HAUNTINGS

FANTASTIC STORIES

VERNON LEE

1890

To _FLORA PRIESTLEY_ and _ARTHUR LEMON_

_Are Dedicated_

DIONEA, AMOUR DURE, _and_ THESE PAGES OF INTRODUCTION AND APOLOGY. 

_Preface_

We were talking last evening--as the blue moon-mist poured in throughthe old-fashioned grated window, and mingled with our yellowlamplight at table--we were talking of a certain castle whoseheir is initiated (as folk tell) on his twenty-first birthday to theknowledge of a secret so terrible as to overshadow his subsequent life. It struck us, discussing idly the various mysteries and terrors thatmay lie behind this fact or this fable, that no doom or horrorconceivable and to be defined in words could ever adequately solve thisriddle; that no reality of dreadfulness could seem caught but paltry, bearable, and easy to face in comparison with this vague we know notwhat. 

And this leads me to say, that it seems to me that the supernatural, inorder to call forth those sensations, terrible to our ancestors andterrible but delicious to ourselves, skeptical posterity, mustnecessarily, and with but a few exceptions, remain enwrapped inmystery. Indeed, 'tis the mystery that touches us, the vague shroud ofmoonbeams that hangs about the haunting lady, the glint on thewarrior's breastplate, the click of his unseen spurs, while the figureitself wanders forth, scarcely outlined, scarcely separated from thesurrounding trees; or walks, and sucked back, ever and anon, into theflickering shadows. 

A number of ingenious persons of our day, desirous of apocket-superstition, as men of yore were greedy of a pocket-saint tocarry about in gold and enamel, a number of highly reasoning men ofsemi-science have returned to the notion of our fathers, that ghostshave an existence outside our own fancy and emotion; and have culledfrom the experience of some Jemima Jackson, who fifty years ago, beingnine years of age, saw her maiden aunt appear six months after decease, abundant proof of this fact. One feels glad to think the maiden auntshould have walked about after death, if it afforded her anysatisfaction, poor soul! but one is struck by the extremeuninterestingness of this lady's appearance in the spirit, corresponding perhaps to her want of charm while in the flesh. Altogether one quite agrees, having duly perused the collection ofevidence on the subject, with the wisdom of these modern ghost-experts, when they affirm that you can always tell a genuine ghost-story by thecircumstance of its being about a nobody, its having no point orpicturesqueness, and being, generally speaking, flat, stale, andunprofitable. 

A genuine ghost-story! But then they are not genuine ghost-stories, those tales that tingle through our additional sense, the sense of thesupernatural, and fill places, nay whole epochs, with their strangeperfume of witchgarden flowers. 

No, alas! neither the story of the murdered King of Denmark (murderedpeople, I am told, usually stay quiet, as a scientific fact), nor ofthat weird woman who saw King James the Poet three times with hisshroud wrapped ever higher; nor the tale of the finger of the bronzeVenus closing over the wedding-ring, whether told by Morris in versepatterned like some tapestry, or by Mérimée in terror of cynicalreality, or droned by the original mediaeval professional story-teller, none of these are genuine ghost-stories. They exist, these ghosts, onlyin our minds, in the minds of those dead folk; they have never stumbledand fumbled about, with Jemima Jackson's maiden aunt, among thearmchairs and rep sofas of reality. 

They are things of the imagination, born there, bred there, sprung fromthe strange confused heaps, half-rubbish, half-treasure, which lie inour fancy, heaps of half-faded recollections, of fragmentary vividimpressions, litter of multi-colored tatters, and faded herbs andflowers, whence arises that odor (we all know it), musty and damp, butpenetratingly sweet and intoxicatingly heady, which hangs in the airwhen the ghost has swept through the unopened door, and the flickeringflames of candle and fire start up once more after waning. 

The genuine ghost? And is not this he, or she, this one born ofourselves, of the weird places we have seen, the strange stories wehave heard--this one, and not the aunt of Miss Jemima Jackson? For whatuse, I entreat you to tell me, is that respectable spinster's vision?Was she worth seeing, that aunt of hers, or would she, if followed, have led the way to any interesting brimstone or any endurablebeatitude?

The supernatural can open the caves of Jamschid and scale the ladder ofJacob: what use has it got if it land us in Islington or Shepherd'sBush? It is well known that Dr. Faustus, having been offered any ghosthe chose, boldly selected, for Mephistopheles to convey, no less aperson than Helena of Troy. Imagine if the familiar fiend had summonedup some Miss Jemima Jackson's Aunt of Antiquity!

That is the thing--the Past, the more or less remote Past, of which theprose is clean obliterated by distance--that is the place to get ourghosts from. Indeed we live ourselves, we educated folk of moderntimes, on the borderland of the Past, in houses looking down on itstroubadours' orchards and Greek folks' pillared courtyards; and alegion of ghosts, very vague and changeful, are perpetually to and fro, fetching and carrying for us between it and the Present. 

Hence, my four little tales are of no genuine ghosts in the scientificsense; they tell of no hauntings such as could be contributed by theSociety for Psychical Research, of no specters that can be caught indefinite places and made to dictate judicial evidence. My ghosts arewhat you call spurious ghosts (according to me the only genuine ones), of whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains, and have haunted, among others, my own and my friends'--yours, dearArthur Lemon, along the dim twilit tracks, among the high growingbracken and the spectral pines, of the south country; and yours, amidstthe mist of moonbeams and olive-branches, dear Flora Priestley, whilethe moonlit sea moaned and rattled against the moldering walls of thehouse whence Shelley set sail for eternity. 

VERNON LEE

_MAIANO, near FLORENCE, June 1889. _

_Amour Dure:_

PASSAGES FROM THE DIARY OF SPIRIDION TREPKA. 

_Part I_

_Urbania, August 20th, 1885. --_

I had longed, these years and years, to be in Italy, to come face toface with the Past; and was this Italy, was this the Past? I could havecried, yes cried, for disappointment when I first wandered about Rome, with an invitation to dine at the German Embassy in my pocket, andthree or four Berlin and Munich Vandals at my heels, telling me wherethe best beer and sauerkraut could be had, and what the last article byGrimm or Mommsen was about. 

Is this folly? Is it falsehood? Am I not myself a product of modern, northern civilization; is not my coming to Italy due to this verymodern scientific vandalism, which has given me a traveling scholarshipbecause I have written a book like all those other atrocious books oferudition and art-criticism? Nay, am I not here at Urbania on theexpress understanding that, in a certain number of months, I shallproduce just another such book? Dost thou imagine, thou miserableSpiridion, thou Pole grown into the semblance of a German pedant, doctor of philosophy, professor even, author of a prize essay on thedespots of the fifteenth century, dost thou imagine that thou, with thyministerial letters and proof-sheets in thy black professorialcoat-pocket, canst ever come in spirit into the presence of the Past?

Too true, alas! But let me forget it, at least, every now and then; asI forgot it this afternoon, while the white bullocks dragged my gigslowly winding along interminable valleys, crawling along interminablehill-sides, with the invisible droning torrent far below, and only thebare grey and reddish peaks all around, up to this town of Urbania, forgotten of mankind, towered and battlemented on the high Apennineridge. Sigillo, Penna, Fossombrone, Mercatello, Montemurlo--each singlevillage name, as the driver pointed it out, brought to my mind therecollection of some battle or some great act of treachery of formerdays. And as the huge mountains shut out the setting sun, and thevalleys filled with bluish shadow and mist, only a band of threateningsmoke-red remaining behind the towers and cupolas of the city on itsmountain-top, and the sound of church bells floated across theprecipice from Urbania, I almost expected, at every turning of theroad, that a troop of horsemen, with beaked helmets and clawed shoes, would emerge, with armor glittering and pennons waving in the sunset. And then, not two hours ago, entering the town at dusk, passing alongthe deserted streets, with only a smoky light here and there under ashrine or in front of a fruit-stall, or a fire reddening the blacknessof a smithy; passing beneath the battlements and turrets of thepalace. .. . Ah, that was Italy, it was the Past!

_August 21st. --_

And this is the Present! Four letters of introduction to deliver, andan hour's polite conversation to endure with the Vice-Prefect, theSyndic, the Director of the Archives, and the good man to whom myfriend Max had sent me for lodgings. .. . 

_August 22nd-27th. --_

Spent the greater part of the day in the Archives, and the greater partof my time there in being bored to extinction by the Director thereof, who today spouted Aeneas Sylvius' Commentaries for three-quarters of anhour without taking breath. From this sort of martyrdom (what are thesensations of a former racehorse being driven in a cab? If you canconceive them, they are those of a Pole turned Prussian professor) Itake refuge in long rambles through the town. This town is a handful oftall black houses huddled on to the top of an Alp, long narrow lanestrickling down its sides, like the slides we made on hillocks in ourboyhood, and in the middle the superb red brick structure, turreted andbattlemented, of Duke Ottobuono's palace, from whose windows you lookdown upon a sea, a kind of whirlpool, of melancholy grey mountains. Then there are the people, dark, bushy-bearded men, riding about likebrigands, wrapped in green-lined cloaks upon their shaggy pack-mules;or loitering about, great, brawny, low-headed youngsters, like theparti-colored bravos in Signorelli's frescoes; the beautiful boys, likeso many young Raphaels, with eyes like the eyes of bullocks, and thehuge women, Madonnas or St. Elizabeths, as the case may be, with theirclogs firmly poised on their toes and their brass pitchers on theirheads, as they go up and down the steep black alleys. I do not talkmuch to these people; I fear my illusions being dispelled. At thecorner of a street, opposite Francesco di Giorgio's beautiful littleportico, is a great blue and red advertisement, representing an angeldescending to crown Elias Howe, on account of his sewing-machines; andthe clerks of the Vice-Prefecture, who dine at the place where I get mydinner, yell politics, Minghetti, Cairoli, Tunis, ironclads, &c. , ateach other, and sing snatches of _La Fille de Mme. Angot, _ which Iimagine they have been performing here recently. 

No; talking to the natives is evidently a dangerous experiment. Exceptindeed, perhaps, to my good landlord, Signor Notaro Porri, who is justas learned, and takes considerably less snuff (or rather brushes it offhis coat more often) than the Director of the Archives. I forgot to jotdown (and I feel I must jot down, in the vain belief that some daythese scraps will help, like a withered twig of olive or a three-wickedTuscan lamp on my table, to bring to my mind, in that hateful Babylonof Berlin, these happy Italian days)--I forgot to record that I amlodging in the house of a dealer in antiquities. My window looks up theprincipal street to where the little column with Mercury on the toprises in the midst of the awnings and porticoes of the market-place. Bending over the chipped ewers and tubs full of sweet basil, clovepinks, and marigolds, I can just see a corner of the palace turret, andthe vague ultramarine of the hills beyond. The house, whose back goessharp down into the ravine, is a queer up-and-down black place, whitewashed rooms, hung with the Raphaels and Francias and Peruginos, whom mine host regularly carries to the chief inn whenever a strangeris expected; and surrounded by old carved chairs, sofas of the Empire, embossed and gilded wedding-chests, and the cupboards which containbits of old damask and embroidered altar-cloths scenting the place withthe smell of old incense and mustiness; all of which are presided overby Signor Porri's three maiden sisters--Sora Serafina, Sora Lodovica, and Sora Adalgisa--the three Fates in person, even to the distaffs andtheir black cats. 

Sor Asdrubale, as they call my landlord, is also a notary. He regretsthe Pontifical Government, having had a cousin who was a Cardinal'strain-bearer, and believes that if only you lay a table for two, lightfour candles made of dead men's fat, and perform certain rites aboutwhich he is not very precise, you can, on Christmas Eve and similarnights, summon up San Pasquale Baylon, who will write you the winningnumbers of the lottery upon the smoked back of a plate, if you havepreviously slapped him on both cheeks and repeated three Ave Marias. The difficulty consists in obtaining the dead men's fat for thecandles, and also in slapping the saint before he have time to vanish. 

"If it were not for that, " says Sor Asdrubale, "the Government wouldhave had to suppress the lottery ages ago--eh!"

_Sept. 9th. _--This history of Urbania is not without its romance, although that romance (as usual) has been overlooked by our Dryasdusts. Even before coming here I felt attracted by the strange figure of awoman, which appeared from out of the dry pages of Gualterio's andPadre de Sanctis' histories of this place. This woman is Medea, daughter of Galeazzo IV. Malatesta, Lord of Carpi, wife first ofPierluigi Orsini, Duke of Stimigliano, and subsequently of GuidalfonsoII. , Duke of Urbania, predecessor of the great Duke Robert II. 

This woman's history and character remind one of that of BiancaCappello, and at the same time of Lucrezia Borgia. Born in 1556, shewas affianced at the age of twelve to a cousin, a Malatesta of theRimini family. This family having greatly gone down in the world, herengagement was broken, and she was betrothed a year later to a memberof the Pico family, and married to him by proxy at the age of fourteen. But this match not satisfying her own or her father's ambition, themarriage by proxy was, upon some pretext, declared null, and the suitencouraged of the Duke of Stimigliano, a great Umbrian feudatory of theOrsini family. But the bridegroom, Giovanfrancesco Pico, refused tosubmit, pleaded his case before the Pope, and tried to carry off byforce his bride, with whom he was madly in love, as the lady was mostlovely and of most cheerful and amiable manner, says an old anonymouschronicle. Pico waylaid her litter as she was going to a villa of herfather's, and carried her to his castle near Mirandola, where herespectfully pressed his suit; insisting that he had a right toconsider her as his wife. But the lady escaped by letting herself intothe moat by a rope of sheets, and Giovanfrancesco Pico was discoveredstabbed in the chest, by the hand of Madonna Medea da Carpi. He was ahandsome youth only eighteen years old. 

The Pico having been settled, and the marriage with him declared nullby the Pope, Medea da Carpi was solemnly married to the Duke ofStimigliano, and went to live upon his domains near Rome. 

Two years later, Pierluigi Orsini was stabbed by one of his grooms athis castle of Stimigliano, near Orvieto; and suspicion fell upon hiswidow, more especially as, immediately after the event, she caused themurderer to be cut down by two servants in her own chamber; but notbefore he had declared that she had induced him to assassinate hismaster by a promise of her love. Things became so hot for Medea daCarpi that she fled to Urbania and threw herself at the feet of DukeGuidalfonso II. , declaring that she had caused the groom to be killedmerely to avenge her good fame, which he had slandered, and that shewas absolutely guiltless of the death of her husband. The marvelousbeauty of the widowed Duchess of Stimigliano, who was only nineteen, entirely turned the head of the Duke of Urbania. He affected implicitbelief in her innocence, refused to give her up to the Orsinis, kinsmenof her late husband, and assigned to her magnificent apartments in theleft wing of the palace, among which the room containing the famousfireplace ornamented with marble Cupids on a blue ground. Guidalfonsofell madly in love with his beautiful guest. Hitherto timid anddomestic in character, he began publicly to neglect his wife, MaddalenaVarano of Camerino, with whom, although childless, he had hithertolived on excellent terms; he not only treated with contempt theadmonitions of his advisers and of his suzerain the Pope, but went sofar as to take measures to repudiate his wife, on the score of quiteimaginary ill-conduct. The Duchess Maddalena, unable to bear thistreatment, fled to the convent of the barefooted sisters at Pesaro, where she pined away, while Medea da Carpi reigned in her place atUrbania, embroiling Duke Guidalfonso in quarrels both with the powerfulOrsinis, who continued to accuse her of Stimigliano's murder, and withthe Varanos, kinsmen of the injured Duchess Maddalena; until at length, in the year 1576, the Duke of Urbania, having become suddenly, and notwithout suspicious circumstances, a widower, publicly married Medea daCarpi two days after the decease of his unhappy wife. No child was bornof this marriage; but such was the infatuation of Duke Guidalfonso, that the new Duchess induced him to settle the inheritance of the Duchy(having, with great difficulty, obtained the consent of the Pope) onthe boy Bartolommeo, her son by Stimigliano, but whom the Orsinisrefused to acknowledge as such, declaring him to be the child of thatGiovanfrancesco Pico to whom Medea had been married by proxy, and whom, in defense, as she had said, of her honor, she had assassinated; andthis investiture of the Duchy of Urbania on to a stranger and a bastardwas at the expense of the obvious rights of the Cardinal Robert, Guidalfonso's younger brother. 

In May 1579 Duke Guidalfonso died suddenly and mysteriously, Medeahaving forbidden all access to his chamber, lest, on his deathbed, hemight repent and reinstate his brother in his rights. The Duchessimmediately caused her son, Bartolommeo Orsini, to be proclaimed Dukeof Urbania, and herself regent; and, with the help of two or threeunscrupulous young men, particularly a certain Captain Oliverotto daNarni, who was rumored to be her lover, seized the reins of governmentwith extraordinary and terrible vigor, marching an army against theVaranos and Orsinis, who were defeated at Sigillo, and ruthlesslyexterminating every person who dared question the lawfulness of thesuccession; while, all the time, Cardinal Robert, who had flung asidehis priest's garb and vows, went about in Rome, Tuscany, Venice--nay, even to the Emperor and the King of Spain, imploring help against theusurper. In a few months he had turned the tide of sympathy against theDuchess-Regent; the Pope solemnly declared the investiture ofBartolommeo Orsini worthless, and published the accession of RobertII. , Duke of Urbania and Count of Montemurlo; the Grand Duke of Tuscanyand the Venetians secretly promised assistance, but only if Robert wereable to assert his rights by main force. Little by little, one townafter the other of the Duchy went over to Robert, and Medea da Carpifound herself surrounded in the mountain citadel of Urbania like ascorpion surrounded by flames. (This simile is not mine, but belongs toRaffaello Gualterio, historiographer to Robert II. ) But, unlike thescorpion, Medea refused to commit suicide. It is perfectly marveloushow, without money or allies, she could so long keep her enemies atbay; and Gualterio attributes this to those fatal fascinations whichhad brought Pico and Stimigliano to their deaths, which had turned theonce honest Guidalfonso into a villain, and which were such that, ofall her lovers, not one but preferred dying for her, even after he hadbeen treated with ingratitude and ousted by a rival; a faculty whichMesser Raffaello Gualterio clearly attributed to hellish connivance. 

At last the ex-Cardinal Robert succeeded, and triumphantly enteredUrbania in November 1579. His accession was marked by moderation andclemency. Not a man was put to death, save Oliverotto da Narni, whothrew himself on the new Duke, tried to stab him as he alighted at thepalace, and who was cut down by the Duke's men, crying, "Orsini, Orsini! Medea, Medea! Long live Duke Bartolommeo!" with his dyingbreath, although it is said that the Duchess had treated him withignominy. The little Bartolommeo was sent to Rome to the Orsinis; theDuchess, respectfully confined in the left wing of the palace. 

It is said that she haughtily requested to see the new Duke, but thathe shook his head, and, in his priest's fashion, quoted a verse aboutUlysses and the Sirens; and it is remarkable that he persistentlyrefused to see her, abruptly leaving his chamber one day that she hadentered it by stealth. After a few months a conspiracy was discoveredto murder Duke Robert, which had obviously been set on foot by Medea. But the young man, one Marcantonio Frangipani of Rome, denied, evenunder the severest torture, any complicity of hers; so that DukeRobert, who wished to do nothing violent, merely transferred theDuchess from his villa at Sant' Elmo to the convent of the Clarisse intown, where she was guarded and watched in the closest manner. Itseemed impossible that Medea should intrigue any further, for shecertainly saw and could be seen by no one. Yet she contrived to send aletter and her portrait to one Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi, a youth, only nineteen years old, of noble Romagnole family, and who wasbetrothed to one of the most beautiful girls of Urbania. He immediatelybroke off his engagement, and, shortly afterwards, attempted to shootDuke Robert with a holster-pistol as he knelt at mass on the festivalof Easter Day. This time Duke Robert was determined to obtain proofsagainst Medea. Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi was kept some days withoutfood, then submitted to the most violent tortures, and finallycondemned. When he was going to be flayed with red-hot pincers andquartered by horses, he was told that he might obtain the grace ofimmediate death by confessing the complicity of the Duchess; and theconfessor and nuns of the convent, which stood in the place ofexecution outside Porta San Romano, pressed Medea to save the wretch, whose screams reached her, by confessing her own guilt. Medea askedpermission to go to a balcony, where she could see Prinzivalle and beseen by him. She looked on coldly, then threw down her embroideredkerchief to the poor mangled creature. He asked the executioner to wipehis mouth with it, kissed it, and cried out that Medea was innocent. Then, after several hours of torments, he died. This was too much forthe patience even of Duke Robert. Seeing that as long as Medea livedhis life would be in perpetual danger, but unwilling to cause a scandal(somewhat of the priest-nature remaining), he had Medea strangled inthe convent, and, what is remarkable, insisted that only women--twoinfanticides to whom he remitted their sentence--should be employed forthe deed. 

"This clement prince, " writes Don Arcangelo Zappi in his life of him, published in 1725, "can be blamed only for one act of cruelty, the moreodious as he had himself, until released from his vows by the Pope, been in holy orders. It is said that when he caused the death of theinfamous Medea da Carpi, his fear lest her extraordinary charms shouldseduce any man was such, that he not only employed women asexecutioners, but refused to permit her a priest or monk, thus forcingher to die unshriven, and refusing her the benefit of any penitencethat may have lurked in her adamantine heart. "

Such is the story of Medea da Carpi, Duchess of Stimigliano Orsini, andthen wife of Duke Guidalfonso II. Of Urbania. She was put to death justtwo hundred and ninety-seven years ago, December 1582, at the age ofbarely seven-and twenty, and having, in the course of her short life, brought to a violent end five of her lovers, from Giovanfrancesco Picoto Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi. 

_Sept. 20th. _--

A grand illumination of the town in honor of the taking of Rome fifteenyears ago. Except Sor Asdrubale, my landlord, who shakes his head atthe Piedmontese, as he calls them, the people here are allItalianissimi. The Popes kept them very much down since Urbania lapsedto the Holy See in 1645. 

_Sept. 28th. _--

I have for some time been hunting for portraits of the Duchess Medea. Most of them, I imagine, must have been destroyed, perhaps by DukeRobert II. 's fear lest even after her death this terrible beauty shouldplay him a trick. Three or four I have, however, been able to find--onea miniature in the Archives, said to be that which she sent to poorPrinzivalle degli Ordelaffi in order to turn his head; one a marblebust in the palace lumber-room; one in a large composition, possibly byBaroccio, representing Cleopatra at the feet of Augustus. Augustus isthe idealized portrait of Robert II. , round cropped head, nose a littleawry, clipped beard and scar as usual, but in Roman dress. Cleopatraseems to me, for all her Oriental dress, and although she wears a blackwig, to be meant for Medea da Carpi; she is kneeling, baring her breastfor the victor to strike, but in reality to captivate him, and he turnsaway with an awkward gesture of loathing. None of these portraits seemvery good, save the miniature, but that is an exquisite work, and withit, and the suggestions of the bust, it is easy to reconstruct thebeauty of this terrible being. The type is that most admired by thelate Renaissance, and, in some measure, immortalized by Jean Goujon andthe French. The face is a perfect oval, the forehead somewhatover-round, with minute curls, like a fleece, of bright auburn hair;the nose a trifle over-aquiline, and the cheek-bones a trifle too low;the eyes grey, large, prominent, beneath exquisitely curved brows andlids just a little too tight at the corners; the mouth also, brilliantly red and most delicately designed, is a little too tight, the lips strained a trifle over the teeth. Tight eyelids and tight lipsgive a strange refinement, and, at the same time, an air of mystery, asomewhat sinister seductiveness; they seem to take, but not to give. The mouth with a kind of childish pout, looks as if it could bite orsuck like a leech. The complexion is dazzlingly fair, the perfecttransparent rosette lily of a red-haired beauty; the head, with hairelaborately curled and plaited close to it, and adorned with pearls, sits like that of the antique Arethusa on a long, supple, swan-likeneck. A curious, at first rather conventional, artificial-looking sortof beauty, voluptuous yet cold, which, the more it is contemplated, themore it troubles and haunts the mind. Round the lady's neck is a goldchain with little gold lozenges at intervals, on which is engraved theposy or pun (the fashion of French devices is common in those days), "Amour Dure--Dure Amour. " The same posy is inscribed in the hollow ofthe bust, and, thanks to it, I have been able to identify the latter asMedea's portrait. I often examine these tragic portraits, wonderingwhat this face, which led so many men to their death, may have beenlike when it spoke or smiled, what at the moment when Medea da Carpifascinated her victims into love unto death--"Amour Dure--Dure Amour, "as runs her device--love that lasts, cruel love--yes indeed, when onethinks of the fidelity and fate of her lovers. 

_Oct. 13th. _--

I have literally not had time to write a line of my diary all thesedays. My whole mornings have gone in those Archives, my afternoonstaking long walks in this lovely autumn weather (the highest hills arejust tipped with snow). My evenings go in writing that confoundedaccount of the Palace of Urbania which Government requires, merely tokeep me at work at something useless. Of my history I have not yet beenable to write a word. .. . By the way, I must note down a curiouscircumstance mentioned in an anonymous MS. Life of Duke Robert, which Ifell upon today. When this prince had the equestrian statue of himselfby Antonio Tassi, Gianbologna's pupil, erected in the square of the_Corte_, he secretly caused to be made, says my anonymous MS. , asilver statuette of his familiar genius or angel--"familiaris ejusangelus seu genius, quod a vulgo dicitur _idolino_"--whichstatuette or idol, after having been consecrated by theastrologers--"ab astrologis quibusdam ritibus sacrato"--was placed inthe cavity of the chest of the effigy by Tassi, in order, says the MS. , that his soul might rest until the general Resurrection. This passageis curious, and to me somewhat puzzling; how could the soul of DukeRobert await the general Resurrection, when, as a Catholic, he ought tohave believed that it must, as soon as separated from his body, go toPurgatory? Or is there some semi-pagan superstition of the Renaissance(most strange, certainly, in a man who had been a Cardinal) connectingthe soul with a guardian genius, who could be compelled, by magic rites("ab astrologis sacrato, " the MS. Says of the little idol), to remainfixed to earth, so that the soul should sleep in the body until the Dayof Judgment? I confess this story baffles me. I wonder whether such anidol ever existed, or exists nowadays, in the body of Tassi's bronzeeffigy?

_Oct. 20th. --_

I have been seeing a good deal of late of the Vice-Prefect's son: anamiable young man with a love-sick face and a languid interest inUrbanian history and archaeology, of which he is profoundly ignorant. This young man, who has lived at Siena and Lucca before his father waspromoted here, wears extremely long and tight trousers, which almostpreclude his bending his knees, a stick-up collar and an eyeglass, anda pair of fresh kid gloves stuck in the breast of his coat, speaks ofUrbania as Ovid might have spoken of Pontus, and complains (as well hemay) of the barbarism of the young men, the officials who dine at myinn and howl and sing like madmen, and the nobles who drive gigs, showing almost as much throat as a lady at a ball. This personfrequently entertains me with his _amori_, past, present, andfuture; he evidently thinks me very odd for having none to entertainhim with in return; he points out to me the pretty (or ugly)servant-girls and dressmakers as we walk in the street, sighs deeply orsings in falsetto behind every tolerably young-looking woman, and hasfinally taken me to the house of the lady of his heart, a greatblack-mustachioed countess, with a voice like a fish-crier; here, hesays, I shall meet all the best company in Urbania and some beautifulwomen--ah, too beautiful, alas! I find three huge half-furnished rooms, with bare brick floors, petroleum lamps, and horribly bad pictures onbright washball-blue and gamboge walls, and in the midst of it all, every evening, a dozen ladies and gentlemen seated in a circle, vociferating at each other the same news a year old; the younger ladiesin bright yellows and greens, fanning themselves while my teethchatter, and having sweet things whispered behind their fans byofficers with hair brushed up like a hedgehog. And these are the womenmy friend expects me to fall in love with! I vainly wait for tea orsupper which does not come, and rush home, determined to leave alonethe Urbanian _beau monde_. 

It is quite true that I have no _amori_, although my friend doesnot believe it. When I came to Italy first, I looked out for romance; Isighed, like Goethe in Rome, for a window to open and a wondrouscreature to appear, "welch mich versengend erquickt. " Perhaps it isbecause Goethe was a German, accustomed to German _Fraus_, and Iam, after all, a Pole, accustomed to something very different from_Fraus_; but anyhow, for all my efforts, in Rome, Florence, andSiena, I never could find a woman to go mad about, either among theladies, chattering bad French, or among the lower classes, as 'cute andcold as money-lenders; so I steer clear of Italian womankind, itsshrill voice and gaudy toilettes. I am wedded to history, to the Past, to women like Lucrezia Borgia, Vittoria Accoramboni, or that Medea daCarpi, for the present; some day I shall perhaps find a grand passion, a woman to play the Don Quixote about, like the Pole that I am; a womanout of whose slipper to drink, and for whose pleasure to die; but nothere! Few things strike me so much as the degeneracy of Italian women. What has become of the race of Faustinas, Marozias, Bianca Cappellos?Where discover nowadays (I confess she haunts me) another Medea daCarpi? Were it only possible to meet a woman of that extremedistinction of beauty, of that terribleness of nature, even if onlypotential, I do believe I could love her, even to the Day of Judgment, like any Oliverotto da Narni, or Frangipani or Prinzivalle. 

_Oct. 27th. --_

Fine sentiments the above are for a professor, a learned man! I thoughtthe young artists of Rome childish because they played practical jokesand yelled at night in the streets, returning from the Caffč Greco orthe cellar in the Via Palombella; but am I not as childish to thefull--I, melancholy wretch, whom they called Hamlet and the Knight ofthe Doleful Countenance?

_Nov. 5th. --_

I can't free myself from the thought of this Medea da Carpi. In mywalks, my mornings in the Archives, my solitary evenings, I catchmyself thinking over the woman. Am I turning novelist instead ofhistorian? And still it seems to me that I understand her so well; somuch better than my facts warrant. First, we must put aside allpedantic modern ideas of right and wrong. Right and wrong in a centuryof violence and treachery does not exist, least of all for creatureslike Medea. Go preach right and wrong to a tigress, my dear sir! Yet isthere in the world anything nobler than the huge creature, steel whenshe springs, velvet when she treads, as she stretches her supple body, or smooths her beautiful skin, or fastens her strong claws into hervictim?

Yes; I can understand Medea. Fancy a woman of superlative beauty, ofthe highest courage and calmness, a woman of many resources, of genius, brought up by a petty princelet of a father, upon Tacitus and Sallust, and the tales of the great Malatestas, of Caesar Borgia andsuch-like!--a woman whose one passion is conquest and empire--fancyher, on the eve of being wedded to a man of the power of the Duke ofStimigliano, claimed, carried off by a small fry of a Pico, locked upin his hereditary brigand's castle, and having to receive the youngfool's red-hot love as an honor and a necessity! The mere thought ofany violence to such a nature is an abominable outrage; and if Picochooses to embrace such a woman at the risk of meeting a sharp piece ofsteel in her arms, why, it is a fair bargain. Young hound--or, if youprefer, young hero--to think to treat a woman like this as if she wereany village wench! Medea marries her Orsini. A marriage, let it benoted, between an old soldier of fifty and a girl of sixteen. Reflectwhat that means: it means that this imperious woman is soon treatedlike a chattel, made roughly to understand that her business is to givethe Duke an heir, not advice; that she must never ask "wherefore thisor that?" that she must courtesy before the Duke's counselors, hiscaptains, his mistresses; that, at the least suspicion ofrebelliousness, she is subject to his foul words and blows; at theleast suspicion of infidelity, to be strangled or starved to death, orthrown down an oubliette. Suppose that she know that her husband hastaken it into his head that she has looked too hard at this man orthat, that one of his lieutenants or one of his women have whisperedthat, after all, the boy Bartolommeo might as soon be a Pico as anOrsini. Suppose she know that she must strike or be struck? Why, shestrikes, or gets some one to strike for her. At what price? A promiseof love, of love to a groom, the son of a serf! Why, the dog must bemad or drunk to believe such a thing possible; his very belief inanything so monstrous makes him worthy of death. And then he dares toblab! This is much worse than Pico. Medea is bound to defend her honora second time; if she could stab Pico, she can certainly stab thisfellow, or have him stabbed. 

Hounded by her husband's kinsmen, she takes refuge at Urbania. TheDuke, like every other man, falls wildly in love with Medea, andneglects his wife; let us even go so far as to say, breaks his wife'sheart. Is this Medea's fault? Is it her fault that every stone thatcomes beneath her chariot-wheels is crushed? Certainly not. Do yousuppose that a woman like Medea feels the smallest ill-will against apoor, craven Duchess Maddalena? Why, she ignores her very existence. Tosuppose Medea a cruel woman is as grotesque as to call her an immoralwoman. Her fate is, sooner or later, to triumph over her enemies, atall events to make their victory almost a defeat; her magic faculty isto enslave all the men who come across her path; all those who see her, love her, become her slaves; and it is the destiny of all her slaves toperish. Her lovers, with the exception of Duke Guidalfonso, all come toan untimely end; and in this there is nothing unjust. The possession ofa woman like Medea is a happiness too great for a mortal man; it wouldturn his head, make him forget even what he owed her; no man mustsurvive long who conceives himself to have a right over her; it is akind of sacrilege. And only death, the willingness to pay for suchhappiness by death, can at all make a man worthy of being her lover; hemust be willing to love and suffer and die. This is the meaning of herdevice--"Amour Dure--Dure Amour. " The love of Medea da Carpi cannotfade, but the lover can die; it is a constant and a cruel love. 

_Nov. 11th. --_

I was right, quite right in my idea. I have found--Oh, joy! I treatedthe Vice-Prefect's son to a dinner of five courses at the Trattoria LaStella d'Italia out of sheer jubilation--I have found in the Archives, unknown, of course, to the Director, a heap of letters--letters of DukeRobert about Medea da Carpi, letters of Medea herself! Yes, Medea's ownhandwriting--a round, scholarly character, full of abbreviations, witha Greek look about it, as befits a learned princess who could readPlato as well as Petrarch. The letters are of little importance, meredrafts of business letters for her secretary to copy, during the timethat she governed the poor weak Guidalfonso. But they are her letters, and I can imagine almost that there hangs about these moldering piecesof paper a scent as of a woman's hair. 

The few letters of Duke Robert show him in a new light. A cunning, cold, but craven priest. He trembles at the bare thought of Medea--"lapessima Medea"--worse than her namesake of Colchis, as he calls her. His long clemency is a result of mere fear of laying violent hands uponher. He fears her as something almost supernatural; he would haveenjoyed having had her burnt as a witch. After letter on letter, telling his crony, Cardinal Sanseverino, at Rome his variousprecautions during her lifetime--how he wears a jacket of mail underhis coat; how he drinks only milk from a cow which he has milked in hispresence; how he tries his dog with morsels of his food, lest it bepoisoned; how he suspects the wax-candles because of their peculiarsmell; how he fears riding out lest some one should frighten his horseand cause him to break his neck--after all this, and when Medea hasbeen in her grave two years, he tells his correspondent of his fear ofmeeting the soul of Medea after his own death, and chuckles over theingenious device (concocted by his astrologer and a certain FraGaudenzio, a Capuchin) by which he shall secure the absolute peace ofhis soul until that of the wicked Medea be finally "chained up in hellamong the lakes of boiling pitch and the ice of Caina described by theimmortal bard"--old pedant! Here, then, is the explanation of thatsilver image--_quod vulgo dicitur idolino_--which he caused to besoldered into his effigy by Tassi. As long as the image of his soul wasattached to the image of his body, he should sleep awaiting the Day ofJudgment, fully convinced that Medea's soul will then be properlytarred and feathered, while his--honest man!--will fly straight toParadise. And to think that, two weeks ago, I believed this man to be ahero! Aha! my good Duke Robert, you shall be shown up in my history;and no amount of silver idolinos shall save you from being heartilylaughed at!

_Nov. 15th. --_

Strange! That idiot of a Prefect's son, who has heard me talk a hundredtimes of Medea da Carpi, suddenly recollects that, when he was a childat Urbania, his nurse used to threaten him with a visit from MadonnaMedea, who rode in the sky on a black he-goat. My Duchess Medea turnedinto a bogey for naughty little boys!

_Nov. 20th. --_

I have been going about with a Bavarian Professor of mediaeval history, showing him all over the country. Among other places we went to RoccaSant'Elmo, to see the former villa of the Dukes of Urbania, the villawhere Medea was confined between the accession of Duke Robert and theconspiracy of Marcantonio Frangipani, which caused her removal to thenunnery immediately outside the town. A long ride up the desolateApennine valleys, bleak beyond words just now with their thin fringe ofoak scrub turned russet, thin patches of grass seared by the frost, thelast few yellow leaves of the poplars by the torrents shaking andfluttering about in the chill Tramontana; the mountaintops are wrappedin thick grey cloud; tomorrow, if the wind continues, we shall see themround masses of snow against the cold blue sky. Sant' Elmo is awretched hamlet high on the Apennine ridge, where the Italianvegetation is already replaced by that of the North. You ride for milesthrough leafless chestnut woods, the scent of the soaking brown leavesfilling the air, the roar of the torrent, turbid with autumn rains, rising from the precipice below; then suddenly the leafless chestnutwoods are replaced, as at Vallombrosa, by a belt of black, dense firplantations. Emerging from these, you come to an open space, frozenblasted meadows, the rocks of snow clad peak, the newly fallen snow, close above you; and in the midst, on a knoll, with a gnarled larch oneither side, the ducal villa of Sant' Elmo, a big black stone box witha stone escutcheon, grated windows, and a double flight of steps infront. It is now let out to the proprietor of the neighboring woods, who uses it for the storage of chestnuts, faggots, and charcoal fromthe neighboring ovens. We tied our horses to the iron rings andentered: an old woman, with disheveled hair, was alone in the house. The villa is a mere hunting-lodge, built by Ottobuono IV. , the fatherof Dukes Guidalfonso and Robert, about 1530. Some of the rooms have atone time been frescoed and paneled with oak carvings, but all this hasdisappeared. Only, in one of the big rooms, there remains a largemarble fireplace, similar to those in the palace at Urbania, beautifully carved with Cupids on a blue ground; a charming naked boysustains a jar on either side, one containing clove pinks, the otherroses. The room was filled with stacks of faggots. 

We returned home late, my companion in excessively bad humor at thefruitlessness of the expedition. We were caught in the skirt of asnowstorm as we got into the chestnut woods. The sight of the snowfalling gently, of the earth and bushes whitened all round, made mefeel back at Posen, once more a child. I sang and shouted, to mycompanion's horror. This will be a bad point against me if reported atBerlin. A historian of twenty-four who shouts and sings, and that whenanother historian is cursing at the snow and the bad roads! All night Ilay awake watching the embers of my wood fire, and thinking of Medea daCarpi mewed up, in winter, in that solitude of Sant' Elmo, the firsgroaning, the torrent roaring, the snow falling all round; miles andmiles away from human creatures. I fancied I saw it all, and that I, somehow, was Marcantonio Frangipani come to liberate her--or was itPrinzivalle degli Ordelaffi? I suppose it was because of the long ride, the unaccustomed pricking feeling of the snow in the air; or perhapsthe punch which my professor insisted on drinking after dinner. 

Nov. 23rd. --

Thank goodness, that Bavarian professor has finally departed! Thosedays he spent here drove me nearly crazy. Talking over my work, I toldhim one day my views on Medea da Carpi; whereupon he condescended toanswer that those were the usual tales due to the mythopoeic (oldidiot!) tendency of the Renaissance; that research would disprove thegreater part of them, as it had disproved the stories current about theBorgias, &c. ; that, moreover, such a woman as I made out waspsychologically and physiologically impossible. Would that one couldsay as much of such professors as he and his fellows!

Nov. 24th. --

I cannot get over my pleasure in being rid of that imbecile; I felt asif I could have throttled him every time he spoke of the Lady of mythoughts--for such she has become--_Metea_, as the animal calledher!

Nov. 30th. --

I feel quite shaken at what has just happened; I am beginning to fearthat that old pedant was right in saying that it was bad for me to liveall alone in a strange country, that it would make me morbid. It isridiculous that I should be put into such a state of excitement merelyby the chance discovery of a portrait of a woman dead these threehundred years. With the case of my uncle Ladislas, and other suspicionsof insanity in my family, I ought really to guard against such foolishexcitement. 

Yet the incident was really dramatic, uncanny. I could have sworn thatI knew every picture in the palace here; and particularly every pictureof Her. Anyhow, this morning, as I was leaving the Archives, I passedthrough one of the many small rooms--irregular-shaped closets--whichfill up the ins and outs of this curious palace, turreted like a Frenchchāteau. I must have passed through that closet before, for the viewwas so familiar out of its window; just the particular bit of roundtower in front, the cypress on the other side of the ravine, the belfrybeyond, and the piece of the line of Monte Sant' Agata and theLeonessa, covered with snow, against the sky. I suppose there must betwin rooms, and that I had got into the wrong one; or rather, perhapssome shutter had been opened or curtain withdrawn. As I was passing, myeye was caught by a very beautiful old mirror-frame let into the brownand yellow inlaid wall. I approached, and looking at the frame, lookedalso, mechanically, into the glass. I gave a great start, and almostshrieked, I do believe--(it's lucky the Munich professor is safe out ofUrbania!). Behind my own image stood another, a figure close to myshoulder, a face close to mine; and that figure, that face, hers! Medeada Carpi's! I turned sharp round, as white, I think, as the ghost Iexpected to see. On the wall opposite the mirror, just a pace or twobehind where I had been standing, hung a portrait. And such aportrait!--Bronzino never painted a grander one. Against a backgroundof harsh, dark blue, there stands out the figure of the Duchess (for itis Medea, the real Medea, a thousand times more real, individual, andpowerful than in the other portraits), seated stiffly in a high-backedchair, sustained, as it were, almost rigid, by the stiff brocade ofskirts and stomacher, stiffer for plaques of embroidered silver flowersand rows of seed pearl. The dress is, with its mixture of silver andpearl, of a strange dull red, a wicked poppy-juice color, against whichthe flesh of the long, narrow hands with fringe-like fingers; of thelong slender neck, and the face with bared forehead, looks white andhard, like alabaster. The face is the same as in the other portraits:the same rounded forehead, with the short fleece-like, yellowish-redcurls; the same beautifully curved eyebrows, just barely marked; thesame eyelids, a little tight across the eyes; the same lips, a littletight across the mouth; but with a purity of line, a dazzling splendorof skin, and intensity of look immeasurably superior to all the otherportraits. 

She looks out of the frame with a cold, level glance; yet the lipssmile. One hand holds a dull-red rose; the other, long, narrow, tapering, plays with a thick rope of silk and gold and jewels hangingfrom the waist; round the throat, white as marble, partially confinedin the tight dull-red bodice, hangs a gold collar, with the device onalternate enameled medallions, "AMOUR DURE--DURE AMOUR. "

On reflection, I see that I simply could never have been in that roomor closet before; I must have mistaken the door. But, although theexplanation is so simple, I still, after several hours, feel terriblyshaken in all my being. If I grow so excitable I shall have to go toRome at Christmas for a holiday. I feel as if some danger pursued mehere (can it be fever?); and yet, and yet, I don't see how I shall evertear myself away. 

_Dec. 10th_. --

I have made an effort, and accepted the Vice-Prefect's son's invitationto see the oil-making at a villa of theirs near the coast. The villa, or farm, is an old fortified, towered place, standing on a hillsideamong olive-trees and little osier-bushes, which look like a brightorange flame. The olives are squeezed in a tremendous black cellar, like a prison: you see, by the faint white daylight, and the smokyyellow flare of resin burning in pans, great white bullocks movinground a huge millstone; vague figures working at pulleys and handles:it looks, to my fancy, like some scene of the Inquisition. TheCavaliere regaled me with his best wine and rusks. I took some longwalks by the seaside; I had left Urbania wrapped in snow-clouds; downon the coast there was a bright sun; the sunshine, the sea, the bustleof the little port on the Adriatic seemed to do me good. I came back toUrbania another man. Sor Asdrubale, my landlord, poking about inslippers among the gilded chests, the Empire sofas, the old cups andsaucers and pictures which no one will buy, congratulated me upon theimprovement in my looks. "You work too much, " he says; "youth requiresamusement, theatres, promenades, _amori_--it is time enough to beserious when one is bald"--and he took off his greasy red cap. Yes, Iam better! and, as a result, I take to my work with delight again. I willcut them out still, those wiseacres at Berlin!

_Dec. 14th_. --

I don't think I have ever felt so happy about my work. I see it all sowell--that crafty, cowardly Duke Robert; that melancholy DuchessMaddalena; that weak, showy, would-be chivalrous Duke Guidalfonso; andabove all, the splendid figure of Medea. I feel as if I were thegreatest historian of the age; and, at the same time, as if I were aboy of twelve. It snowed yesterday for the first time in the city, fortwo good hours. When it had done, I actually went into the square andtaught the ragamuffins to make a snowman; no, a snow-woman; and I hadthe fancy to call her Medea. "La pessima Medea!" cried one of theboys--"the one who used to ride through the air on a goat?" "No, no, " Isaid; "she was a beautiful lady, the Duchess of Urbania, the mostbeautiful woman that ever lived. " I made her a crown of tinsel, andtaught the boys to cry "Evviva, Medea!" But one of them said, "She is awitch! She must be burnt!" At which they all rushed to fetch burningfaggots and tow; in a minute the yelling demons had melted her down. 

_Dec. 15th_. --

What a goose I am, and to think I am twenty-four, and known inliterature! In my long walks I have composed to a tune (I don't knowwhat it is) which all the people are singing and whistling in thestreet at present, a poem in frightful Italian, beginning "Medea, miadea, " calling on her in the name of her various lovers. I go abouthumming between my teeth, "Why am I not Marcantonio? or Prinzivalle? orhe of Narni? or the good Duke Alfonso? that I might be beloved by thee, Medea, mia dea, " &c. &c. Awful rubbish! My landlord, I think, suspectsthat Medea must be some lady I met while I was staying by the seaside. I am sure Sora Serafina, Sora Lodovica, and Sora Adalgisa--the threeParcae or _Norns_, as I call them--have some such notion. Thisafternoon, at dusk, while tidying my room, Sora Lodovica said to me, "How beautifully the Signorino has taken to singing!" I was scarcelyaware that I had been vociferating, "Vieni, Medea, mia dea, " while theold lady bobbed about making up my fire. I stopped; a nice reputation Ishall get! I thought, and all this will somehow get to Rome, and thenceto Berlin. Sora Lodovica was leaning out of the window, pulling in theiron hook of the shrine-lamp which marks Sor Asdrubale's house. As shewas trimming the lamp previous to swinging it out again, she said inher odd, prudish little way, "You are wrong to stop singing, my son"(she varies between calling me Signor Professore and such terms ofaffection as "Nino, " "Viscere mie, " &c. ); "you are wrong to stopsinging, for there is a young lady there in the street who has actuallystopped to listen to you. "

I ran to the window. A woman, wrapped in a black shawl, was standing inan archway, looking up to the window. 

"Eh, eh! the Signor Professore has admirers, " said Sora Lodovica. 

"Medea, mia dea!" I burst out as loud as I could, with a boy's pleasurein disconcerting the inquisitive passer-by. She turned suddenly roundto go away, waving her hand at me; at that moment Sora Lodovica swungthe shrine-lamp back into its place. A stream of light fell across thestreet. I felt myself grow quite cold; the face of the woman outsidewas that of Medea da Carpi!

What a fool I am, to be sure!

Part II

Dec. 17th. --I fear that my craze about Medea da Carpi has become wellknown, thanks to my silly talk and idiotic songs. That Vice-Prefect'sson--or the assistant at the Archives, or perhaps some of the companyat the Contessa's, is trying to play me a trick! But take care, my goodladies and gentlemen, I shall pay you out in your own coin! Imagine myfeelings when, this morning, I found on my desk a folded letteraddressed to me in a curious handwriting which seemed strangelyfamiliar to me, and which, after a moment, I recognized as that of theletters of Medea da Carpi at the Archives. It gave me a horrible shock. My next idea was that it must be a present from some one who knew myinterest in Medea--a genuine letter of hers on which some idiot hadwritten my address instead of putting it into an envelope. But it wasaddressed to me, written to me, no old letter; merely four lines, whichran as follows:--

"To Spiridion. --

"A person who knows the interest you bear her will be at the Church ofSan Giovanni Decollato this evening at nine. Look out, in the leftaisle, for a lady wearing a black mantle, and holding a rose. "

By this time I understood that I was the object of a conspiracy, thevictim of a hoax. I turned the letter round and round. It was writtenon paper such as was made in the sixteenth century, and in anextraordinarily precise imitation of Medea da Carpi's characters. Whohad written it? I thought over all the possible people. On the whole, it must be the Vice-Prefect's son, perhaps in combination with hislady-love, the Countess. They must have torn a blank page off some oldletter; but that either of them should have had the ingenuity ofinventing such a hoax, or the power of committing such a forgery, astounds me beyond measure. There is more in these people than I shouldhave guessed. How pay them off? By taking no notice of the letter?Dignified, but dull. No, I will go; perhaps some one will be there, andI will mystify them in their turn. Or, if no one is there, how I shallcrow over them for their imperfectly carried out plot! Perhaps this issome folly of the Cavalier Muzio's to bring me into the presence ofsome lady whom he destines to be the flame of my future _amori_. That is likely enough. And it would be too idiotic and professorial torefuse such an invitation; the lady must be worth knowing who can forgesixteenth-century letters like this, for I am sure that languid swellMuzio never could. I will go! By Heaven! I'll pay them back in theirown coin! It is now five--how long these days are!

_Dec. 18th. _--

Am I mad? Or are there really ghosts? That adventure of last night hasshaken me to the very depth of my soul. 

I went at nine, as the mysterious letter had bid me. It was bitterlycold, and the air full of fog and sleet; not a shop open, not a windowunshuttered, not a creature visible; the narrow black streets, precipitous between their, high walls and under their lofty archways, were only the blacker for the dull light of an oil-lamp here and there, with its flickering yellow reflection on the wet flags. San GiovanniDecollato is a little church, or rather oratory, which I have alwayshitherto seen shut up (as so many churches here are shut up except ongreat festivals); and situate behind the ducal palace, on a sharpascent, and forming the bifurcation of two steep paved lanes. I havepassed by the place a hundred times, and scarcely noticed the littlechurch, except for the marble high relief over the door, showing thegrizzly head of the Baptist in the charger, and for the iron cage closeby, in which were formerly exposed the heads of criminals; thedecapitated, or, as they call him here, decollated, John the Baptist, being apparently the patron of axe and block. 

A few strides took me from my lodgings to San Giovanni Decollato. Iconfess I was excited; one is not twenty-four and a Pole for nothing. On getting to the kind of little platform at the bifurcation of the twoprecipitous streets, I found, to my surprise, that the windows of thechurch or oratory were not lighted, and that the door was locked! Sothis was the precious joke that had been played upon me; to send me ona bitter cold, sleety night, to a church which was shut up and hadperhaps been shut up for years! I don't know what I couldn't have donein that moment of rage; I felt inclined to break open the church door, or to go and pull the Vice-Prefect's son out of bed (for I felt surethat the joke was his). I determined upon the latter course; and waswalking towards his door, along the black alley to the left of thechurch, when I was suddenly stopped by the sound as of an organ closeby, an organ, yes, quite plainly, and the voice of choristers and thedrone of a litany. So the church was not shut, after all! I retraced mysteps to the top of the lane. All was dark and in complete silence. Suddenly there came again a faint gust of organ and voices. I listened;it clearly came from the other lane, the one on the right-hand side. Was there, perhaps, another door there? I passed beneath the archway, and descended a little way in the direction whence the sounds seemed tocome. But no door, no light, only the black walls, the black wet flags, with their faint yellow reflections of flickering oil-lamps; moreover, complete silence. I stopped a minute, and then the chant rose again;this time it seemed to me most certainly from the lane I had just left. I went back--nothing. Thus backwards and forwards, the sounds alwaysbeckoning, as it were, one way, only to beckon me back, vainly, to theother. 

At last I lost patience; and I felt a sort of creeping terror, whichonly a violent action could dispel. If the mysterious sounds cameneither from the street to the right, nor from the street to the left, they could come only from the church. Half-maddened, I rushed up thetwo or three steps, and prepared to wrench the door open with atremendous effort. To my amazement, it opened with the greatest ease. Ientered, and the sounds of the litany met me louder than before, as Ipaused a moment between the outer door and the heavy leathern curtain. I raised the latter and crept in. The altar was brilliantly illuminatedwith tapers and garlands of chandeliers; this was evidently someevening service connected with Christmas. The nave and aisles werecomparatively dark, and about half-full. I elbowed my way along theright aisle towards the altar. When my eyes had got accustomed to theunexpected light, I began to look round me, and with a beating heart. The idea that all this was a hoax, that I should meet merely someacquaintance of my friend the Cavaliere's, had somehow departed: Ilooked about. The people were all wrapped up, the men in big cloaks, the women in woolen veils and mantles. The body of the church wascomparatively dark, and I could not make out anything very clearly, butit seemed to me, somehow, as if, under the cloaks and veils, thesepeople were dressed in a rather extraordinary fashion. The man in frontof me, I remarked, showed yellow stockings beneath his cloak; a woman, hard by, a red bodice, laced behind with gold tags. Could these bepeasants from some remote part come for the Christmas festivities, ordid the inhabitants of Urbania don some old-fashioned garb in honor ofChristmas?

As I was wondering, my eye suddenly caught that of a woman standing inthe opposite aisle, close to the altar, and in the full blaze of itslights. She was wrapped in black, but held, in a very conspicuous way, a red rose, an unknown luxury at this time of the year in a place likeUrbania. She evidently saw me, and turning even more fully into thelight, she loosened her heavy black cloak, displaying a dress of deepred, with gleams of silver and gold embroideries; she turned her facetowards me; the full blaze of the chandeliers and tapers fell upon it. It was the face of Medea da Carpi! I dashed across the nave, pushingpeople roughly aside, or rather, it seemed to me, passing throughimpalpable bodies. But the lady turned and walked rapidly down theaisle towards the door. I followed close upon her, but somehow I couldnot get up with her. Once, at the curtain, she turned round again. Shewas within a few paces of me. Yes, it was Medea. Medea herself, nomistake, no delusion, no sham; the oval face, the lips tightened overthe mouth, the eyelids tight over the corner of the eyes, the exquisitealabaster complexion! She raised the curtain and glided out. Ifollowed; the curtain alone separated me from her. I saw the woodendoor swing to behind her. One step ahead of me! I tore open the door;she must be on the steps, within reach of my arm!

I stood outside the church. All was empty, merely the wet pavement andthe yellow reflections in the pools: a sudden cold seized me; I couldnot go on. I tried to re-enter the church; it was shut. I rushed home, my hair standing on end, and trembling in all my limbs, and remainedfor an hour like a maniac. Is it a delusion? Am I too going mad? O God, God! am I going mad?

_Dec. 19th. --_

A brilliant, sunny day; all the black snow-slush has disappeared out ofthe town, off the bushes and trees. The snow-clad mountains sparkleagainst the bright blue sky. A Sunday, and Sunday weather; all thebells are ringing for the approach of Christmas. They are preparing fora kind of fair in the square with the colonnade, putting up boothsfilled with colored cotton and woolen ware, bright shawls andkerchiefs, mirrors, ribbons, brilliant pewter lamps; the whole turn-outof the peddler in "Winter's Tale. " The pork-shops are all garlandedwith green and with paper flowers, the hams and cheeses stuck full oflittle flags and green twigs. I strolled out to see the cattle-fairoutside the gate; a forest of interlacing horns, an ocean of lowing andstamping: hundreds of immense white bullocks, with horns a yard longand red tassels, packed close together on the little piazza d'armiunder the city walls. Bah! Why do I write this trash? What's the use ofit all? While I am forcing myself to write about bells, and Christmasfestivities, and cattle-fairs, one idea goes on like a bell within me:Medea, Medea! Have I really seen her, or am I mad?

Two hours later. --That Church of San Giovanni Decollato--so my landlordinforms me--has not been made use of within the memory of man. Could ithave been all a hallucination or a dream--perhaps a dream dreamed thatnight? I have been out again to look at that church. There it is, atthe bifurcation of the two steep lanes, with its bas-relief of theBaptist's head over the door. The door does look as if it had not beenopened for years. I can see the cobwebs in the windowpanes; it doeslook as if, as Sor Asdrubale says, only rats and spiders congregatedwithin it. And yet--and yet; I have so clear a remembrance, so distincta consciousness of it all. There was a picture of the daughter ofHerodias dancing, upon the altar; I remember her white turban with ascarlet tuft of feathers, and Herod's blue caftan; I remember the shapeof the central chandelier; it swung round slowly, and one of the waxlights had got bent almost in two by the heat and draught. 

Things, all these, which I may have seen elsewhere, stored unawares inmy brain, and which may have come out, somehow, in a dream; I haveheard physiologists allude to such things. I will go again: if thechurch be shut, why then it must have been a dream, a vision, theresult of over-excitement. I must leave at once for Rome and seedoctors, for I am afraid of going mad. If, on the other hand--pshaw!there _is no other hand_ in such a case. Yet if there were--whythen, I should really have seen Medea; I might see her again; speak toher. The mere thought sets my blood in a whirl, not with horror, butwith. .. I know not what to call it. The feeling terrifies me, but it isdelicious. Idiot! There is some little coil of my brain, the twentiethof a hair's-breadth out of order--that's all!

_Dec. 20th. --_

I have been again; I have heard the music; I have been inside thechurch; I have seen Her! I can no longer doubt my senses. Why should I?Those pedants say that the dead are dead, the past is past. For them, yes; but why for me?--why for a man who loves, who is consumed with thelove of a woman?--a woman who, indeed--yes, let me finish the sentence. Why should there not be ghosts to such as can see them? Why should shenot return to the earth, if she knows that it contains a man who thinksof, desires, only her?

A hallucination? Why, I saw her, as I see this paper that I write upon;standing there, in the full blaze of the altar. Why, I heard the rustleof her skirts, I smelt the scent of her hair, I raised the curtainwhich was shaking from her touch. Again I missed her. But this time, asI rushed out into the empty moonlit street, I found upon the churchsteps a rose--the rose which I had seen in her hand the momentbefore--I felt it, smelt it; a rose, a real, living rose, dark red andonly just plucked. I put it into water when I returned, after havingkissed it, who knows how many times? I placed it on the top of thecupboard; I determined not to look at it for twenty-four hours lest itshould be a delusion. But I must see it again; I must. .. . Good Heavens!this is horrible, horrible; if I had found a skeleton it could not havebeen worse! The rose, which last night seemed freshly plucked, full ofcolor and perfume, is brown, dry--a thing kept for centuries betweenthe leaves of a book--it has crumbled into dust between my fingers. Horrible, horrible! But why so, pray? Did I not know that I was in lovewith a woman dead three hundred years? If I wanted fresh roses whichbloomed yesterday, the Countess Fiammetta or any little sempstress inUrbania might have given them me. What if the rose has fallen to dust?If only I could hold Medea in my arms as I held it in my fingers, kissher lips as I kissed its petals, should I not be satisfied if she toowere to fall to dust the next moment, if I were to fall to dust myself?

_Dec. 22nd, Eleven at night. --_

I have seen her once more!--almost spoken to her. I have been promisedher love! Ah, Spiridion! you were right when you felt that you were notmade for any earthly _amori_. At the usual hour I betook myselfthis evening to San Giovanni Decollato. A bright winter night; the highhouses and belfries standing out against a deep blue heaven luminous, shimmering like steel with myriads of stars; the moon has not yetrisen. There was no light in the windows; but, after a little effort, the door opened and I entered the church, the altar, as usual, brilliantly illuminated. It struck me suddenly that all this crowd ofmen and women standing all round, these priests chanting and movingabout the altar, were dead--that they did not exist for any man saveme. I touched, as if by accident, the hand of my neighbor; it was cold, like wet clay. He turned round, but did not seem to see me: his facewas ashy, and his eyes staring, fixed, like those of a blind man or acorpse. I felt as if I must rush out. But at that moment my eye fellupon Her, standing as usual by the altar steps, wrapped in a blackmantle, in the full blaze of the lights. She turned round; the lightfell straight upon her face, the face with the delicate features, theeyelids and lips a little tight, the alabaster skin faintly tinged withpale pink. Our eyes met. 

I pushed my way across the nave towards where she stood by the altarsteps; she turned quickly down the aisle, and I after her. Once ortwice she lingered, and I thought I should overtake her; but again, when, not a second after the door had closed upon her, I stepped outinto the street, she had vanished. On the church step lay somethingwhite. It was not a flower this time, but a letter. I rushed back tothe church to read it; but the church was fast shut, as if it had notbeen opened for years. I could not see by the flickeringshrine-lamps--I rushed home, lit my lamp, pulled the letter from mybreast. I have it before me. The handwriting is hers; the same as inthe Archives, the same as in that first letter:--

"To Spiridion. --

"Let thy courage be equal to thy love, and thy love shall be rewarded. On the night preceding Christmas, take a hatchet and saw; cut boldlyinto the body of the bronze rider who stands in the Corte, on the leftside, near the waist. Saw open the body, and within it thou wilt findthe silver effigy of a winged genius. Take it out, hack it into ahundred pieces, and fling them in all directions, so that the winds maysweep them away. That night she whom thou lovest will come to rewardthy fidelity. "

On the brownish wax is the device--"AMOUR DURE--DURE AMOUR. "

_Dec. 23rd. --_

So it is true! I was reserved for something wonderful in this world. Ihave at last found that after which my soul has been straining. Ambition, love of art, love of Italy, these things which have occupiedmy spirit, and have yet left me continually unsatisfied, these werenone of them my real destiny. I have sought for life, thirsting for itas a man in the desert thirsts for a well; but the life of the sensesof other youths, the life of the intellect of other men, have neverslaked that thirst. Shall life for me mean the love of a dead woman? Wesmile at what we choose to call the superstition of the past, forgetting that all our vaunted science of today may seem just suchanother superstition to the men of the future; but why should thepresent be right and the past wrong? The men who painted the picturesand built the palaces of three hundred years ago were certainly of asdelicate fiber, of as keen reason, as ourselves, who merely printcalico and build locomotives. What makes me think this, is that I havebeen calculating my nativity by help of an old book belonging to SorAsdrubale--and see, my horoscope tallies almost exactly with that ofMedea da Carpi, as given by a chronicler. May this explain? No, no; allis explained by the fact that the first time I read of this woman'scareer, the first time I saw her portrait, I loved her, though I hid mylove to myself in the garb of historical interest. Historical interestindeed!

I have got the hatchet and the saw. I bought the saw of a poor joiner, in a village some miles off; he did not understand at first what Imeant, and I think he thought me mad; perhaps I am. But if madnessmeans the happiness of one's life, what of it? The hatchet I saw lyingin a timber-yard, where they prepare the great trunks of the fir-treeswhich grow high on the Apennines of Sant' Elmo. There was no one in theyard, and I could not resist the temptation; I handled the thing, triedits edge, and stole it. This is the first time in my life that I havebeen a thief; why did I not go into a shop and buy a hatchet? I don'tknow; I seemed unable to resist the sight of the shining blade. What Iam going to do is, I suppose, an act of vandalism; and certainly I haveno right to spoil the property of this city of Urbania. But I wish noharm either to the statue or the city, if I could plaster up thebronze, I would do so willingly. But I must obey Her; I must avengeHer; I must get at that silver image which Robert of Montemurlo hadmade and consecrated in order that his cowardly soul might sleep inpeace, and not encounter that of the being whom he dreaded most in theworld. Aha! Duke Robert, you forced her to die unshriven, and you stuckthe image of your soul into the image of your body, thinking therebythat, while she suffered the tortures of Hell, you would rest in peace, until your well-scoured little soul might fly straight up toParadise;--you were afraid of Her when both of you should be dead, andthought yourself very clever to have prepared for all emergencies! Notso, Serene Highness. You too shall taste what it is to wander afterdeath, and to meet the dead whom one has injured. 

What an interminable day! But I shall see her again tonight. 

Eleven o'clock. --No; the church was fast closed; the spell had ceased. Until tomorrow I shall not see her. But tomorrow! Ah, Medea! did any ofthy lovers love thee as I do?

Twenty-four hours more till the moment of happiness--the moment forwhich I seem to have been waiting all my life. And after that, whatnext? Yes, I see it plainer every minute; after that, nothing more. Allthose who loved Medea da Carpi, who loved and who served her, died:Giovanfrancesco Pico, her first husband, whom she left stabbed in thecastle from which she fled; Stimigliano, who died of poison; the groomwho gave him the poison, cut down by her orders; Oliverotto da Narni, Marcantonio Frangipani, and that poor boy of the Ordelaffi, who hadnever even looked upon her face, and whose only reward was thathandkerchief with which the hangman wiped the sweat off his face, whenhe was one mass of broken limbs and torn flesh: all had to die, and Ishall die also. 

The love of such a woman is enough, and is fatal--"Amour Dure, " as herdevice says. I shall die also. But why not? Would it be possible tolive in order to love another woman? Nay, would it be possible to dragon a life like this one after the happiness of tomorrow? Impossible;the others died, and I must die. I always felt that I should not livelong; a gipsy in Poland told me once that I had in my hand the cut-linewhich signifies a violent death. I might have ended in a duel with somebrother-student, or in a railway accident. No, no; my death will not beof that sort! Death--and is not she also dead? What strange vistas doessuch a thought not open! Then the others--Pico, the Groom, Stimigliano, Oliverotto, Frangipani, Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi--will they all be_there?_ But she shall love me best--me by whom she has been lovedafter she has been three hundred years in the grave!

_Dec. 24th. --_

I have made all my arrangements. Tonight at eleven I slip out; SorAsdrubale and his sisters will be sound asleep. I have questioned them;their fear of rheumatism prevents their attending midnight mass. Luckily there are no churches between this and the Corte; whatevermovement Christmas night may entail will be a good way off. TheVice-Prefect's rooms are on the other side of the palace; the rest ofthe square is taken up with state-rooms, archives, and empty stablesand coach-houses of the palace. Besides, I shall be quick at my work. 

I have tried my saw on a stout bronze vase I bought of Sor Asdrubale;and the bronze of the statue, hollow and worn away by rust (I have evennoticed holes), cannot resist very much, especially after a blow withthe sharp hatchet. I have put my papers in order, for the benefit ofthe Government which has sent me hither. I am sorry to have defraudedthem of their "History of Urbania. " To pass the endless day and calmthe fever of impatience, I have just taken a long walk. This is thecoldest day we have had. The bright sun does not warm in the least, butseems only to increase the impression of cold, to make the snow on themountains glitter, the blue air to sparkle like steel. The few peoplewho are out are muffled to the nose, and carry earthenware braziersbeneath their cloaks; long icicles hang from the fountain with thefigure of Mercury upon it; one can imagine the wolves trooping downthrough the dry scrub and beleaguering this town. Somehow this coldmakes me feel wonderfully calm--it seems to bring back to me myboyhood. 

As I walked up the rough, steep, paved alleys, slippery with frost, andwith their vista of snow mountains against the sky, and passed by thechurch steps strewn with box and laurel, with the faint smell ofincense coming out, there returned to me--I know not why--therecollection, almost the sensation, of those Christmas Eves long ago atPosen and Breslau, when I walked as a child along the wide streets, peeping into the windows where they were beginning to light the tapersof the Christmas-trees, and wondering whether I too, on returning home, should be let into a wonderful room all blazing with lights and gildednuts and glass beads. They are hanging the last strings of those blueand red metallic beads, fastening on the last gilded and silveredwalnuts on the trees out there at home in the North; they are lightingthe blue and red tapers; the wax is beginning to run on to thebeautiful spruce green branches; the children are waiting with beatinghearts behind the door, to be told that the Christ-Child has been. AndI, for what am I waiting? I don't know; all seems a dream; everythingvague and unsubstantial about me, as if time had ceased, nothing couldhappen, my own desires and hopes were all dead, myself absorbed into Iknow not what passive dreamland. Do I long for tonight? Do I dread it?Will tonight ever come? Do I feel anything, does anything exist allround me?

I sit and seem to see that street at Posen, the wide street with thewindows illuminated by the Christmas lights, the green fir-branchesgrazing the window-panes. 

_Christmas Eve, Midnight. --_

I have done it. I slipped out noiselessly. Sor Asdrubale and hissisters were fast asleep. I feared I had waked them, for my hatchetfell as I was passing through the principal room where my landlordkeeps his curiosities for sale; it struck against some old armor whichhe has been piecing. I heard him exclaim, half in his sleep; and blewout my light and hid in the stairs. He came out in his dressing-gown, but finding no one, went back to bed again. "Some cat, no doubt!" hesaid. I closed the house door softly behind me. The sky had becomestormy since the afternoon, luminous with the full moon, but strewnwith grey and buff-colored vapors; every now and then the moondisappeared entirely. Not a creature abroad; the tall gaunt housesstaring in the moonlight. 

I know not why, I took a roundabout way to the Corte, past one or twochurch doors, whence issued the faint flicker of midnight mass. For amoment I felt a temptation to enter one of then; but something seemedto restrain me. I caught snatches of the Christmas hymn. I felt myselfbeginning to be unnerved, and hastened towards the Corte. As I passedunder the portico at San Francesco I heard steps behind me; it seemedto me that I was followed. I stopped to let the other pass. As heapproached his pace flagged; he passed close by me and murmured, "Donot go: I am Giovanfrancesco Pico. " I turned round; he was gone. Acoldness numbed me; but I hastened on. 

Behind the cathedral apse, in a narrow lane, I saw a man leaningagainst a wall. The moonlight was full upon him; it seemed to me thathis face, with a thin pointed beard, was streaming with blood. Iquickened my pace; but as I grazed by him he whispered, "Do not obeyher; return home: I am Marcantonio Frangipani. " My teeth chattered, butI hurried along the narrow lane, with the moonlight blue upon the whitewalls. At last I saw the Corte before me: the square was flooded withmoonlight, the windows of the palace seemed brightly illuminated, andthe statue of Duke Robert, shimmering green, seemed advancing towardsme on its horse. I came into the shadow. I had to pass beneath anarchway. There started a figure as if out of the wall, and barred mypassage with his outstretched cloaked arm. I tried to pass. He seizedme by the arm, and his grasp was like a weight of ice. "You shall notpass!" he cried, and, as the moon came out once more, I saw his face, ghastly white and bound with an embroidered kerchief; he seemed almosta child. "You shall not pass!" he cried; "you shall not have her! Sheis mine, and mine alone! I am Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi. " I felt hisice-cold clutch, but with my other arm I laid about me wildly with thehatchet which I carried beneath my cloak. The hatchet struck the walland rang upon the stone. He had vanished. 

I hurried on. I did it. I cut open the bronze; I sawed it into a widergash. I tore out the silver image, and hacked it into innumerablepieces. As I scattered the last fragments about, the moon was suddenlyveiled; a great wind arose, howling down the square; it seemed to methat the earth shook. I threw down the hatchet and the saw, and fledhome. I felt pursued, as if by the tramp of hundreds of invisiblehorsemen. 

Now I am calm. It is midnight; another moment and she will be here!Patience, my heart! I hear it beating loud. I trust that no one willaccuse poor Sor Asdrubale. I will write a letter to the authorities todeclare his innocence should anything happen. .. . One! the clock in thepalace tower has just struck. .. . "I hereby certify that, shouldanything happen this night to me, Spiridion Trepka, no one but myselfis to be held. .. " A step on the staircase! It is she! it is she! Atlast, Medea, Medea! Ah! AMOUR DURE--DURE AMOUR!

 * * * * *

_NOTE. --Here ends the diary of the late Spiridion Trepka The chiefnewspapers of the province of Umbria informed the public that, onChristmas morning of the year 1885, the bronze equestrian statue ofRobert II. Had been found grievously mutilated; and that ProfessorSpiridion Trepka of Posen, in the German Empire, had been discovereddead of a stab in the region of the heart, given by an unknownhand. _

Dionea

From the Letters of Doctor Alessandro De Rosis to the Lady EvelynSavelli, Princess of Sabina. 

_Montemiro Ligure, June 29, 1873. _

I take immediate advantage of the generous offer of your Excellency(allow an old Republican who has held you on his knees to address youby that title sometimes, 'tis so appropriate) to help our poor people. I never expected to come a-begging so soon. For the olive crop has beenunusually plenteous. We semi-Genoese don't pick the olives unripe, likeour Tuscan neighbors, but let them grow big and black, when the youngfellows go into the trees with long reeds and shake them down on thegrass for the women to collect--a pretty sight which your Excellencymust see some day: the grey trees with the brown, barefoot ladscraning, balanced in the branches, and the turquoise sea as backgroundjust beneath. .. . That sea of ours--it is all along of it that I wish toask for money. Looking up from my desk, I see the sea through thewindow, deep below and beyond the olive woods, bluish-green in thesunshine and veined with violet under the cloud-bars, like one of yourRavenna mosaics spread out as pavement for the world: a wicked sea, wicked in its loveliness, wickeder than your grey northern ones, andfrom which must have arisen in times gone by (when Phoenicians orGreeks built the temples at Lerici and Porto Venere) a baleful goddessof beauty, a Venus Verticordia, but in the bad sense of the word, overwhelming men's lives in sudden darkness like that squall of lastweek. 

To come to the point. I want you, dear Lady Evelyn, to promise me somemoney, a great deal of money, as much as would buy you a little mannishcloth frock--for the complete bringing-up, until years of discretion, of a young stranger whom the sea has laid upon our shore. Our people, kind as they are, are very poor, and overburdened with children;besides, they have got a certain repugnance for this poor little waif, cast up by that dreadful storm, and who is doubtless a heathen, for shehad no little crosses or scapulars on, like proper Christian children. So, being unable to get any of our women to adopt the child, and havingan old bachelor's terror of my housekeeper, I have bethought me ofcertain nuns, holy women, who teach little girls to say their prayersand make lace close by here; and of your dear Excellency to pay for thewhole business. 

Poor little brown mite! She was picked up after the storm (such aset-out of ship-models and votive candles as that storm must havebrought the Madonna at Porto Venere!) on a strip of sand between therocks of our castle: the thing was really miraculous, for this coast islike a shark's jaw, and the bits of sand are tiny and far between. Shewas lashed to a plank, swaddled up close in outlandish garments; andwhen they brought her to me they thought she must certainly be dead: alittle girl of four or five, decidedly pretty, and as brown as a berry, who, when she came to, shook her head to show she understood no kind ofItalian, and jabbered some half-intelligible Eastern jabber, a fewGreek words embedded in I know not what; the Superior of the College DePropagandā Fide would be puzzled to know. The child appears to be theonly survivor from a ship which must have gone down in the greatsquall, and whose timbers have been strewing the bay for some dayspast; no one at Spezia or in any of our ports knows anything about her, but she was seen, apparently making for Porto Venere, by some of oursardine-fishers: a big, lumbering craft, with eyes painted on each sideof the prow, which, as you know, is a peculiarity of Greek boats. Shewas sighted for the last time off the island of Palmaria, entering, with all sails spread, right into the thick of the storm-darkness. Nobodies, strangely enough, have been washed ashore. 

_July 10. _

I have received the money, dear Donna Evelina. There was tremendousexcitement down at San Massimo when the carrier came in with aregistered letter, and I was sent for, in presence of all the villageauthorities, to sign my name on the postal register. 

The child has already been settled some days with the nuns; such dearlittle nuns (nuns always go straight to the heart of an oldpriest-hater and conspirator against the Pope, you know), dressed inbrown robes and close, white caps, with an immense round straw-hatflapping behind their heads like a nimbus: they are called Sisters ofthe Stigmata, and have a convent and school at San Massimo, a littleway inland, with an untidy garden full of lavender and cherry-trees. Your _protégée_ has already half set the convent, the village, theEpiscopal See, the Order of St. Francis, by the ears. First, becausenobody could make out whether or not she had been christened. Thequestion was a grave one, for it appears (as your uncle-in-law, theCardinal, will tell you) that it is almost equally undesirable to bechristened twice over as not to be christened at all. The first dangerwas finally decided upon as the less terrible; but the child, they say, had evidently been baptized before, and knew that the operation oughtnot to be repeated, for she kicked and plunged and yelled like twentylittle devils, and positively would not let the holy water touch her. The Mother Superior, who always took for granted that the baptism hadtaken place before, says that the child was quite right, and thatHeaven was trying to prevent a sacrilege; but the priest and thebarber's wife, who had to hold her, think the occurrence fearful, andsuspect the little girl of being a Protestant. Then the question of thename. Pinned to her clothes--striped Eastern things, and that kind ofcrinkled silk stuff they weave in Crete and Cyprus--was a piece ofparchment, a scapular we thought at first, but which was found tocontain only the name _Dionea_--Dionea, as they pronounce it here. The question was, Could such a name be fitly borne by a young lady atthe Convent of the Stigmata? Half the population here have names asunchristian quite--Norma, Odoacer, Archimedes--my housemaid is calledThemis--but Dionea seemed to scandalize every one, perhaps becausethese good folk had a mysterious instinct that the name is derived fromDione, one of the loves of Father Zeus, and mother of no less a ladythan the goddess Venus. The child was very near being called Maria, although there are already twenty-three other Marias, Mariettas, Mariuccias, and so forth at the convent. But the sister-bookkeeper, whoapparently detests monotony, bethought her to look out Dionea first inthe Calendar, which proved useless; and then in a big vellum-boundbook, printed at Venice in 1625, called "Flos Sanctorum, or Lives ofthe Saints, by Father Ribadeneira, S. J. , with the addition of suchSaints as have no assigned place in the Almanack, otherwise called theMovable or Extravagant Saints. " The zeal of Sister Anna Maddalena hasbeen rewarded, for there, among the Extravagant Saints, sure enough, with a border of palm-branches and hour-glasses, stands the name ofSaint Dionea, Virgin and Martyr, a lady of Antioch, put to death by theEmperor Decius. I know your Excellency's taste for historicalinformation, so I forward this item. But I fear, dear Lady Evelyn, Ifear that the heavenly patroness of your little sea-waif was a muchmore extravagant saint than that. 

_December 21, 1879. _

Many thanks, dear Donna Evelina, for the money for Dionea's schooling. Indeed, it was not wanted yet: the accomplishments of young ladies aretaught at a very moderate rate at Montemirto: and as to clothes, whichyou mention, a pair of wooden clogs, with pretty red tips, costssixty-five centimes, and ought to last three years, if the owner iscareful to carry them on her head in a neat parcel when out walking, and to put them on again only on entering the village. The MotherSuperior is greatly overcome by your Excellency's munificence towardsthe convent, and much perturbed at being unable to send you a specimenof your _protégée's_ skill, exemplified in an embroideredpocket-handkerchief or a pair of mittens; but the fact is that poorDionea _has_ no skill. "We will pray to the Madonna and St. Francis to make her more worthy, " remarked the Superior. Perhaps, however, your Excellency, who is, I fear but a Pagan woman (for all theSavelli Popes and St. Andrew Savelli's miracles), and insufficientlyappreciative of embroidered pocket-handkerchiefs, will be quite assatisfied to hear that Dionea, instead of skill, has got the prettiestface of any little girl in Montemirto. She is tall, for her age (she iseleven) quite wonderfully well proportioned and extremely strong: ofall the convent-full, she is the only one for whom I have never beencalled in. The features are very regular, the hair black, and despiteall the good Sisters' efforts to keep it smooth like a Chinaman's, beautifully curly. I am glad she should be pretty, for she will moreeasily find a husband; and also because it seems fitting that your_protégée_ should be beautiful. Unfortunately her character is notso satisfactory: she hates learning, sewing, washing up the dishes, allequally. I am sorry to say she shows no natural piety. Her companionsdetest her, and the nuns, although they admit that she is not exactlynaughty, seem to feel her as a dreadful thorn in the flesh. She spendshours and hours on the terrace overlooking the sea (her great desire, she confided to me, is to get to the sea--to get _back to thesea_, as she expressed it), and lying in the garden, under the bigmyrtle-bushes, and, in spring and summer, under the rose-hedge. Thenuns say that rose-hedge and that myrtle-bush are growing a great dealtoo big, one would think from Dionea's lying under them; the fact, Isuppose, has drawn attention to them. "That child makes all the uselessweeds grow, " remarked Sister Reparata. Another of Dionea's amusementsis playing with pigeons. The number of pigeons she collects about heris quite amazing; you would never have thought that San Massimo or theneighboring hills contained as many. They flutter down like snowflakes, and strut and swell themselves out, and furl and unfurl their tails, and peck with little sharp movements of their silly, sensual heads anda little throb and gurgle in their throats, while Dionea lies stretchedout full length in the sun, putting out her lips, which they come tokiss, and uttering strange, cooing sounds; or hopping about, flappingher arms slowly like wings, and raising her little head with much thesame odd gesture as they;--'tis a lovely sight, a thing fit for one ofyour painters, Burne Jones or Tadema, with the myrtle-bushes all round, the bright, white-washed convent walls behind, the white marble chapelsteps (all steps are marble in this Carrara country) and the enamelblue sea through the ilex-branches beyond. But the good Sistersabominate these pigeons, who, it appears, are messy little creatures, and they complain that, were it not that the Reverend Director likes apigeon in his pot on a holiday, they could not stand the bother ofperpetually sweeping the chapel steps and the kitchen threshold allalong of those dirty birds. .. . 

_August 6, 1882. _

Do not tempt me, dearest Excellency, with your invitations to Rome. Ishould not be happy there, and do but little honor to your friendship. My many years of exile, of wanderings in northern countries, have mademe a little bit into a northern man: I cannot quite get on with my ownfellow-countrymen, except with the good peasants and fishermen allround. Besides--forgive the vanity of an old man, who has learned tomake triple acrostic sonnets to cheat the days and months atTheresienstadt and Spielberg--I have suffered too much for Italy toendure patiently the sight of little parliamentary cabals and municipalwranglings, although they also are necessary in this day asconspiracies and battles were in mine. I am not fit for your roomful ofministers and learned men and pretty women: the former would think mean ignoramus, and the latter--what would afflict me much more--apedant. .. . Rather, if your Excellency really wants to show yourself andyour children to your father's old _protégé_ of Mazzinian times, find a few days to come here next spring. You shall have some very barerooms with brick floors and white curtains opening out on my terrace;and a dinner of all manner of fish and milk (the white garlic flowersshall be mown away from under the olives lest my cow should eat it) andeggs cooked in herbs plucked in the hedges. Your boys can go and seethe big ironclads at Spezia; and you shall come with me up our lanesfringed with delicate ferns and overhung by big olives, and into thefields where the cherry-trees shed their blossoms on to the buddingvines, the fig-trees stretching out their little green gloves, wherethe goats nibble perched on their hind legs, and the cows low in thehuts of reeds; and there rise from the ravines, with the gurgle of thebrooks, from the cliffs with the boom of the surf, the voices of unseenboys and girls, singing about love and flowers and death, just as inthe days of Theocritus, whom your learned Excellency does well to read. Has your Excellency ever read Longus, a Greek pastoral novelist? He isa trifle free, a trifle nude for us readers of Zola; but the old Frenchof Amyot has a wonderful charm, and he gives one an idea, as no oneelse does, how folk lived in such valleys, by such sea-boards, as thesein the days when daisy-chains and garlands of roses were still hung onthe olive-trees for the nymphs of the grove; when across the bay, atthe end of the narrow neck of blue sea, there clung to the marble rocksnot a church of Saint Laurence, with the sculptured martyr on hisgridiron, but the temple of Venus, protecting her harbor. .. . Yes, dearLady Evelyn, you have guessed aright. Your old friend has returned tohis sins, and is scribbling once more. But no longer at verses orpolitical pamphlets. I am enthralled by a tragic history, the historyof the fall of the Pagan Gods. .. . Have you ever read of theirwanderings and disguises, in my friend Heine's little book?

And if you come to Montemirto, you shall see also your _protégée_, of whom you ask for news. It has just missed being disastrous. PoorDionea! I fear that early voyage tied to the spar did no good to herwits, poor little waif! There has been a fearful row; and it hasrequired all my influence, and all the awfulness of your Excellency'sname, and the Papacy, and the Holy Roman Empire, to prevent herexpulsion by the Sisters of the Stigmata. It appears that this madcreature very nearly committed a sacrilege: she was discovered handlingin a suspicious manner the Madonna's gala frock and her best veil of_pizzo di Cantł_, a gift of the late Marchioness ViolanteVigalcila of Fornovo. One of the orphans, Zaira Barsanti, whom theycall the Rossaccia, even pretends to have surprised Dionea as she wasabout to adorn her wicked little person with these sacred garments;and, on another occasion, when Dionea had been sent to pass some oiland sawdust over the chapel floor (it was the eve of Easter of theRoses), to have discovered her seated on the edge of the altar, in thevery place of the Most Holy Sacrament. I was sent for in hot haste, andhad to assist at an ecclesiastical council in the convent parlor, whereDionea appeared, rather out of place, an amazing little beauty, dark, lithe, with an odd, ferocious gleam in her eyes, and a still oddersmile, tortuous, serpentine, like that of Leonardo da Vinci's women, among the plaster images of St. Francis, and the glazed and framedsamplers before the little statue of the Virgin, which wears in summera kind of mosquito-curtain to guard it from the flies, who, as youknow, are creatures of Satan. 

Speaking of Satan, does your Excellency know that on the inside of ourlittle convent door, just above the little perforated plate of metal(like the rose of a watering-pot) through which the Sister-portresspeeps and talks, is pasted a printed form, an arrangement of holy namesand texts in triangles, and the stigmatized hands of St. Francis, and avariety of other devices, for the purpose, as is explained in a specialnotice, of baffling the Evil One, and preventing his entrance into thatbuilding? Had you seen Dionea, and the stolid, contemptuous way inwhich she took, without attempting to refute, the various shockingallegations against her, your Excellency would have reflected, as Idid, that the door in question must have been accidentally absent fromthe premises, perhaps at the joiner's for repair, the day that your_protégée_ first penetrated into the convent. The ecclesiasticaltribunal, consisting of the Mother Superior, three Sisters, theCapuchin Director, and your humble servant (who vainly attempted to beDevil's advocate), sentenced Dionea, among other things, to make thesign of the cross twenty-six times on the bare floor with her tongue. Poor little child! One might almost expect that, as happened when DameVenus scratched her hand on the thorn-bush, red roses should sprout upbetween the fissures of the dirty old bricks. 

_October 14, 1883_. 

You ask whether, now that the Sisters let Dionea go and do half a day'sservice now and then in the village, and that Dionea is a grown-upcreature, she does not set the place by the ears with her beauty. Thepeople here are quite aware of its existence. She is already dubbed_La bella Dionea_; but that does not bring her any nearer gettinga husband, although your Excellency's generous offer of awedding-portion is well known throughout the district of San Massimoand Montemirto. None of our boys, peasants or fishermen, seem to hangon her steps; and if they turn round to stare and whisper as she goesby straight and dainty in her wooden clogs, with the pitcher of wateror the basket of linen on her beautiful crisp dark head, it is, Iremark, with an expression rather of fear than of love. The women, ontheir side, make horns with their fingers as she passes, and as theysit by her side in the convent chapel; but that seems natural. Myhousekeeper tells me that down in the village she is regarded aspossessing the evil eye and bringing love misery. "You mean, " I said, "that a glance from her is too much for our lads' peace of mind. "Veneranda shook her head, and explained, with the deference andcontempt with which she always mentions any of her country-folk'ssuperstitions to me, that the matter is different: it's not with herthey are in love (they would be afraid of her eye), but where-ever shegoes the young people must needs fall in love with each other, andusually where it is far from desirable. "You know Sora Luisa, theblacksmith's widow? Well, Dionea did a _half-service_ for her lastmonth, to prepare for the wedding of Luisa's daughter. Well, now, thegirl must say, forsooth! that she won't have Pieriho of Lerici anylonger, but will have that raggamuffin Wooden Pipe from Solaro, or gointo a convent. And the girl changed her mind the very day that Dioneahad come into the house. Then there is the wife of Pippo, thecoffee-house keeper; they say she is carrying on with one of thecoastguards, and Dionea helped her to do her washing six weeks ago. Theson of Sor Temistocle has just cut off a finger to avoid theconscription, because he is mad about his cousin and afraid of beingtaken for a soldier; and it is a fact that some of the shirts whichwere made for him at the Stigmata had been sewn by Dionea;" . .. Andthus a perfect string of love misfortunes, enough to make a little"Decameron, " I assure you, and all laid to Dionea's account. Certain itis that the people of San Massimo are terribly afraid of Dionea. .. . 

_July 17, 1884. _

Dionea's strange influence seems to be extending in a terrible way. Iam almost beginning to think that our folk are correct in their fear ofthe young witch. I used to think, as physician to a convent, thatnothing was more erroneous than all the romancings of Diderot andSchubert (your Excellency sang me his "Young Nun" once: do yourecollect, just before your marriage?), and that no more humdrumcreature existed than one of our little nuns, with their pink babyfaces under their tight white caps. It appeared the romancing was morecorrect than the prose. Unknown things have sprung up in these goodSisters' hearts, as unknown flowers have sprung up among themyrtle-bushes and the rose-hedge which Dionea lies under. Did I evermention to you a certain little Sister Giuliana, who professed only twoyears ago?--a funny rose and white little creature presiding over theinfirmary, as prosaic a little saint as ever kissed a crucifix orscoured a saucepan. Well, Sister Giuliana has disappeared, and the sameday has disappeared also a sailor-boy from the port. 

_August 20, 1884_. 

The case of Sister Giuliana seems to have been but the beginning of anextraordinary love epidemic at the Convent of the Stigmata: the elderschoolgirls have to be kept under lock and key lest they should talkover the wall in the moonlight, or steal out to the little hunchbackwho writes love-letters at a penny a-piece, beautiful flourishes andall, under the portico by the Fishmarket. I wonder does that wickedlittle Dionea, whom no one pays court to, smile (her lips like aCupid's bow or a tiny snake's curves) as she calls the pigeons downaround her, or lies fondling the cats under the myrtle-bush, when shesees the pupils going about with swollen, red eyes; the poor littlenuns taking fresh penances on the cold chapel flags; and hears thelong-drawn guttural vowels, _amore_ and _morte_ and _mio bene_, which rise up of an evening, with the boom of the surf and thescent of the lemon-flowers, as the young men wander up and down, arm-in-arm, twanging their guitars along the moonlit lanes underthe olives?

_October 20, 1885. _

A terrible, terrible thing has happened! I write to your Excellencywith hands all a-tremble; and yet I _must_ write, I must speak, orelse I shall cry out. Did I ever mention to you Father Domenico ofCasoria, the confessor of our Convent of the Stigmata? A young man, tall, emaciated with fasts and vigils, but handsome like the monkplaying the virginal in Giorgione's "Concert, " and under his brownserge still the most stalwart fellow of the country all round? One hasheard of men struggling with the tempter. Well, well, Father Domenicohad struggled as hard as any of the Anchorites recorded by St. Jerome, and he had conquered. I never knew anything comparable to the angelicserenity of gentleness of this victorious soul. I don't like monks, butI loved Father Domenico. I might have been his father, easily, yet Ialways felt a certain shyness and awe of him; and yet men haveaccounted me a clean-lived man in my generation; but I felt, whenever Iapproached him, a poor worldly creature, debased by the knowledge of somany mean and ugly things. Of late Father Domenico had seemed to meless calm than usual: his eyes had grown strangely bright, and redspots had formed on his salient cheekbones. One day last week, takinghis hand, I felt his pulse flutter, and all his strength as it were, liquefy under my touch. "You are ill, " I said. "You have fever, FatherDomenico. You have been overdoing yourself--some new privation, somenew penance. Take care and do not tempt Heaven; remember the flesh isweak. " Father Domenico withdrew his hand quickly. "Do not say that, " hecried; "the flesh is strong!" and turned away his face. His eyes wereglistening and he shook all over. "Some quinine, " I ordered. But I feltit was no case for quinine. Prayers might be more useful, and could Ihave given them he should not have wanted. Last night I was suddenlysent for to Father Domenico's monastery above Montemirto: they told mehe was ill. I ran up through the dim twilight of moonbeams and oliveswith a sinking heart. Something told me my monk was dead. He was lyingin a little low whitewashed room; they had carried him there from hisown cell in hopes he might still be alive. The windows were wide open;they framed some olive-branches, glistening in the moonlight, and farbelow, a strip of moonlit sea. When I told them that he was reallydead, they brought some tapers and lit them at his head and feet, andplaced a crucifix between his hands. "The Lord has been pleased to callour poor brother to Him, " said the Superior. "A case of apoplexy, mydear Doctor--a case of apoplexy. You will make out the certificate forthe authorities. " I made out the certificate. It was weak of me. But, after all, why make a scandal? He certainly had no wish to injure thepoor monks. 

Next day I found the little nuns all in tears. They were gatheringflowers to send as a last gift to their confessor. In the conventgarden I found Dionea, standing by the side of a big basket of roses, one of the white pigeons perched on her shoulder. 

"So, " she said, "he has killed himself with charcoal, poor PadreDomenico!"

Something in her tone, her eyes, shocked me. 

"God has called to Himself one of His most faithful servants, " I saidgravely. 

Standing opposite this girl, magnificent, radiant in her beauty, beforethe rose-hedge, with the white pigeons furling and unfurling, struttingand pecking all round, I seemed to see suddenly the whitewashed room oflast night, the big crucifix, that poor thin face under the yellowwaxlight. I felt glad for Father Domenico; his battle was over. 

"Take this to Father Domenico from me, " said Dionea, breaking off atwig of myrtle starred over with white blossom; and raising her headwith that smile like the twist of a young snake, she sang out in a highguttural voice a strange chant, consisting of the word _Amor--amor--amor_. I took the branch of myrtle and threw it in her face. 

_January 3, 1886_

It will be difficult to find a place for Dionea, and in thisneighborhood well-nigh impossible. The people associate her somehowwith the death of Father Domenico, which has confirmed her reputationof having the evil eye. She left the convent (being now seventeen) sometwo months back, and is at present gaining her bread working with themasons at our notary's new house at Lerici: the work is hard, but ourwomen often do it, and it is magnificent to see Dionea, in her shortwhite skirt and tight white bodice, mixing the smoking lime with herbeautiful strong arms; or, an empty sack drawn over her head andshoulders, walking majestically up the cliff, up the scaffoldings withher load of bricks. .. . I am, however, very anxious to get Dionea out ofthe neighborhood, because I cannot help dreading the annoyances towhich her reputation for the evil eye exposes her, and even someexplosion of rage if ever she should lose the indifferent contempt withwhich she treats them. I hear that one of the rich men of our part ofthe world, a certain Sor Agostino of Sarzana, who owns a whole flank ofmarble mountain, is looking out for a maid for his daughter, who isabout to be married; kind people and patriarchal in their riches, theold man still sitting down to table with all his servants; and hisnephew, who is going to be his son-in-law, a splendid young fellow, whohas worked like Jacob, in the quarry and at the saw-mill, for love ofhis pretty cousin. That whole house is so good, simple, and peaceful, that I hope it may tame down even Dionea. If I do not succeed ingetting Dionea this place (and all your Excellency's illustriousnessand all my poor eloquence will be needed to counteract the sinisterreports attaching to our poor little waif), it will be best to acceptyour suggestion of taking the girl into your household at Rome, sinceyou are curious to see what you call our baleful beauty. I am amused, and a little indignant at what you say about your footmen beinghandsome: Don Juan himself, my dear Lady Evelyn, would be cowed byDionea. .. . 

_May 29, 1886. _

Here is Dionea back upon our hands once more! but I cannot send her toyour Excellency. Is it from living among these peasants andfishing-folk, or is it because, as people pretend, a skeptic is alwayssuperstitious? I could not muster courage to send you Dionea, althoughyour boys are still in sailor-clothes and your uncle, the Cardinal, iseighty-four; and as to the Prince, why, he bears the most potent amuletagainst Dionea's terrible powers in your own dear capricious person. Seriously, there is something eerie in this coincidence. Poor Dionea!I feel sorry for her, exposed to the passion of a once patriarchallyrespectable old man. I feel even more abashed at the incredibleaudacity, I should almost say sacrilegious madness, of the vile oldcreature. But still the coincidence is strange and uncomfortable. Lastweek the lightning struck a huge olive in the orchard of Sor Agostino'shouse above Sarzana. Under the olive was Sor Agostino himself, who waskilled on the spot; and opposite, not twenty paces off, drawing waterfrom the well, unhurt and calm, was Dionea. It was the end of a sultryafternoon: I was on a terrace in one of those villages of ours, jammed, like some hardy bush, in the gash of a hill-side. I saw the storm rushdown the valley, a sudden blackness, and then, like a curse, a flash, atremendous crash, re-echoed by a dozen hills. "I told him, " Dionea saidvery quietly, when she came to stay with me the next day (for SorAgostino's family would not have her for another half-minute), "that ifhe did not leave me alone Heaven would send him an accident. "

_July 15, 1886_. 

My book? Oh, dear Donna Evelina, do not make me blush by talking of mybook! Do not make an old man, respectable, a Government functionary(communal physician of the district of San Massimo and MontemirtoLigure), confess that he is but a lazy unprofitable dreamer, collectingmaterials as a child picks hips out of a hedge, only to throw themaway, liking them merely for the little occupation of scratching hishands and standing on tiptoe, for their pretty redness. .. . You rememberwhat Balzac says about projecting any piece of work?--"_C'est fumierdes cigarettes enchantées_. .. . " Well, well! The data obtainableabout the ancient gods in their days of adversity are few and farbetween: a quotation here and there from the Fathers; two or threelegends; Venus reappearing; the persecutions of Apollo in Styria;Proserpina going, in Chaucer, to reign over the fairies; a few obscurereligious persecutions in the Middle Ages on the score of Paganism;some strange rites practiced till lately in the depths of a Bretonforest near Lannion. .. . As to Tannhäuser, he was a real knight, and asorry one, and a real Minnesinger not of the best. Your Excellency willfind some of his poems in Von der Hagen's four immense volumes, but Irecommend you to take your notions of Ritter Tannhäuser's poetry ratherfrom Wagner. Certain it is that the Pagan divinities lasted much longerthan we suspect, sometimes in their own nakedness, sometimes in thestolen garb of the Madonna or the saints. Who knows whether they do notexist to this day? And, indeed, is it possible they should not? For theawfulness of the deep woods, with their filtered green light, the creakof the swaying, solitary reeds, exists, and is Pan; and the blue, starry May night exists, the sough of the waves, the warm wind carryingthe sweetness of the lemon-blossoms, the bitterness of the myrtle onour rocks, the distant chant of the boys cleaning out their nets, ofthe girls sickling the grass under the olives, _Amor--amor--amor, _and all this is the great goddess Venus. And opposite to me, as Iwrite, between the branches of the ilexes, across the blue sea, streaked like a Ravenna mosaic with purple and green, shimmer the whitehouses and walls, the steeple and towers, an enchanted Fata Morganacity, of dim Porto Venere; . .. And I mumble to myself the verse ofCatullus, but addressing a greater and more terrible goddess than hedid:--

"Procul a mea sit furor omnis, Hera, domo; alios; age incitatos, aliosage rabidos. "

_March 25, 1887. _

Yes; I will do everything in my power for your friends. Are youwell-bred folk as well bred as we, Republican _bourgeois, _ withthe coarse hands (though you once told me mine were psychic hands whenthe mania of palmistry had not yet been succeeded by that of theReconciliation between Church and State), I wonder, that you shouldapologize, you whose father fed me and housed me and clothed me in myexile, for giving me the horrid trouble of hunting for lodgings? It islike you, dear Donna Evelina, to have sent me photographs of my futurefriend Waldemar's statue. .. . I have no love for modern sculpture, forall the hours I have spent in Gibson's and Dupré's studio: 'tis a deadart we should do better to bury. But your Waldemar has something of theold spirit: he seems to feel the divineness of the mere body, thespirituality of a limpid stream of mere physical life. But why amongthese statues only men and boys, athletes and fauns? Why only the bustof that thin, delicate-lipped little Madonna wife of his? Why nowide-shouldered Amazon or broad-flanked Aphrodite?

_April 10, 1887. _

You ask me how poor Dionea is getting on. Not as your Excellency and Iought to have expected when we placed her with the good Sisters of theStigmata: although I wager that, fantastic and capricious as you are, you would be better pleased (hiding it carefully from that grave sideof you which bestows devout little books and carbolic acid upon theindigent) that your _protégée_ should be a witch than aserving-maid, a maker of philters rather than a knitter of stockingsand sewer of shirts. 

A maker of philters. Roughly speaking, that is Dionea's profession. Shelives upon the money which I dole out to her (with many uselessobjurgations) on behalf of your Excellency, and her ostensibleemployment is mending nets, collecting olives, carrying bricks, andother miscellaneous jobs; but her real status is that of villagesorceress. You think our peasants are skeptical? Perhaps they do notbelieve in thought-reading, mesmerism, and ghosts, like you, dear LadyEvelyn. But they believe very firmly in the evil eye, in magic, and inlove-potions. Every one has his little story of this or that whichhappened to his brother or cousin or neighbor. My stable-boy and malefactotum's brother-in-law, living some years ago in Corsica, was seizedwith a longing for a dance with his beloved at one of those balls whichour peasants give in the winter, when the snow makes leisure in themountains. A wizard anointed him for money, and straightway he turnedinto a black cat, and in three bounds was over the seas, at the door ofhis uncle's cottage, and among the dancers. He caught his beloved bythe skirt to draw her attention; but she replied with a kick which senthim squealing back to Corsica. When he returned in summer he refused tomarry the lady, and carried his left arm in a sling. "You broke it whenI came to the Veglia!" he said, and all seemed explained. Another lad, returning from working in the vineyards near Marseilles, was walking upto his native village, high in our hills, one moonlight night. He heardsounds of fiddle and fife from a roadside barn, and saw yellow lightfrom its chinks; and then entering, he found many women dancing, oldand young, and among them his affianced. He tried to snatch her roundthe waist for a waltz (they play _Mme. Angot_ at our rusticballs), but the girl was unclutchable, and whispered, "Go; for theseare witches, who will kill thee; and I am a witch also. Alas! I shallgo to hell when I die. "

I could tell your Excellency dozens of such stories. But love-philtersare among the commonest things to sell and buy. Do you remember the sadlittle story of Cervantes' Licentiate, who, instead of a love-potion, drank a philter which made him think he was made of glass, fit emblemof a poor mad poet? . .. It is love-philters that Dionea prepares. No;do not misunderstand; they do not give love of her, still less herlove. 

Your seller of love-charms is as cold as ice, as pure as snow. Thepriest has crusaded against her, and stones have flown at her as shewent by from dissatisfied lovers; and the very children, paddling inthe sea and making mud-pies in the sand, have put out forefinger andlittle finger and screamed, "Witch, witch! ugly witch!" as she passedwith basket or brick load; but Dionea has only smiled, that snake-like, amused smile, but more ominous than of yore. The other day I determinedto seek her and argue with her on the subject of her evil trade. Dioneahas a certain regard for me; not, I fancy, a result of gratitude, butrather the recognition of a certain admiration and awe which sheinspires in your Excellency's foolish old servant. She has taken up herabode in a deserted hut, built of dried reeds and thatch, such as theykeep cows in, among the olives on the cliffs. She was not there, butabout the hut pecked some white pigeons, and from it, startling mefoolishly with its unexpected sound, came the eerie bleat of her petgoat. .. . Among the olives it was twilight already, with streakings offaded rose in the sky, and faded rose, like long trails of petals, onthe distant sea. I clambered down among the myrtle-bushes and came to alittle semicircle of yellow sand, between two high and jagged rocks, the place where the sea had deposited Dionea after the wreck. She wasseated there on the sand, her bare foot dabbling in the waves; she hadtwisted a wreath of myrtle and wild roses on her black, crisp hair. Near her was one of our prettiest girls, the Lena of Sor Tullio theblacksmith, with ashy, terrified face under her flowered kerchief. Idetermined to speak to the child, but without startling her now, forshe is a nervous, hysteric little thing. So I sat on the rocks, screened by the myrtle-bushes, waiting till the girl had gone. Dionea, seated listless on the sands, leaned over the sea and took some of itswater in the hollow of her hand. "Here, " she said to the Lena of SorTullio, "fill your bottle with this and give it to drink to Tommasinothe Rosebud. " Then she set to singing:--

"Love is salt, like sea-water--I drink and I die of thirst. .. . Water!water! Yet the more I drink, the more I burn. Love! thou art bitter asthe seaweed. "

_April 20, 1887. _

Your friends are settled here, dear Lady Evelyn. The house is built inwhat was once a Genoese fort, growing like a grey spiked aloes out ofthe marble rocks of our bay; rock and wall (the walls existed longbefore Genoa was ever heard of) grown almost into a homogeneous mass, delicate grey, stained with black and yellow lichen, and dotted hereand there with myrtle-shoots and crimson snapdragon. In what was oncethe highest enclosure of the fort, where your friend Gertrude watchesthe maids hanging out the fine white sheets and pillow-cases to dry (abit of the North, of Hermann and Dorothea transferred to the South), agreat twisted fig-tree juts out like an eccentric gargoyle over thesea, and drops its ripe fruit into the deep blue pools. There is butscant furniture in the house, but a great oleander overhangs it, presently to burst into pink splendor; and on all the window-sills, even that of the kitchen (such a background of shining brass saucepansWaldemar's wife has made of it!) are pipkins and tubs full of trailingcarnations, and tufts of sweet basil and thyme and mignonette. Shepleases me most, your Gertrude, although you foretold I should preferthe husband; with her thin white face, a Memling Madonna finished bysome Tuscan sculptor, and her long, delicate white hands ever busy, like those of a mediaeval lady, with some delicate piece of work; andthe strange blue, more limpid than the sky and deeper than the sea, ofher rarely lifted glance. 

It is in her company that I like Waldemar best; I prefer to the geniusthat infinitely tender and respectful, I would not say _lover_--yet I have no other word--of his pale wife. He seems to me, when with her, like some fierce, generous, wild thing from thewoods, like the lion of Una, tame and submissive to this saint. .. . Thistenderness is really very beautiful on the part of that big lionWaldemar, with his odd eyes, as of some wild animal--odd, and, yourExcellency remarks, not without a gleam of latent ferocity. I thinkthat hereby hangs the explanation of his never doing any but malefigures: the female figure, he says (and your Excellency must hold himresponsible, not me, for such profanity), is almost inevitably inferiorin strength and beauty; woman is not form, but expression, andtherefore suits painting, but not sculpture. The point of a woman isnot her body, but (and here his eyes rested very tenderly upon the thinwhite profile of his wife) her soul. "Still, " I answered, "theancients, who understood such matters, did manufacture some tolerablefemale statues: the Fates of the Parthenon, the Phidian Pallas, theVenus of Milo. ". .. 

"Ah! yes, " exclaimed Waldemar, smiling, with that savage gleam of hiseyes; "but those are not women, and the people who made them have leftas the tales of Endymion, Adonis, Anchises: a goddess might sit forthem. ". .. 

_May 5, 1887. _

Has it ever struck your Excellency in one of your La Rochefoucauld fits(in Lent say, after too many balls) that not merely maternal butconjugal unselfishness may be a very selfish thing? There! you tossyour little head at my words; yet I wager I have heard you say that_other_ women may think it right to humor their husbands, but asto you, the Prince must learn that a wife's duty is as much to chastenher husband's whims as to satisfy them. I really do feel indignant thatsuch a snow-white saint should wish another woman to part with allinstincts of modesty merely because that other woman would be a goodmodel for her husband; really it is intolerable. "Leave the girlalone, " Waldemar said, laughing. "What do I want with the unaestheticsex, as Schopenhauer calls it?" But Gertrude has set her heart on hisdoing a female figure; it seems that folk have twitted him with neverhaving produced one. She has long been on the look-out for a model forhim. It is odd to see this pale, demure, diaphanous creature, not themore earthly for approaching motherhood, scanning the girls of ourvillage with the eyes of a slave-dealer. 

"If you insist on speaking to Dionea, " I said, "I shall insist onspeaking to her at the same time, to urge her to refuse your proposal. "But Waldemar's pale wife was indifferent to all my speeches aboutmodesty being a poor girl's only dowry. "She will do for a Venus, " shemerely answered. 

We went up to the cliffs together, after some sharp words, Waldemar'swife hanging on my arm as we slowly clambered up the stony path amongthe olives. We found Dionea at the door of her hut, making faggots ofmyrtle-branches. She listened sullenly to Gertrude's offer andexplanations; indifferently to my admonitions not to accept. Thethought of stripping for the view of a man, which would send a shudderthrough our most brazen village girls, seemed not to startle her, immaculate and savage as she is accounted. She did not answer, but satunder the olives, looking vaguely across the sea. At that momentWaldemar came up to us; he had followed with the intention of puttingan end to these wranglings. 

"Gertrude, " he said, "do leave her alone. I have found a model--afisher-boy, whom I much prefer to any woman. "

Dionea raised her head with that serpentine smile. "I will come, " shesaid. 

Waldemar stood silent; his eyes were fixed on her, where she stoodunder the olives, her white shift loose about her splendid throat, hershining feet bare in the grass. Vaguely, as if not knowing what hesaid, he asked her name. She answered that her name was Dionea; for therest, she was an Innocentina, that is to say, a foundling; then shebegan to sing:--

 "Flower of the myrtle! My father is the starry sky, The mother that made me is the sea. "

_June 22, 1887_. 

I confess I was an old fool to have grudged Waldemar his model. As Iwatch him gradually building up his statue, watch the goddess graduallyemerging from the clay heap, I ask myself--and the case might trouble amore subtle moralist than me--whether a village girl, an obscure, useless life within the bounds of what we choose to call right andwrong, can be weighed against the possession by mankind of a great workof art, a Venus immortally beautiful? Still, I am glad that the twoalternatives need not be weighed against each other. Nothing can equalthe kindness of Gertrude, now that Dionea has consented to sit to herhusband; the girl is ostensibly merely a servant like any other; and, lest any report of her real functions should get abroad and discredither at San Massimo or Montemirto, she is to be taken to Rome, where noone will be the wiser, and where, by the way, your Excellency will havean opportunity of comparing Waldemar's goddess of love with our littleorphan of the Convent of the Stigmata. What reassures me still more isthe curious attitude of Waldemar towards the girl. I could never havebelieved that an artist could regard a woman so utterly as a mereinanimate thing, a form to copy, like a tree or flower. Truly hecarries out his theory that sculpture knows only the body, and the bodyscarcely considered as human. The way in which he speaks to Dioneaafter hours of the most rapt contemplation of her is almost brutal inits coldness. And yet to hear him exclaim, "How beautiful she is! GoodGod, how beautiful!" No love of mere woman was ever so violent as thislove of woman's mere shape. 

_June 27, 1887_. 

You asked me once, dearest Excellency, whether there survived among ourpeople (you had evidently added a volume on folk-lore to that heap ofhalf-cut, dog's-eared books that litter about among the Chineseries andmediaeval brocades of your rooms) any trace of Pagan myths. I explainedto you then that all our fairy mythology, classic gods, and demons andheroes, teemed with fairies, ogres, and princes. Last night I had acurious proof of this. Going to see the Waldemar, I found Dionea seatedunder the oleander at the top of the old Genoese fort, telling storiesto the two little blonde children who were making the falling pinkblossoms into necklaces at her feet; the pigeons, Dionea's whitepigeons, which never leave her, strutting and pecking among the basilpots, and the white gulls flying round the rocks overhead. This is whatI heard. .. "And the three fairies said to the youngest son of the King, to the one who had been brought up as a shepherd, 'Take this apple, andgive it to her among us who is most beautiful. ' And the first fairysaid, 'If thou give it to me thou shalt be Emperor of Rome, and havepurple clothes, and have a gold crown and gold armor, and horses andcourtiers;' and the second said, 'If thou give it to me thou shalt bePope, and wear a miter, and have the keys of heaven and hell;' and thethird fairy said, 'Give the apple to me, for I will give thee the mostbeautiful lady to wife. ' And the youngest son of the King sat in thegreen meadow and thought about it a little, and then said, 'What use isthere in being Emperor or Pope? Give me the beautiful lady to wife, since I am young myself. ' And he gave the apple to the third of thethree fairies. ". .. 

Dionea droned out the story in her half-Genoese dialect, her eyeslooking far away across the blue sea, dotted with sails like whitesea-gulls, that strange serpentine smile on her lips. 

"Who told thee that fable?" I asked. 

She took a handful of oleander-blossoms from the ground, and throwingthem in the air, answered listlessly, as she watched the little showerof rosy petals descend on her black hair and pale breast--

"Who knows?"

_July 6, 1887_. 

How strange is the power of art! Has Waldemar's statue shown me thereal Dionea, or has Dionea really grown more strangely beautiful thanbefore? Your Excellency will laugh; but when I meet her I cast down myeyes after the first glimpse of her loveliness; not with the shyness ofa ridiculous old pursuer of the Eternal Feminine, but with a sort ofreligious awe--the feeling with which, as a child kneeling by mymother's side, I looked down on the church flags when the Mass belltold the elevation of the Host. .. . Do you remember the story of Zeuxisand the ladies of Crotona, five of the fairest not being too much forhis Juno? Do you remember--you, who have read everything--all the boshof our writers about the Ideal in Art? Why, here is a girl whodisproves all this nonsense in a minute; she is far, far more beautifulthan Waldemar's statue of her. He said so angrily, only yesterday, whenhis wife took me into his studio (he has made a studio of thelong-desecrated chapel of the old Genoese fort, itself, they say, occupying the site of the temple of Venus). 

As he spoke that odd spark of ferocity dilated in his eyes, and seizingthe largest of his modeling tools, he obliterated at one swoop thewhole exquisite face. Poor Gertrude turned ashy white, and a convulsionpassed over her face. .. . 

_July 15_. 

I wish I could make Gertrude understand, and yet I could never, neverbring myself to say a word. As a matter of fact, what is there to besaid? Surely she knows best that her husband will never love any womanbut herself. Yet ill, nervous as she is, I quite understand that shemust loathe this unceasing talk of Dionea, of the superiority of themodel over the statue. Cursed statue! I wish it were finished, or elsethat it had never been begun. 

_July 20_. 

This morning Waldemar came to me. He seemed strangely agitated: Iguessed he had something to tell me, and yet I could never ask. Was itcowardice on my part? He sat in my shuttered room, the sunshine makingpools on the red bricks and tremulous stars on the ceiling, talking ofmany things at random, and mechanically turning over the manuscript, the heap of notes of my poor, never-finished book on the Exiled Gods. Then he rose, and walking nervously round my study, talkingdisconnectedly about his work, his eye suddenly fell upon a littlealtar, one of my few antiquities, a little block of marble with acarved garland and rams' heads, and a half-effaced inscriptiondedicating it to Venus, the mother of Love. 

"It was found, " I explained, "in the ruins of the temple, somewhere onthe site of your studio: so, at least, the man said from whom I boughtit. "

Waldemar looked at it long. "So, " he said, "this little cavity was toburn the incense in; or rather, I suppose, since it has two littlegutters running into it, for collecting the blood of the victim? Well, well! they were wiser in that day, to wring the neck of a pigeon orburn a pinch of incense than to eat their own hearts out, as we do, allalong of Dame Venus;" and he laughed, and left me with that oddferocious lighting-up of his face. Presently there came a knock at mydoor. It was Waldemar. "Doctor, " he said very quietly, "will you dome a favor? Lend me your little Venus altar--only for a few days, onlytill the day after tomorrow. I want to copy the design of it for thepedestal of my statue: it is appropriate. " I sent the altar to him: thelad who carried it told me that Waldemar had set it up in the studio, and calling for a flask of wine, poured out two glasses. One he hadgiven to my messenger for his pains; of the other he had drunk amouthful, and thrown the rest over the altar, saying some unknownwords. "It must be some German habit, " said my servant. What oddfancies this man has!

_July 25_. 

You ask me, dearest Excellency, to send you some sheets of my book: youwant to know what I have discovered. Alas! dear Donna Evelina, I havediscovered, I fear, that there is nothing to discover; that Apollo wasnever in Styria; that Chaucer, when he called the Queen of the FairiesProserpine, meant nothing more than an eighteenth century poet when hecalled Dolly or Betty Cynthia or Amaryllis; that the lady who damnedpoor Tannhäuser was not Venus, but a mere little Suabian mountainsprite; in fact, that poetry is only the invention of poets, and thatthat rogue, Heinrich Heine, is entirely responsible for the existenceof _Dieux en Exil_. .. . My poor manuscript can only tell you whatSt. Augustine, Tertullian, and sundry morose old Bishops thought aboutthe loves of Father Zeus and the miracles of the Lady Isis, none ofwhich is much worth your attention. .. . Reality, my dear Lady Evelyn, isalways prosaic: at least when investigated into by bald old gentlemenlike me. 

And yet, it does not look so. The world, at times, seems to be playingat being poetic, mysterious, full of wonder and romance. I am writing, as usual, by my window, the moonlight brighter in its whiteness than mymean little yellow-shining lamp. From the mysterious greyness, theolive groves and lanes beneath my terrace, rises a confused quaver offrogs, and buzz and whirr of insects: something, in sound, like thevague trails of countless stars, the galaxies on galaxies blurred intomere blue shimmer by the moon, which rides slowly across the highestheaven. The olive twigs glisten in the rays: the flowers of thepomegranate and oleander are only veiled as with bluish mist in theirscarlet and rose. In the sea is another sea, of molten, rippled silver, or a magic causeway leading to the shining vague offing, the luminouspale sky-line, where the islands of Palmaria and Tino float likeunsubstantial, shadowy dolphins. The roofs of Montemirto glimmer amongthe black, pointing cypresses: farther below, at the end of thathalf-moon of land, is San Massimo: the Genoese fort inhabited by ourfriends is profiled black against the sky. All is dark: our fisher-folkgo to bed early; Gertrude and the little ones are asleep: they at leastare, for I can imagine Gertrude lying awake, the moonbeams on her thinMadonna face, smiling as she thinks of the little ones around her, ofthe other tiny thing that will soon lie on her breast. .. . There is alight in the old desecrated chapel, the thing that was once the templeof Venus, they say, and is now Waldemar's workshop, its broken roofmended with reeds and thatch. Waldemar has stolen in, no doubt to seehis statue again. But he will return, more peaceful for thepeacefulness of the night, to his sleeping wife and children. God blessand watch over them! Good-night, dearest Excellency. 

_July 26_. 

I have your Excellency's telegram in answer to mine. Many thanks forsending the Prince. I await his coming with feverish longing; it isstill something to look forward to. All does not seem over. And yetwhat can he do?

The children are safe: we fetched them out of their bed and broughtthem up here. They are still a little shaken by the fire, the bustle, and by finding themselves in a strange house; also, they want to knowwhere their mother is; but they have found a tame cat, and I hear themchirping on the stairs. 

It was only the roof of the studio, the reeds and thatch, that burned, and a few old pieces of timber. Waldemar must have set fire to it withgreat care; he had brought armfuls of faggots of dry myrtle and heatherfrom the bakehouse close by, and thrown into the blaze quantities ofpine-cones, and of some resin, I know not what, that smelt likeincense. When we made our way, early this morning, through thesmoldering studio, we were stifled with a hot church-like perfume: mybrain swam, and I suddenly remembered going into St. Peter's on EasterDay as a child. 

It happened last night, while I was writing to you. Gertrude had goneto bed, leaving her husband in the studio. About eleven the maids heardhim come out and call to Dionea to get up and come and sit to him. Hehad had this craze once before, of seeing her and his statue by anartificial light: you remember he had theories about the way in whichthe ancients lit up the statues in their temples. Gertrude, theservants say, was heard creeping downstairs a little later. 

Do you see it? I have seen nothing else these hours, which have seemedweeks and months. He had placed Dionea on the big marble block behindthe altar, a great curtain of dull red brocade--you know that Venetianbrocade with the gold pomegranate pattern--behind her, like a Madonnaof Van Eyck's. He showed her to me once before like this, the whitenessof her neck and breast, the whiteness of the drapery round her flanks, toned to the color of old marble by the light of the resin burning inpans all round. .. . Before Dionea was the altar--the altar of Venuswhich he had borrowed from me. He must have collected all the rosesabout it, and thrown the incense upon the embers when Gertrude suddenlyentered. And then, and then. .. 

We found her lying across the altar, her pale hair among the ashes ofthe incense, her blood--she had but little to give, poor whiteghost!--trickling among the carved garlands and rams' heads, blackeningthe heaped-up roses. The body of Waldemar was found at the foot of thecastle cliff. Had he hoped, by setting the place on fire, to buryhimself among its ruins, or had he not rather wished to complete inthis way the sacrifice, to make the whole temple an immense votivepyre? It looked like one, as we hurried down the hills to San Massimo:the whole hillside, dry grass, myrtle, and heather, all burning, thepale short flames waving against the blue moonlit sky, and the oldfortress outlined black against the blaze. 

_August 30. _

Of Dionea I can tell you nothing certain. We speak of her as little aswe can. Some say they have seen her, on stormy nights, wandering amongthe cliffs: but a sailor-boy assures me, by all the holy things, thatthe day after the burning of the Castle Chapel--we never call itanything else--he met at dawn, off the island of Palmaria, beyond theStrait of Porto Venere, a Greek boat, with eyes painted on the prow, going full sail to sea, the men singing as she went. And against themast, a robe of purple and gold about her, and a myrtle-wreath on herhead, leaned Dionea, singing words in an unknown tongue, the whitepigeons circling around her. 

_Oke of Okehurst_

To COUNT PETER BOUTOURLINE, _AT TAGANTCHA_, GOVERNMENT OF KIEW, RUSSIA. 

MY DEAR BOUTOURLINE, Do you remember my telling you, one afternoon that you sat upon thehearthstool at Florence, the story of Mrs. Oke of Okehurst?

You thought it a fantastic tale, you lover of fantastic things, and urgedme to write it out at once, although I protested that, in such matters, towrite is to exorcise, to dispel the charm; and that printers' ink chasesaway the ghosts that may pleasantly haunt us, as efficaciously as gallonsof holy water. 

But if, as I suspect, you will now put down any charm that story mayhave possessed to the way in which we had been working ourselves up, that firelight evening, with all manner of fantastic stuff--if, as Ifear, the story of Mrs. Oke of Okehurst will strike you as stale andunprofitable--the sight of this little book will serve at least to remindyou, in the middle of your Russian summer, that there is such a seasonas winter, such a place as Florence, and such a person as your friend, VERNON LEE

Kensington, _July_ 1886. 

1

That sketch up there with the boy's cap? Yes; that's the same woman. Iwonder whether you could guess who she was. A singular being, is she not?The most marvellous creature, quite, that I have ever met: a wonderfulelegance, exotic, far-fetched, poignant; an artificial perverse sort ofgrace and research in every outline and movement and arrangement of headand neck, and hands and fingers. Here are a lot of pencil sketches I madewhile I was preparing to paint her portrait. Yes; there's nothing but herin the whole sketchbook. Mere scratches, but they may give some idea of hermarvellous, fantastic kind of grace. Here she is leaning over thestaircase, and here sitting in the swing. Here she is walking quickly outof the room. That's her head. You see she isn't really handsome; herforehead is too big, and her nose too short. This gives no idea of her. Itwas altogether a question of movement. Look at the strange cheeks, hollowand rather flat; well, when she smiled she had the most marvellous dimpleshere. There was something exquisite and uncanny about it. Yes; I began thepicture, but it was never finished. I did the husband first. I wonder whohas his likeness now? Help me to move these pictures away from the wall. Thanks. This is her portrait; a huge wreck. I don't suppose you can makemuch of it; it is merely blocked in, and seems quite mad. You see my ideawas to make her leaning against a wall--there was one hung with yellow thatseemed almost brown--so as to bring out the silhouette. 

It was very singular I should have chosen that particular wall. It doeslook rather insane in this condition, but I like it; it has something ofher. I would frame it and hang it up, only people would ask questions. Yes;you have guessed quite right--it is Mrs. Oke of Okehurst. I forgot you hadrelations in that part of the country; besides, I suppose the newspaperswere full of it at the time. You didn't know that it all took place undermy eyes? I can scarcely believe now that it did: it all seems so distant, vivid but unreal, like a thing of my own invention. It really was muchstranger than any one guessed. People could no more understand it than theycould understand her. I doubt whether any one ever understood Alice Okebesides myself. You mustn't think me unfeeling. She was a marvellous, weird, exquisite creature, but one couldn't feel sorry for her. I felt muchsorrier for the wretched creature of a husband. It seemed such anappropriate end for her; I fancy she would have liked it could she haveknown. Ah! I shall never have another chance of painting such a portrait asI wanted. She seemed sent me from heaven or the other place. You have neverheard the story in detail? Well, I don't usually mention it, because peopleare so brutally stupid or sentimental; but I'll tell it you. Let me see. It's too dark to paint any more today, so I can tell it you now. Wait; Imust turn her face to the wall. Ah, she was a marvellous creature!

2

You remember, three years ago, my telling you I had let myself in forpainting a couple of Kentish squireen? I really could not understand whathad possessed me to say yes to that man. A friend of mine had brought himone day to my studio--Mr. Oke of Okehurst, that was the name on his card. He was a very tall, very well-made, very good-looking young man, with abeautiful fair complexion, beautiful fair moustache, and beautifullyfitting clothes; absolutely like a hundred other young men you can see anyday in the Park, and absolutely uninteresting from the crown of his head tothe tip of his boots. Mr. Oke, who had been a lieutenant in the Bluesbefore his marriage, was evidently extremely uncomfortable on findinghimself in a studio. He felt misgivings about a man who could wear a velvetcoat in town, but at the same time he was nervously anxious not to treat mein the very least like a tradesman. He walked round my place, looked ateverything with the most scrupulous attention, stammered out a fewcomplimentary phrases, and then, looking at his friend for assistance, tried to come to the point, but failed. The point, which the friend kindlyexplained, was that Mr. Oke was desirous to know whether my engagementswould allow of my painting him and his wife, and what my terms would be. The poor man blushed perfectly crimson during this explanation, as if hehad come with the most improper proposal; and I noticed--the onlyinteresting thing about him--a very odd nervous frown between his eyebrows, a perfect double gash, --a thing which usually means something abnormal: amad-doctor of my acquaintance calls it the maniac-frown. When I hadanswered, he suddenly burst out into rather confused explanations: hiswife--Mrs. Oke--had seen some of my--pictures--paintings--portraits--atthe--the--what d'you call it?--Academy. She had--in short, they had made avery great impression upon her. Mrs. Oke had a great taste for art; shewas, in short, extremely desirous of having her portrait and his painted byme, _etcetera_. 

"My wife, " he suddenly added, "is a remarkable woman. I don't know whetheryou will think her handsome, --she isn't exactly, you know. But she'sawfully strange, " and Mr. Oke of Okehurst gave a little sigh and frownedthat curious frown, as if so long a speech and so decided an expression ofopinion had cost him a great deal. 

It was a rather unfortunate moment in my career. A very influential sitterof mine--you remember the fat lady with the crimson curtain behindher?--had come to the conclusion or been persuaded that I had painted herold and vulgar, which, in fact, she was. Her whole clique had turnedagainst me, the newspapers had taken up the matter, and for the moment Iwas considered as a painter to whose brushes no woman would trust herreputation. Things were going badly. So I snapped but too gladly at Mr. Oke's offer, and settled to go down to Okehurst at the end of a fortnight. But the door had scarcely closed upon my future sitter when I began toregret my rashness; and my disgust at the thought of wasting a whole summerupon the portrait of a totally uninteresting Kentish squire, and hisdoubtless equally uninteresting wife, grew greater and greater as the timefor execution approached. I remember so well the frightful temper in whichI got into the train for Kent, and the even more frightful temper in whichI got out of it at the little station nearest to Okehurst. It was pouringfloods. I felt a comfortable fury at the thought that my canvases would getnicely wetted before Mr. Oke's coachman had packed them on the top of thewaggonette. It was just what served me right for coming to this confoundedplace to paint these confounded people. We drove off in the steadydownpour. The roads were a mass of yellow mud; the endless flatgrazing-grounds under the oak-trees, after having been burnt to cinders ina long drought, were turned into a hideous brown sop; the country seemedintolerably monotonous. 

My spirits sank lower and lower. I began to meditate upon the modern Gothiccountry-house, with the usual amount of Morris furniture, Liberty rugs, andMudie novels, to which I was doubtless being taken. My fancy pictured veryvividly the five or six little Okes--that man certainly must have at leastfive children--the aunts, and sisters-in-law, and cousins; the eternalroutine of afternoon tea and lawn-tennis; above all, it pictured Mrs. Oke, the bouncing, well-informed, model housekeeper, electioneering, charity-organising young lady, whom such an individual as Mr. Oke wouldregard in the light of a remarkable woman. And my spirit sank within me, and I cursed my avarice in accepting the commission, my spiritlessness innot throwing it over while yet there was time. We had meanwhile driven intoa large park, or rather a long succession of grazing-grounds, dotted aboutwith large oaks, under which the sheep were huddled together for shelterfrom the rain. In the distance, blurred by the sheets of rain, was a lineof low hills, with a jagged fringe of bluish firs and a solitary windmill. It must be a good mile and a half since we had passed a house, and therewas none to be seen in the distance--nothing but the undulation of seregrass, sopped brown beneath the huge blackish oak-trees, and whence arose, from all sides, a vague disconsolate bleating. At last the road made asudden bend, and disclosed what was evidently the home of my sitter. Itwas not what I had expected. In a dip in the ground a large red-brickhouse, with the rounded gables and high chimney-stacks of the time ofJames I. , --a forlorn, vast place, set in the midst of the pasture-land, with no trace of garden before it, and only a few large trees indicatingthe possibility of one to the back; no lawn either, but on the other sideof the sandy dip, which suggested a filled-up moat, a huge oak, short, hollow, with wreathing, blasted, black branches, upon which only a handfulof leaves shook in the rain. It was not at all what I had pictured tomyself the home of Mr. Oke of Okehurst. 

My host received me in the hall, a large place, panelled and carved, hunground with portraits up to its curious ceiling--vaulted and ribbed like theinside of a ship's hull. He looked even more blond and pink and white, moreabsolutely mediocre in his tweed suit; and also, I thought, even moregood-natured and duller. He took me into his study, a room hung round withwhips and fishing-tackle in place of books, while my things were beingcarried upstairs. It was very damp, and a fire was smouldering. He gave theembers a nervous kick with his foot, and said, as he offered me a cigar--

"You must excuse my not introducing you at once to Mrs. Oke. My wife--inshort, I believe my wife is asleep. "

"Is Mrs. Oke unwell?" I asked, a sudden hope flashing across me that Imight be off the whole matter. 

"Oh no! Alice is quite well; at least, quite as well as she usually is. Mywife, " he added, after a minute, and in a very decided tone, "does notenjoy very good health--a nervous constitution. Oh no! not at all ill, nothing at all serious, you know. Only nervous, the doctors say; mustn't beworried or excited, the doctors say; requires lots of repose, --that sortof thing. "

There was a dead pause. This man depressed me, I knew not why. He had alistless, puzzled look, very much out of keeping with his evident admirablehealth and strength. 

"I suppose you are a great sportsman?" I asked from sheer despair, noddingin the direction of the whips and guns and fishing-rods. 

"Oh no! not now. I was once. I have given up all that, " he answered, standing with his back to the fire, and staring at the polar bear beneathhis feet. "I--I have no time for all that now, " he added, as if anexplanation were due. "A married man--you know. Would you like to come upto your rooms?" he suddenly interrupted himself. "I have had one arrangedfor you to paint in. My wife said you would prefer a north light. If thatone doesn't suit, you can have your choice of any other. "

I followed him out of the study, through the vast entrance-hall. In lessthan a minute I was no longer thinking of Mr. And Mrs. Oke and the boredomof doing their likeness; I was simply overcome by the beauty of this house, which I had pictured modern and philistine. It was, without exception, themost perfect example of an old English manor-house that I had ever seen;the most magnificent intrinsically, and the most admirably preserved. Outof the huge hall, with its immense fireplace of delicately carved andinlaid grey and black stone, and its rows of family portraits, reachingfrom the wainscoting to the oaken ceiling, vaulted and ribbed like a ship'shull, opened the wide, flat-stepped staircase, the parapet surmounted atintervals by heraldic monsters, the wall covered with oak carvings ofcoats-of-arms, leafage, and little mythological scenes, painted a faded redand blue, and picked out with tarnished gold, which harmonised with thetarnished blue and gold of the stamped leather that reached to the oakcornice, again delicately tinted and gilded. The beautifully damascenedsuits of court armour looked, without being at all rusty, as if no modernhand had ever touched them; the very rugs under foot were ofsixteenth-century Persian make; the only things of to-day were the bigbunches of flowers and ferns, arranged in majolica dishes upon thelandings. Everything was perfectly silent; only from below came the chimes, silvery like an Italian palace fountain, of an old-fashioned clock. 

It seemed to me that I was being led through the palace of the SleepingBeauty. 

"What a magnificent house!" I exclaimed as I followed my host through along corridor, also hung with leather, wainscoted with carvings, andfurnished with big wedding coffers, and chairs that looked as if they cameout of some Vandyck portrait. In my mind was the strong impression that allthis was natural, spontaneous--that it had about it nothing of thepicturesqueness which swell studios have taught to rich and aesthetichouses. Mr. Oke misunderstood me. 

"It is a nice old place, " he said, "but it's too large for us. You see, mywife's health does not allow of our having many guests; and there are nochildren. "

I thought I noticed a vague complaint in his voice; and he evidently wasafraid there might have seemed something of the kind, for he addedimmediately--

"I don't care for children one jackstraw, you know, myself; can'tunderstand how any one can, for my part. "

If ever a man went out of his way to tell a lie, I said to myself, Mr. Okeof Okehurst was doing so at the present moment. 

When he had left me in one of the two enormous rooms that were allotted tome, I threw myself into an arm-chair and tried to focus the extraordinaryimaginative impression which this house had given me. 

I am very susceptible to such impressions; and besides the sort of spasm ofimaginative interest sometimes given to me by certain rare and eccentricpersonalities, I know nothing more subduing than the charm, quieter andless analytic, of any sort of complete and out-of-the-common-run sort ofhouse. To sit in a room like the one I was sitting in, with the figures ofthe tapestry glimmering grey and lilac and purple in the twilight, thegreat bed, columned and curtained, looming in the middle, and the embersreddening beneath the overhanging mantelpiece of inlaid Italian stonework, a vague scent of rose-leaves and spices, put into the china bowls by thehands of ladies long since dead, while the clock downstairs sent up, everynow and then, its faint silvery tune of forgotten days, filled theroom;--to do this is a special kind of voluptuousness, peculiar and complexand indescribable, like the half-drunkenness of opium or haschisch, andwhich, to be conveyed to others in any sense as I feel it, would require agenius, subtle and heady, like that of Baudelaire. 

After I had dressed for dinner I resumed my place in the arm-chair, andresumed also my reverie, letting all these impressions of the past--whichseemed faded like the figures in the arras, but still warm like the embersin the fireplace, still sweet and subtle like the perfume of the deadrose-leaves and broken spices in the china bowls--permeate me and go to myhead. Of Oke and Oke's wife I did not think; I seemed quite alone, isolatedfrom the world, separated from it in this exotic enjoyment. 

Gradually the embers grew paler; the figures in the tapestry more shadowy;the columned and curtained bed loomed out vaguer; the room seemed to fillwith greyness; and my eyes wandered to the mullioned bow-window, beyondwhose panes, between whose heavy stonework, stretched a greyish-brownexpanse of sore and sodden park grass, dotted with big oaks; while far off, behind a jagged fringe of dark Scotch firs, the wet sky was suffused withthe blood-red of the sunset. Between the falling of the raindrops from theivy outside, there came, fainter or sharper, the recurring bleating of thelambs separated from their mothers, a forlorn, quavering, eerie little cry. 

I started up at a sudden rap at my door. 

"Haven't you heard the gong for dinner?" asked Mr. Oke's voice. 

I had completely forgotten his existence. 

3

I feel that I cannot possibly reconstruct my earliest impressions of Mrs. Oke. My recollection of them would be entirely coloured by my subsequentknowledge of her; whence I conclude that I could not at first haveexperienced the strange interest and admiration which that extraordinarywoman very soon excited in me. Interest and admiration, be it wellunderstood, of a very unusual kind, as she was herself a very unusual kindof woman; and I, if you choose, am a rather unusual kind of man. But I canexplain that better anon. 

This much is certain, that I must have been immeasurably surprised atfinding my hostess and future sitter so completely unlike everything I hadanticipated. Or no--now I come to think of it, I scarcely felt surprised atall; or if I did, that shock of surprise could have lasted but aninfinitesimal part of a minute. The fact is, that, having once seen AliceOke in the reality, it was quite impossible to remember that one could havefancied her at all different: there was something so complete, socompletely unlike every one else, in her personality, that she seemedalways to have been present in one's consciousness, although present, perhaps, as an enigma. 

Let me try and give you some notion of her: not that first impression, whatever it may have been, but the absolute reality of her as I graduallylearned to see it. To begin with, I must repeat and reiterate over and overagain, that she was, beyond all comparison, the most graceful and exquisitewoman I have ever seen, but with a grace and an exquisiteness that hadnothing to do with any preconceived notion or previous experience of whatgoes by these names: grace and exquisiteness recognised at once as perfect, but which were seen in her for the first, and probably, I do believe, forthe last time. It is conceivable, is it not, that once in a thousand yearsthere may arise a combination of lines, a system of movements, an outline, a gesture, which is new, unprecedented, and yet hits off exactly ourdesires for beauty and rareness? She was very tall; and I suppose peoplewould have called her thin. I don't know, for I never thought about her asa body--bones, flesh, that sort of thing; but merely as a wonderful seriesof lines, and a wonderful strangeness of personality. Tall and slender, certainly, and with not one item of what makes up our notion of awell-built woman. She was as straight--I mean she had as little of whatpeople call figure--as a bamboo; her shoulders were a trifle high, and shehad a decided stoop; her arms and her shoulders she never once woreuncovered. But this bamboo figure of hers had a suppleness and astateliness, a play of outline with every step she took, that I can'tcompare to anything else; there was in it something of the peacock andsomething also of the stag; but, above all, it was her own. I wish I coulddescribe her. I wish, alas!--I wish, I wish, I have wished a hundredthousand times--I could paint her, as I see her now, if I shut myeyes--even if it were only a silhouette. There! I see her so plainly, walking slowly up and down a room, the slight highness of her shoulders;just completing the exquisite arrangement of lines made by the straightsupple back, the long exquisite neck, the head, with the hair cropped inshort pale curls, always drooping a little, except when she would suddenlythrow it back, and smile, not at me, nor at any one, nor at anything thathad been said, but as if she alone had suddenly seen or heard something, with the strange dimple in her thin, pale cheeks, and the strange whitenessin her full, wide-opened eyes: the moment when she had something of thestag in her movement. But where is the use of talking about her? I don'tbelieve, you know, that even the greatest painter can show what is the realbeauty of a very beautiful woman in the ordinary sense: Titian's andTintoretto's women must have been miles handsomer than they have made them. Something--and that the very essence--always escapes, perhaps because realbeauty is as much a thing in time--a thing like music, a succession, aseries--as in space. Mind you, I am speaking of a woman beautiful in theconventional sense. Imagine, then, how much more so in the case of a womanlike Alice Oke; and if the pencil and brush, imitating each line and tint, can't succeed, how is it possible to give even the vaguest notion with merewretched words--words possessing only a wretched abstract meaning, animpotent conventional association? To make a long story short, Mrs. Oke ofOkehurst was, in my opinion, to the highest degree exquisite andstrange, --an exotic creature, whose charm you can no more describe than youcould bring home the perfume of some newly discovered tropical flower bycomparing it with the scent of a cabbage-rose or a lily. 

That first dinner was gloomy enough. Mr. Oke--Oke of Okehurst, as thepeople down there called him--was horribly shy, consumed with a fear ofmaking a fool of himself before me and his wife, I then thought. But thatsort of shyness did not wear off; and I soon discovered that, although itwas doubtless increased by the presence of a total stranger, it wasinspired in Oke, not by me, but by his wife. He would look every now andthen as if he were going to make a remark, and then evidently restrainhimself, and remain silent. It was very curious to see this big, handsome, manly young fellow, who ought to have had any amount of success with women, suddenly stammer and grow crimson in the presence of his own wife. Nor wasit the consciousness of stupidity; for when you got him alone, Oke, although always slow and timid, had a certain amount of ideas, and verydefined political and social views, and a certain childlike earnestness anddesire to attain certainty and truth which was rather touching. On theother hand, Oke's singular shyness was not, so far as I could see, theresult of any kind of bullying on his wife's part. You can always detect, if you have any observation, the husband or the wife who is accustomed tobe snubbed, to be corrected, by his or her better-half: there is aself-consciousness in both parties, a habit of watching and fault-finding, of being watched and found fault with. This was clearly not the case atOkehurst. Mrs. Oke evidently did not trouble herself about her husband inthe very least; he might say or do any amount of silly things withoutrebuke or even notice; and he might have done so, had he chosen, ever sincehis wedding-day. You felt that at once. Mrs. Oke simply passed over hisexistence. I cannot say she paid much attention to any one's, even to mine. At first I thought it an affectation on her part--for there was somethingfar-fetched in her whole appearance, something suggesting study, whichmight lead one to tax her with affectation at first; she was dressed in astrange way, not according to any established aesthetic eccentricity, butindividually, strangely, as if in the clothes of an ancestress of theseventeenth century. Well, at first I thought it a kind of pose on herpart, this mixture of extreme graciousness and utter indifference which shemanifested towards me. She always seemed to be thinking of something else;and although she talked quite sufficiently, and with every sign of superiorintelligence, she left the impression of having been as taciturn as herhusband. 

In the beginning, in the first few days of my stay at Okehurst, I imaginedthat Mrs. Oke was a highly superior sort of flirt; and that her absentmanner, her look, while speaking to you, into an invisible distance, hercurious irrelevant smile, were so many means of attracting and bafflingadoration. I mistook it for the somewhat similar manners of certain foreignwomen--it is beyond English ones--which mean, to those who can understand, "pay court to me. " But I soon found I was mistaken. Mrs. Oke had not thefaintest desire that I should pay court to her; indeed she did not honourme with sufficient thought for that; and I, on my part, began to be toomuch interested in her from another point of view to dream of such a thing. I became aware, not merely that I had before me the most marvellously rareand exquisite and baffling subject for a portrait, but also one of the mostpeculiar and enigmatic of characters. Now that I look back upon it, I amtempted to think that the psychological peculiarity of that woman might besummed up in an exorbitant and absorbing interest in herself--a Narcissusattitude--curiously complicated with a fantastic imagination, a sort ofmorbid day-dreaming, all turned inwards, and with no outer characteristicsave a certain restlessness, a perverse desire to surprise and shock, tosurprise and shock more particularly her husband, and thus be revenged forthe intense boredom which his want of appreciation inflicted upon her. 

I got to understand this much little by little, yet I did not seem to havereally penetrated the something mysterious about Mrs. Oke. There was awaywardness, a strangeness, which I felt but could not explain--a somethingas difficult to define as the peculiarity of her outward appearance, andperhaps very closely connected therewith. I became interested in Mrs. Okeas if I had been in love with her; and I was not in the least in love. Ineither dreaded parting from her, nor felt any pleasure in her presence. Ihad not the smallest wish to please or to gain her notice. But I had her onthe brain. I pursued her, her physical image, her psychologicalexplanation, with a kind of passion which filled my days, and prevented myever feeling dull. The Okes lived a remarkably solitary life. There werebut few neighbours, of whom they saw but little; and they rarely had aguest in the house. Oke himself seemed every now and then seized with asense of responsibility towards me. He would remark vaguely, during ourwalks and after-dinner chats, that I must find life at Okehurst horriblydull; his wife's health had accustomed him to solitude, and then also hiswife thought the neighbours a bore. He never questioned his wife's judgmentin these matters. He merely stated the case as if resignation were quitesimple and inevitable; yet it seemed to me, sometimes, that this monotonouslife of solitude, by the side of a woman who took no more heed of him thanof a table or chair, was producing a vague depression and irritation inthis young man, so evidently cut out for a cheerful, commonplace life. Ioften wondered how he could endure it at all, not having, as I had, theinterest of a strange psychological riddle to solve, and of a greatportrait to paint. He was, I found, extremely good, --the type of theperfectly conscientious young Englishman, the sort of man who ought to havebeen the Christian soldier kind of thing; devout, pure-minded, brave, incapable of any baseness, a little intellectually dense, and puzzled byall manner of moral scruples. The condition of his tenants and of hispolitical party--he was a regular Kentish Tory--lay heavy on his mind. Hespent hours every day in his study, doing the work of a land agent and apolitical whip, reading piles of reports and newspapers and agriculturaltreatises; and emerging for lunch with piles of letters in his hand, andthat odd puzzled look in his good healthy face, that deep gash between hiseyebrows, which my friend the mad-doctor calls the _maniac-frown_. It waswith this expression of face that I should have liked to paint him; but Ifelt that he would not have liked it, that it was more fair to him torepresent him in his mere wholesome pink and white and blondconventionality. I was perhaps rather unconscientious about the likeness ofMr. Oke; I felt satisfied to paint it no matter how, I mean as regardscharacter, for my whole mind was swallowed up in thinking how I shouldpaint Mrs. Oke, how I could best transport on to canvas that singular andenigmatic personality. I began with her husband, and told her frankly thatI must have much longer to study her. Mr. Oke couldn't understand why itshould be necessary to make a hundred and one pencil-sketches of his wifebefore even determining in what attitude to paint her; but I think he wasrather pleased to have an opportunity of keeping me at Okehurst; mypresence evidently broke the monotony of his life. Mrs. Oke seemedperfectly indifferent to my staying, as she was perfectly indifferent to mypresence. Without being rude, I never saw a woman pay so little attentionto a guest; she would talk with me sometimes by the hour, or rather let metalk to her, but she never seemed to be listening. She would lie back in abig seventeenth-century armchair while I played the piano, with thatstrange smile every now and then in her thin cheeks, that strange whitenessin her eyes; but it seemed a matter of indifference whether my musicstopped or went on. In my portrait of her husband she did not take, orpretend to take, the very faintest interest; but that was nothing to me. Idid not want Mrs. Oke to think me interesting; I merely wished to go onstudying her. 

The first time that Mrs. Oke seemed to become at all aware of my presenceas distinguished from that of the chairs and tables, the dogs that lay inthe porch, or the clergyman or lawyer or stray neighbour who wasoccasionally asked to dinner, was one day--I might have been there aweek--when I chanced to remark to her upon the very singular resemblancethat existed between herself and the portrait of a lady that hung in thehall with the ceiling like a ship's hull. The picture in question was afull length, neither very good nor very bad, probably done by some strayItalian of the early seventeenth century. It hung in a rather dark corner, facing the portrait, evidently painted to be its companion, of a dark man, with a somewhat unpleasant expression of resolution and efficiency, in ablack Vandyck dress. The two were evidently man and wife; and in the cornerof the woman's portrait were the words, "Alice Oke, daughter of VirgilPomfret, Esq. , and wife to Nicholas Oke of Okehurst, " and the date1626--"Nicholas Oke" being the name painted in the corner of the smallportrait. The lady was really wonderfully like the present Mrs. Oke, atleast so far as an indifferently painted portrait of the early days ofCharles I, can be like a living woman of the nineteenth century. There werethe same strange lines of figure and face, the same dimples in the thincheeks, the same wide-opened eyes, the same vague eccentricity ofexpression, not destroyed even by the feeble painting and conventionalmanner of the time. One could fancy that this woman had the same walk, thesame beautiful line of nape of the neck and stooping head as herdescendant; for I found that Mr. And Mrs. Oke, who were first cousins, wereboth descended from that Nicholas Oke and that Alice, daughter of VirgilPomfret. But the resemblance was heightened by the fact that, as I soonsaw, the present Mrs. Oke distinctly made herself up to look like herancestress, dressing in garments that had a seventeenth-century look; nay, that were sometimes absolutely copied from this portrait. 

"You think I am like her, " answered Mrs. Oke dreamily to my remark, and hereyes wandered off to that unseen something, and the faint smile dimpled herthin cheeks. 

"You are like her, and you know it. I may even say you wish to be like her, Mrs. Oke, " I answered, laughing. 

"Perhaps I do. "

And she looked in the direction of her husband. I noticed that he had anexpression of distinct annoyance besides that frown of his. 

"Isn't it true that Mrs. Oke tries to look like that portrait?" I asked, with a perverse curiosity. 

"Oh, fudge!" he exclaimed, rising from his chair and walking nervously tothe window. "It's all nonsense, mere nonsense. I wish you wouldn't, Alice. "

"Wouldn't what?" asked Mrs. Oke, with a sort of contemptuous indifference. "If I am like that Alice Oke, why I am; and I am very pleased any oneshould think so. She and her husband are just about the only two members ofour family--our most flat, stale, and unprofitable family--that ever werein the least degree interesting. "

Oke grew crimson, and frowned as if in pain. 

"I don't see why you should abuse our family, Alice, " he said. "Thank God, our people have always been honourable and upright men and women!"

"Excepting always Nicholas Oke and Alice his wife, daughter of VirgilPomfret, Esq. , " she answered, laughing, as he strode out into the park. 

"How childish he is!" she exclaimed when we were alone. "He really minds, really feels disgraced by what our ancestors did two centuries and a halfago. I do believe William would have those two portraits taken down andburned if he weren't afraid of me and ashamed of the neighbours. And as itis, these two people really are the only two members of our family thatever were in the least interesting. I will tell you the story some day. "

As it was, the story was told to me by Oke himself. The next day, as wewere taking our morning walk, he suddenly broke a long silence, layingabout him all the time at the sere grasses with the hooked stick that hecarried, like the conscientious Kentishman he was, for the purpose ofcutting down his and other folk's thistles. 

"I fear you must have thought me very ill-mannered towards my wifeyesterday, " he said shyly; "and indeed I know I was. "

Oke was one of those chivalrous beings to whom every woman, every wife--andhis own most of all--appeared in the light of something holy. "But--but--Ihave a prejudice which my wife does not enter into, about raking up uglythings in one's own family. I suppose Alice thinks that it is so long agothat it has really got no connection with us; she thinks of it merely as apicturesque story. I daresay many people feel like that; in short, I amsure they do, otherwise there wouldn't be such lots of discreditable familytraditions afloat. But I feel as if it were all one whether it was long agoor not; when it's a question of one's own people, I would rather have itforgotten. I can't understand how people can talk about murders in theirfamilies, and ghosts, and so forth. "

"Have you any ghosts at Okehurst, by the way?" I asked. The place seemed asif it required some to complete it. 

"I hope not, " answered Oke gravely. 

His gravity made me smile. 

"Why, would you dislike it if there were?" I asked. 

"If there are such things as ghosts, " he replied, "I don't think theyshould be taken lightly. God would not permit them to be, except as awarning or a punishment. "

We walked on some time in silence, I wondering at the strange type of thiscommonplace young man, and half wishing I could put something into myportrait that should be the equivalent of this curious unimaginativeearnestness. Then Oke told me the story of those two pictures--told it meabout as badly and hesitatingly as was possible for mortal man. 

He and his wife were, as I have said, cousins, and therefore descended fromthe same old Kentish stock. The Okes of Okehurst could trace back toNorman, almost to Saxon times, far longer than any of the titled orbetter-known families of the neighbourhood. I saw that William Oke, in hisheart, thoroughly looked down upon all his neighbours. "We have never doneanything particular, or been anything particular--never held any office, "he said; "but we have always been here, and apparently always done ourduty. An ancestor of ours was killed in the Scotch wars, another atAgincourt--mere honest captains. " Well, early in the seventeenth century, the family had dwindled to a single member, Nicholas Oke, the same who hadrebuilt Okehurst in its present shape. This Nicholas appears to have beensomewhat different from the usual run of the family. He had, in his youth, sought adventures in America, and seems, generally speaking, to have beenless of a nonentity than his ancestors. He married, when no longer veryyoung, Alice, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, a beautiful young heiress from aneighbouring county. "It was the first time an Oke married a Pomfret, " myhost informed me, "and the last time. The Pomfrets were quite differentsort of people--restless, self-seeking; one of them had been a favourite ofHenry VIII. " It was clear that William Oke had no feeling of having anyPomfret blood in his veins; he spoke of these people with an evident familydislike--the dislike of an Oke, one of the old, honourable, modest stock, which had quietly done its duty, for a family of fortune-seekers and Courtminions. Well, there had come to live near Okehurst, in a little houserecently inherited from an uncle, a certain Christopher Lovelock, a younggallant and poet, who was in momentary disgrace at Court for some loveaffair. This Lovelock had struck up a great friendship with his neighboursof Okehurst--too great a friendship, apparently, with the wife, either forher husband's taste or her own. Anyhow, one evening as he was riding homealone, Lovelock had been attacked and murdered, ostensibly by highwaymen, but as was afterwards rumoured, by Nicholas Oke, accompanied by his wifedressed as a groom. No legal evidence had been got, but the tradition hadremained. "They used to tell it us when we were children, " said my host, ina hoarse voice, "and to frighten my cousin--I mean my wife--and me withstories about Lovelock. It is merely a tradition, which I hope may die out, as I sincerely pray to heaven that it may be false. " "Alice--Mrs. Oke--yousee, " he went on after some time, "doesn't feel about it as I do. Perhaps Iam morbid. But I do dislike having the old story raked up. "

And we said no more on the subject. 

4

From that moment I began to assume a certain interest in the eyes of Mrs. Oke; or rather, I began to perceive that I had a means of securing herattention. Perhaps it was wrong of me to do so; and I have often reproachedmyself very seriously later on. But after all, how was I to guess that Iwas making mischief merely by chiming in, for the sake of the portrait Ihad undertaken, and of a very harmless psychological mania, with what wasmerely the fad, the little romantic affectation or eccentricity, of ascatter-brained and eccentric young woman? How in the world should I havedreamed that I was handling explosive substances? A man is surely notresponsible if the people with whom he is forced to deal, and whom he dealswith as with all the rest of the world, are quite different from all otherhuman creatures. 

So, if indeed I did at all conduce to mischief, I really cannot blamemyself. I had met in Mrs. Oke an almost unique subject for aportrait-painter of my particular sort, and a most singular, _bizarre_personality. I could not possibly do my subject justice so long as I waskept at a distance, prevented from studying the real character of thewoman. I required to put her into play. And I ask you whether any moreinnocent way of doing so could be found than talking to a woman, andletting her talk, about an absurd fancy she had for a couple of ancestorsof hers of the time of Charles I. , and a poet whom they hadmurdered?--particularly as I studiously respected the prejudices of myhost, and refrained from mentioning the matter, and tried to restrain Mrs. Oke from doing so, in the presence of William Oke himself. 

I had certainly guessed correctly. To resemble the Alice Oke of the year1626 was the caprice, the mania, the pose, the whatever you may call it, ofthe Alice Oke of 1880; and to perceive this resemblance was the sure way ofgaining her good graces. It was the most extraordinary craze, of all theextraordinary crazes of childless and idle women, that I had ever met; butit was more than that, it was admirably characteristic. It finished off thestrange figure of Mrs. Oke, as I saw it in my imagination--this _bizarre_creature of enigmatic, far-fetched exquisiteness--that she should have nointerest in the present, but only an eccentric passion in the past. Itseemed to give the meaning to the absent look in her eyes, to herirrelevant and far-off smile. It was like the words to a weird piece ofgipsy music, this that she, who was so different, so distant from all womenof her own time, should try and identify herself with a woman of thepast--that she should have a kind of flirtation--But of this anon. 

I told Mrs. Oke that I had learnt from her husband the outline of thetragedy, or mystery, whichever it was, of Alice Oke, daughter of VirgilPomfret, and the poet Christopher Lovelock. That look of vague contempt, ofa desire to shock, which I had noticed before, came into her beautiful, pale, diaphanous face. 

"I suppose my husband was very shocked at the whole matter, " shesaid--"told it you with as little detail as possible, and assured youvery solemnly that he hoped the whole story might be a mere dreadfulcalumny? Poor Willie! I remember already when we were children, and Iused to come with my mother to spend Christmas at Okehurst, and my cousinwas down here for his holidays, how I used to horrify him by insistingupon dressing up in shawls and waterproofs, and playing the story of thewicked Mrs. Oke; and he always piously refused to do the part of Nicholas, when I wanted to have the scene on Cotes Common. I didn't know then that Iwas like the original Alice Oke; I found it out only after our marriage. You really think that I am?"

She certainly was, particularly at that moment, as she stood in a whiteVandyck dress, with the green of the park-land rising up behind her, andthe low sun catching her short locks and surrounding her head, herexquisitely bowed head, with a pale-yellow halo. But I confess I thoughtthe original Alice Oke, siren and murderess though she might be, veryuninteresting compared with this wayward and exquisite creature whom I hadrashly promised myself to send down to posterity in all her unlikelywayward exquisiteness. 

One morning while Mr. Oke was despatching his Saturday heap of Conservativemanifestoes and rural decisions--he was justice of the peace in a mostliteral sense, penetrating into cottages and huts, defending the weak andadmonishing the ill-conducted--one morning while I was making one of mymany pencil-sketches (alas, they are all that remain to me now!) of myfuture sitter, Mrs. Oke gave me her version of the story of Alice Oke andChristopher Lovelock. 

"Do you suppose there was anything between them?" I asked--"that she wasever in love with him? How do you explain the part which tradition ascribesto her in the supposed murder? One has heard of women and their lovers whohave killed the husband; but a woman who combines with her husband to killher lover, or at least the man who is in love with her--that is surely verysingular. " I was absorbed in my drawing, and really thinking very little ofwhat I was saying. 

"I don't know, " she answered pensively, with that distant look in her eyes. "Alice Oke was very proud, I am sure. She may have loved the poet verymuch, and yet been indignant with him, hated having to love him. She mayhave felt that she had a right to rid herself of him, and to call upon herhusband to help her to do so. "

"Good heavens! what a fearful idea!" I exclaimed, half laughing. "Don't youthink, after all, that Mr. Oke may be right in saying that it is easier andmore comfortable to take the whole story as a pure invention?"

"I cannot take it as an invention, " answered Mrs. Oke contemptuously, "because I happen to know that it is true. "

"Indeed!" I answered, working away at my sketch, and enjoying putting thisstrange creature, as I said to myself, through her paces; "how is that?"

"How does one know that anything is true in this world?" she repliedevasively; "because one does, because one feels it to be true, I suppose. "

And, with that far-off look in her light eyes, she relapsed into silence. 

"Have you ever read any of Lovelock's poetry?" she asked me suddenly thenext day. 

"Lovelock?" I answered, for I had forgotten the name. "Lovelock, who"--But I stopped, remembering the prejudices of my host, who wasseated next to me at table. 

"Lovelock who was killed by Mr. Oke's and my ancestors. "

And she looked full at her husband, as if in perverse enjoyment of theevident annoyance which it caused him. 

"Alice, " he entreated in a low voice, his whole face crimson, "for mercy'ssake, don't talk about such things before the servants. "

Mrs. Oke burst into a high, light, rather hysterical laugh, the laugh of anaughty child. 

"The servants! Gracious heavens! do you suppose they haven't heard thestory? Why, it's as well known as Okehurst itself in the neighbourhood. Don't they believe that Lovelock has been seen about the house? Haven'tthey all heard his footsteps in the big corridor? Haven't they, my dearWillie, noticed a thousand times that you never will stay a minute alone inthe yellow drawing-room--that you run out of it, like a child, if I happento leave you there for a minute?"

True! How was it I had not noticed that? or rather, that I only nowremembered having noticed it? The yellow drawing-room was one of the mostcharming rooms in the house: a large, bright room, hung with yellow damaskand panelled with carvings, that opened straight out on to the lawn, farsuperior to the room in which we habitually sat, which was comparativelygloomy. This time Mr. Oke struck me as really too childish. I felt anintense desire to badger him. 

"The yellow drawing-room!" I exclaimed. "Does this interesting literarycharacter haunt the yellow drawing-room? Do tell me about it. What happenedthere?"

Mr. Oke made a painful effort to laugh. 

"Nothing ever happened there, so far as I know, " he said, and rose from thetable. 

"Really?" I asked incredulously. 

"Nothing did happen there, " answered Mrs. Oke slowly, playing mechanicallywith a fork, and picking out the pattern of the tablecloth. "That is justthe extraordinary circumstance, that, so far as any one knows, nothing everdid happen there; and yet that room has an evil reputation. No member ofour family, they say, can bear to sit there alone for more than a minute. You see, William evidently cannot. "

"Have you ever seen or heard anything strange there?" I asked of my host. 

He shook his head. "Nothing, " he answered curtly, and lit his cigar. 

"I presume you have not, " I asked, half laughing, of Mrs. Oke, "since youdon't mind sitting in that room for hours alone? How do you explain thisuncanny reputation, since nothing ever happened there?"

"Perhaps something is destined to happen there in the future, " sheanswered, in her absent voice. And then she suddenly added, "Suppose youpaint my portrait in that room?"

Mr. Oke suddenly turned round. He was very white, and looked as if he weregoing to say something, but desisted. 

"Why do you worry Mr. Oke like that?" I asked, when he had gone into hissmoking-room with his usual bundle of papers. "It is very cruel of you, Mrs. Oke. You ought to have more consideration for people who believe insuch things, although you may not be able to put yourself in their frame ofmind. "

"Who tells you that I don't believe in _such things_, as you call them?"she answered abruptly. 

"Come, " she said, after a minute, "I want to show you why I believe inChristopher Lovelock. Come with me into the yellow room. "

5

What Mrs. Oke showed me in the yellow room was a large bundle of papers, some printed and some manuscript, but all of them brown with age, which shetook out of an old Italian ebony inlaid cabinet. It took her some time toget them, as a complicated arrangement of double locks and false drawershad to be put in play; and while she was doing so, I looked round the room, in which I had been only three or four times before. It was certainly themost beautiful room in this beautiful house, and, as it seemed to me now, the most strange. It was long and low, with something that made you thinkof the cabin of a ship, with a great mullioned window that let in, as itwere, a perspective of the brownish green park-land, dotted with oaks, andsloping upwards to the distant line of bluish firs against the horizon. Thewalls were hung with flowered damask, whose yellow, faded to brown, unitedwith the reddish colour of the carved wainscoting and the carved oakenbeams. For the rest, it reminded me more of an Italian room than an Englishone. The furniture was Tuscan of the early seventeenth century, inlaid andcarved; there were a couple of faded allegorical pictures, by someBolognese master, on the walls; and in a corner, among a stack of dwarforange-trees, a little Italian harpsichord of exquisite curve andslenderness, with flowers and landscapes painted upon its cover. In arecess was a shelf of old books, mainly English and Italian poets of theElizabethan time; and close by it, placed upon a carved wedding-chest, alarge and beautiful melon-shaped lute. The panes of the mullioned windowwere open, and yet the air seemed heavy, with an indescribable headyperfume, not that of any growing flower, but like that of old stuff thatshould have lain for years among spices. 

"It is a beautiful room!" I exclaimed. "I should awfully like to paint youin it"; but I had scarcely spoken the words when I felt I had done wrong. This woman's husband could not bear the room, and it seemed to me vaguelyas if he were right in detesting it. 

Mrs. Oke took no notice of my exclamation, but beckoned me to the tablewhere she was standing sorting the papers. 

"Look!" she said, "these are all poems by Christopher Lovelock"; andtouching the yellow papers with delicate and reverent fingers, shecommenced reading some of them out loud in a slow, half-audible voice. Theywere songs in the style of those of Herrick, Waller, and Drayton, complaining for the most part of the cruelty of a lady called Dryope, inwhose name was evidently concealed a reference to that of the mistress ofOkehurst. The songs were graceful, and not without a certain faded passion:but I was thinking not of them, but of the woman who was reading them tome. 

Mrs. Oke was standing with the brownish yellow wall as a background to herwhite brocade dress, which, in its stiff seventeenth-century make, seemedbut to bring out more clearly the slightness, the exquisite suppleness, ofher tall figure. She held the papers in one hand, and leaned the other, asif for support, on the inlaid cabinet by her side. Her voice, which wasdelicate, shadowy, like her person, had a curious throbbing cadence, as ifshe were reading the words of a melody, and restraining herself withdifficulty from singing it; and as she read, her long slender throatthrobbed slightly, and a faint redness came into her thin face. Sheevidently knew the verses by heart, and her eyes were mostly fixed withthat distant smile in them, with which harmonised a constant tremulouslittle smile in her lips. 

"That is how I would wish to paint her!" I exclaimed within myself; andscarcely noticed, what struck me on thinking over the scene, that thisstrange being read these verses as one might fancy a woman would readlove-verses addressed to herself. 

"Those are all written for Alice Oke--Alice the daughter of VirgilPomfret, " she said slowly, folding up the papers. "I found them at thebottom of this cabinet. Can you doubt of the reality of ChristopherLovelock now?"

The question was an illogical one, for to doubt of the existence ofChristopher Lovelock was one thing, and to doubt of the mode of his deathwas another; but somehow I did feel convinced. 

"Look!" she said, when she had replaced the poems, "I will show yousomething else. " Among the flowers that stood on the upper storey of herwriting-table--for I found that Mrs. Oke had a writing-table in the yellowroom--stood, as on an altar, a small black carved frame, with a silkcurtain drawn over it: the sort of thing behind which you would haveexpected to find a head of Christ or of the Virgin Mary. She drew thecurtain and displayed a large-sized miniature, representing a young man, with auburn curls and a peaked auburn beard, dressed in black, but withlace about his neck, and large pear-shaped pearls in his ears: a wistful, melancholy face. Mrs. Oke took the miniature religiously off its stand, andshowed me, written in faded characters upon the back, the name "ChristopherLovelock, " and the date 1626. 

"I found this in the secret drawer of that cabinet, together with the heapof poems, " she said, taking the miniature out of my hand. 

I was silent for a minute. 

"Does--does Mr. Oke know that you have got it here?" I asked; and thenwondered what in the world had impelled me to put such a question. 

Mrs. Oke smiled that smile of contemptuous indifference. "I have neverhidden it from any one. If my husband disliked my having it, he might havetaken it away, I suppose. It belongs to him, since it was found in hishouse. "

I did not answer, but walked mechanically towards the door. There wassomething heady and oppressive in this beautiful room; something, Ithought, almost repulsive in this exquisite woman. She seemed to me, suddenly, perverse and dangerous. 

I scarcely know why, but I neglected Mrs. Oke that afternoon. I went to Mr. Oke's study, and sat opposite to him smoking while he was engrossed in hisaccounts, his reports, and electioneering papers. On the table, above theheap of paper-bound volumes and pigeon-holed documents, was, as soleornament of his den, a little photograph of his wife, done some yearsbefore. I don't know why, but as I sat and watched him, with his florid, honest, manly beauty, working away conscientiously, with that littleperplexed frown of his, I felt intensely sorry for this man. 

But this feeling did not last. There was no help for it: Oke was not asinteresting as Mrs. Oke; and it required too great an effort to pump upsympathy for this normal, excellent, exemplary young squire, in thepresence of so wonderful a creature as his wife. So I let myself go to thehabit of allowing Mrs. Oke daily to talk over her strange craze, or ratherof drawing her out about it. I confess that I derived a morbid andexquisite pleasure in doing so: it was so characteristic in her, soappropriate to the house! It completed her personality so perfectly, andmade it so much easier to conceive a way of painting her. I made up my mindlittle by little, while working at William Oke's portrait (he proved a lesseasy subject than I had anticipated, and, despite his conscientiousefforts, was a nervous, uncomfortable sitter, silent and brooding)--I madeup my mind that I would paint Mrs. Oke standing by the cabinet in theyellow room, in the white Vandyck dress copied from the portrait of herancestress. Mr. Oke might resent it, Mrs. Oke even might resent it; theymight refuse to take the picture, to pay for it, to allow me to exhibit;they might force me to run my umbrella through the picture. No matter. Thatpicture should be painted, if merely for the sake of having painted it; forI felt it was the only thing I could do, and that it would be far away mybest work. I told neither of my resolution, but prepared sketch aftersketch of Mrs. Oke, while continuing to paint her husband. 

Mrs. Oke was a silent person, more silent even than her husband, for shedid not feel bound, as he did, to attempt to entertain a guest or to showany interest in him. She seemed to spend her life--a curious, inactive, half-invalidish life, broken by sudden fits of childish cheerfulness--in aneternal daydream, strolling about the house and grounds, arranging thequantities of flowers that always filled all the rooms, beginning to readand then throwing aside novels and books of poetry, of which she always hada large number; and, I believe, lying for hours, doing nothing, on a couchin that yellow drawing-room, which, with her sole exception, no member ofthe Oke family had ever been known to stay in alone. Little by little Ibegan to suspect and to verify another eccentricity of this eccentricbeing, and to understand why there were stringent orders never to disturbher in that yellow room. 

It had been a habit at Okehurst, as at one or two other Englishmanor-houses, to keep a certain amount of the clothes of each generation, more particularly wedding dresses. A certain carved oaken press, of whichMr. Oke once displayed the contents to me, was a perfect museum ofcostumes, male and female, from the early years of the seventeenth to theend of the eighteenth century--a thing to take away the breath of a_bric-a-brac_ collector, an antiquary, or a _genre_ painter. Mr. Oke wasnone of these, and therefore took but little interest in the collection, save in so far as it interested his family feeling. Still he seemed wellacquainted with the contents of that press. 

He was turning over the clothes for my benefit, when suddenly I noticedthat he frowned. I know not what impelled me to say, "By the way, have youany dresses of that Mrs. Oke whom your wife resembles so much? Have you gotthat particular white dress she was painted in, perhaps?"

Oke of Okehurst flushed very red. 

"We have it, " he answered hesitatingly, "but--it isn't here at present--Ican't find it. I suppose, " he blurted out with an effort, "that Alice hasgot it. Mrs. Oke sometimes has the fancy of having some of these old thingsdown. I suppose she takes ideas from them. "

A sudden light dawned in my mind. The white dress in which I had seen Mrs. Oke in the yellow room, the day that she showed me Lovelock's verses, wasnot, as I had thought, a modern copy; it was the original dress of AliceOke, the daughter of Virgil Pomfret--the dress in which, perhaps, Christopher Lovelock had seen her in that very room. 

The idea gave me a delightful picturesque shudder. I said nothing. But Ipictured to myself Mrs. Oke sitting in that yellow room--that room which noOke of Okehurst save herself ventured to remain in alone, in the dress ofher ancestress, confronting, as it were, that vague, haunting somethingthat seemed to fill the place--that vague presence, it seemed to me, of themurdered cavalier poet. 

Mrs. Oke, as I have said, was extremely silent, as a result of beingextremely indifferent. She really did not care in the least about anythingexcept her own ideas and day-dreams, except when, every now and then, shewas seized with a sudden desire to shock the prejudices or superstitions ofher husband. Very soon she got into the way of never talking to me at all, save about Alice and Nicholas Oke and Christopher Lovelock; and then, whenthe fit seized her, she would go on by the hour, never asking herselfwhether I was or was not equally interested in the strange craze thatfascinated her. It so happened that I was. I loved to listen to her, goingon discussing by the hour the merits of Lovelock's poems, and analysing herfeelings and those of her two ancestors. It was quite wonderful to watchthe exquisite, exotic creature in one of these moods, with the distant lookin her grey eyes and the absent-looking smile in her thin cheeks, talkingas if she had intimately known these people of the seventeenth century, discussing every minute mood of theirs, detailing every scene between themand their victim, talking of Alice, and Nicholas, and Lovelock as she mightof her most intimate friends. Of Alice particularly, and of Lovelock. Sheseemed to know every word that Alice had spoken, every idea that hadcrossed her mind. It sometimes struck me as if she were telling me, speaking of herself in the third person, of her own feelings--as if I werelistening to a woman's confidences, the recital of her doubts, scruples, and agonies about a living lover. For Mrs. Oke, who seemed the mostself-absorbed of creatures in all other matters, and utterly incapable ofunderstanding or sympathising with the feelings of other persons, enteredcompletely and passionately into the feelings of this woman, this Alice, who, at some moments, seemed to be not another woman, but herself. 

"But how could she do it--how could she kill the man she cared for?" I onceasked her. 

"Because she loved him more than the whole world!" she exclaimed, andrising suddenly from her chair, walked towards the window, covering herface with her hands. 

I could see, from the movement of her neck, that she was sobbing. She didnot turn round, but motioned me to go away. 

"Don't let us talk any more about it, " she said. "I am ill to-day, andsilly. "

I closed the door gently behind me. What mystery was there in this woman'slife? This listlessness, this strange self-engrossment and stranger maniaabout people long dead, this indifference and desire to annoy towards herhusband--did it all mean that Alice Oke had loved or still loved some onewho was not the master of Okehurst? And his melancholy, his preoccupation, the something about him that told of a broken youth--did it mean that heknew it?

6

The following days Mrs. Oke was in a condition of quite unusual goodspirits. Some visitors--distant relatives--were expected, and although shehad expressed the utmost annoyance at the idea of their coming, she was nowseized with a fit of housekeeping activity, and was perpetually aboutarranging things and giving orders, although all arrangements, as usual, had been made, and all orders given, by her husband. 

William Oke was quite radiant. 

"If only Alice were always well like this!" he exclaimed; "if only shewould take, or could take, an interest in life, how different things wouldbe! But, " he added, as if fearful lest he should be supposed to accuse herin any way, "how can she, usually, with her wretched health? Still, it doesmake me awfully happy to see her like this. "

I nodded. But I cannot say that I really acquiesced in his views. It seemedto me, particularly with the recollection of yesterday's extraordinaryscene, that Mrs. Oke's high spirits were anything but normal. There wassomething in her unusual activity and still more unusual cheerfulness thatwas merely nervous and feverish; and I had, the whole day, the impressionof dealing with a woman who was ill and who would very speedily collapse. 

Mrs. Oke spent her day wandering from one room to another, and from thegarden to the greenhouse, seeing whether all was in order, when, as amatter of fact, all was always in order at Okehurst. She did not giveme any sitting, and not a word was spoken about Alice Oke or ChristopherLovelock. Indeed, to a casual observer, it might have seemed as if allthat craze about Lovelock had completely departed, or never existed. About five o'clock, as I was strolling among the red-brick round-gabledouthouses--each with its armorial oak--and the old-fashioned spallieredkitchen and fruit garden, I saw Mrs. Oke standing, her hands full of Yorkand Lancaster roses, upon the steps facing the stables. A groom wascurrycombing a horse, and outside the coach-house was Mr. Oke's littlehigh-wheeled cart. 

"Let us have a drive!" suddenly exclaimed Mrs. Oke, on seeing me. "Lookwhat a beautiful evening--and look at that dear little cart! It is so longsince I have driven, and I feel as if I must drive again. Come with me. Andyou, harness Jim at once and come round to the door. "

I was quite amazed; and still more so when the cart drove up before thedoor, and Mrs. Oke called to me to accompany her. She sent away the groom, and in a minute we were rolling along, at a tremendous pace, along theyellow-sand road, with the sere pasture-lands, the big oaks, on eitherside. 

I could scarcely believe my senses. This woman, in her mannish little coatand hat, driving a powerful young horse with the utmost skill, andchattering like a school-girl of sixteen, could not be the delicate, morbid, exotic, hot-house creature, unable to walk or to do anything, whospent her days lying about on couches in the heavy atmosphere, redolentwith strange scents and associations, of the yellow drawing-room. Themovement of the light carriage, the cool draught, the very grind of thewheels upon the gravel, seemed to go to her head like wine. 

"It is so long since I have done this sort of thing, " she kept repeating;"so long, so long. Oh, don't you think it delightful, going at this pace, with the idea that any moment the horse may come down and we two bekilled?" and she laughed her childish laugh, and turned her face, no longerpale, but flushed with the movement and the excitement, towards me. 

The cart rolled on quicker and quicker, one gate after another swinging tobehind us, as we flew up and down the little hills, across the pasturelands, through the little red-brick gabled villages, where the people cameout to see us pass, past the rows of willows along the streams, and thedark-green compact hop-fields, with the blue and hazy tree-tops of thehorizon getting bluer and more hazy as the yellow light began to graze theground. At last we got to an open space, a high-lying piece of common-land, such as is rare in that ruthlessly utilised country of grazing-grounds andhop-gardens. Among the low hills of the Weald, it seemed quitepreternaturally high up, giving a sense that its extent of flat heather andgorse, bound by distant firs, was really on the top of the world. The sunwas setting just opposite, and its lights lay flat on the ground, stainingit with the red and black of the heather, or rather turning it into thesurface of a purple sea, canopied over by a bank of dark-purple clouds--thejet-like sparkle of the dry ling and gorse tipping the purple like sunlitwavelets. A cold wind swept in our faces. 

"What is the name of this place?" I asked. It was the only bit ofimpressive scenery that I had met in the neighbourhood of Okehurst. 

"It is called Cotes Common, " answered Mrs. Oke, who had slackened the paceof the horse, and let the reins hang loose about his neck. "It was herethat Christopher Lovelock was killed. "

There was a moment's pause; and then she proceeded, tickling the flies fromthe horse's ears with the end of her whip, and looking straight into thesunset, which now rolled, a deep purple stream, across the heath to ourfeet--

"Lovelock was riding home one summer evening from Appledore, when, as hehad got half-way across Cotes Common, somewhere about here--for I havealways heard them mention the pond in the old gravel-pits as about theplace--he saw two men riding towards him, in whom he presently recognisedNicholas Oke of Okehurst accompanied by a groom. Oke of Okehurst hailedhim; and Lovelock rode up to meet him. 'I am glad to have met you, Mr. Lovelock, ' said Nicholas, 'because I have some important news for you'; andso saying, he brought his horse close to the one that Lovelock was riding, and suddenly turning round, fired off a pistol at his head. Lovelock hadtime to move, and the bullet, instead of striking him, went straight intothe head of his horse, which fell beneath him. Lovelock, however, hadfallen in such a way as to be able to extricate himself easily from hishorse; and drawing his sword, he rushed upon Oke, and seized his horse bythe bridle. Oke quickly jumped off and drew his sword; and in a minute, Lovelock, who was much the better swordsman of the two, was having thebetter of him. Lovelock had completely disarmed him, and got his sword atOke's throat, crying out to him that if he would ask forgiveness he shouldbe spared for the sake of their old friendship, when the groom suddenlyrode up from behind and shot Lovelock through the back. Lovelock fell, andOke immediately tried to finish him with his sword, while the groom drew upand held the bridle of Oke's horse. At that moment the sunlight fell uponthe groom's face, and Lovelock recognised Mrs. Oke. He cried out, 'Alice, Alice! it is you who have murdered me!' and died. Then Nicholas Oke spranginto his saddle and rode off with his wife, leaving Lovelock dead by theside of his fallen horse. Nicholas Oke had taken the precaution of removingLovelock's purse and throwing it into the pond, so the murder was put downto certain highwaymen who were about in that part of the country. Alice Okedied many years afterwards, quite an old woman, in the reign of CharlesII. ; but Nicholas did not live very long, and shortly before his death gotinto a very strange condition, always brooding, and sometimes threateningto kill his wife. They say that in one of these fits, just shortly beforehis death, he told the whole story of the murder, and made a prophecy thatwhen the head of his house and master of Okehurst should marry anotherAlice Oke descended from himself and his wife, there should be an endof the Okes of Okehurst. You see, it seems to be coming true. We have nochildren, and I don't suppose we shall ever have any. I, at least, havenever wished for them. "

Mrs. Oke paused, and turned her face towards me with the absent smile inher thin cheeks: her eyes no longer had that distant look; they werestrangely eager and fixed. I did not know what to answer; this womanpositively frightened me. We remained for a moment in that same place, withthe sunlight dying away in crimson ripples on the heather, gilding theyellow banks, the black waters of the pond, surrounded by thin rushes, andthe yellow gravel-pits; while the wind blew in our faces and bent theragged warped bluish tops of the firs. Then Mrs. Oke touched the horse, andoff we went at a furious pace. We did not exchange a single word, I think, on the way home. Mrs. Oke sat with her eyes fixed on the reins, breakingthe silence now and then only by a word to the horse, urging him to an evenmore furious pace. The people we met along the roads must have thought thatthe horse was running away, unless they noticed Mrs. Oke's calm manner andthe look of excited enjoyment in her face. To me it seemed that I was inthe hands of a madwoman, and I quietly prepared myself for being upset ordashed against a cart. It had turned cold, and the draught was icy in ourfaces when we got within sight of the red gables and high chimney-stacks ofOkehurst. Mr. Oke was standing before the door. On our approach I saw alook of relieved suspense, of keen pleasure come into his face. 

He lifted his wife out of the cart in his strong arms with a kind ofchivalrous tenderness. 

"I am so glad to have you back, darling, " he exclaimed--"so glad! I wasdelighted to hear you had gone out with the cart, but as you have notdriven for so long, I was beginning to be frightfully anxious, dearest. Where have you been all this time?"

Mrs. Oke had quickly extricated herself from her husband, who had remainedholding her, as one might hold a delicate child who has been causinganxiety. The gentleness and affection of the poor fellow had evidently nottouched her--she seemed almost to recoil from it. 

"I have taken him to Cotes Common, " she said, with that perverse look whichI had noticed before, as she pulled off her driving-gloves. "It is such asplendid old place. "

Mr. Oke flushed as if he had bitten upon a sore tooth, and the double gashpainted itself scarlet between his eyebrows. 

Outside, the mists were beginning to rise, veiling the park-land dottedwith big black oaks, and from which, in the watery moonlight, rose on allsides the eerie little cry of the lambs separated from their mothers. Itwas damp and cold, and I shivered. 

7

The next day Okehurst was full of people, and Mrs. Oke, to my amazement, was doing the honours of it as if a house full of commonplace, noisy youngcreatures, bent upon flirting and tennis, were her usual idea of felicity. 

The afternoon of the third day--they had come for an electioneering ball, and stayed three nights--the weather changed; it turned suddenly very coldand began to pour. Every one was sent indoors, and there was a generalgloom suddenly over the company. Mrs. Oke seemed to have got sick of herguests, and was listlessly lying back on a couch, paying not the slightestattention to the chattering and piano-strumming in the room, when one ofthe guests suddenly proposed that they should play charades. He was adistant cousin of the Okes, a sort of fashionable artistic Bohemian, swelled out to intolerable conceit by the amateur-actor vogue of a season. 

"It would be lovely in this marvellous old place, " he cried, "just to dressup, and parade about, and feel as if we belonged to the past. I have heardyou have a marvellous collection of old costumes, more or less ever sincethe days of Noah, somewhere, Cousin Bill. "

The whole party exclaimed in joy at this proposal. William Oke lookedpuzzled for a moment, and glanced at his wife, who continued to lielistless on her sofa. 

"There is a press full of clothes belonging to the family, " he answereddubiously, apparently overwhelmed by the desire to please his guests;"but--but--I don't know whether it's quite respectful to dress up in theclothes of dead people. "

"Oh, fiddlestick!" cried the cousin. "What do the dead people know aboutit? Besides, " he added, with mock seriousness, "I assure you we shallbehave in the most reverent way and feel quite solemn about it all, if onlyyou will give us the key, old man. "

Again Mr. Oke looked towards his wife, and again met only her vague, absentglance. 

"Very well, " he said, and led his guests upstairs. 

An hour later the house was filled with the strangest crew and thestrangest noises. I had entered, to a certain extent, into William Oke'sfeeling of unwillingness to let his ancestors' clothes and personality betaken in vain; but when the masquerade was complete, I must say that theeffect was quite magnificent. A dozen youngish men and women--those whowere staying in the house and some neighbours who had come for lawn-tennisand dinner--were rigged out, under the direction of the theatrical cousin, in the contents of that oaken press: and I have never seen a more beautifulsight than the panelled corridors, the carved and escutcheoned staircase, the dim drawing-rooms with their faded tapestries, the great hall with itsvaulted and ribbed ceiling, dotted about with groups or single figures thatseemed to have come straight from the past. Even William Oke, who, besidesmyself and a few elderly people, was the only man not masqueraded, seemeddelighted and fired by the sight. A certain schoolboy character suddenlycame out in him; and finding that there was no costume left for him, herushed upstairs and presently returned in the uniform he had worn beforehis marriage. I thought I had really never seen so magnificent a specimenof the handsome Englishman; he looked, despite all the modern associationsof his costume, more genuinely old-world than all the rest, a knight forthe Black Prince or Sidney, with his admirably regular features andbeautiful fair hair and complexion. After a minute, even the elderly peoplehad got costumes of some sort--dominoes arranged at the moment, and hoodsand all manner of disguises made out of pieces of old embroidery andOriental stuffs and furs; and very soon this rabble of masquers had become, so to speak, completely drunk with its own amusement--with thechildishness, and, if I may say so, the barbarism, the vulgarity underlyingthe majority even of well-bred English men and women--Mr. Oke himself doingthe mountebank like a schoolboy at Christmas. 

"Where is Mrs. Oke? Where is Alice?" some one suddenly asked. 

Mrs. Oke had vanished. I could fully understand that to this eccentricbeing, with her fantastic, imaginative, morbid passion for the past, such acarnival as this must be positively revolting; and, absolutely indifferentas she was to giving offence, I could imagine how she would have retired, disgusted and outraged, to dream her strange day-dreams in the yellow room. 

But a moment later, as we were all noisily preparing to go in to dinner, the door opened and a strange figure entered, stranger than any of theseothers who were profaning the clothes of the dead: a boy, slight and tall, in a brown riding-coat, leathern belt, and big buff boots, a little greycloak over one shoulder, a large grey hat slouched over the eyes, a daggerand pistol at the waist. It was Mrs. Oke, her eyes preternaturally bright, and her whole face lit up with a bold, perverse smile. 

Every one exclaimed, and stood aside. Then there was a moment's silence, broken by faint applause. Even to a crew of noisy boys and girls playingthe fool in the garments of men and women long dead and buried, there issomething questionable in the sudden appearance of a young married woman, the mistress of the house, in a riding-coat and jackboots; and Mrs. Oke'sexpression did not make the jest seem any the less questionable. 

"What is that costume?" asked the theatrical cousin, who, after a second, had come to the conclusion that Mrs. Oke was merely a woman of marvelloustalent whom he must try and secure for his amateur troop next season. 

"It is the dress in which an ancestress of ours, my namesake Alice Oke, used to go out riding with her husband in the days of Charles I. , " sheanswered, and took her seat at the head of the table. Involuntarily my eyessought those of Oke of Okehurst. He, who blushed as easily as a girl ofsixteen, was now as white as ashes, and I noticed that he pressed his handalmost convulsively to his mouth. 

"Don't you recognise my dress, William?" asked Mrs. Oke, fixing her eyesupon him with a cruel smile. 

He did not answer, and there was a moment's silence, which the theatricalcousin had the happy thought of breaking by jumping upon his seat andemptying off his glass with the exclamation--

"To the health of the two Alice Okes, of the past and the present!"

Mrs. Oke nodded, and with an expression I had never seen in her facebefore, answered in a loud and aggressive tone--

"To the health of the poet, Mr. Christopher Lovelock, if his ghost behonouring this house with its presence!"

I felt suddenly as if I were in a madhouse. Across the table, in the midstof this room full of noisy wretches, tricked out red, blue, purple, andparti-coloured, as men and women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, andeighteenth centuries, as improvised Turks and Eskimos, and dominoes, andclowns, with faces painted and corked and floured over, I seemed to seethat sanguine sunset, washing like a sea of blood over the heather, towhere, by the black pond and the wind-warped firs, there lay the body ofChristopher Lovelock, with his dead horse near him, the yellow gravel andlilac ling soaked crimson all around; and above emerged, as out of theredness, the pale blond head covered with the grey hat, the absent eyes, and strange smile of Mrs. Oke. It seemed to me horrible, vulgar, abominable, as if I had got inside a madhouse. 

8

From that moment I noticed a change in William Oke; or rather, a changethat had probably been coming on for some time got to the stage of beingnoticeable. 

I don't know whether he had any words with his wife about her masquerade ofthat unlucky evening. On the whole I decidedly think not. Oke was withevery one a diffident and reserved man, and most of all so with his wife;besides, I can fancy that he would experience a positive impossibility ofputting into words any strong feeling of disapprobation towards her, thathis disgust would necessarily be silent. But be this as it may, I perceivedvery soon that the relations between my host and hostess had becomeexceedingly strained. Mrs. Oke, indeed, had never paid much attention toher husband, and seemed merely a trifle more indifferent to his presencethan she had been before. But Oke himself, although he affected to addressher at meals from a desire to conceal his feeling, and a fear of making theposition disagreeable to me, very clearly could scarcely bear to speak toor even see his wife. The poor fellow's honest soul was quite brimful ofpain, which he was determined not to allow to overflow, and which seemed tofilter into his whole nature and poison it. This woman had shocked andpained him more than was possible to say, and yet it was evident that hecould neither cease loving her nor commence comprehending her real nature. I sometimes felt, as we took our long walks through the monotonous country, across the oak-dotted grazing-grounds, and by the brink of the dull-green, serried hop-rows, talking at rare intervals about the value of the crops, the drainage of the estate, the village schools, the Primrose League, andthe iniquities of Mr. Gladstone, while Oke of Okehurst carefully cut downevery tall thistle that caught his eye--I sometimes felt, I say, an intenseand impotent desire to enlighten this man about his wife's character. Iseemed to understand it so well, and to understand it well seemed to implysuch a comfortable acquiescence; and it seemed so unfair that just heshould be condemned to puzzle for ever over this enigma, and wear out hissoul trying to comprehend what now seemed so plain to me. But how would itever be possible to get this serious, conscientious, slow-brainedrepresentative of English simplicity and honesty and thoroughness tounderstand the mixture of self-engrossed vanity, of shallowness, of poeticvision, of love of morbid excitement, that walked this earth under the nameof Alice Oke?

So Oke of Okehurst was condemned never to understand; but he was condemnedalso to suffer from his inability to do so. The poor fellow was constantlystraining after an explanation of his wife's peculiarities; and althoughthe effort was probably unconscious, it caused him a great deal of pain. The gash--the maniac-frown, as my friend calls it--between his eyebrows, seemed to have grown a permanent feature of his face. 

Mrs. Oke, on her side, was making the very worst of the situation. Perhapsshe resented her husband's tacit reproval of that masquerade night's freak, and determined to make him swallow more of the same stuff, for she clearlythought that one of William's peculiarities, and one for which she despisedhim, was that he could never be goaded into an outspoken expression ofdisapprobation; that from her he would swallow any amount of bitternesswithout complaining. At any rate she now adopted a perfect policy ofteasing and shocking her husband about the murder of Lovelock. She wasperpetually alluding to it in her conversation, discussing in his presencewhat had or had not been the feelings of the various actors in the tragedyof 1626, and insisting upon her resemblance and almost identity with theoriginal Alice Oke. Something had suggested to her eccentric mind that itwould be delightful to perform in the garden at Okehurst, under the hugeilexes and elms, a little masque which she had discovered among ChristopherLovelock's works; and she began to scour the country and enter into vastcorrespondence for the purpose of effectuating this scheme. Letters arrivedevery other day from the theatrical cousin, whose only objection was thatOkehurst was too remote a locality for an entertainment in which he foresawgreat glory to himself. And every now and then there would arrive someyoung gentleman or lady, whom Alice Oke had sent for to see whether theywould do. 

I saw very plainly that the performance would never take place, and thatMrs. Oke herself had no intention that it ever should. She was one of thosecreatures to whom realisation of a project is nothing, and who enjoyplan-making almost the more for knowing that all will stop short at theplan. Meanwhile, this perpetual talk about the pastoral, about Lovelock, this continual attitudinising as the wife of Nicholas Oke, had the furtherattraction to Mrs. Oke of putting her husband into a condition of frightfulthough suppressed irritation, which she enjoyed with the enjoyment of aperverse child. You must not think that I looked on indifferent, although Iadmit that this was a perfect treat to an amateur student of character likemyself. I really did feel most sorry for poor Oke, and frequently quiteindignant with his wife. I was several times on the point of begging her tohave more consideration for him, even of suggesting that this kind ofbehavior, particularly before a comparative stranger like me, was very poortaste. But there was something elusive about Mrs. Oke, which made it nextto impossible to speak seriously with her; and besides, I was by no meanssure that any interference on my part would not merely animate herperversity. 

One evening a curious incident took place. We had just sat down to dinner, the Okes, the theatrical cousin, who was down for a couple of days, andthree or four neighbours. It was dusk, and the yellow light of the candlesmingled charmingly with the greyness of the evening. Mrs. Oke was not well, and had been remarkably quiet all day, more diaphanous, strange, andfar-away than ever; and her husband seemed to have felt a sudden return oftenderness, almost of compassion, for this delicate, fragile creature. Wehad been talking of quite indifferent matters, when I saw Mr. Oke suddenlyturn very white, and look fixedly for a moment at the window opposite tohis seat. 

"Who's that fellow looking in at the window, and making signs to you, Alice? Damn his impudence!" he cried, and jumping up, ran to the window, opened it, and passed out into the twilight. We all looked at each other insurprise; some of the party remarked upon the carelessness of servants inletting nasty-looking fellows hang about the kitchen, others told storiesof tramps and burglars. Mrs. Oke did not speak; but I noticed the curious, distant-looking smile in her thin cheeks. 

After a minute William Oke came in, his napkin in his hand. He shut thewindow behind him and silently resumed his place. 

"Well, who was it?" we all asked. 

"Nobody. I--I must have made a mistake, " he answered, and turned crimson, while he busily peeled a pear. 

"It was probably Lovelock, " remarked Mrs. Oke, just as she might have said, "It was probably the gardener, " but with that faint smile of pleasure stillin her face. Except the theatrical cousin, who burst into a loud laugh, none of the company had ever heard Lovelock's name, and, doubtlessimagining him to be some natural appanage of the Oke family, groom orfarmer, said nothing, so the subject dropped. 

From that evening onwards things began to assume a different aspect. Thatincident was the beginning of a perfect system--a system of what? Iscarcely know how to call it. A system of grim jokes on the part of Mrs. Oke, of superstitious fancies on the part of her husband--a system ofmysterious persecutions on the part of some less earthly tenant ofOkehurst. Well, yes, after all, why not? We have all heard of ghosts, haduncles, cousins, grandmothers, nurses, who have seen them; we are all a bitafraid of them at the bottom of our soul; so why shouldn't they be? I amtoo sceptical to believe in the impossibility of anything, for my part!

Besides, when a man has lived throughout a summer in the same house with awoman like Mrs. Oke of Okehurst, he gets to believe in the possibility of agreat many improbable things, I assure you, as a mere result of believingin her. And when you come to think of it, why not? That a weird creature, visibly not of this earth, a reincarnation of a woman who murdered herlover two centuries and a half ago, that such a creature should have thepower of attracting about her (being altogether superior to earthly lovers)the man who loved her in that previous existence, whose love for her washis death--what is there astonishing in that? Mrs. Oke herself, I feelquite persuaded, believed or half believed it; indeed she very seriouslyadmitted the possibility thereof, one day that I made the suggestion halfin jest. At all events, it rather pleased me to think so; it fitted in sowell with the woman's whole personality; it explained those hours and hoursspent all alone in the yellow room, where the very air, with its scent ofheady flowers and old perfumed stuffs, seemed redolent of ghosts. Itexplained that strange smile which was not for any of us, and yet was notmerely for herself--that strange, far-off look in the wide pale eyes. Iliked the idea, and I liked to tease, or rather to delight her with it. Howshould I know that the wretched husband would take such matters seriously?

He became day by day more silent and perplexed-looking; and, as a result, worked harder, and probably with less effect, at his land-improving schemesand political canvassing. It seemed to me that he was perpetuallylistening, watching, waiting for something to happen: a word spokensuddenly, the sharp opening of a door, would make him start, turn crimson, and almost tremble; the mention of Lovelock brought a helpless look, half aconvulsion, like that of a man overcome by great heat, into his face. Andhis wife, so far from taking any interest in his altered looks, went onirritating him more and more. Every time that the poor fellow gave one ofthose starts of his, or turned crimson at the sudden sound of a footstep, Mrs. Oke would ask him, with her contemptuous indifference, whether he hadseen Lovelock. I soon began to perceive that my host was getting perfectlyill. He would sit at meals never saying a word, with his eyes fixedscrutinisingly on his wife, as if vainly trying to solve some dreadfulmystery; while his wife, ethereal, exquisite, went on talking in herlistless way about the masque, about Lovelock, always about Lovelock. During our walks and rides, which we continued pretty regularly, he wouldstart whenever in the roads or lanes surrounding Okehurst, or in itsgrounds, we perceived a figure in the distance. I have seen him tremble atwhat, on nearer approach, I could scarcely restrain my laughter ondiscovering to be some well-known farmer or neighbour or servant. Once, aswe were returning home at dusk, he suddenly caught my arm and pointedacross the oak-dotted pastures in the direction of the garden, then startedoff almost at a run, with his dog behind him, as if in pursuit of someintruder. 

"Who was it?" I asked. And Mr. Oke merely shook his head mournfully. Sometimes in the early autumn twilights, when the white mists rose from thepark-land, and the rooks formed long black lines on the palings, I almostfancied I saw him start at the very trees and bushes, the outlines of thedistant oast-houses, with their conical roofs and projecting vanes, likegibing fingers in the half light. 

"Your husband is ill, " I once ventured to remark to Mrs. Oke, as she satfor the hundred-and-thirtieth of my preparatory sketches (I somehow couldnever get beyond preparatory sketches with her). She raised her beautiful, wide, pale eyes, making as she did so that exquisite curve of shoulders andneck and delicate pale head that I so vainly longed to reproduce. 

"I don't see it, " she answered quietly. "If he is, why doesn't he go up totown and see the doctor? It's merely one of his glum fits. "

"You should not tease him about Lovelock, " I added, very seriously. "Hewill get to believe in him. "

"Why not? If he sees him, why he sees him. He would not be the only personthat has done so"; and she smiled faintly and half perversely, as her eyessought that usual distant indefinable something. 

But Oke got worse. He was growing perfectly unstrung, like a hystericalwoman. One evening that we were sitting alone in the smoking-room, he beganunexpectedly a rambling discourse about his wife; how he had first knownher when they were children, and they had gone to the same dancing-schoolnear Portland Place; how her mother, his aunt-in-law, had brought her forChristmas to Okehurst while he was on his holidays; how finally, thirteenyears ago, when he was twenty-three and she was eighteen, they had beenmarried; how terribly he had suffered when they had been disappointed oftheir baby, and she had nearly died of the illness. 

"I did not mind about the child, you know, " he said in an excited voice;"although there will be an end of us now, and Okehurst will go to theCurtises. I minded only about Alice. " It was next to inconceivable thatthis poor excited creature, speaking almost with tears in his voice and inhis eyes, was the quiet, well-got-up, irreproachable young ex-Guardsman whohad walked into my studio a couple of months before. 

Oke was silent for a moment, looking fixedly at the rug at his feet, whenhe suddenly burst out in a scarce audible voice--

"If you knew how I cared for Alice--how I still care for her. I could kissthe ground she walks upon. I would give anything--my life any day--if onlyshe would look for two minutes as if she liked me a little--as if shedidn't utterly despise me"; and the poor fellow burst into a hystericallaugh, which was almost a sob. Then he suddenly began to laugh outright, exclaiming, with a sort of vulgarity of intonation which was extremelyforeign to him--

"Damn it, old fellow, this is a queer world we live in!" and rang for morebrandy and soda, which he was beginning, I noticed, to take pretty freelynow, although he had been almost a blue-ribbon man--as much so as ispossible for a hospitable country gentleman--when I first arrived. 

9

It became clear to me now that, incredible as it might seem, the thing thatailed William Oke was jealousy. He was simply madly in love with his wife, and madly jealous of her. Jealous--but of whom? He himself would probablyhave been quite unable to say. In the first place--to clear off anypossible suspicion--certainly not of me. Besides the fact that Mrs. Oketook only just a very little more interest in me than in the butler or theupper-housemaid, I think that Oke himself was the sort of man whoseimagination would recoil from realising any definite object of jealousy, even though jealously might be killing him inch by inch. It remained avague, permeating, continuous feeling--the feeling that he loved her, andshe did not care a jackstraw about him, and that everything with which shecame into contact was receiving some of that notice which was refused tohim--every person, or thing, or tree, or stone: it was the recognition ofthat strange far-off look in Mrs. Oke's eyes, of that strange absent smileon Mrs. Oke's lips--eyes and lips that had no look and no smile for him. 

Gradually his nervousness, his watchfulness, suspiciousness, tendency tostart, took a definite shape. Mr. Oke was for ever alluding to steps orvoices he had heard, to figures he had seen sneaking round the house. Thesudden bark of one of the dogs would make him jump up. He cleaned andloaded very carefully all the guns and revolvers in his study, and evensome of the old fowling-pieces and holster-pistols in the hall. Theservants and tenants thought that Oke of Okehurst had been seized with aterror of tramps and burglars. Mrs. Oke smiled contemptuously at all thesedoings. 

"My dear William, " she said one day, "the persons who worry you have justas good a right to walk up and down the passages and staircase, and to hangabout the house, as you or I. They were there, in all probability, longbefore either of us was born, and are greatly amused by your preposterousnotions of privacy. "

Mr. Oke laughed angrily. "I suppose you will tell me it is Lovelock--youreternal Lovelock--whose steps I hear on the gravel every night. I supposehe has as good a right to be here as you or I. " And he strode out of theroom. 

"Lovelock--Lovelock! Why will she always go on like that about Lovelock?"Mr. Oke asked me that evening, suddenly staring me in the face. 

I merely laughed. 

"It's only because she has that play of his on the brain, " I answered; "andbecause she thinks you superstitious, and likes to tease you. "

"I don't understand, " sighed Oke. 

How could he? And if I had tried to make him do so, he would merely havethought I was insulting his wife, and have perhaps kicked me out of theroom. So I made no attempt to explain psychological problems to him, and heasked me no more questions until once--But I must first mention a curiousincident that happened. 

The incident was simply this. Returning one afternoon from our usual walk, Mr. Oke suddenly asked the servant whether any one had come. The answer wasin the negative; but Oke did not seem satisfied. We had hardly sat down todinner when he turned to his wife and asked, in a strange voice which Iscarcely recognised as his own, who had called that afternoon. 

"No one, " answered Mrs. Oke; "at least to the best of my knowledge. "

William Oke looked at her fixedly. 

"No one?" he repeated, in a scrutinising tone; "no one, Alice?"

Mrs. Oke shook her head. "No one, " she replied. 

There was a pause. 

"Who was it, then, that was walking with you near the pond, about fiveo'clock?" asked Oke slowly. 

His wife lifted her eyes straight to his and answered contemptuously--

"No one was walking with me near the pond, at five o'clock or any otherhour. "

Mr. Oke turned purple, and made a curious hoarse noise like a man choking. 

"I--I thought I saw you walking with a man this afternoon, Alice, " hebrought out with an effort; adding, for the sake of appearances before me, "I thought it might have been the curate come with that report for me. "

Mrs. Oke smiled. 

"I can only repeat that no living creature has been near me thisafternoon, " she said slowly. "If you saw any one with me, it must have beenLovelock, for there certainly was no one else. "

And she gave a little sigh, like a person trying to reproduce in her mindsome delightful but too evanescent impression. 

I looked at my host; from crimson his face had turned perfectly livid, andhe breathed as if some one were squeezing his windpipe. 

No more was said about the matter. I vaguely felt that a great danger wasthreatening. To Oke or to Mrs. Oke? I could not tell which; but I was awareof an imperious inner call to avert some dreadful evil, to exert myself, toexplain, to interpose. I determined to speak to Oke the following day, forI trusted him to give me a quiet hearing, and I did not trust Mrs. Oke. That woman would slip through my fingers like a snake if I attempted tograsp her elusive character. 

I asked Oke whether he would take a walk with me the next afternoon, and heaccepted to do so with a curious eagerness. We started about three o'clock. It was a stormy, chilly afternoon, with great balls of white clouds rollingrapidly in the cold blue sky, and occasional lurid gleams of sunlight, broad and yellow, which made the black ridge of the storm, gathered on thehorizon, look blue-black like ink. 

We walked quickly across the sere and sodden grass of the park, and on tothe highroad that led over the low hills, I don't know why, in thedirection of Cotes Common. Both of us were silent, for both of us hadsomething to say, and did not know how to begin. For my part, I recognisedthe impossibility of starting the subject: an uncalled-for interferencefrom me would merely indispose Mr. Oke, and make him doubly dense ofcomprehension. So, if Oke had something to say, which he evidently had, itwas better to wait for him. 

Oke, however, broke the silence only by pointing out to me the condition ofthe hops, as we passed one of his many hop-gardens. "It will be a pooryear, " he said, stopping short and looking intently before him--"no hops atall. No hops this autumn. "

I looked at him. It was clear that he had no notion what he was saying. Thedark-green bines were covered with fruit; and only yesterday he himself hadinformed me that he had not seen such a profusion of hops for many years. 

I did not answer, and we walked on. A cart met us in a dip of the road, andthe carter touched his hat and greeted Mr. Oke. But Oke took no heed; hedid not seem to be aware of the man's presence. 

The clouds were collecting all round; black domes, among which coursed theround grey masses of fleecy stuff. 

"I think we shall be caught in a tremendous storm, " I said; "hadn't webetter be turning?" He nodded, and turned sharp round. 

The sunlight lay in yellow patches under the oaks of the pasture-lands, andburnished the green hedges. The air was heavy and yet cold, and everythingseemed preparing for a great storm. The rooks whirled in black clouds roundthe trees and the conical red caps of the oast-houses which give thatcountry the look of being studded with turreted castles; then theydescended--a black line--upon the fields, with what seemed an unearthlyloudness of caw. And all round there arose a shrill quavering bleating oflambs and calling of sheep, while the wind began to catch the topmostbranches of the trees. 

Suddenly Mr. Oke broke the silence. 

"I don't know you very well, " he began hurriedly, and without turning hisface towards me; "but I think you are honest, and you have seen a good dealof the world--much more than I. I want you to tell me--but truly, please--what do you think a man should do if"--and he stopped for someminutes. 

"Imagine, " he went on quickly, "that a man cares a great deal--a very greatdeal for his wife, and that he finds out that she--well, that--that she isdeceiving him. No--don't misunderstand me; I mean--that she is constantlysurrounded by some one else and will not admit it--some one whom she hidesaway. Do you understand? Perhaps she does not know all the risk she isrunning, you know, but she will not draw back--she will not avow it to herhusband"--

"My dear Oke, " I interrupted, attempting to take the matter lightly, "theseare questions that can't be solved in the abstract, or by people to whomthe thing has not happened. And it certainly has not happened to you orme. "

Oke took no notice of my interruption. "You see, " he went on, "the mandoesn't expect his wife to care much about him. It's not that; he isn'tmerely jealous, you know. But he feels that she is on the brink ofdishonouring herself--because I don't think a woman can really dishonourher husband; dishonour is in our own hands, and depends only on our ownacts. He ought to save her, do you see? He must, must save her, in one wayor another. But if she will not listen to him, what can he do? Must he seekout the other one, and try and get him out of the way? You see it's all thefault of the other--not hers, not hers. If only she would trust in herhusband, she would be safe. But that other one won't let her. "

"Look here, Oke, " I said boldly, but feeling rather frightened; "I knowquite well what you are talking about. And I see you don't understand thematter in the very least. I do. I have watched you and watched Mrs. Okethese six weeks, and I see what is the matter. Will you listen to me?"

And taking his arm, I tried to explain to him my view of thesituation--that his wife was merely eccentric, and a little theatrical andimaginative, and that she took a pleasure in teasing him. That he, on theother hand, was letting himself get into a morbid state; that he was ill, and ought to see a good doctor. I even offered to take him to town with me. 

I poured out volumes of psychological explanations. I dissected Mrs. Oke'scharacter twenty times over, and tried to show him that there wasabsolutely nothing at the bottom of his suspicions beyond an imaginative_pose_ and a garden-play on the brain. I adduced twenty instances, mostlyinvented for the nonce, of ladies of my acquaintance who had suffered fromsimilar fads. I pointed out to him that his wife ought to have an outletfor her imaginative and theatrical over-energy. I advised him to take herto London and plunge her into some set where every one should be more orless in a similar condition. I laughed at the notion of there being anyhidden individual about the house. I explained to Oke that he was sufferingfrom delusions, and called upon so conscientious and religious a man totake every step to rid himself of them, adding innumerable examples ofpeople who had cured themselves of seeing visions and of brooding overmorbid fancies. I struggled and wrestled, like Jacob with the angel, and Ireally hoped I had made some impression. At first, indeed, I felt that notone of my words went into the man's brain--that, though silent, he was notlistening. It seemed almost hopeless to present my views in such a lightthat he could grasp them. I felt as if I were expounding and arguing at arock. But when I got on to the tack of his duty towards his wife andhimself, and appealed to his moral and religious notions, I felt that I wasmaking an impression. 

"I daresay you are right, " he said, taking my hand as we came in sight ofthe red gables of Okehurst, and speaking in a weak, tired, humble voice. "Idon't understand you quite, but I am sure what you say is true. I daresayit is all that I'm seedy. I feel sometimes as if I were mad, and just fitto be locked up. But don't think I don't struggle against it. I do, I docontinually, only sometimes it seems too strong for me. I pray God nightand morning to give me the strength to overcome my suspicions, or to removethese dreadful thoughts from me. God knows, I know what a wretched creatureI am, and how unfit to take care of that poor girl. "

And Oke again pressed my hand. As we entered the garden, he turned to meonce more. 

"I am very, very grateful to you, " he said, "and, indeed, I will do my bestto try and be stronger. If only, " he added, with a sigh, "if only Alicewould give me a moment's breathing-time, and not go on day after daymocking me with her Lovelock. "

10

I had begun Mrs. Oke's portrait, and she was giving me a sitting. She wasunusually quiet that morning; but, it seemed to me, with the quietness of awoman who is expecting something, and she gave me the impression of beingextremely happy. She had been reading, at my suggestion, the "Vita Nuova, "which she did not know before, and the conversation came to roll upon that, and upon the question whether love so abstract and so enduring was apossibility. Such a discussion, which might have savoured of flirtation inthe case of almost any other young and beautiful woman, became in the caseof Mrs. Oke something quite different; it seemed distant, intangible, notof this earth, like her smile and the look in her eyes. 

"Such love as that, " she said, looking into the far distance of theoak-dotted park-land, "is very rare, but it can exist. It becomes aperson's whole existence, his whole soul; and it can survive the death, notmerely of the beloved, but of the lover. It is unextinguishable, and goeson in the spiritual world until it meet a reincarnation of the beloved; andwhen this happens, it jets out and draws to it all that may remain of thatlover's soul, and takes shape and surrounds the beloved one once more. "

Mrs. Oke was speaking slowly, almost to herself, and I had never, I think, seen her look so strange and so beautiful, the stiff white dress bringingout but the more the exotic exquisiteness and incorporealness of herperson. 

I did not know what to answer, so I said half in jest--

"I fear you have been reading too much Buddhist literature, Mrs. Oke. Thereis something dreadfully esoteric in all you say. "

She smiled contemptuously. 

"I know people can't understand such matters, " she replied, and was silentfor some time. But, through her quietness and silence, I felt, as it were, the throb of a strange excitement in this woman, almost as if I had beenholding her pulse. 

Still, I was in hopes that things might be beginning to go better inconsequence of my interference. Mrs. Oke had scarcely once alluded toLovelock in the last two or three days; and Oke had been much more cheerfuland natural since our conversation. He no longer seemed so worried; andonce or twice I had caught in him a look of great gentleness andloving-kindness, almost of pity, as towards some young and very frailthing, as he sat opposite his wife. 

But the end had come. After that sitting Mrs. Oke had complained of fatigueand retired to her room, and Oke had driven off on some business to thenearest town. I felt all alone in the big house, and after having worked alittle at a sketch I was making in the park, I amused myself rambling aboutthe house. 

It was a warm, enervating, autumn afternoon: the kind of weather thatbrings the perfume out of everything, the damp ground and fallen leaves, the flowers in the jars, the old woodwork and stuffs; that seems to bringon to the surface of one's consciousness all manner of vague recollectionsand expectations, a something half pleasurable, half painful, that makes itimpossible to do or to think. I was the prey of this particular, not at allunpleasurable, restlessness. I wandered up and down the corridors, stoppingto look at the pictures, which I knew already in every detail, to followthe pattern of the carvings and old stuffs, to stare at the autumn flowers, arranged in magnificent masses of colour in the big china bowls and jars. Itook up one book after another and threw it aside; then I sat down to thepiano and began to play irrelevant fragments. I felt quite alone, althoughI had heard the grind of the wheels on the gravel, which meant that my hosthad returned. I was lazily turning over a book of verses--I remember itperfectly well, it was Morris's "Love is Enough"--in a corner of thedrawing-room, when the door suddenly opened and William Oke showed himself. He did not enter, but beckoned to me to come out to him. There wassomething in his face that made me start up and follow him at once. He wasextremely quiet, even stiff, not a muscle of his face moving, but verypale. 

"I have something to show you, " he said, leading me through the vaultedhall, hung round with ancestral pictures, into the gravelled space thatlooked like a filled-up moat, where stood the big blasted oak, with itstwisted, pointing branches. I followed him on to the lawn, or rather thepiece of park-land that ran up to the house. We walked quickly, he infront, without exchanging a word. Suddenly he stopped, just where therejutted out the bow-window of the yellow drawing-room, and I felt Oke's handtight upon my arm. 

"I have brought you here to see something, " he whispered hoarsely; and heled me to the window. 

I looked in. The room, compared with the out door, was rather dark; butagainst the yellow wall I saw Mrs. Oke sitting alone on a couch in herwhite dress, her head slightly thrown back, a large red rose in her hand. 

"Do you believe now?" whispered Oke's voice hot at my ear. "Do you believenow? Was it all my fancy? But I will have him this time. I have locked thedoor inside, and, by God! he shan't escape. "

The words were not out of Oke's mouth. I felt myself struggling with himsilently outside that window. But he broke loose, pulled open the window, and leapt into the room, and I after him. As I crossed the threshold, something flashed in my eyes; there was a loud report, a sharp cry, and thethud of a body on the ground. 

Oke was standing in the middle of the room, with a faint smoke about him;and at his feet, sunk down from the sofa, with her blond head resting onits seat, lay Mrs. Oke, a pool of red forming in her white dress. Her mouthwas convulsed, as if in that automatic shriek, but her wide-open white eyesseemed to smile vaguely and distantly. 

I know nothing of time. It all seemed to be one second, but a second thatlasted hours. Oke stared, then turned round and laughed. 

"The damned rascal has given me the slip again!" he cried; and quicklyunlocking the door, rushed out of the house with dreadful cries. 

That is the end of the story. Oke tried to shoot himself that evening, butmerely fractured his jaw, and died a few days later, raving. There were allsorts of legal inquiries, through which I went as through a dream; andwhence it resulted that Mr. Oke had killed his wife in a fit of momentarymadness. That was the end of Alice Oke. By the way, her maid brought me alocket which was found round her neck, all stained with blood. It containedsome very dark auburn hair, not at all the colour of William Oke's. I amquite sure it was Lovelock's. 

_A Wicked Voice_

To M. W. , IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE LAST SONG AT PALAZZO BARBARO, _Chi hainteso, intenda. _

They have been congratulating me again today upon being the onlycomposer of our days--of these days of deafening orchestral effects andpoetical quackery--who has despised the new-fangled nonsense ofWagner, and returned boldly to the traditions of Handel and Gluck andthe divine Mozart, to the supremacy of melody and the respect of thehuman voice. 

O cursed human voice, violin of flesh and blood, fashioned with thesubtle tools, the cunning hands, of Satan! O execrable art of singing, have you not wrought mischief enough in the past, degrading so muchnoble genius, corrupting the purity of Mozart, reducing Handel to awriter of high-class singing-exercises, and defrauding the world of theonly inspiration worthy of Sophocles and Euripides, the poetry of thegreat poet Gluck? Is it not enough to have dishonored a whole centuryin idolatry of that wicked and contemptible wretch the singer, withoutpersecuting an obscure young composer of our days, whose only wealth ishis love of nobility in art, and perhaps some few grains of genius?

And then they compliment me upon the perfection with which I imitatethe style of the great dead masters; or ask me very seriously whether, even if I could gain over the modern public to this bygone style ofmusic, I could hope to find singers to perform it. Sometimes, whenpeople talk as they have been talking today, and laugh when I declaremyself a follower of Wagner, I burst into a paroxysm of unintelligible, childish rage, and exclaim, "We shall see that some day!"

Yes; some day we shall see! For, after all, may I not recover from thisstrangest of maladies? It is still possible that the day may come whenall these things shall seem but an incredible nightmare; the day when_Ogier the Dane_ shall be completed, and men shall know whether Iam a follower of the great master of the Future or the miserablesinging-masters of the Past. I am but half-bewitched, since I amconscious of the spell that binds me. My old nurse, far off in Norway, used to tell me that were-wolves are ordinary men and women half theirdays, and that if, during that period, they become aware of theirhorrid transformation they may find the means to forestall it. May thisnot be the case with me? My reason, after all, is free, although myartistic inspiration be enslaved; and I can despise and loathe themusic I am forced to compose, and the execrable power that forces me. 

Nay, is it not because I have studied with the doggedness of hatredthis corrupt and corrupting music of the Past, seeking for every littlepeculiarity of style and every biographical trifle merely to displayits vileness, is it not for this presumptuous courage that I have beenovertaken by such mysterious, incredible vengeance?

And meanwhile, my only relief consists in going over and over again inmy mind the tale of my miseries. This time I will write it, writingonly to tear up, to throw the manuscript unread into the fire. And yet, who knows? As the last charred pages shall crackle and slowly sink intothe red embers, perhaps the spell may be broken, and I may possess oncemore my long-lost liberty, my vanished genius. 

It was a breathless evening under the full moon, that implacable fullmoon beneath which, even more than beneath the dreamy splendor ofnoon-tide, Venice seemed to swelter in the midst of the waters, exhaling, like some great lily, mysterious influences, which make thebrain swim and the heart faint--a moral malaria, distilled, as Ithought, from those languishing melodies, those cooing vocalizationswhich I had found in the musty music-books of a century ago. I see thatmoonlight evening as if it were present. I see my fellow-lodgers ofthat little artists' boarding-house. The table on which they lean aftersupper is strewn with bits of bread, with napkins rolled in tapestryrollers, spots of wine here and there, and at regular intervals chippedpepper-pots, stands of toothpicks, and heaps of those huge hard peacheswhich nature imitates from the marble-shops of Pisa. The whole_pension_-full is assembled, and examining stupidly the engravingwhich the American etcher has just brought for me, knowing me to be madabout eighteenth century music and musicians, and having noticed, as heturned over the heaps of penny prints in the square of San Polo, thatthe portrait is that of a singer of those days. 

Singer, thing of evil, stupid and wicked slave of the voice, of thatinstrument which was not invented by the human intellect, but begottenof the body, and which, instead of moving the soul, merely stirs up thedregs of our nature! For what is the voice but the Beast calling, awakening that other Beast sleeping in the depths of mankind, the Beastwhich all great art has ever sought to chain up, as the archangelchains up, in old pictures, the demon with his woman's face? How couldthe creature attached to this voice, its owner and its victim, thesinger, the great, the real singer who once ruled over every heart, beotherwise than wicked and contemptible? But let me try and get on withmy story. 

I can see all my fellow-boarders, leaning on the table, contemplatingthe print, this effeminate beau, his hair curled into _ailes depigeon_, his sword passed through his embroidered pocket, seatedunder a triumphal arch somewhere among the clouds, surrounded by puffyCupids and crowned with laurels by a bouncing goddess of fame. I hearagain all the insipid exclamations, the insipid questions about thissinger:--"When did he live? Was he very famous? Are you sure, Magnus, that this is really a portrait, " &c. &c. And I hear my own voice, as ifin the far distance, giving them all sorts of information, biographicaland critical, out of a battered little volume called _The Theatre ofMusical Glory; or, Opinions upon the most Famous Chapel-masters andVirtuosi of this Century_, by Father Prosdocimo Sabatelli, Barnalite, Professor of Eloquence at the College of Modena, and Memberof the Arcadian Academy, under the pastoral name of Evander Lilybaean, Venice, 1785, with the approbation of the Superiors. I tell them allhow this singer, this Balthasar Cesari, was nick-named Zaffirinobecause of a sapphire engraved with cabalistic signs presented to himone evening by a masked stranger, in whom wise folk recognized thatgreat cultivator of the human voice, the devil; how much more wonderfulhad been this Zaffirino's vocal gifts than those of any singer ofancient or modern times; how his brief life had been but a series oftriumphs, petted by the greatest kings, sung by the most famous poets, and finally, adds Father Prosdocimo, "courted (if the grave Muse ofhistory may incline her ear to the gossip of gallantry) by the mostcharming nymphs, even of the very highest quality. "

My friends glance once more at the engraving; more insipid remarks aremade; I am requested--especially by the American young ladies--to playor sing one of this Zaffirino's favorite songs--"For of course you knowthem, dear Maestro Magnus, you who have such a passion for all oldmusic. Do be good, and sit down to the piano. " I refuse, rudely enough, rolling the print in my fingers. How fearfully this cursed heat, thesecursed moonlight nights, must have unstrung me! This Venice wouldcertainly kill me in the long-run! Why, the sight of this idioticengraving, the mere name of that coxcomb of a singer, have made myheart beat and my limbs turn to water like a love-sick hobbledehoy. 

After my gruff refusal, the company begins to disperse; they prepare togo out, some to have a row on the lagoon, others to saunter before the_cafés_ at St. Mark's; family discussions arise, gruntings offathers, murmurs of mothers, peals of laughing from young girls andyoung men. And the moon, pouring in by the wide-open windows, turnsthis old palace ballroom, nowadays an inn dining-room, into a lagoon, scintillating, undulating like the other lagoon, the real one, whichstretches out yonder furrowed by invisible gondolas betrayed by the redprow-lights. At last the whole lot of them are on the move. I shall beable to get some quiet in my room, and to work a little at my opera of_Ogier the Dane_. But no! Conversation revives, and, of allthings, about that singer, that Zaffirino, whose absurd portrait I amcrunching in my fingers. 

The principal speaker is Count Alvise, an old Venetian with dyedwhiskers, a great check tie fastened with two pins and a chain; athreadbare patrician who is dying to secure for his lanky son thatpretty American girl, whose mother is intoxicated by all his mooninganecdotes about the past glories of Venice in general, and of hisillustrious family in particular. Why, in Heaven's name, must he pitchupon Zaffirino for his mooning, this old duffer of a patrician?

"Zaffirino, --ah yes, to be sure! Balthasar Cesari, called Zaffirino, "snuffles the voice of Count Alvise, who always repeats the last word ofevery sentence at least three times. "Yes, Zaffirino, to be sure! Afamous singer of the days of my forefathers; yes, of my forefathers, dear lady!" Then a lot of rubbish about the former greatness of Venice, the glories of old music, the former Conservatoires, all mixed up withanecdotes of Rossini and Donizetti, whom he pretends to have knownintimately. Finally, a story, of course containing plenty about hisillustrious family:--"My great grand-aunt, the Procuratessa Vendramin, from whom we have inherited our estate of Mistrą, on the Brenta"--ahopelessly muddled story, apparently, fully of digressions, but ofwhich that singer Zaffirino is the hero. The narrative, little bylittle, becomes more intelligible, or perhaps it is I who am giving itmore attention. 

"It seems, " says the Count, "that there was one of his songs inparticular which was called the 'Husbands' Air'--_L'Aria deiMarit_--because they didn't enjoy it quite as much as theirbetter-halves. .. . My grand-aunt, Pisana Renier, married to theProcuratore Vendramin, was a patrician of the old school, of the stylethat was getting rare a hundred years ago. Her virtue and her priderendered her unapproachable. Zaffirino, on his part, was in the habitof boasting that no woman had ever been able to resist his singing, which, it appears, had its foundation in fact--the ideal changes, mydear lady, the ideal changes a good deal from one century toanother!--and that his first song could make any woman turn pale andlower her eyes, the second make her madly in love, while the third songcould kill her off on the spot, kill her for love, there under his veryeyes, if he only felt inclined. My grandaunt Vendramin laughed whenthis story was told her, refused to go to hear this insolent dog, andadded that it might be quite possible by the aid of spells and infernalpacts to kill a _gentildonna_, but as to making her fall in lovewith a lackey--never! This answer was naturally reported to Zaffirino, who piqued himself upon always getting the better of any one who waswanting in deference to his voice. Like the ancient Romans, _parceresubjectis et debellare superbos_. You American ladies, who are solearned, will appreciate this little quotation from the divine Virgil. While seeming to avoid the Procuratessa Vendramin, Zaffirino took theopportunity, one evening at a large assembly, to sing in her presence. He sang and sang and sang until the poor grand-aunt Pisana fell ill forlove. The most skilful physicians were kept unable to explain themysterious malady which was visibly killing the poor young lady; andthe Procuratore Vendramin applied in vain to the most veneratedMadonnas, and vainly promised an altar of silver, with massive goldcandlesticks, to Saints Cosmas and Damian, patrons of the art ofhealing. At last the brother-in-law of the Procuratessa, MonsignorAlmorņ Vendramin, Patriarch of Aquileia, a prelate famous for thesanctity of his life, obtained in a vision of Saint Justina, for whomhe entertained a particular devotion, the information that the onlything which could benefit the strange illness of his sister-in-law wasthe voice of Zaffirino. Take notice that my poor grand-aunt had nevercondescended to such a revelation. 

"The Procuratore was enchanted at this happy solution; and his lordshipthe Patriarch went to seek Zaffirino in person, and carried him in hisown coach to the Villa of Mistrą, where the Procuratessa was residing. 

"On being told what was about to happen, my poor grand-aunt went intofits of rage, which were succeeded immediately by equally violent fitsof joy. However, she never forgot what was due to her great position. Although sick almost unto death, she had herself arrayed with thegreatest pomp, caused her face to be painted, and put on all herdiamonds: it would seem as if she were anxious to affirm her fulldignity before this singer. Accordingly she received Zaffirinoreclining on a sofa which had been placed in the great ballroom of theVilla of Mistrą, and beneath the princely canopy; for the Vendramins, who had intermarried with the house of Mantua, possessed imperial fiefsand were princes of the Holy Roman Empire. Zaffirino saluted her withthe most profound respect, but not a word passed between them. Only, the singer inquired from the Procuratore whether the illustrious ladyhad received the Sacraments of the Church. Being told that theProcuratessa had herself asked to be given extreme unction from thehands of her brother-in-law, he declared his readiness to obey theorders of His Excellency, and sat down at once to the harpsichord. 

"Never had he sung so divinely. At the end of the first song theProcuratessa Vendramin had already revived most extraordinarily; by theend of the second she appeared entirely cured and beaming with beautyand happiness; but at the third air--the _Aria dei Mariti_, nodoubt--she began to change frightfully; she gave a dreadful cry, andfell into the convulsions of death. In a quarter of an hour she wasdead! Zaffirino did not wait to see her die. Having finished his song, he withdrew instantly, took post-horses, and traveled day and night asfar as Munich. People remarked that he had presented himself at Mistrądressed in mourning, although he had mentioned no death among hisrelatives; also that he had prepared everything for his departure, asif fearing the wrath of so powerful a family. Then there was also theextraordinary question he had asked before beginning to sing, about theProcuratessa having confessed and received extreme unction. .. . No, thanks, my dear lady, no cigarettes for me. But if it does not distressyou or your charming daughter, may I humbly beg permission to smoke acigar?"

And Count Alvise, enchanted with his talent for narrative, and sure ofhaving secured for his son the heart and the dollars of his fairaudience, proceeds to light a candle, and at the candle one of thoselong black Italian cigars which require preliminary disinfection beforesmoking. 

. .. If this state of things goes on I shall just have to ask the doctorfor a bottle; this ridiculous beating of my heart and disgusting coldperspiration have increased steadily during Count Alvise's narrative. To keep myself in countenance among the various idiotic commentaries onthis cock-and-bull story of a vocal coxcomb and a vaporing great lady, I begin to unroll the engraving, and to examine stupidly the portraitof Zaffirino, once so renowned, now so forgotten. A ridiculous ass, this singer, under his triumphal arch, with his stuffed Cupids and thegreat fat winged kitchenmaid crowning him with laurels. How flat andvapid and vulgar it is, to be sure, all this odious eighteenth century!

But he, personally, is not so utterly vapid as I had thought. Thateffeminate, fat face of his is almost beautiful, with an odd smile, brazen and cruel. I have seen faces like this, if not in real life, atleast in my boyish romantic dreams, when I read Swinburne andBaudelaire, the faces of wicked, vindictive women. Oh yes! he isdecidedly a beautiful creature, this Zaffirino, and his voice must havehad the same sort of beauty and the same expression of wickedness. .. . 

"Come on, Magnus, " sound the voices of my fellow-boarders, "be a goodfellow and sing us one of the old chap's songs; or at least somethingor other of that day, and we'll make believe it was the air with whichhe killed that poor lady. "

"Oh yes! the _Aria dei Mariti_, the 'Husbands' Air, '" mumbles oldAlvise, between the puffs at his impossible black cigar. "My poorgrand-aunt, Pisana Vendramin; he went and killed her with those songsof his, with that _Aria dei Mariti_. "

I feel senseless rage overcoming me. Is it that horrible palpitation(by the way, there is a Norwegian doctor, my fellow-countryman, atVenice just now) which is sending the blood to my brain and making memad? The people round the piano, the furniture, everything togetherseems to get mixed and to turn into moving blobs of color. I set tosinging; the only thing which remains distinct before my eyes being theportrait of Zaffirino, on the edge of that boarding-house piano; thesensual, effeminate face, with its wicked, cynical smile, keepsappearing and disappearing as the print wavers about in the draughtthat makes the candles smoke and gutter. And I set to singing madly, singing I don't know what. Yes; I begin to identify it: 'tis the_Biondina in Gondoleta_, the only song of the eighteenth centurywhich is still remembered by the Venetian people. I sing it, mimickingevery old-school grace; shakes, cadences, languishingly swelled anddiminished notes, and adding all manner of buffooneries, until theaudience, recovering from its surprise, begins to shake with laughing;until I begin to laugh myself, madly, frantically, between the phrasesof the melody, my voice finally smothered in this dull, brutallaughter. .. . And then, to crown it all, I shake my fist at thislong-dead singer, looking at me with his wicked woman's face, with hismocking, fatuous smile. 

"Ah! you would like to be revenged on me also!" I exclaim. "You wouldlike me to write you nice roulades and flourishes, another nice _Ariadei Mariti_, my fine Zaffirino!"

That night I dreamed a very strange dream. Even in the bighalf-furnished room the heat and closeness were stifling. The airseemed laden with the scent of all manner of white flowers, faint andheavy in their intolerable sweetness: tuberoses, gardenias, andjasmines drooping I know not where in neglected vases. The moonlighthad transformed the marble floor around me into a shallow, shining, pool. On account of the heat I had exchanged my bed for a bigold-fashioned sofa of light wood, painted with little nosegays andsprigs, like an old silk; and I lay there, not attempting to sleep, andletting my thoughts go vaguely to my opera of _Ogier the Dane_, ofwhich I had long finished writing the words, and for whose music I hadhoped to find some inspiration in this strange Venice, floating, as itwere, in the stagnant lagoon of the past. But Venice had merely put allmy ideas into hopeless confusion; it was as if there arose out of itsshallow waters a miasma of long-dead melodies, which sickened butintoxicated my soul. I lay on my sofa watching that pool of whitishlight, which rose higher and higher, little trickles of light meetingit here and there, wherever the moon's rays struck upon some polishedsurface; while huge shadows waved to and fro in the draught of the openbalcony. 

I went over and over that old Norse story: how the Paladin, Ogier, oneof the knights of Charlemagne, was decoyed during his homewardwanderings from the Holy Land by the arts of an enchantress, the samewho had once held in bondage the great Emperor Caesar and given him KingOberon for a son; how Ogier had tarried in that island only one day andone night, and yet, when he came home to his kingdom, he found allchanged, his friends dead, his family dethroned, and not a man who knewhis face; until at last, driven hither and thither like a beggar, apoor minstrel had taken compassion of his sufferings and given him allhe could give--a song, the song of the prowess of a hero dead forhundreds of years, the Paladin Ogier the Dane. 

The story of Ogier ran into a dream, as vivid as my waking thoughts hadbeen vague. I was looking no longer at the pool of moonlight spreadinground my couch, with its trickles of light and looming, waving shadows, but the frescoed walls of a great saloon. It was not, as I recognizedin a second, the dining-room of that Venetian palace now turned into aboarding-house. It was a far larger room, a real ballroom, almostcircular in its octagon shape, with eight huge white doors surroundedby stucco moldings, and, high on the vault of the ceiling, eight littlegalleries or recesses like boxes at a theatre, intended no doubt formusicians and spectators. The place was imperfectly lighted by only oneof the eight chandeliers, which revolved slowly, like huge spiders, each on its long cord. But the light struck upon the gilt stuccoesopposite me, and on a large expanse of fresco, the sacrifice ofIphigenia, with Agamemnon and Achilles in Roman helmets, lappets, andknee-breeches. It discovered also one of the oil panels let into themoldings of the roof, a goddess in lemon and lilac draperies, foreshortened over a great green peacock. Round the room, where thelight reached, I could make out big yellow satin sofas and heavy gildedconsoles; in the shadow of a corner was what looked like a piano, andfarther in the shade one of those big canopies which decorate theanterooms of Roman palaces. I looked about me, wondering where I was: aheavy, sweet smell, reminding me of the flavor of a peach, filled theplace. 

Little by little I began to perceive sounds; little, sharp, metallic, detached notes, like those of a mandolin; and there was united to thema voice, very low and sweet, almost a whisper, which grew and grew andgrew, until the whole place was filled with that exquisite vibratingnote, of a strange, exotic, unique quality. The note went on, swellingand swelling. Suddenly there was a horrible piercing shriek, and thethud of a body on the floor, and all manner of smothered exclamations. There, close by the canopy, a light suddenly appeared; and I could see, among the dark figures moving to and fro in the room, a woman lying onthe ground, surrounded by other women. Her blond hair, tangled, full ofdiamond-sparkles which cut through the half-darkness, was hangingdisheveled; the laces of her bodice had been cut, and her white breastshone among the sheen of jeweled brocade; her face was bent forwards, and a thin white arm trailed, like a broken limb, across the knees ofone of the women who were endeavoring to lift her. There was a suddensplash of water against the floor, more confused exclamations, ahoarse, broken moan, and a gurgling, dreadful sound. .. . I awoke with astart and rushed to the window. 

Outside, in the blue haze of the moon, the church and belfry of St. George loomed blue and hazy, with the black hull and rigging, the redlights, of a large steamer moored before them. From the lagoon rose adamp sea-breeze. What was it all? Ah! I began to understand: that storyof old Count Alvise's, the death of his grand-aunt, Pisana Vendramin. Yes, it was about that I had been dreaming. 

I returned to my room; I struck a light, and sat down to mywriting-table. Sleep had become impossible. I tried to work at myopera. Once or twice I thought I had got hold of what I had looked forso long. .. . But as soon as I tried to lay hold of my theme, there arosein my mind the distant echo of that voice, of that long note swelledslowly by insensible degrees, that long note whose tone was so strongand so subtle. 

There are in the life of an artist moments when, still unable to seizehis own inspiration, or even clearly to discern it, he becomes aware ofthe approach of that long-invoked idea. A mingled joy and terror warnhim that before another day, another hour have passed, the inspirationshall have crossed the threshold of his soul and flooded it with itsrapture. All day I had felt the need of isolation and quiet, and atnightfall I went for a row on the most solitary part of the lagoon. Allthings seemed to tell that I was going to meet my inspiration, and Iawaited its coming as a lover awaits his beloved. 

I had stopped my gondola for a moment, and as I gently swayed to andfro on the water, all paved with moonbeams, it seemed to me that I wason the confines of an imaginary world. It lay close at hand, envelopedin luminous, pale blue mist, through which the moon had cut a wide andglistening path; out to sea, the little islands, like moored blackboats, only accentuated the solitude of this region of moonbeams andwavelets; while the hum of the insects in orchards hard by merely addedto the impression of untroubled silence. On some such seas, I thought, must the Paladin Ogier, have sailed when about to discover that duringthat sleep at the enchantress's knees centuries had elapsed and theheroic world had set, and the kingdom of prose had come. 

While my gondola rocked stationary on that sea of moonbeams, I ponderedover that twilight of the heroic world. In the soft rattle of the wateron the hull I seemed to hear the rattle of all that armor, of all thoseswords swinging rusty on the walls, neglected by the degenerate sons ofthe great champions of old. I had long been in search of a theme whichI called the theme of the "Prowess of Ogier;" it was to appear fromtime to time in the course of my opera, to develop at last into thatsong of the Minstrel, which reveals to the hero that he is one of along-dead world. And at this moment I seemed to feel the presence ofthat theme. Yet an instant, and my mind would be overwhelmed by thatsavage music, heroic, funereal. 

Suddenly there came across the lagoon, cleaving, checkering, andfretting the silence with a lacework of sound even as the moon wasfretting and cleaving the water, a ripple of music, a voice breakingitself in a shower of little scales and cadences and trills. 

I sank back upon my cushions. The vision of heroic days had vanished, and before my closed eyes there seemed to dance multitudes of littlestars of light, chasing and interlacing like those suddenvocalizations. 

"To shore! Quick!" I cried to the gondolier. 

But the sounds had ceased; and there came from the orchards, with theirmulberry-trees glistening in the moonlight, and their black swayingcypress-plumes, nothing save the confused hum, the monotonous chirp, ofthe crickets. 

I looked around me: on one side empty dunes, orchards, and meadows, without house or steeple; on the other, the blue and misty sea, emptyto where distant islets were profiled black on the horizon. 

A faintness overcame me, and I felt myself dissolve. For all of asudden a second ripple of voice swept over the lagoon, a shower oflittle notes, which seemed to form a little mocking laugh. 

Then again all was still. This silence lasted so long that I fell oncemore to meditating on my opera. I lay in wait once more for thehalf-caught theme. But no. It was not that theme for which I waswaiting and watching with baited breath. I realized my delusion when, on rounding the point of the Giudecca, the murmur of a voice arose fromthe midst of the waters, a thread of sound slender as a moonbeam, scarce audible, but exquisite, which expanded slowly, insensibly, taking volume and body, taking flesh almost and fire, an ineffablequality, full, passionate, but veiled, as it were, in a subtle, downywrapper. The note grew stronger and stronger, and warmer and morepassionate, until it burst through that strange and charming veil, andemerged beaming, to break itself in the luminous facets of a wonderfulshake, long, superb, triumphant. 

There was a dead silence. 

"Row to St. Mark's!" I exclaimed. "Quick!"

The gondola glided through the long, glittering track of moonbeams, andrent the great band of yellow, reflected light, mirroring the cupolasof St. Mark's, the lace-like pinnacles of the palace, and the slenderpink belfry, which rose from the lit-up water to the pale and bluishevening sky. 

In the larger of the two squares the military band was blaring throughthe last spirals of a _crescendo_ of Rossini. The crowd wasdispersing in this great open-air ballroom, and the sounds arose whichinvariably follow upon out-of-door music. A clatter of spoons andglasses, a rustle and grating of frocks and of chairs, and the click ofscabbards on the pavement. I pushed my way among the fashionable youthscontemplating the ladies while sucking the knob of their sticks;through the serried ranks of respectable families, marching arm in armwith their white frocked young ladies close in front. I took a seatbefore Florian's, among the customers stretching themselves beforedeparting, and the waiters hurrying to and fro, clattering their emptycups and trays. Two imitation Neapolitans were slipping their guitarand violin under their arm, ready to leave the place. 

"Stop!" I cried to them; "don't go yet. Sing me _something--sing_La Camesella_ or _Funiculģ, funiculą_--no matter what, provided you make a row;" and as they screamed and scraped their utmost, I added, "But can't you sing louder, d--n you!--sing louder, do youunderstand?"

I felt the need of noise, of yells and false notes, of something vulgarand hideous to drive away that ghost-voice which was haunting me. 

Again and again I told myself that it had been some silly prank of aromantic amateur, hidden in the gardens of the shore or glidingunperceived on the lagoon; and that the sorcery of moonlight andsea-mist had transfigured for my excited brain mere humdrum rouladesout of exercises of Bordogni or Crescentini. 

But all the same I continued to be haunted by that voice. My work wasinterrupted ever and anon by the attempt to catch its imaginary echo;and the heroic harmonies of my Scandinavian legend were strangelyinterwoven with voluptuous phrases and florid cadences in which Iseemed to hear again that same accursed voice. 

To be haunted by singing-exercises! It seemed too ridiculous for a manwho professedly despised the art of singing. And still, I preferred tobelieve in that childish amateur, amusing himself with warbling to themoon. 

One day, while making these reflections the hundredth time over, myeyes chanced to light upon the portrait of Zaffirino, which my friendhad pinned against the wall. I pulled it down and tore it into half adozen shreds. Then, already ashamed of my folly, I watched the tornpieces float down from the window, wafted hither and thither by thesea-breeze. One scrap got caught in a yellow blind below me; the othersfell into the canal, and were speedily lost to sight in the dark water. I was overcome with shame. My heart beat like bursting. What amiserable, unnerved worm I had become in this cursed Venice, with itslanguishing moonlights, its atmosphere as of some stuffy boudoir, longunused, full of old stuffs and potpourri!

That night, however, things seemed to be going better. I was able tosettle down to my opera, and even to work at it. In the intervals mythoughts returned, not without a certain pleasure, to those scatteredfragments of the torn engraving fluttering down to the water. I wasdisturbed at my piano by the hoarse voices and the scraping of violinswhich rose from one of those music-boats that station at night underthe hotels of the Grand Canal. The moon had set. Under my balcony thewater stretched black into the distance, its darkness cut by the stilldarker outlines of the flotilla of gondolas in attendance on themusic-boat, where the faces of the singers, and the guitars andviolins, gleamed reddish under the unsteady light of theChinese-lanterns. 

"_Jammo, jammo; jammo, jammo ją_, " sang the loud, hoarse voices;then a tremendous scrape and twang, and the yelled-out burden, _"Funiculi, funiculą; funiculi, funiculą; jammo, jammo, jammo, jammo, jammo ją_. "

Then came a few cries of "_Bis, Bis_!" from a neighboring hotel, abrief clapping of hands, the sound of a handful of coppers rattlinginto the boat, and the oar-stroke of some gondolier making ready toturn away. 

"Sing the _Camesella___, " ordered some voice with a foreignaccent. 

"No, no! _Santa Lucia_. "

"I want the _Camesella_. "

"No! _Santa Lucia_. Hi! sing _Santa Lucia_--d'you hear?"

The musicians, under their green and yellow and red lamps, held awhispered consultation on the manner of conciliating thesecontradictory demands. Then, after a minute's hesitation, the violinsbegan the prelude of that once famous air, which has remained popularin Venice--the words written, some hundred years ago, by the patricianGritti, the music by an unknown composer--_La Biondina inGondoleta_. 

That cursed eighteenth century! It seemed a malignant fatality thatmade these brutes choose just this piece to interrupt me. 

At last the long prelude came to an end; and above the cracked guitarsand squeaking fiddles there arose, not the expected nasal chorus, but asingle voice singing below its breath. 

My arteries throbbed. How well I knew that voice! It was singing, as Ihave said, below its breath, yet none the less it sufficed to fill allthat reach of the canal with its strange quality of tone, exquisite, far-fetched. 

They were long-drawn-out notes, of intense but peculiar sweetness, aman's voice which had much of a woman's, but more even of achorister's, but a chorister's voice without its limpidity andinnocence; its youthfulness was veiled, muffled, as it were, in a sortof downy vagueness, as if a passion of tears withheld. 

There was a burst of applause, and the old palaces re-echoed with theclapping. "Bravo, bravo! Thank you, thank you! Sing again--please, singagain. Who can it be?"

And then a bumping of hulls, a splashing of oars, and the oaths ofgondoliers trying to push each other away, as the red prow-lamps of thegondolas pressed round the gaily lit singing-boat. 

But no one stirred on board. It was to none of them that this applausewas due. And while every one pressed on, and clapped and vociferated, one little red prow-lamp dropped away from the fleet; for a moment asingle gondola stood forth black upon the black water, and then waslost in the night. 

For several days the mysterious singer was the universal topic. Thepeople of the music-boat swore that no one besides themselves had beenon board, and that they knew as little as ourselves about the owner ofthat voice. The gondoliers, despite their descent from the spies of theold Republic, were equally unable to furnish any clue. No musicalcelebrity was known or suspected to be at Venice; and every one agreedthat such a singer must be a European celebrity. The strangest thing inthis strange business was, that even among those learned in music therewas no agreement on the subject of this voice: it was called by allsorts of names and described by all manner of incongruous adjectives;people went so far as to dispute whether the voice belonged to a man orto a woman: every one had some new definition. 

In all these musical discussions I, alone, brought forward no opinion. I felt a repugnance, an impossibility almost, of speaking about thatvoice; and the more or less commonplace conjectures of my friend hadthe invariable effect of sending me out of the room. 

Meanwhile my work was becoming daily more difficult, and I soon passedfrom utter impotence to a state of inexplicable agitation. Everymorning I arose with fine resolutions and grand projects of work; onlyto go to bed that night without having accomplished anything. I spenthours leaning on my balcony, or wandering through the network of laneswith their ribbon of blue sky, endeavoring vainly to expel the thoughtof that voice, or endeavoring in reality to reproduce it in my memory;for the more I tried to banish it from my thoughts, the more I grew tothirst for that extraordinary tone, for those mysteriously downy, veiled notes; and no sooner did I make an effort to work at my operathan my head was full of scraps of forgotten eighteenth century airs, of frivolous or languishing little phrases; and I fell to wonderingwith a bitter-sweet longing how those songs would have sounded if sungby that voice. 

At length it became necessary to see a doctor, from whom, however, Icarefully hid away all the stranger symptoms of my malady. The air ofthe lagoons, the great heat, he answered cheerfully, had pulled me downa little; a tonic and a month in the country, with plenty of riding andno work, would make me myself again. That old idler, Count Alvise, whohad insisted on accompanying me to the physician's, immediatelysuggested that I should go and stay with his son, who was boringhimself to death superintending the maize harvest on the mainland: hecould promise me excellent air, plenty of horses, and all the peacefulsurroundings and the delightful occupations of a rural life--"Besensible, my dear Magnus, and just go quietly to Mistrą. "

Mistrą--the name sent a shiver all down me. I was about to declinethe invitation, when a thought suddenly loomed vaguely in my mind. 

"Yes, dear Count, " I answered; "I accept your invitation withgratitude and pleasure. I will start tomorrow for Mistrą. "

The next day found me at Padua, on my way to the Villa of Mistrą. Itseemed as if I had left an intolerable burden behind me. I was, for thefirst time since how long, quite light of heart. The tortuous, rough-paved streets, with their empty, gloomy porticoes; theill-plastered palaces, with closed, discolored shutters; the littlerambling square, with meager trees and stubborn grass; the Venetiangarden-houses reflecting their crumbling graces in the muddy canal; thegardens without gates and the gates without gardens, the avenuesleading nowhere; and the population of blind and legless beggars, ofwhining sacristans, which issued as by magic from between theflag-stones and dust-heaps and weeds under the fierce August sun, allthis dreariness merely amused and pleased me. My good spirits wereheightened by a musical mass which I had the good fortune to hear atSt. Anthony's. 

Never in all my days had I heard anything comparable, although Italyaffords many strange things in the way of sacred music. Into the deepnasal chanting of the priests there had suddenly burst a chorus ofchildren, singing absolutely independent of all time and tune; gruntingof priests answered by squealing of boys, slow Gregorian modulationinterrupted by jaunty barrel-organ pipings, an insane, insanely merryjumble of bellowing and barking, mewing and cackling and braying, suchas would have enlivened a witches' meeting, or rather some mediaevalFeast of Fools. And, to make the grotesqueness of such music still morefantastic and Hoffmannlike, there was, besides, the magnificence of thepiles of sculptured marbles and gilded bronzes, the tradition of themusical splendor for which St. Anthony's had been famous in days goneby. I had read in old travelers, Lalande and Burney, that the Republicof St. Mark had squandered immense sums not merely on the monuments anddecoration, but on the musical establishment of its great cathedral ofTerra Firma. In the midst of this ineffable concert of impossiblevoices and instruments, I tried to imagine the voice of Guadagni, thesoprano for whom Gluck had written _Che faru senza Euridice_, andthe fiddle of Tartini, that Tartini with whom the devil had once comeand made music. And the delight in anything so absolutely, barbarously, grotesquely, fantastically incongruous as such a performance in such aplace was heightened by a sense of profanation: such were thesuccessors of those wonderful musicians of that hated eighteenthcentury!

The whole thing had delighted me so much, so very much more than themost faultless performance could have done, that I determined to enjoyit once more; and towards vesper-time, after a cheerful dinner with twobagmen at the inn of the Golden Star, and a pipe over the rough sketchof a possible cantata upon the music which the devil made for Tartini, I turned my steps once more towards St. Anthony's. 

The bells were ringing for sunset, and a muffled sound of organs seemedto issue from the huge, solitary church; I pushed my way under theheavy leathern curtain, expecting to be greeted by the grotesqueperformance of that morning. 

I proved mistaken. Vespers must long have been over. A smell of staleincense, a crypt-like damp filled my mouth; it was already night inthat vast cathedral. Out of the darkness glimmered the votive-lamps ofthe chapels, throwing wavering lights upon the red polished marble, thegilded railing, and chandeliers, and plaqueing with yellow the musclesof some sculptured figure. In a corner a burning taper put a halo aboutthe head of a priest, burnishing his shining bald skull, his whitesurplice, and the open book before him. "Amen" he chanted; the book wasclosed with a snap, the light moved up the apse, some dark figures ofwomen rose from their knees and passed quickly towards the door; a mansaying his prayers before a chapel also got up, making a great clatterin dropping his stick. 

The church was empty, and I expected every minute to be turned out bythe sacristan making his evening round to close the doors. I wasleaning against a pillar, looking into the greyness of the greatarches, when the organ suddenly burst out into a series of chords, rolling through the echoes of the church: it seemed to be theconclusion of some service. And above the organ rose the notes of avoice; high, soft, enveloped in a kind of downiness, like a cloud ofincense, and which ran through the mazes of a long cadence. The voicedropped into silence; with two thundering chords the organ closed in. All was silent. For a moment I stood leaning against one of the pillarsof the nave: my hair was clammy, my knees sank beneath me, anenervating heat spread through my body; I tried to breathe morelargely, to suck in the sounds with the incense-laden air. I wassupremely happy, and yet as if I were dying; then suddenly a chill ranthrough me, and with it a vague panic. I turned away and hurried outinto the open. 

The evening sky lay pure and blue along the jagged line of roofs; thebats and swallows were wheeling about; and from the belfries allaround, half-drowned by the deep bell of St. Anthony's, jangled thepeel of the _Ave Maria_. 

"You really don't seem well, " young Count Alvise had said the previousevening, as he welcomed me, in the light of a lantern held up by apeasant, in the weedy back-garden of the Villa of Mistrą. Everythinghad seemed to me like a dream: the jingle of the horse's bells drivingin the dark from Padua, as the lantern swept the acacia-hedges withtheir wide yellow light; the grating of the wheels on the gravel; thesupper-table, illumined by a single petroleum lamp for fear ofattracting mosquitoes, where a broken old lackey, in an old stablejacket, handed round the dishes among the fumes of onion; Alvise's fatmother gabbling dialect in a shrill, benevolent voice behind thebullfights on her fan; the unshaven village priest, perpetuallyfidgeting with his glass and foot, and sticking one shoulder up abovethe other. And now, in the afternoon, I felt as if I had been in thislong, rambling, tumble-down Villa of Mistrą--a villa three-quarters ofwhich was given up to the storage of grain and garden tools, or to theexercise of rats, mice, scorpions, and centipedes--all my life; as if Ihad always sat there, in Count Alvise's study, among the pile ofundusted books on agriculture, the sheaves of accounts, the samples ofgrain and silkworm seed, the ink-stains and the cigar-ends; as if I hadnever heard of anything save the cereal basis of Italian agriculture, the diseases of maize, the peronospora of the vine, the breeds ofbullocks, and the iniquities of farm laborers; with the blue cones ofthe Euganean hills closing in the green shimmer of plain outside thewindow. 

After an early dinner, again with the screaming gabble of the fat oldCountess, the fidgeting and shoulder-raising of the unshaven priest, the smell of fried oil and stewed onions, Count Alvise made me get intothe cart beside him, and whirled me along among clouds of dust, betweenthe endless glister of poplars, acacias, and maples, to one of hisfarms. 

In the burning sun some twenty or thirty girls, in colored skirts, laced bodices, and big straw-hats, were threshing the maize on the bigred brick threshing-floor, while others were winnowing the grain ingreat sieves. Young Alvise III. (the old one was Alvise II. : every oneis Alvise, that is to say, Lewis, in that family; the name is on thehouse, the carts, the barrows, the very pails) picked up the maize, touched it, tasted it, said something to the girls that made themlaugh, and something to the head farmer that made him look very glum;and then led me into a huge stable, where some twenty or thirty whitebullocks were stamping, switching their tails, hitting their hornsagainst the mangers in the dark. Alvise III. Patted each, called him byhis name, gave him some salt or a turnip, and explained which was theMantuan breed, which the Apulian, which the Romagnolo, and so on. Thenhe bade me jump into the trap, and off we went again through the dust, among the hedges and ditches, till we came to some more brick farmbuildings with pinkish roofs smoking against the blue sky. Here therewere more young women threshing and winnowing the maize, which made agreat golden Danaė cloud; more bullocks stamping and lowing in the cooldarkness; more joking, fault-finding, explaining; and thus through fivefarms, until I seemed to see the rhythmical rising and falling of theflails against the hot sky, the shower of golden grains, the yellowdust from the winnowing-sieves on to the bricks, the switching ofinnumerable tails and plunging of innumerable horns, the glistening ofhuge white flanks and foreheads, whenever I closed my eyes. 

"A good day's work!" cried Count Alvise, stretching out his long legswith the tight trousers riding up over the Wellington boots. "Mamma, give us some aniseed-syrup after dinner; it is an excellent restorativeand precaution against the fevers of this country. "

"Oh! you've got fever in this part of the world, have you? Why, yourfather said the air was so good!"

"Nothing, nothing, " soothed the old Countess. "The only thing to bedreaded are mosquitoes; take care to fasten your shutters beforelighting the candle. "

"Well, " rejoined young Alvise, with an effort of conscience, "of coursethere _are_ fevers. But they needn't hurt you. Only, don' go outinto the garden at night, if you don't want to catch them. Papa told methat you have fancies for moonlight rambles. It won't do in thisclimate, my dear fellow; it won't do. If you must stalk about at night, being a genius, take a turn inside the house; you can get quiteexercise enough. "

After dinner the aniseed-syrup was produced, together with brandy andcigars, and they all sat in the long, narrow, half-furnished room onthe first floor; the old Countess knitting a garment of uncertain shapeand destination, the priest reading out the newspaper; Count Alvisepuffing at his long, crooked cigar, and pulling the ears of a long, lean dog with a suspicion of mange and a stiff eye. From the darkgarden outside rose the hum and whirr of countless insects, and thesmell of the grapes which hung black against the starlit, blue sky, onthe trellis. I went to the balcony. The garden lay dark beneath;against the twinkling horizon stood out the tall poplars. There was thesharp cry of an owl; the barking of a dog; a sudden whiff of warm, enervating perfume, a perfume that made me think of the taste ofcertain peaches, and suggested white, thick, wax-like petals. I seemedto have smelt that flower once before: it made me feel languid, almostfaint. 

"I am very tired, " I said to Count Alvise. "See how feeble we city folkbecome!"

But, despite my fatigue, I found it quite impossible to sleep. Thenight seemed perfectly stifling. I had felt nothing like it at Venice. Despite the injunctions of the Countess I opened the solid woodenshutters, hermetically closed against mosquitoes, and looked out. 

The moon had risen; and beneath it lay the big lawns, the roundedtree-tops, bathed in a blue, luminous mist, every leaf glistening andtrembling in what seemed a heaving sea of light. Beneath the window wasthe long trellis, with the white shining piece of pavement under it. Itwas so bright that I could distinguish the green of the vine-leaves, the dull red of the catalpa-flowers. There was in the air a vaguescent of cut grass, of ripe American grapes, of that white flower (itmust be white) which made me think of the taste of peaches all meltinginto the delicious freshness of falling dew. From the village churchcame the stroke of one: Heaven knows how long I had been vainlyattempting to sleep. A shiver ran through me, and my head suddenlyfilled as with the fumes of some subtle wine; I remembered all thoseweedy embankments, those canals full of stagnant water, the yellowfaces of the peasants; the word malaria returned to my mind. No matter!I remained leaning on the window, with a thirsty longing to plungemyself into this blue moonmist, this dew and perfume and silence, whichseemed to vibrate and quiver like the stars that strewed the depths ofheaven. .. . What music, even Wagner's, or of that great singer of starrynights, the divine Schumann, what music could ever compare with thisgreat silence, with this great concert of voiceless things that singwithin one's soul?

As I made this reflection, a note, high, vibrating, and sweet, rent thesilence, which immediately closed around it. I leaned out of thewindow, my heart beating as though it must burst. After a brief spacethe silence was cloven once more by that note, as the darkness iscloven by a falling star or a firefly rising slowly like a rocket. Butthis time it was plain that the voice did not come, as I had imagined, from the garden, but from the house itself, from some corner of thisrambling old villa of Mistrą. 

Mistrą--Mistrą! The name rang in my ears, and I began at length tograsp its significance, which seems to have escaped me till then. "Yes, " I said to myself, "it is quite natural. " And with this oddimpression of naturalness was mixed a feverish, impatient pleasure. Itwas as if I had come to Mistrą on purpose, and that I was about to meetthe object of my long and weary hopes. 

Grasping the lamp with its singed green shade, I gently opened the doorand made my way through a series of long passages and of big, emptyrooms, in which my steps re-echoed as in a church, and my lightdisturbed whole swarms of bats. I wandered at random, farther andfarther from the inhabited part of the buildings. 

This silence made me feel sick; I gasped as under a suddendisappointment. 

All of a sudden there came a sound--chords, metallic, sharp, ratherlike the tone of a mandolin--close to my ear. Yes, quite close: I wasseparated from the sounds only by a partition. I fumbled for a door;the unsteady light of my lamp was insufficient for my eyes, which wereswimming like those of a drunkard. At last I found a latch, and, aftera moment's hesitation, I lifted it and gently pushed open the door. Atfirst I could not understand what manner of place I was in. It was darkall round me, but a brilliant light blinded me, a light coming frombelow and striking the opposite wall. It was as if I had entered a darkbox in a half-lighted theatre. I was, in fact, in something of thekind, a sort of dark hole with a high balustrade, half-hidden by anup-drawn curtain. I remembered those little galleries or recesses forthe use of musicians or lookers-on--which exist under the ceiling ofthe ballrooms in certain old Italian palaces. Yes; it must have beenone like that. Opposite me was a vaulted ceiling covered with giltmoldings, which framed great time-blackened canvases; and lower down, in the light thrown up from below, stretched a wall covered with fadedfrescoes. Where had I seen that goddess in lilac and lemon draperiesforeshortened over a big, green peacock? For she was familiar to me, and the stucco Tritons also who twisted their tails round her gildedframe. And that fresco, with warriors in Roman cuirasses and green andblue lappets, and knee-breeches--where could I have seen them before? Iasked myself these questions without experiencing any surprise. Moreover, I was very calm, as one is calm sometimes in extraordinarydreams--could I be dreaming?

I advanced gently and leaned over the balustrade. My eyes were met atfirst by the darkness above me, where, like gigantic spiders, the bigchandeliers rotated slowly, hanging from the ceiling. Only one of themwas lit, and its Murano-glass pendants, its carnations and roses, shoneopalescent in the light of the guttering wax. This chandelier lightedup the opposite wall and that piece of ceiling with the goddess and thegreen peacock; it illumined, but far less well, a corner of the hugeroom, where, in the shadow of a kind of canopy, a little group ofpeople were crowding round a yellow satin sofa, of the same kind asthose that lined the walls. On the sofa, half-screened from me by thesurrounding persons, a woman was stretched out: the silver of herembroidered dress and the rays of her diamonds gleamed and shot forthas she moved uneasily. And immediately under the chandelier, in thefull light, a man stooped over a harpsichord, his head bent slightly, as if collecting his thoughts before singing. 

He struck a few chords and sang. Yes, sure enough, it was the voice, the voice that had so long been persecuting me! I recognized at oncethat delicate, voluptuous quality, strange, exquisite, sweet beyondwords, but lacking all youth and clearness. That passion veiled intears which had troubled my brain that night on the lagoon, and againon the Grand Canal singing the _Biondina_, and yet again, only twodays since, in the deserted cathedral of Padua. But I recognized nowwhat seemed to have been hidden from me till then, that this voice waswhat I cared most for in all the wide world. 

The voice wound and unwound itself in long, languishing phrases, inrich, voluptuous _rifiorituras_, all fretted with tiny scales andexquisite, crisp shakes; it stopped ever and anon, swaying as ifpanting in languid delight. And I felt my body melt even as wax in thesunshine, and it seemed to me that I too was turning fluid andvaporous, in order to mingle with these sounds as the moonbeams minglewith the dew. 

Suddenly, from the dimly lighted corner by the canopy, came a littlepiteous wail; then another followed, and was lost in the singer'svoice. During a long phrase on the harpsichord, sharp and tinkling, thesinger turned his head towards the dais, and there came a plaintivelittle sob. But he, instead of stopping, struck a sharp chord; and witha thread of voice so hushed as to be scarcely audible, slid softly intoa long _cadenza_. At the same moment he threw his head backwards, and the light fell full upon the handsome, effeminate face, with itsashy pallor and big, black brows, of the singer Zaffirino. At the sightof that face, sensual and sullen, of that smile which was cruel andmocking like a bad woman's, I understood--I knew not why, by whatprocess--that his singing _must_ be cut short, that the accursedphrase _must_ never be finished. I understood that I was before anassassin, that he was killing this woman, and killing me also, with hiswicked voice. 

I rushed down the narrow stair which led down from the box, pursued, asit were, by that exquisite voice, swelling, swelling by insensibledegrees. I flung myself on the door which must be that of the bigsaloon. I could see its light between the panels. I bruised my hands intrying to wrench the latch. The door was fastened tight, and while Iwas struggling with that locked door I heard the voice swelling, swelling, rending asunder that downy veil which wrapped it, leapingforth clear, resplendent, like the sharp and glittering blade of aknife that seemed to enter deep into my breast. Then, once more, awail, a death-groan, and that dreadful noise, that hideous gurgle ofbreath strangled by a rush of blood. And then a long shake, acute, brilliant, triumphant. 

The door gave way beneath my weight, one half crashed in. I entered. Iwas blinded by a flood of blue moonlight. It poured in through fourgreat windows, peaceful and diaphanous, a pale blue mist of moonlight, and turned the huge room into a kind of submarine cave, paved withmoonbeams, full of shimmers, of pools of moonlight. It was as bright asat midday, but the brightness was cold, blue, vaporous, supernatural. The room was completely empty, like a great hayloft. Only, there hungfrom the ceiling the ropes which had once supported a chandelier; andin a corner, among stacks of wood and heaps of Indian-corn, whencespread a sickly smell of damp and mildew, there stood a long, thinharpsichord, with spindle-legs, and its cover cracked from end to end. 

I felt, all of a sudden, very calm. The one thing that mattered was thephrase that kept moving in my head, the phrase of that unfinishedcadence which I had heard but an instant before. I opened theharpsichord, and my fingers came down boldly upon its keys. Ajingle-jangle of broken strings, laughable and dreadful, was the onlyanswer. 

Then an extraordinary fear overtook me. I clambered out of one of thewindows; I rushed up the garden and wandered through the fields, amongthe canals and the embankments, until the moon had set and the dawnbegan to shiver, followed, pursued for ever by that jangle of brokenstrings. 

People expressed much satisfaction at my recovery. 

It seems that one dies of those fevers. 

Recovery? But have I recovered? I walk, and eat and drink and talk; Ican even sleep. I live the life of other living creatures. But I amwasted by a strange and deadly disease. I can never lay hold of my owninspiration. My head is filled with music which is certainly by me, since I have never heard it before, but which still is not my own, which I despise and abhor: little, tripping flourishes and languishingphrases, and long-drawn, echoing cadences. 

O wicked, wicked voice, violin of flesh and blood made by the EvilOne's hand, may I not even execrate thee in peace; but is it necessarythat, at the moment when I curse, the longing to hear thee again shouldparch my soul like hell-thirst? And since I have satiated thy lust forrevenge, since thou hast withered my life and withered my genius, is itnot time for pity? May I not hear one note, only one note of thine, Osinger, O wicked and contemptible wretch?

_Other books by Vernon Lee_

Fiction

 _Miss Brown_

_Baldwin_