the disembodied joys – intense, all pervading and unclutchable like the sunshine – of their present condition the precarious and sometimes odious relations in which the Olympians had formerly stood towards their worshippers. Nowadays they were adored and invoked only by poets and artists, and upon the most dignified and useless occasions – while then! And he painted a masterly picture of the ignominies of tripod-prophecy in answer to futile questions and silly dreams; of the depressing troops of sick persons (he alluded briefly to the case of Admetus, husband of Alkestis) so indecorously unwilling to have done with the miseries of life. He even adverted, in terms at once veiled and vigorous, to the sickening mess of the hecatombs and the sacrificial reek of boiled fat. As he spoke, his words dropped naturally into poetical numbers and musical intervals; moreover, delivering them with the unabashed resonance of the professional lyrist, he entirely drowned the dissenting murmurs of Ares and Herakles, who were protesting rather shamefacedly that the scent of burnt offerings had more than once been grateful to their divine appetite.

“Of course,” remarked Zeus, who always spoke very nearly as loud as Apollo, “it would be unworthy of the father and king of the Gods to suggest that he could have suffered any diminution or opposition to his wishes. Yet eternal justice, which I continue (fortunately) not to enact but to represent, constrains me to point out that Apollo, like his sisters the Muses, has on the whole come off the best of all of us Olympians in the Great Change; they being perpetually invoked without any expectation of assistance by their votaries, so that they have only exchanged one sinecure for another.”

Apollo, however, was far too full of his subject to notice this interruption.

“Hail, race of mortals!” he finally burst out, changing from a faintly accompanied recitative or arioso into a full-fledged aria not unlike the omitted ones in Mozart’s operas, with marvellously executed bravura and leaps from low notes on to higher ones – “Hail, race of mortals, greatest of great Chaos’ offspring, that harnessing thy twin courses or wisdom and song, hast charioted us ever-grateful Immortals out of thine own passion-befogged regions into our true immortality!”

The Gods applauded, for disembodied essences are quite amazingly conventional, and it was an understood thing to go into raptures whenever Apollo put forth his song. But while acquiescing in the main, Athena asked to be allowed a few words not of disparagement, but of analysis, of Apollo’s statements. She had had occasion to observe that in the last few centuries of their (so to speak) earthly existence, the Pythian divinity had unduly sacrificed the severe and sober graces of the Phidian and pre-Phidian style (to which she had for her part scrupulously adhered), adopting in their stead a little of the declamatory manner, the “pathos” – as well as of the florid coiffure of the Hellenistic period, with which lack of restraint she could not help connecting what seemed in her (perhaps pedantic!) eyes a slight tendency to inaccuracy of thought and wording.

“For although it is fortunately true,” she said, “that we Immortals have passed into a higher, a more lucid, state of being since ceasing to fetch and carry for mortal men; yet it is by no means correct to attribute any of the merit of this change to that human race. Since if we have passed into the supreme perfection of pure ideas and forms, this is due merely to that great historical Necessity whose subjective aspect is Logical Thought. We have become what we had to become, fulfilling the formula of our essential nature in response to the essential nature of everything else. And as to the Race of Men, it is a priori evident, and confirmed by one or two little facts come lately to our knowledge through Aphrodite’s new favourite, that this Mortal Race has by no means adopted Lucretius’s good advice to be done with superstition, but on the contrary has obeyed the necessities of its essential nature and become – well, not to put too fine a point upon it, a very poor thing indeed. But remark!” And the Virgin Goddess looked round with cerulean glance full of bewitching logical acumen, as she raised one finger to the level of her impeccably Grecian nose, “But remark that the intense satisfactoriness of the whole matter, as indeed of all matters without distinction, is precisely that their human imperfection and our divine perfection are quite equally perfect inasmuch as answering equally to the rational Necessity of Existence.”

“All that is too learned for me,” said Hera. “But what I do say is that there has been a great improvement in morality; and that is owing to the Race of Mortals, or rather their hussies of daughters, no longer throwing themselves in that shameless manner across the path of the Gods.”

And sighing with relief at the thought of Semele, Leto, Io, Antiope, Leda, Europa, and so many others, she stroked the thunder-grasping hand of Zeus with half maternal forgiveness of his former escapades.

Zeus was a little vexed at the allusion, which he found tactless, so: “Of course, of course,” he answered; “and I have always been for the principle of indissoluble marriage quite as much as you, my dear Hera.” Then, with masculine meanness he sought to divert gossip to another’s disadvantage – “Still, with respect to our morals being so much improved, I don’t want to seem unkind to a charming goddess not present at this moment, but I must point out that if the daughters of mortals have ceased tempting us masculine divinities from our duties (as I regret to say they were occasionally known to do) yet our dear Aphrodite has found it possible to continue throwing herself across the path of mortal men, more by token that she is at present absent from our midst on one of her visits to that hill in Thuringia where she entertains, as we all know, a very mediocre little High Dutch Poet.”

“It is fair to say that she says he is a warrior by profession,” put in Ares, still jealous of his calling though no longer of his love – “and that poetry is the only amusement of his leisure moments; she even said something about his having to pay a secretary to write it down, reading and writing being still rightly considered effeminate accomplishments.” And Ares looked haughtily in the direction of Apollo and Athena, whom he had never ceased disliking.

“We never have expected propriety of conduct from our exquisite Love-Goddess,” said Hera with acid good nature; “nor even, I may add, much good taste in her liaisons; for I remember she was always running after shepherds and suchlike and trying to pass them off for the foundling sons of kings.”

“It is possible to be attached to a shepherd without departing from the strictest propriety,” – interrupted Artemis – “it depends altogether upon whether one has any natural tenue.”

But at that very moment Aphrodite suddenly returned and, as if to bear out both the strictures of Artemis and the excuses of Athena, she was weeping the most wonderfully becoming tears.

“Some row with the German Poet,” whispered Hermes, who had retained his business habits of picking up gossip. “I have heard something of the sort from my old friends the dryads, who have had to turn Christian in order to be allowed to inhabit the forests of the Landgrave of Thuringia.”

Meanwhile Aphrodite had alighted from her little car, not unlike an eighteenth century gala sledge, drawn by a fluttering flock of doves. And, covering her gold-powdered hair with the end of her cloak, after the manner of suppliants, she approached the gold and ivory seat of Zeus, and sank down upon its footstool, her translucent alabaster bosom heaving rhythmically with sobs, as she buried her head on the God-Father’s knees.

“Is he dead?” asked Artemis, remembrance of her own dignified behaviour to Hippolytus overcoming her aversion to all Aphrodite’s doings.

“I assure you I have had no hand in it,” protested Ares – “for, as Athena says, I have become a pure idea, which perhaps is more than can be said of you.”

“If he is dead,” said Apollo gently and dramatically – “not that I have any very clear notion who or what he is, but a few distant allusions are quite enough, I will compose a choral lamentation for him, O beloved, bereaved Aphrodite; and the Muses shall perform it publicly under my direction: something in a far more modern style – perhaps indeed in vers libres – than anything I ever inspired about poor old Adonis.”

“He is not dead,” answered the weeping goddess, brushing away Apollo’s offer with some irritation, “and no poetry or music is of the slightest use in the matter, let alone that his own, as he repeatedly tells me, is far better than anyone else’s. Indeed,” she cried, raising her head rather angrily although continuing to clasp Zeus’s knees, “if you had not invented poetry and music and poetical contests and all that sort of thing, none of this trouble would have come upon poor wretched me. He wants to go away from our dear little mountain which I had furnished so tastefully, he wants to leave me just as we were beginning to understand each other so thoroughly, and merely – Oh, it’s too dreadful to think of! – merely to go to a competition of professional poets at a place called the Wartburg somewhere in his country. And I don’t know how I am to prevent him! Far better he should have found some other love, for one could have turned her into a hen or a hedgehog; far better he had been killed by a wild beast, for one could, after all, have brought him to life again half-yearly! But a competition of poets, of High Dutch minstrels! Oh, what shall I do, wretched goddess that I am!”

“A competition of poets!” exclaimed Apollo; “how awfully interesting! How much I should like… Why, dear Aphrodite, tell your young friend that I’ll go in his place and he’ll be sure of the prize.”

Aphrodite shook her head. “It isn’t the prize he wants; the prize is only the glove of the wife of a tyrant of that country, quite old and ill-favoured. What he wants is the fun, he wants just to go, can’t you understand? And he doesn’t want the others to think he has withdrawn from the competition.”

“That, of course, complicates the matter a little,” said Zeus in his sententious way, while the others exclaimed: “A woman’s glove! You mean the woman herself? Surely you have mistaken the word. Perhaps glove is High Dutch for a tripod or a team of horses or a suit of armour. What could a man do with such a thing as a glove?”

“It is a glove,” exclaimed Aphrodite testily; “but that’s neither here nor there. What matters is that he insists on going. And if he goes how shall I ever get him back?”

“O Aphrodite, what a poor opinion you have of your attractions!” cried Zeus gallantly.

But Aphrodite merely continued her lamentations.

“And at the same time,” she said, interrupting her sobs with charming effect, “life isn’t worth living with him in the humour he is, grumbling all day, looking so bored (of course he puts it on to annoy me) whenever I have in the dear Graces to dance or send for my son with some of the funny little Cupids those nice Alexandrians made us a present of. What can I do when he falls to sighing and singing dreadful dreary High Dutch tunes, and starts up every now and then at meals, pretending he hears some sort of clashing those people call Bells, which puts him into a state of nervous prostration he calls Remorse? Oh, it is dreadful, dreadful! But if I let him go I am sure all those horrid people with the Bells and the Remorse and the elderly ill-favoured women who make presents of old gloves, will all band together to prevent his returning, however much he may want to, poor silly old dear. Besides, it’s all very well to drop on to that Earth again, but you must know how practically impossible it is for anyone not a god to rise up again once he’s down there. Oh me miserable! Wretched Aphrodite! Accursed be all poets and poetry and whoever invented them!”

“Why not go with him, my dear!” suggested Hera gently, the mad hope of Aphrodite’s total disappearance flashing across her respectable mind.

Aphrodite understood.

“I have not forgotten my divine dignity so much as you seem to think,” she fired up. “I might possibly send Iris, or even Eros, among those people. But not even for poor dear little Tanhûser’s sake would I expose myself to the incivility of those Christian creatures.”

Here was Apollo’s opportunity. Affecting an indifference he was very far from feeling:

“Quite right,” he said. “But what would Aphrodite give her big brother Apollo if he offered to go down with her young friend and bring him safely back?”

“O Apollo, darling Sun God, would you really?” And Aphrodite threw herself into the arms of the Pythian, whose draperies and dignity were rather ruffled by the suddenness of her affection.

“Oh,” he protested, straightening his peplos, “pas de quoi, dear Aphrodite. The God of Poetry must always be charmed to do a good turn to the Goddess of Love. Besides, your protégé, however barbarous his language and style, is after all one of my children, and I am therefore bound to protect him.”

Aphrodite had always disliked Apollo a little, and his way of treating the greatest passion of gods and men as only so much raw material for his own tiresome art. So, despite her gratitude, the impulsive Goddess could not help saying:

“I don’t feel sure he’s even so much as heard your name. He says Latin isn’t a language for gentlemen of his birth to learn, and he was quite surprised when I told him that Greek wasn’t the same as Turkish.”

“All that is no obstacle for unprejudiced minds,” suddenly joined in Athena, who had hitherto been a mere interested listener, “and there’s nothing infra dig. when one travels incog. As of course would be the case. Besides, I shall go with Apollo, and make sure that all is done according to the dictates of reason.”

“Oh, will you?” retorted Apollo, much taken aback. “That wasn’t at all my idea.”

“Don’t be afraid. I’m not likely to enter my name for the poetic competition,” answered Athena soothingly, “that isn’t my line. But I confess to some curiosity about the world as it now is and the race this Tan – whatever his name – belongs to. So I am delighted at this opportunity turning up; and you needn’t waste any gratitude on me, dear Aphrodite, for I make it a rule to tell the plain, unvarnished truth when it is disagreeable; and I make no pretence of undertaking this journey for your sake, as Apollo imagines himself to be doing. So come, the sooner, the better. What disguise will you take, Apollo?”

Apollo had thought it all out.

“I will go,” he said, “as an old blind bard. Bards are always blind, and it gives one facilities for looking about. And you? I suppose you will go as Mentor, as usual? For I notice that you independent and fearless females find it convenient to dress up as men whenever anything is up.”

“Never mind how I go,” replied Athena, with testy serenity. “The Goddess who helped Odysseus is never at a loss for needful and even gratuitous departures from literal fact. And now, Aphrodite, call your favourite and let him show us the way to that earth we have so long and so fortunately forsaken.”

“I think this would be an occasion for a little cosmic disturbance,” remarked Zeus, feeling a little left out. And he gave a vigorous pull at his thunderbolt, till the heavens echoed with its roar.

CHAPTER II

The Return on to Earth

When, however, the matter was broached to Aphrodite’s favourite in person, that discontented and tiresome minstrel expressed much annoyance at not being allowed to depart by himself, and it was only the alternative between the company of Apollo and Athena on his excursion and giving it up entirely and remaining an eternal prisoner in the Hörselberg, which made him signify an ungracious acquiescence. Indeed, he became reconciled to the situation, and fairly civil towards his celestial fellow-travellers, only on Aphrodite’s representation that he would cut a far better figure at the competition of minstrels if thus escorted by two, however disguised, chief dignities of Olympus, than if he appeared at the Wartburg without any retinue whatever. Even thus, however, it turned out that the God and Goddess must run the gauntlet of a dozen captious difficulties and silly whims on the part of Aphrodite’s spoilt minion. He would not hear of the disguises under which Apollo and Athena had intended to preserve a correct and convenient incognito. Mentor he had never heard of, being totally unaware of the bare existence of Homer. And as to a blind bard, or worse still a shepherd (for Apollo had obligingly suggested this alternative in recollection of his position at the Court of Admetus), he vowed that he would not let himself be ridiculous in the eyes of the best-born people of Thuringia by what he went so far as to describe as an escort of tatterdemalions. The precise wording of these discussions was fortunately not followed by Apollo and Athena, who felt themselves severely bound by the etiquette which notoriously forbids classical divinities from understanding anything save Greek and Latin. And Aphrodite who had infringed this rule (like many others) to the extent of learning a little High Dutch off her present favourite, Aphrodite was far too tactful to translate his remarks quite literally.

So at last, after a good deal of wrangling, in which Apollo’s intense wish to display himself at the poetical contest alone overcame the conservatism of his views, it was decided that Tanhûser should have his way and present his companions as persons creditable to the retinue of a knight errant. He was indeed quite vexed that Aphrodite did not procure him a brace more Gods whom he might disguise as his squires; but he came at last to the happy thought of representing to the hosts and the guests of the Wartburg that he had suffered shipwreck while returning from the Crusade (which constituted an alibi for his year in the Hörselberg) and lost all his retinue except the two faithful strangers now in his suite. And in order both to silence all inquiries, and extract all possible credit from their company, Tanhûser decided that Apollo should be presented as a learned Greek grammarian lent him as interpreter by the Emperor of Trebizond, while Athena should be habited as a Moorish necromancer, whom he thought it fine to identity with one Klingsor, who enjoyed much vogue in the magical circles of the day. And this by the way (together with certain circumstances to be related anon) explains the otherwise inexplicable historic tradition by which Klingsor, whom the Reader may remember as playing a somewhat disreputable part in the adventures of Parzival, came to have his name entered for the competition, or Minstrel’s War, at the Wartburg. Apollo, having been habited as a somewhat youthful Greek schoolmaster, inkhorn at his belt and goose quill behind his ear; and Athena, after some protesting (but what sacrifice comes amiss to the truly scientific mind?) got up with a long grey beard, a yellow turban and a gabardine embroidered with suns and moons; moreover, Tanhûser having obtained from Aphrodite a bag of silver coins of the Island of Cythera or Cerigo, the party was at last ready to start. Which it did, after a terrible scene of weeping and promises on the part of Aphrodite, from the foot of the Hörselberg, on a fine May morning in the middle of the thirteenth century. Nay, such were the grief and the forebodings of the poor infatuated Goddess that, despite the most strenuous objections of Apollo and Athena, and the undisguised annoyance of Tanhûser himself she accompanied them very conspicuously hidden in a rosy cloud which hung for some time over the Thuringian landscape, and more particularly over the village nearest the Hörselberg. There Tanhûser made his first use of her antique money by mounting himself and his retinue, himself on a tolerably turned out blue roan horse he found at the smith’s, Apollo on a charcoal-burner’s mule which went rather short, and Athena on a comely grey ass accustomed to carry sacks to the neighbouring mill.

“Remember thy promise!” cried Aphrodite from her cloud. For, in order to give the matter a proper mythological cachet, Zeus had insisted that the story of Orpheus and similar others should be imitated, quite needlessly, to the effect that if Tanhûser mentioned his divine sweetheart’s name once, he would incur much criticism, if twice he would be submitted to bodily torments, and if three times, he would lose the Goddess for all eternity. At the moment of Aphrodite recalling this extremely annoying arrangement, and blowing a last kiss to her unworthy favourite, the whole sky was lit up as by an aurora borealis, the air was full of the whir of doves, and a rain of roseleaves, to the astonishment and terror of the whole countryside, fell over the whole region, and especially upon the little cavalcade of the minstrel knight and his celestial attendants disappearing on their horse, mule and donkey, down the wooded Thuringian valley.

The stress of my narrative has led me to forget mentioning in its right place, that before allowing her young friend to depart, Aphrodite had cajoled her ingenious and long-suffering husband into making him an invisible helmet, very handy on occasion and light enough to fold in one’s pocket, which Tanhûser had described as very much worn by the mythical heroes and demigods of his own country. This invisible helmet Tanhûser thought it time to put on at a turn of their path, when they came upon the towers and battlemented houses of the Wartburg, high above the still leafless forests of Eisenach. And clapping spurs to the blacksmith’s roan, who naturally became invisible along with his rider, Tanhûser cantered off to get ahead of a bevy of lords and ladies on horseback and in litters, behind whom Apollo and Athena jogged angrily along on the mule that went short and the miller’s grey donkey.

They were, as it turned out, only just in time. And when they arrived in the castle-yard, where the last guests were dismounting, they found themselves in a crowd of the Landgrave’s serving-men, who took their beasts from them not without jeers and a dumbshow signifying a request for largesse, which the impecunious divinities (for Tanhûser had gone off with those coins from Cythera) were unable to satisfy. Until Athena, with the readiness for which she was so universally noted, pretended to drop the yellow silk handkerchief with which she was mopping her divine brow after that ride, and under cover of picking it up, laid hold of a handful of gravel from the castle-yard, which, by virtue of a spell she had had from the much maligned Danae, was converted into so many gold pieces, and distributed, not without judicious economy, to the rabble. Instantly the jeers turned to cheers, all caps flew off and half a dozen particoloured servitors offered themselves, in the civilest manner, to conduct the celestials to the very best seats for the ceremony, throwing open door after door and pushing a number of persons of quality rudely out of the way. That much was plain to Athena and Apollo, but it was not all they wanted. So, with the natural expressiveness of Mediterranean divinities, they pointed first to the castle walls, then to themselves and cried in every tone of interrogation, and in worse and worse Latin:

“Tanhûser! Ubi est amicus noster poeta Tanhûser?” But without any answer save shaking and scratching of heads and a horrid jabber of what was evidently High Dutch.

“Dash my helmet,” exclaimed Athena, a terrible oath she used only on tremendous occasions; “that miserable traitor has left us in the lurch and got into the place with his invisible cap on! That’s why these fools have never heard of him.”

“Tanhûser be swallowed by everlasting Orcus,” answered Apollo. “It isn’t Tanhûser I have come for, but the poetical competition.”

And turning with eager dignity to the obsequious menials. “Ubi est,” he said, “campus poetici istis certaminis?”

Again there was a consultation among the crowd which had by this time gathered round the Olympians. Apollo’s Latin had been too Ciceronian even for the Clerks in Orders who were keeping company with the footmen.

“Ach!” suddenly exclaimed a voice (and that exclamation was to become familiar to the Immortals). “Ach, Gongorsus! Dominus vult dicere Gongorsus Minnesingorum.”

“Yes, yes,” exclaimed Apollo and Athena in whatever may be the Latin (which the present writer has never been able to discover) for that useful interjection. “Concursus! Concursus!” And Athena, who had an uncommon good memory, remembered that Aphrodite had called Tanhûser a Minnesinger, which was High Dutch for Poet.

The person who had come to the rescue was a portly monk, who plucking Apollo by the sleeve of his rusty schoolmaster’s robe, pushed him through the crowd into a narrow vaulted room, where by the very insufficient light of some tallow candles, three crop-haired personages were busy cutting pens behind an oaken desk.

“Concursus Minnesingorum,” repeated Apollo, trying to adopt the style of these barbarians, “volo concurrere cum aliis minnesingeris,” and added, in a simple though elegant Latin, “Ego sum poeta notissimus toto orbi.”

The three Clerks shook their heads, and only after much confabulation with the monk, and much repetition of “Ach! Ach so: Aha!” they seemed to grasp the situation and began to turn page after page of the ledger before them.

Apollo meanwhile was waxing impatient, for he heard a great sound of voices next door, and was dreadfully afraid of not being in time.

“Concursus! Volo concursum! Ego sum poeta, etc.,” he kept exclaiming in desperation. And he threw a gold piece which he had prudently abstracted from Athena, on to the desk. Instantly the ledger was turned towards him and a pen thrust into his hand.

“Nomen,” cried his friend the monk: “Scis tu scribere?” Apollo understood. These Barbarians, he remembered Aphrodite having told him, were usually devoid of the arts of reading and writing, and the queer blotted marks, crosses he believed they were called, on the register were the signatures of the poets who had entered their names for the competition. And he also was to sign his name. But what was his name?

It would be a great deal too marked to sign Phoebus or Pythius or even any of his less well-known appellations; besides, he wanted to remain incog. and have the fun of carrying off the prize without any help from his real position. Meanwhile sign something he must and the precious moments were passing. He had it! There was the name of that necromancer whom Athena was personating. Athena would never attempt to profit by the identification; she was notoriously incapable of putting two lines of poetry together, least of all extempore. So, with a splendid gesture and in magnificent capitals he boldly wrote: Klingsor. Which is the explanation of that name being (so inexplicably) among those of the competing poets of the Wartburg, and perhaps the explanation of one of the other competitors, Wolfram von Eschenbach, having maliciously given it to the disreputable sorcerer in his poem about Parzival, whence it was taken on by Richard Wagner.

CHAPTER III

Apollo and the Abbess

The monk meanwhile, equally impressed by Apollo’s handsome tips and delighted to air his own monastic Latin, took the God firmly by the shoulder and pushed him through the crowd which occupied the standing room of a vast vaulted hall; and, disregarding both the stifled cries and oaths of those around, and the fact that a stentorian voice was already vociferating High Dutch verses from a dais at the other end, he elbowed his way to the last row of the reserved seats, murmured something to a couple of tonsured personages seated there, and squeezed the astonished God on to a stool behind a column.

When Apollo had recovered from all this pushing and scuffling, to which his godlike habits had ill-suited his excessively sensitive and easily ruffled poet’s nature, he felt utterly dazed and dreadfully depressed. To begin with, he found himself wedged behind two colossal knights in armour, whose hereditary dignity allowed them to keep on plumed head-dresses by the side of which the most outrageous hats of our theatre-going ladies would have been a joke, so that he could at first see only the vault of the ceiling, painted in blue and gold patterns; and occasionally, when one of the colossal vizored and crested helmets leaned whispering towards the other, he could catch a glimpse of the heads and shoulders, and of what he took to be the harps, of a company of men on a dais at the end of the hall. From this dais proceeded, in a silence by no means strictly observed, a faint twanging of strings, and a ceaseless murmur, occasionally rising to a bellow, of horribly guttural, and of course quite unintelligible, words delivered upon two or three intoned notes.

It seemed endless to the God. But at last it ceased. The hall echoed with applause, the two knights in front stamped their iron-shod feet very nearly upon Apollo’s, and rattled their great swords on the pavement, and a general hubbub of male and female voices arose, in which the God could only distinguish what he now knew to be the chief High Dutch remark “Ach” – sometimes accompanied by Nein and sometimes by So, and which evidently expressed surprise, deep thought and heartfelt admiration. Then, after a few minutes there was a blare of trumpets, a herald spoke unintelligible words, and more twanging of the harp preluded a new competitor.

“Dominus Waltherus a Campo Avico,” said a voice suddenly at Apollo’s ear, and he felt himself very gently nudged. The voice was a woman’s, very friendly, and evidently intended to convey to the Stranger from beyond the Alps that a local celebrity was going to begin. Apollo turned towards the speaker. But she was intently gazing into the space between the two crested and plumed helmets; her profile was hidden by a curious head-dress of stiff white and black stuff on either side of it, and Apollo could see nothing of her except that she was robed in black, wore a great gold chain and cross round her neck, leaned upon a curiously shaped staff, not unlike those with whose crooked ends shepherds are wont to catch recalcitrant sheep by the leg; moreover, that the hand which lay on her lap was encased in a thick white glove upon whose forefinger shone an enormous emerald ring. But Apollo was never much interested in his fellow creatures, or, indeed, in anything except poetry and himself; and about poetry and himself he was now most horribly depressed and very nearly on the point of bursting into tears. For why, why had he ever come to this accursed place? How could he ever compete among these High Dutch people who understood no Greek or Latin and only said: “Ach nein,” and “Ach so”?

And as the voice of Dominus Waltherus, whom we know as von der Vogelweide, went on carolling verse after verse to the twang-twang of his little harp, Apollo began to break down under the closeness of the air; in nervous exasperation large tears actually coursed down his cheeks, and, with a suppressed sob he ejaculated: “Eheu! Eheu! Me miser,” and its Greek equivalent.

There was a rustle just as Dominus Waltherus came to an end on a falsetto note; and when Apollo looked up, he found himself before a most unexpected sight. It was a face, apparently made of the most delicate parchment, entirely surrounded by stiff white and black material, and out of which, under a broad hairless forehead, shone two very intelligent and kind little eyes.

At the same time he felt the gloved hand touch his and introduce between his tear-stained fingers a tiny phial.

“Dost thou want salts? Art thou ill, young stranger? Hast thou pains anywhere in thy person?” asked a most gentle voice (the same which had previously murmured the information about Dominus Waltherus) in very funny, but on the whole correct, Latin. Apollo applied the little gold flask somewhat incautiously to his divine nostrils, in consequence of which he was seized by a fit of sneezing, which made the two knights turn half round with much clank of iron and cry hush-sh at the top of their voices. Apollo felt much better, if only because he had attracted a little attention.

“I suppose,” he said, restoring the phial to its owner, while wondering whether it might not have been intended as a votive offering – “I suppose from all the gold you possess about your person, that you are the Venerable Mother of the Despot of this place?”

“My unworthiness does indeed receive the pious title of Venerable,” she answered, rather puzzled at his question, “and of course I am a Reverend Mother. But I am not the mother of anybody here or elsewhere, being bound to celibacy. In fact, I am the Mitred Abbess of Mulda.”

“Your words are full of mystery,” answered Apollo. “How can you be a mother without being the mother of somebody? And what is Abbess in Greek?”

For an instant the great female dignitary (for she was a prince of the Holy Roman Empire) wondered not without horror whether her neighbour was not an escaped lunatic. But no lunatic, she thought, could have such serene brows; moreover, she was frightfully excited at meeting for the first time in her long life a person who apparently knew Greek; it was already delightful to have an opportunity of airing her Latin to one really conversant with that language, and who spoke, as she said to herself, like a god.

“I do not know what Abbess of Mulda would be in Greek,” she said with charming modesty, “for alas, I do not know a word of that wonderful language. But since, O most interesting young stranger, you seem ignorant of the customs and language of our country, I will do my best to satisfy your curiosity in all things.”

And thus it came about that under cover of the next recitation, which was by Dominus Wolframus de Eschenbach, the Mitred Abbess of Mulda carried on a briskly whispered conversation with the strayed Olympian, despite the occasional angry sh-sh of the two knights in front. Avoiding every phrase and expression which was not Ciceronian, she explained herself as a priestess of Jove Optimus Maximus, the head of a college of Vestals chosen among the Noble Virgins of the land, each of whom was required to possess a shield divided in sixteen parts. To which Apollo answered that they doubtless used these shields to execute a war dance, or did they hang them up in the portico of the temple?

And it was now the Abbess’s turn to be puzzled; so, fearful lest further explanations should lead to some barbarism of language, she merely answered that it was doubtless something of the kind, and hastily passed on to what really interested her. This was the fact that, emulous of the fame of the immortal Hroswitha, Abbess of Gandersheim, she also, ever since her earliest youth, had sacrificed to the Muses…

Apollo pricked up his divine ears, shaped like the loveliest rosy shells. “Have you indeed?” he said. “Well then, I may as well tell you that you have most probably been wasting your time. Those Muses, with whom I am more intimately acquainted than is often agreeable, have contrived to make themselves a very – I may say a monstrously exaggerated reputation. And you would do far better to sacrifice to Apollo in person: just an occasional trifle, a young heifer for instance or a chaplet of wool, or some of your own hair, unless indeed, as your appearance would indicate, you have already cut that off as a sacrifice to some other divinity—”

“How wonderfully eloquent you are!” exclaimed the delighted Abbess. “Why you talk like a copy of verses; and one might almost imagine that sacrificing to the Gods was a reality and not a mere flower of rhetoric! Well, in mere pedestrian prose, I meant that I have written plays – you may even have heard of my Hecuba and my Sacrifice of Isaac; I believe they are given in a great many foreign religious houses.”

Apollo was becoming enormously interested. “I see, I see,” he cried, provoking a loud hush-sh from the audience who were hanging on the words of Dominus Wolfram. “You are of the breed of those almost divine women, the Aeolian poetesses of the Islands, who went about crowned with violets and gave lessons in elocution to a numerous chorus of vocal virgins—”

“Yes,” said the Mitred Abbess, “some of my nuns have occasionally performed my plays. They really learned the Latin quite well, poor things, considering they didn’t understand a word of it. We were able to have those on sacred subjects in the Church itself, and the Hecuba and my version of Terence’s Adelphi in the Chapter House. You see Mulda has great ecclesiastical privileges, and the very best company, secular and ecclesiastic, did me the honour of attending.”

But Apollo took no heed of the unintelligible end of her sentence, far too absorbed in his poetical visions and of a vague possibility of reviving his own worship in the old lady’s abbey. He was soon taken up wondering whether his new friend, if divested of her mournful draperies and slightly rejuvenated with a little judicious help from Aphrodite (who after all was deeply in his debt for looking after her detestable favourite) might not pass muster as a Cassandra, or at all events an inspired Pythoness, laurel-crowned and robed in orange; after all, one must not ask too much in these degenerate days… Indeed, his divine fancy so got the better of him that he would never have noticed the end of Dominus Wolfram’s recitation, and the fact that all the audience were noisily leaving the room, if the Abbess had not taken him very graciously by the hand and informed him that during the Grand Pause the Landgrave was offering a slight collation to the better born of his guests; adding that unless they were quick, they might not get much to eat, or not have time to consume it comfortably, since fifteen other poets were down on the programme and the silver trumpets of the heralds would very soon announce the recommencement of the performance.

Holding on to the Mitred Abbess of Mulda, before whom the crowd instantly made way (“A learned young Latin scholar from beyond the Alps” – she introduced Apollo to various mailed and coronetted (sic) personages) Apollo found himself before a table covered with every kind of eatable most provocative of a God’s nausea. But just as he was turning away in horror at the fumes of roast meat (to which he was used only in sacrifices in the open air) what should sufficiently catch his eyes a few yards off, but the figure of Tanhûser, dressed in a handsome embroidered surcoat (he had borrowed it on the score of his captivity among the Infidels from the Landgrave) and ladling out a large glass of hot spiced beer for the Landgrave’s young daughter.

“That,” said the Abbess, looking through her horn eyeglass, “is young Tanhûser opposite– such an interesting young man, and so very deserving! Only think! He was kept nearly a year as the prisoner of the Soldan of Babylonia in the recent crusade! They say he is a most remarkable poet.”

“Crusade!” whispered Apollo fiercely, glancing at Tanhûser. “A pretty crusade he has been! Why he had been living for the last year in a cave with no less a person than…”

“Hush, hush,” cried the Abbess, starting at the name he had pronounced; “even as metaphorical expressions such names are not fit to be mentioned in the ears of a Vestal.”

At that moment Tanhûser’s glance met Apollo’s. But odd as it may appear, while the truant lover of Aphrodite turned quickly aside, not without visible embarrassment, Apollo also evaded his glance and turned, offering his arm to the Abbess in imitation of the other men of the party. After all, he did not want to be bothered with Tanhûser; his one wish being to pursue the delightful acquaintance which fate had sent him.

“Supposing we go back upstairs before the crush?” he said. “Surely you have had enough to eat?”

“How dignified and direct, how without any form of false civility, is the Latin language!” thought the Abbess, and resting upon the God’s arm, and using her crozier as a crutch, she hastily hobbled upstairs, when the silver trumpets sounded the end of the Grand Pause.

This early departure from the banqueting place had the effect foreseen by Apollo. The great hall of the poetical competition was only thinly sprinkled with people, and the God and the Abbess were able to secure seats in the very first row, at a stone’s throw from the minstrels’ platform. It would not be so easy to converse there as it had been further back; but then he would be able to snatch his opportunity when his turn came, or indeed create it for himself if his name had not been properly entered among the competitors. Indeed, Apollo’s spirits had risen so much that he was beginning to consider whether he would sit through all the intolerable, unintelligible jabber of the other poets, and not rather affirm, by a high-handed act, his divine right to precedence…

“If only,” whispered the Abbess spreading her black and white skirts on either side, and leaning her gloved and ringed hands on her pastoral staff, “if only you could see your way to taking holy orders, there is in my gift a vacant benefice of about two hundred crowns besides a hogshead of wine and eggs and pigeons from the serfs, which I should be very happy to present you to. It has a nice little town house (besides the farms) in the Abbey precincts, which would enable me to have the pleasure of seeing you even in bad weather. And,” she added with a charming sigh, “I do so much want to learn a little Greek before I die!”

“Why not?” answered Apollo, rather to himself than to the Abbess, for he was seriously revolving whether this silly adventure might not be the providential opportunity for his reinstatement among the powers worshipped by men (or at least by women) and the end of that regime of Lucretian absenteeism which whatever he was wont to say in its favour, was after all a poor dull thing compared with the processions and sacrifices of former days. “Why not?” he repeated.

But the Abbess’s joyful “Would you really?” was drowned by the sudden blare of the silver trumpets, and the voice of the Landgrave’s escutcheoned herald making silence and announcing “Dominus Tanhûser!”

CHAPTER IV

Athena and the Cardinal

But it is time to tell the Reader what had happened in the meanwhile to Pallas Athena. This intelligent and spirited divinity had found herself completely in her element. There was nothing she enjoyed much more than travelling in foreign countries and mastering the grammar and vocabulary of unknown tongues, so far as that decree of fate concerning the use of only Greek and Latin would allow of her satisfying this passion. And the bare fact of finding herself in a crowd of people who knew nothing about her, and whose manners and words required observation and interpretation, filled her with a sense of enjoyment like that wherewith she had followed the adventures and intrigues of Odysseus. A scientific mind, it has often been remarked, is not without resemblance to that of a detective; and with a glow of enjoyment Athena had remarked and generalized upon the fact that the one man who had hitherto understood a word of Latin had a piece of hair like a half-crown shorn out of the back of his head and was unencumbered by the shirts of mail, helmets and clanking swords of the other masculine spectators. When accordingly she found herself (much to her pleasure) separated from Apollo, she made straight for a group of individuals thus distinguished by what she immediately ascertained to be called (for she always touched unknown objects, smiling delightfully and saying “Quid est nomen hujus?”) a tonsure. Her surmise proved correct. These clerks (“Clericus sum” they had replied) all knew a few words of Latin, and as the Goddess of Wisdom instantly picked up some of the alien expressions with which they larded it, they were very soon engaged in conversation. As, moreover, the fame of her largesse in the castleyard had by this time passed through every group, her new friends immediately offered their services. Did she want a front seat near His Highness the Landgrave? Or a peep into the Green-room where the minstrels were tuning their harps and drinking beer?

“No poets for me,” answered Pallas Athena, her grave intelligence tempered by sprightliness (and the Clerks in Orders did admit that there were too many poets in the world, particularly at the Wartburg on this particular afternoon); “but could you not,” she added, clattering her money in the pocket of her Astrologer’s gown embroidered with suns and moons, “could you not introduce me to one of your wise men? Some prophet, or soothsayer or geometrician or sophist? Or someone who has undergone strange changes of sex or shape, like Teiresias or Proteus?”

There was a few moments’ confabulation, not without the inevitable Ach so! And Ach nein! between the tonsured individuals, who shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders in turn. Meanwhile, taking immediate stock of their slowness of apprehension, the Goddess had cast her eyes around that part of the great vestibule where guests were entering one by one:

“Now that aged man,” she said, pointing with her forefinger, “surely he must be a sage, a man of wonderful adventures, and,” she added, remembering Herakles, Theseus and Odysseus, “the kind of mortal who may have been in Hell?”

The tonsured persons turned stolidly in the direction she was pointing at, and ejaculated, one after the other, Aha! But at the word Hell, the youngest of the clerks had a sudden flash of intelligence.

“Ach so!” he cried, “this eminent person (spectabilis vir) wants to make the acquaintance of the Cardinal.”

“The very thing,” exclaimed the others in chorus. “A sage – a geometrician – a philosopher and – well…!”

And the intelligent one of the party immediately elbowed his way through the incoming crowd in the direction of the personage who had attracted Athena’s far-seeing eye. He had just been helped out of a litter and was extending his hand to be kissed by a number of more or less comely and bedizened ladies. He was of great stature, entirely dressed in carnation-coloured silk trimmed with miniver, and on his snow-white head, which he held arrogantly erect above the crowd, he carried a flat scarlet hat with long and very inconvenient ladders of scarlet tassels on either side. With penetrating intellect Athena saw at a glance that a wretched tonsured person could never get a word with such a dignitary, so, beckoning back her messenger, she drew from her finger a ring (which had not been there before) and bade him deliver it to “the Cardinal” with the greetings of Klingsor the Wizard. She was pleased with herself for having chosen a sardonyx engraved with the swastika and other Orphic emblems; but she regretted instantly afterwards having made use of the name of Klingsor: that fool Tanhûser was sure to be all wrong about local celebrities in the philosophical line. However, all turned out for the best; and with childish delight Athena saw the red Sage examine the ring through a magnifying glass and make a gesture of acquiescence. With the presence of mind which was one of her divine attributes, she had meanwhile profited by the interval to extract the chief facts about her future acquaintance. “Cardinal,” she was told, meant one who is a hinge of the Church. A hinge of the Church could become Pontifex Maximus, and this particular Cardinal or hinge-man was pretty sure of becoming Pontifex Maximus the very next election. The reason for this certainty was that, besides being the most profound natural philosopher of the age (he had manufactured several earthenware heads which spoke every language) he had also been the private tutor of the Emperor Frederick, and moreover a famous necromancer before he fell a victim to gout. It was moreover rumoured that he did not believe in God or the Devil, and (however contradictory this may seem) it was pretty well ascertained that he had sold himself to the latter for the red hat he now wore. That was why Athena’s request for a philosopher who had been, or might go, to Hell, had instantly pointed him out as the man for her.

The Cardinal, when Athena was admitted into his presence, was not in the great hall with the rest of the audience, but in a turret or, as we should say, bow window, projecting from it in such a way as to command a view of the precipitous wooded ravine on the one side, and of the dais of the minstrels on the other, looking down it much as you might from an opera-box. Why he alone should be thus placed, and whether it was a high privilege or a form of ostracism, Athena desisted from asking him, but putting together what she had been told with the awed look of the Grandees whom she had watched receiving him, the acute Goddess came to the conclusion that her new acquaintance despised his fellow men and was looked at by them with a certain terror and aversion. This was the very thing to her liking; besides, the Cardinal was quite alone, as if on purpose to enjoy her conversation.

“Sit down, Jew,” said His Eminence (Athena had carefully inquired after his style). After looking the Goddess up and down and pointing with his chin to a stool opposite the great armchair on which he rested like some splendid scarlet poppy. “Not that you are a Jew,” he added, “for Jews do not speak Latin.”

“Doubtless Your Eminence is conversant with my native Greek,” answered the Goddess with affected humility. There was nothing she enjoyed so much as pretending to be a poor scholar, or a swineherd or beggar – it gave such scope for snubbing people. She guessed that Greek was the one thing which the Cardinal did not know; and his brow was clouded with dissatisfaction.

“I can do many things more to the point,” he answered, “as for instance, have stray Jews and infidels and necromancers on the loose burnt in the market-place for their sauciness.”

This was a bad beginning, but Athena was a match for him.

“I had imagined,” she answered with perfect presence of mind, “that Your Eminence might be better pleased to use a poor wandering wizard in order to show your own superior proficiency in his Art,” and she bowed, touching her knees with her long false beard.

“Have you other stolen goods by you like this ring which you had the incredible audacity to send me?” asked the Cardinal, holding it against the light and scanning the Goddess’s features, for being a wizard, he scented a mystery.

“As many as my Lord Cardinal may choose to accept from his poor slave,” she answered. And holding up her two hands she displayed the fact that their shapeliness was unmarred by ornaments. Then, cracking her finger-joints, she turned them up once more, and behold! They were sparkling with priceless gems.

“Oho!” cried the Cardinal, “two can play at that game.” And beckoning with his forefinger, a magnificent cameo walked straight across the air from the Goddess’s hand to his own and slipped on to it.

“This is indeed a game most diverting to play at in company,” answered Athena; and as she spoke, the Cardinal gave a start, suppressed a terrible cry and pulled off the ring with frantic hurry.

“Damnation!” cried the prince of the Church, shaking it off.

“I fear Your Eminence may have found it a little too warm for this really summer weather,” said Athena. But as the Cardinal held up a burnt finger, she quickly advanced and slipped upon it a little ring made of dittany leaf, which instantly healed it. “Perhaps Your Eminence may now recognize that to whatever use you may care to put your poor servant Klingsor, being burnt is the one thing in which he cannot serve you.”

“The Devil!” exclaimed the Cardinal. And so saying his whole tone and manner changed to the most delightful and dignified cordiality. “Well then, tell me, Klingsor,” he asked, “why in the world does a wise man like you come to this imbecile meeting of poets, which my worldly and spiritual dignity obliges me, for my sins, to attend. Nay worse, how does a greybeard like you take it into his head to compete with these barbarous young rhymesters?”

“Your Eminence is like the late Sphinx, amused to ask your visitors riddles.”

But the Cardinal had drawn from his fur-lined cape a long list of parchment on which, in characters so crabbed as to tax Athena considerably, were written a series of outlandish names:

“Dominus Waltherus de Vogelweide,” read the Cardinal in a stage snuffle. “Dominus Wolfram de Eschenbach – Dominus Reinmar – Dominus Tanhûser – Dominus Klingsor—”

“Oh!” answered Athena with rapid understanding, “that must be Klingsor minor, a poor young half-brother of mine, who let himself be enticed here by that vagabond Tanhûser. Indeed that is the reason of my presence. The poor fellow has a craze for poetry, and particularly for poetic competitions, ever since he beat (and I am sorry to say behaved rather unhandsomely to) a certain Phrygian flute player in a competition which was not at all fairly conducted, seeing that his own (and I must add, alas! my) sisters were the sole umpires.”

“You are a very queer fish, Klingsor,” said the Cardinal.

“At Your Eminence’s service,” answered Athena.

“Well then,” cried his Eminence in high good humour, “let us two have a little friendly competition. Do you feel as if you would like something better than the Landgrave’s beer after your long journey, eh?” And taking a silver-gilt cup from the table placed in the window recess beside him, he brought it in contact with the arm of his chair, and in the most approved magical manner, filled it with sparkling wine as from a tap.

Athena took it and raised it to her lips.

“Your Eminence’s good health,” she exclaimed. “But as I cannot allow a Cardinal to drink out of a vessel polluted by my plebeian lips, I will, with your permission, send for a clean cup.” And cracking her finger-joints, she instantly caused the appearance, through a pane of the window, of a ravishingly beautiful young winged genius who set before the Cardinal a cup made of a single ruby, and vanished as he had come.

“Bravo, Klingsor!” cried the Cardinal.

And thus the two new acquaintances whiled away the tedious hours of the minstrels’ droning performance with a number of simple, elegant and often quite original necromantic tricks, interspersed with conversation on the deepest philosophical subjects, both natural and metaphysical. Athena had rarely enjoyed herself so much, even in the best days of the subtle and experienced Ulysses.

After this they asked each other riddles and capped one another with geometrical problems. But the greatness of the Cardinal’s intellect showed itself by his statesmanlike memory of even the most trifling facts and his power of attending to all that went on while sustaining the most sublime discussions.

“By the way, Klingsor,” he suddenly remarked, glancing over his shoulder and over the parapet of the kind of opera-box in which they sat. “Didn’t you tell me that your young half-brother had come here in the company of a disreputable person called Tanhûser? Is that the fellow you mean?”

“I have always had the poorest possible opinion of the individual in question,” answered Athena, rather vexed at this frivolous interruption. But remembering all the to-do which Aphrodite had made about Tanhûser, and indeed that he was the cause of her visit to the abode of mortal men, she also turned towards the hall and looked over the balustrade.

What she witnessed repaid her curiosity after a moment or two, and completed some interesting mental notes she had been making about the manners and mentality of the particular Barbarians among whom she found herself. After that blare of trumpets and that herald’s announcement which had, as I said in my last chapter, suddenly startled Apollo, the recreant favourite of Aphrodite walked on to the platform from the minstrels’ Green-room and was received by loud clapping and a chorus of ladies’ exclamations: “Welcome home, Ritter Tanhûser! A hearty welcome to our long lost, pious crusader-poet!”

Tanhûser began striking an attitude, twanging his little harp and intoning a series of lilting, clanging sounds, exactly like all the other minstrels before him. And after a moment Athena was just turning away from the parapet and resuming the interrupted philosophical discussion with the Cardinal, when her ear was suddenly caught by a familiar strain into which Tanhûser had burst in the middle of his recitation. She knew the hateful little jingle, because the infatuated Aphrodite used to go about the divine abodes humming it to herself, and had even tried to elicit the Gods’ admiration by repeating it and translating the words so that they might, she said, enjoy the exquisite naïveté, the graceful humorousness, of the greatest of High Dutch poets. The song was one which Tanhûser had made for her one day in the Hörselberg, and (probably because of the incident I am about to relate) its two verses have come down the centuries to our own day, first in a ballad of the Wunderhorn collection, then incorporated in a poem of Heine, and is doubtless well-known to my Reader:

“Frau Venus meine Minne

Ihr seid eine Teufelinne.”

“Faugh!” exclaimed Athena to herself, sickened by its familiar vulgarity. “Brute! Fancy compromising a goddess in a mixed assembly, and when that wretched Aphrodite has sworn by the Styx that he would never see her again if he mentioned her name!”

Tanhûser who had perhaps been indulging overmuch in strong, spiced drinks in the Green-room, was in a state of visible elation, and evidently counted upon his lyric having the same success with mortals as with his infatuated immortal mistress. So not satisfied with giving it once to the astonished ears of his fellow-countrymen, he worked it into some kind of longer composition, to which it acted as refrain. The first time it passed apparently unnoticed; but when it suddenly reappeared at the end of a second couplet, Athena noticed a murmur and as slight concerted gesticulation run through the semicircle of Minnesingers, both those who had been heard, and those whose turn was still to come, seated on the dais behind Tanhûser. And when at the end of yet another couplet Tanhûser trolled out at the top of his voice:

“Frau Venus meine Minne

Ihr seid eine Teufelinne.”

there was a crash and scuffle and hubbub, the whole body of minstrels springing up, overturning stools and tables, and attacking the luckless Tanhûser from all sides, hitting him with their sheathed swords in cadence and yelling rhythmically:

“Forfeit! Forfeit! Beer! Beer! He shall pay us our Beer!”

“Well done!” Athena could not prevent herself exclaiming. “Sacrilege! Kill the sacrilegious dog,” for she did not notice that the Knights had not drawn their blades but were belabouring the fallen minstrel with the scabbard and all.

“I am glad,” she said, turning to the Cardinal, “to see that these young Barbarians have some sense of propriety when it is a case of the immortal Gods.”

“Do not believe it,” answered the Cardinal, amused at this mistake: “the horseplay of these ignoramuses is merely because he has infringed a students’ rule, which forbids classical allusions under penalty of a beating and beer money if repeated three times.”

By this time the whole masculine part of the audience had risen to their feet, and were making a frightful uproar, stamping and hitting their swords on the ground rhythmically and joining in that cadenced yell: “No Classical Allusions! Forfeit, Forfeit! Beer! Beer!” while the other Minnesingers danced wildly round the discomfited Tanhûser, banging him with their swords and repeating their barbaric cries. The whole assembly, weary with so many hours of silence and poetry, seemed to have gone mad, and even the ladies, standing on their chairs, waved their handkerchiefs and sang shrilly: “He is forfeit! No Classical Allusions! Beer! Beer!”

Nor did the hubbub and horseplay seem likely to end till the Cardinal, rising from his seat and leaning against the parapet of the balcony-shaped window, lifted his hand on high and on the sudden silence which he made, said in loud tones, so distinct and solemn that Athena contrived to understand every word:

“Your Highness the Landgrave! Knights and Ladies all! I propose that this defaulting minstrel should be put in a basket and let down into the castle moat which is, I hope, full of tadpoles, in just punishment of his shameful disregard of all Minnesingers’ laws; to which, as representative of our Holy Mother Church, I add eternal damnation of his soul as one of the most intolerable bores that have ever risen, even among poets.”

A shout of applause greeted this speech, Tanhûser was carried off, cat’s-cradle, by the most stalwart of the competing minstrels; and the Cardinal turning to the supposed Klingsor said: “And now, my learned friend, let us return to the consideration of the fifth proposition of the first book of Euclid.”

Athena bowed. But casting an eye through the window which overhung the castle rock, along whose precipitous side poor Tanhûser was at this moment being let down in a basket for sousing in the stagnant moat below, her more than mortal eyes became aware of a more than mortal sight: in the afternoon sky, which was taking on the beryl tint of evening, and alongside the planet Venus which had just pierced it with its beam, there hovered a little rosy cloud, with a handful of rose petals. And in it, quite small but perfectly distinct, an exquisite female figure stood wringing her hand and tearing her hair as, slowly, slowly, the little feather ball of pink vapour rose higher and higher and disappeared at last in the pellucid zenith.

“Thank goodness!” Athena said to herself, “there is an end of Tanhûser so far as we are concerned.”

CHAPTER V

The End of the Poetical Competition

Apollo let himself be warned by the wretched Tanhûser’s misadventure. In a society, or rather among ruffians, such that a poet could be treated with such brutal indignity for alluding to a mythological figure, it was obviously out of the question for a God to come forward and recite Greek Sapphics or Latin hexameters. Luckily, as it is very well-known, classical divinities have resources denied to poor mortal poets. So it was with perfect self possession that, when the herald announced “Dominus Klingsor,” Apollo, disdaining to pass through those vile Barbarians’ Green-room, suddenly appeared upon the dais, no one could tell how or whence. Being provided with no instrument of his own, the God of Music quietly picked up the harp which poor Tanhûser had dropped when he fell ignominiously under his fellow minstrels’ vulgar blows. It had suffered in the fray; and Apollo, advancing, to what ought to have been the footlights, in his black grammarian’s gown, held it on high to show its broken strings, and made a gesture of deprecation, so youthfully modest and at the same time so majestic that the whole assembly, which by this time felt rather ashamed of its recent uproariousness, broke into a respectful murmur of expectancy and admiration. Here was a poet, they thought, who was original enough to do without that silly conventional twanging. Perhaps, who knows? he would not even attempt to sing, but, being a foreigner, be satisfied to tell them some nice little prose fable about merchants’ wives and monks or talking animals. Those Welsch fabliaux were somewhat risqué, but at bottom so harmless!

But the unknown poet did not so much as open his very beautiful mouth. He took the broken harp between his two hands and passed his fingers across imaginary strings, combing, as it were, the empty air. And as he did so, a sound issued from beneath them, faint at first, then louder, until, while remaining pianissimo, it filled the whole hall: a rustling as if someone were gently and steadily shaking yards and yards of silk; a sound lulling and yet disquieting, which put to sleep and brought restless dreams; a sound which most of that audience had never heard before, but those who had done so in distant crusades and pilgrimages, had never forgotten: the sound of a tideless sea breaking against the rocks. And with it there gradually mingled another sound, watery also, which slaked the ear’s thirst after that salt and feverish lapping of the waves: the babble of brooks along stony channels upon rocky weirs and in mountain pools. And with it came the creaking of dry reeds and the heavy swaying of evergreen branches. Then from all around, so low that you doubted at first whether it was or it was not, came the cool, silvery sawing of thousands of crickets in dewy grass; and breaking into it, the distant harmoniously clattering chorus of tiny leaf frogs. Then came the downy note of an owl; and the far softer, liquid note of a toad. These various sounds made their appearance one after another without interference, opening out and remaining as the constellations and galaxies open out and remain in a starlight night; and as they go to make up the shining void of night, so these sounds made up an audible stillness, till, even as the heavens throb with intermeshed stars, so that silence throbbed with interwoven delicate faint sounds. And just as the golden orb of the moon rising behind a hill bursts suddenly forth and blots out the fainting stars, so also there rose through that hushed invisible orchestra the metallic magnificence of a great nightingale’s song. But a nightingale such as had never been heard in the thickets of Thuringia, even by Walther von der Vogelweide: the nightingale of antique lands.

The audience, when they afterwards tried to describe what had happened, were full of contradictory versions. Some admitted to have slept, and some to have seen strange seas in their dreams, blue and with white buildings shimmering on rocky headlands. Many vowed that they had remained awake with eyes fixed on the foreign minstrel’s face, the like of which they had never seen before, for he was a beardless youth and yet inexpressibly venerable. And these maintained that he had sung a song of spring, only quite different from the fashionable minstrels’ harping upon green grass and budding flowers; and that they had understood everything he had told them, although they could not, for the life of them, remember afterwards a word, or even in what language he had sung, for his song had been somehow not words, but the things themselves. And many also maintained that he had not sung at all, and that his lips had never been parted except with an odd and somewhat alarming smile.

Be this as it may, this much is certain, that when his song, or his silence, had ceased; when, in short, that audible vision of a May night had come to an end, they were filled with an intolerable sense of panic: their limbs like lead, or shaking with fever; their hair dank and dripping ice; and their tongues dry and speechless in parched and closed-up throats. And while thus they sat there helpless under that terrible, yet delicious spell, they had all seen the foreign minstrel thrown down the borrowed harp with a crash which made the whole castle quake and rock, tear off his scholar’s gown and display a white and shining body barely draped in a white and shining cloak, his figure growing and growing with flamelike blond locks under a green wreath, until he touched the ceiling and vanished into a flaring furnace of rays and with a noise as of a thousands aeolian harps resounding in the wind. The whole place reeled; and blinded by that portentous sight, they groped about clutching one another in the darkness and yelling:

“A Demon! A Demon! Stop the Warlock!” And many affirmed on their oath that, only a minute later they had indeed seen a witch fly out on a blazing besom, and more precisely through the turret window where the Cardinal was seated.

Only the Abbess of Mulda, when obliged to satisfy the inquisitiveness of her Confessor, reluctantly added that just before the foreign minstrel had cast Tanhûser’s broken harp upon the ground, and thereby begun the series of extraordinary events just narrated, he had set an evergreen garland on his head, and taking some leaves from it, scattered them in the direction where she was seated, accompanying them with certain Latin words of uncertain import. More it was never possible to extract from her Right Reverence. But it was noticed that she wrote no more verse; and that, between the pages of her breviary some faded leaves, scented and which crackled in the fire, were discovered at her demise, in the odour of sanctity, a few years afterwards.

Now as to that witch whom sundry affirmed to have seen flying from out of the Cardinal’s turret-window, the real state of the case was very simple.

Athena and the Cardinal had been far too engrossed in a discussion upon the Nature of All Things (de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis), and more especially upon whether Achilles never catching up the celebrated Tortoise should or should not be regarded as finally decisive of the transcendental existence of time and space, to have been at all aware of the silent performance of Apollo, or even of the hubbub which followed its close and his disappearance. The Cardinal had indeed noticed the earthquake and taken the occasion to air a theory of his own explaining that inconvenient phenomenon by the collision of the Moon and the planet Mars under the sea. And this led His Eminence to confide to his learned friend the shocking Epicurean heresy of which he was suspected (and for which the Poet Dante subsequently found him chin-deep in a flaming marble sarcophagus of handsome workmanship); adding, however, that he was duly aware of the importance of religious beliefs among other persons, to the maintenance of which he would see once he was elected to the throne of Pontifex Maximus.

“I shall then,” he playfully added, “try whether my dear friend Klingsor is really as non-combustible as he boasts. But as that moment has fortunately not yet come, I shall meantime, and as soon as I get home, give myself the pleasure of presenting him with a little theological treatise which I have found it convenient to publish anonymously.” And he rapidly sketched out the main argument of that terrible treatise, “Of the Three Impostors” (De tribus Impostoribus) erroneously attributed to the Emperor Frederick II of damnable memory. “And as to the divinities of the Greeks and Romans,” concluded the Cardinal, “I don’t mind telling you, my learned gossip Klingsor, that with all respect for the superiority of Antiquity in all matters, I have never given a brass farthing for the existence of many of them, except Venus and Bacchus of whom I had some pleasant experience in my youth, and now perhaps, alas, of Father Cronos.”

“Venus! Bacchus!” burst out Athena, indignation overcoming all habit of dissimulation. “You dissolute and impious old red-gowned ignoramus! You have believed only in them, have you? It is indeed time that you learn from the wrath of a very different divinity how shamefully your sacrilegious ignorance has misled you.”

So saying, she rose to her shining feet, and carefully loosening the fastenings of her yellow necromancer’s gabardine, displayed beneath it the snake-enlaced Gorgon’s head which covered her divine and virgin bosom in a terrible but tasteful pattern.

“Patet dea!” was all the wretched Cardinal could ejaculate, showing thereby his profound scholarship even at the moment that he was stricken with complete palsy, which was made an excuse for refusing him that tiara of Pontifex Maximus, to secure which he had, as was most notorious, sold his unbelieving soul to the Devil.

But the Goddess, her face cleared of the false beard, and her ambrosial locks covered by a sphinx-crested helmet no longer hidden under the old yellow turban, struck the window with her diamond-tipped spear, and in a serene storm of wide-playing sheet-lightning, flew out of the castle and away towards the familiar flaming bounds of Space and Time.

CHAPTER VI – and Last

The Blossoming of the Staff

The rest of the story of Tanhûser and the Poets’ Competition at the Wartburg is so well known in our day that it would be unnecessary to insist upon it, were it not for one point upon which an erroneous impression has been handed on by the Mediaeval Balladmongers, an impression most uncritically endorsed by the somewhat Pan-German prejudices of Richard Wagner.

That indiscreet mention of Aphrodite having (though not for the reasons usually alleged) cost the unhappy Tanhûser his chance at the Minstrel’s Competition and also all possibility of proposing to the Landgrave’s niece, or as some say, daughter, the Cardinal’s jesting malediction began to prey upon the poor knight’s spirits, more especially as he found that Aphrodite, bound by her oath upon the Styx, was genuinely unable to communicate with him except from the top of a rose-coloured cloud. Partly from this idée fixe, which soon took maniacal proportions, and also from a more reasonable desire to avoid the monotonous jokes of his fellow minstrels, Tanhûser made up his mind to join a very select pilgrimage to Rome. There he had the honour of being presented to His Holiness Pope Urban IV, who took much innocent pleasure in the recital of the poor fellow’s lamentable story. But when Tanhûser began, as usual, with his very transparent allusions to Venus (for the poor man was unable to master the more difficult Greek name of the Goddess) and confessed his morbid terror of what would happen to him in the next world, Pope Urban, at first considerably embarrassed how to rid himself of such a maniac, had the happy and characteristic inspiration of making him a present of a walking stick, advising him to use it forthwith to pilgrimage back home, where, added the wise and kindly pontiff, he might employ the rest of his life in cultivating that dry piece of wood, as His Holiness had observed so many amateur gardeners do with much soothing effect on their spirits, watching whether it might not be got to bud and put forth leaves. And this hopeful answer of Pope Urban’s was communicated, instantly on his return home, by Tanhûser to his former sweetheart Aphrodite, who vouchsafed him a last interview, but only, as is well known, from the height of the usual rose-coloured cloud which hovered, never to reappear again till the days of Wagner, in the evening sky over the forests and castles of Thuringia.

•   •   •   •   •

“And what is it you want me to do for you now?” asked Zeus rather testily, for the whole business, particularly the journey of Apollo and Athena and his consequent diminished party in the Lucretian Empyrean, had rubbed him the wrong way. “I hope you aren’t going to suggest any more of these adventures which savour overmuch of the baser existence we Gods have, thanks to Lucretius, so happily left behind.”

“Don’t be cross, darling father of Gods,” begged Aphrodite clasping his knees, which always acted like tickling a cat under the chin; “don’t be cross and do this one little thing for me, like a dear, and I’ll never bother you again.”

“Well, what is it? Some other underbred fancy of this foolish protégé of yours, who really does compromise you in a manner most unsuitable to a Goddess.”

“It is for him, I admit it,” answered Aphrodite with well-feigned bashfulness and real sorrow, “but it is, alas, the last favour we can bestow upon him, for the wretch has gone into what they call a monastery, and shaved his head, making himself positively frightful to look at. But he has one last fancy – for it appears people mayn’t have fancies in monasteries. It is something connected with a foolish superstition about what he calls being saved (as if he hadn’t been safe enough so long as I was there!). See: make this to bud and put forth leaves, dear Zeus; it is the last pleasure I can do my poor dear little friend.” And sobbing gently Aphrodite drew from out of her exquisitely folded and looped sleeve something not unlike the hazel wand of a water seeker.

“There – make this to green again, dear Father Zeus, for the sake of your poor, poor little forsaken Aphrodite.”

“Tut, tut!” said Zeus, who could never stand a lady’s tears, least of all Aphrodite’s. “And what is this foolish dry stick to bud into, I wonder? Ah, of course! I have it!” And running his exquisitely vigorous divine fingers along the thin grey wood, he caused its dry knots to swell, to bud, to bring forth aromatic leaves, and even, O wonder! delicate white blossoms filled with glittering stamens.

“The myrtle consecrate to Aphrodite, presented by her affectionate old father,” he said, and handed it to her with a gentle nod of his Olympian curls.

But Aphrodite, having taken it, warmed the flowery branch with her kisses and moistened it with her tears, and then, with a lovely reluctant gesture, flung it beyond the flaming bounds of Space and Time. The enchanted myrtle branch descended slowly earthwards through the pellucid evening air wherein the evening star shone beryl-green.

Then, when it had disappeared into the purlieus of earth, there seemed, after a while, to rise in answer a faint, faint clashing of brass.

“They are delighted with their miracle, of course,” remarked Apollo somewhat savagely, for he was still a little ruffled by the business of that poetic competition.

“They are poor superstitious bodies,” answered Athena, “but superstitious is merely one of many historical phenomena and to be accepted as such.”

But as regards Aphrodite, she said no more, and merely wept at the knee of Zeus. For she had really been very much attracted to Tanhûser, whose name was never mentioned again among the Immortal Gods.

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