The Knickerbocker Gallery/The Shrouded Portrait
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George Wm. Curtis
The Shrouded Portrait.
By George W. Curtis.
The Marquis di Sangrido owns the grim old palace that fronts the public square in Rieti. He is not a favorite with the peasants. Even the children of that little Italian town pass the great door or portone of the palace hurriedly, and their prattle sinks into a whisper beneath those gloomy windows. No guests ever come from Rome and pass into the palace with festal welcome to visit the Marquis di Sangrido. Those heavily-framed, gloomy windows never flash with the brilliancy of revels within. They are like dead-lights—like the staring eyes of a corpse.
When the summer-storms burst among the hills, and the gleaming lightning and rattling thunders appal the superstitious peasants, while the church-bell rings solemnly in the storm, and kneeling, with muttered prayers, the poor people of Rieti shudder and make the sign of the cross, the yellow palace of the Marquis di Sangrido stands sullen in the tempest, sardonic with a sickly glare, against the heavy black cloud that rises behind it.
On the holy feast-days, when the sun lies lazily in the great square of Rieti all the long Italian morning, and the peasants, in gay costume, dance the Tarantella and the Saltarella, and with music and flowers go into the church to hang votive pictures to the Madonna, one suspending the shoe which he wore when Our Blessed Lady saved him from drowning; and another, the cap of the child whom the Holy Virgin raised from sickness; and another, the necklace which her lover gave her when he went to the wars, from which he returned safely; the Marquis di Sangrido does not come, nor look out of those gloomy windows, nor send wine and money. But often in the midst of the festival a fear falls upon the peasants, like a cloud-shadow upon a waving, glittering rye-field; they look furtively at the sullen yellow palace, which watches them in malicious silence; a sudden horror seizes them all, as if they expected the great gates to swing open, creaking upon rusty hinges, and a black procession of death and despair to issue forth and chill the summer day.
It is in vain that the servants of the Marquis di Sangrido endeavor to be friendly and sociable with the people of Rieti. They are regarded as parts of that gloom and mystery which envelop the palace and its master. Their most cheerful smile is suspected; their jokes make the people shudder, for they believe them to be magic spells in grinning masks. They move in a circle of solitude, for every inhabitant of the town instinctively withdraws, until the servants, too, gradually grow sardonic and gloomy; and when they appear it is as if the yellow old palace were taking a walk, and sullenly cursing the little cowering town of Rieti, that hides upon the plain beyond the Campagna.
Twice a year the great gate of the palace opens. Then the people shrink into their houses and peer through the windows and doors; for the heavy lumbering state-carriage of the Marquis di Sangrido rolls clumsily out, with a flaring chasseur riding before, and a dozen servants on horseback grouped behind and around like a body-guard. The doors are closed; the blinds are drawn up; nothing is seen within the carriage; but the people of Rieti know that the Marquis is sitting there, alone, in the shadow; and their terrified and bewitched imaginations enter and sit beside him, and try to see the expression of that face, and to conceive the grimness of his smile, and the demoniacal horror of his frown. But not even their imaginations can figure him. The Marquis di Sangrido sits inscrutable, wrapped in a cloud, and the lumbering state-carriage thunders out of the staring, wondering town, and rolls across the Campagna toward Rome, where the Marquis has another palace. Rieti is then very cheerful, for the Marquis di Sangrido has gone to Rome.
Once again during the year the grim gates open, and the heavy carriage, and the little group of servants, and the flaring chasseur leading the way, are absorbed within the mysterious yellow walls; and the little town of Rieti is chilled and trembles because the Marquis di Sangrido has returned from Rome.
It was a pleasant summer-day when I came to Rieti, and after eating the frittata and prosciutto crudo at the albergo, I looked id'y out of the window into the great square of the town. The sun blazed upon the open place, and there was perfect silence in the air. My eyes were dazzled, as I gazed, by the yellow wall of the palace; and I called the landlord and asked the name of the owner.
"The Marquis di Sangrido," replied the padrone, with a shudder.
"Is he here?" I inquired.
"Excellency, no," returned the host as he moved away.
"But tell me, can I get into the house? there may be pictures—or into the grounds?"
"Excellency, God forgive us our sins! I know nothing," answered the padrone, with such undisguised fear that I pressed him no farther, and he withdrew.
Of course I sauntered out immediately toward the Sangrido palace. I was sure that I had struck the trail of a romance; for what are anguish, doubts, despairs, years of life lost in misery, all the acutest forms of human woe, but romances to the traveller who saunters out on warm summer mornings, when they are the tears and the woes of other people and other years?
I paused before the great gate, sheltered from the sun by the shade of the heavily-projecting mouldings, and almost feared to rattle with my stick upon the massive panels. After a few moments the slide was slipped, and a curious restless glance danced over my face and figure, while a sharp low female voice inquired my business. I answered that I was a stranger passing through Rieti, and wished to see the pictures in the palace, and also the garden, if it were possible.
After some sharp questioning, which I answered very simply and directly, the gate was opened, and I entered the court. The garden rose behind the palace in broad terraces upon the hill-side, and I went directly toward it. The custode, who told me she was the only servant left in the house, the Marquis being in Rome, disappeared, and I passed up the broken, crumbling steps of the terrace in entire solitude. The garden was fallen into decay. Weeds grew and glittered in the walks. The long, narrow avenues of cypress and ilex were not smooth and clipped, but untrimmed boughs and shoots leaned out beyond the line and towered in slim, swaying twigs above. In the misshapen niches of this green wall stood broken statues of discolored marble; fauns holding to their mouths hands whence the pipes had fallen; and nymphs who held vases and flowers no longer. In carrefours, where the paths crossed, were huge globular vases, broken and stained, but overflowing with the leathery leaves of the aloe, like jagged green flame flaring and falling. The great plants burst out luxuriantly from the crevices of the walls, and lay sprawled over them, lazily sucking the sun, while the lizards darted among them, half-loathsome miniatures of crocodiles; and high over all, the dome-topped stone-pines lay like heavy bars of cloud in the glittering air. In the universal sunshine and ruin, there were only silence, sadness, and decay.
I passed along, perplexed with a strange and nameless sorrow, and sat down upon the crumbling stone margin of a fountain, long since dry, and in whose basin lay pebbles and twigs. A reverie in n decayed garden naturally decks the trees again with the splendor of long-vanished summers, trims them as they had once been trimmed, and throngs the paths and the arbors with that host of the young and beautiful which the Imagination accords to all gardens, and palaces, and happy haunts. But as I sat and dreamed, I felt myself seized with the spell of mysterious horror which I had perceived in the padrone at the inn, and saying with him, "God forgive us all our sins!" I arose and strolled along the melancholy avenues, and descending the terraces, entered the house.
I saw no custode. The old woman, I fancied, sure that I was no thief, did not intend to disturb her siesta to look farther after me. So I walked slowly on, and passing up the grand stone-staircase in the cold hall, I entered the suite of state apartments. They were lofty and spacious. The ceilings were painted in fresco, and there was an unnatural freshness in the color, as if it was not the work of many years before. The windows were heavily and richly draped. The furniture was stately and costly, and the walls were tapestried. There was an oppressive air of cold regal magnificence in each apartment. There was nothing domestic; no pleasant disorder; no gentle confusion, as if children had just fled from the rooms; nothing that indicated a home; every thing that bespoke a ceremonial palace. Some of the walls were not tapestried, and upon them hung pictures—mainly portraits—soldiers in uniforms, and noblemen in robes, or dignified Italian ladies in the stiff fashions of dead centuries. At length I reached the state bed-chamber. In the centre of the room stood the bed, ascended by steps, and muffled in thick clustering draperies, covered with the crest of Sangrido. There was an oratory adjoining, with a massive silver crucifix and a carved priedieu. But my eyes clung with a painful curiosity to the solemnly-draped bed. The curtains were black, and folded over it like a heavy cloud; and as I gazed, the whole seemed to me to form a funeral catafalque. Through the thick glass of the windows, rimed with the gathered dust of years, and through the plain white muslin curtains that hung over them like shrouds, the light came sickly and thin, and the funeral drapery apparently thickened the air of the room. Instinctively I stepped to the window, but I could not open it, and it was so coated with obscurity that I could not look down into the sunny square. I listened for a sound, but there was nothing to hear. My own respiration was as audible as at midnight, and I turned back into the solemn chamber. Almost involuntarily, and as if drawn by an irresistible fascination, I climbed the steps that ascended to the bed, and laying hold of the heavy black curtains, pulled them aside and looked within them. There was nothing to be seen but a bed fairly made; the linen yellow, as with time. But as I looked up I saw something black hanging from the ring in the ceiling which held the drapery, so that the curtains made a funeral tabernacle for it. It was beyond my reach, but I could see that it was a frame shrouded in a black bag. It was evidently a picture: it must be a portrait. Why shrouded in black? Why there?
As I stood upon the steps, still holding back the curtains, still staring upward and wondering, I felt my foot forcibly seized, and looking down, saw a shrivelled, bony hand grasping it. It was the hand of the old custode, whose withered face, white and terrified, was turned beseechingly toward me. The forefinger of one hand was pressed over the mouth in sign of silence, while the other grasped my foot. I descended the steps, and the old woman seized both my hands with frenzied earnestness, and glared into my eyes, while her frame trembled, and upon her wan lips quivered the words:
"For the love of God, signor! For the love of God, signor!"
I waited patiently for her to speak, which she did at length, in a low, hurried, and appalled tone, begging me to leave the palace upon the moment, and if I had the slightest regard for the life of a miserable sinner, never to betray that I had penetrated so far as to see the bed and the shrouded portrait.
"I fell asleep, signor, and did not hear you when you came in from the garden. O Dio! O Dio!"
I left the yellow palace, and left Rieti, but not until I had learned the secret of that picture.
Ten years before, the Marquis di Sangrido concluded to marry. He was then sixty years old, a man of high family, of large fortune, of good person. He ordered the state carriage and drove to Rome, He was known everywhere, and was especially intimate with the Countess Ondella, who was the guardian of her orphan niece, Maddalena. The girl had grown up in a Venetian convent. She had seen no man but Padre Giuseppe, who wore long clothes like the women, and droned all the morning, and dozed all the afternoon, and did not seem to be a man. To him she confessed regularly every week. The old man usually went to sleep before the tale was over, for there were no very startling sins to confess, but occasionally strange thoughts and emotions, which Maddalena did not understand, nor the good Giuseppe either. On the whole, it was pleasant childish tattle, which soothed him to sleep, in which he dreamed of other times and other children, among whom was one child early habited in a solemn separate robe and divorced from life. In the face of that dream-child Padre Giuseppe seemed to see his own features, but deli cate and youthful, without wrinkles and snuff-stains. And so the placid confessor dreamed until dinner-time, and feared, as he arose and found that he must wipe the moisture from his eyes, that he was getting old and rheumy.
Maddalena was taught the duty of all good children—to confess and pray, and guard her mind from thoughts of men; never to tell lies, and always to obey her elders. She listened and learned. In the silent old convent-garden she read and mused, and vague hopes and yearnings fluttered sometimes across her mind as she saw birds floating in the sky, or bright leaves whirling and whirling, and then dropping, dropping, until they were lost upon the ground. Sixteen eventless years thus passed, and Maddalena Ondella was a woman.
One day, after having confessed to Padre Giuseppe, she went into the garden at sunset, and sat upon a pedestal whence a statue had long ago fallen. The vesper bell had ceased ringing; there was no wind to stir the leaves, and the darkening twilight touched her beauty with more exquisite grace as she sat motionless, gazing at the West, longing and hoping, with all the passionate possibilities of life glim- mering in her luscious lips. That moment she was summoned by the superior, and informed that she was to go to Rome immediately.
"Thank the Holy Virgin, Maddalena," said the abbess, "that you are to be married to a noble and worthy man. In all things, my child, remember our instructions, and obey your husband."
Padre Guiseppe's soft soul was touched. He shed tears as Maddalena bade him farewell. The good Padre did not know how beautiful she was, but the Marquis di Sangrido had accompanied the Countess Ondella to Venice, three years before, and had then seen her niece. Three years being past, he considered that he was sixty, and concluded to marry. He came to Rome in the state-carriage, and proposed to the Countess for Maddalena.
The aunt apprised the niece, and the day for the nuptials was appointed. The Marquis di Sangrido had returned to his country-palace at Rieti after his proposals were accepted, and carried with him workmen to decorate his house. Rieti was gay in the prospect of a bride who would bring youth, beauty, and society to cheer its loneliness. No one was permitted to see the work going on in the yellow palace, but it did not lose in splendor by the eager gossip of the town. One morning the workmen did not come. The work was finished. The next morning the old state-carriage, newly burnished, and drawn by the old horses in new and glittering harness, passed out of the gates. The servants wore bridal-favors. The blinds were drawn down, and the hard face of the Marquis di Sangrido returned the gratulations of the town.
A few days afterward a courier came dashing into Rieti, and disappeared in the palazzo Sangrido. It was rumored that the bride would arrive before night, and at sunset the bridal cortége appeared. A face more radiantly beautiful than they had ever seen beamed gratitude upon the peasants, who threw flowers before the bride's carriage, and the Marchioness Maddalena di Sangrido went into her palace. There were money and wine distributed in the square of Rieti that night, and prayers were uttered for the bride in the church next morning by those she never saw.
From an old convent in Venice to an old palace in Rieti the change was not great. But the change was entire in all the habits of life; and sometimes, when Maddalena stole away to a lonely corner of the garden, which had been trimmed and beautified in her honor, she looked wistfully at the long range of hills undulating into the blue distance; and, longing for a richer experience, shuddered as she reflected that, while dreaming in the convent-garden, everything was possible; but that, sitting in the garden of the palace, her future was an endless iteration of the present. She grew sad and silent in the rural splendors of Rieti.
The Marquis di Sangrido watched his wife with an intentness that seemed ferocity. If she went alone into the garden he presently appeared, and taking her arm led her back to the house, or paced solemnly and silently at her side, along the stately green avenues.
He was of high family, and great fortune, and of good person. The girls at the convent in Venice sauntered in the sunny garden, and talked, by stealth, of the happy Maddalena, and envied her splendid fortune and career. Maddalena, in the sunny garden of Rieti, longed for Venice, for companions, for life, for any thing. She grew pale, like a flower in the dark.
The time came to go to Rome. Before ordering the carriage the Marquis di Sangrido warned the Marchioness of the dangers of society, and the duties of wives. Her eyes flashed alternate scorn and longing as he spoke, and with a heart yearning and bursting, she leaped into the carriage, while her brain swam with the sudden and gorgeous hope of a new life. They reached Rome, and took possession of the palace. Fête followed fête. Everywhere Maddalena was the idol of admiration. The elastic Italian tongue was compelled into new forms of compliment; and she, like a thirst-stricken victim, plunged into the stream of life and madly revelled. She tasted new and wild experience, and quaffed it fiercely like burning wine. She had scarcely reached Rome when she saw Giulio. Their eyes met, then their hands. A week had not passed before they were ardent lovers. The whole restrained passion of her nature rose at once to flood-tide. The arrears of years were paid in moments. There was imperial splendor in her beauty. At home, at church, at the opera, upon the promenade, she was radiant, and wherever she was, Giulio was by her side and in her heart. She did not try to disguise it. The dames of high society thought her audacious, shook their fans, and recommended prudence. Maddalena scoffed at their suggestions, laughed prudence to scorn, and gloried in the tumult of her new life.
Before the shrewdest dame had even suspected, however, the Marquis di Sangrido was sure. His eye grow like a serpent's eye, and women shuddered as its livid glare fell upon them. His movements became sinuous and stealthy. Like a reptile, he chilled the sunshine as he slipped along the street to the Casino or the Café. To see him was like being smitten with disease. At the opera, in church, upon the promenade, he watched the young Giulio with his wife. Flowers were not fair enough, nor the sun bright enough, nor the day long enough for them.
The Marquis di Sangrido came home quietly one day an hour before the time he had mentioned. He entered softly, and glided through the apartments, with spectral stillness, toward his wife's room. His hard, cold face had a glacial intensity that froze with horror the valet who saw him pass. Reaching the door of his wife's room, he entered without knocking.
The Marchioness was not at the opera in the evening, nor at the ball afterward, nor was she seen during the next day. The Marquis and Marchioness di Sangrido had returned to Rieti. As the carriage thundered into the town, the blinds were closed; there was no beaming bridal face at the window; there were hurry and stern command, and the great gate closed behind the carriage in sullen gloom.
In was a solemn and melancholy supper that the Marquis and his wife eat that night. From his cold, hard face the snake had vanished, but its frigid ferocity was more terrible; and the pale marble rigidity of his wife was sadder to see. She rose from the table and passed alone through the vast, cold, silent apartments toward her chamber. Her heart was stony with the fixed resolve not to be baulked of life, and love, and happiness, but at some time, by some means, to escape the imprisonment of that palace, and dare the worst for Giulio. She reached her room and dismissed her maid, who withdrew, leaving her alone. Through the lofty windows the full moonlight streamed, and flooded that young beautiful woman who stood with her hands clasped before her, and her head leaning against the window-frame. She was entirely abandoned to the glowing remembrance of the last few weeks. One image, one memory, one hope, one thought, possessed her. She was a child in knowledge and in power, but a woman in passionate emotion. Like a stormy sea ebbing and flowing fiercely in a cavern, her feelings, and wishes, and vows, fluctuated through her mind, and she stood confounded by the greatness and glory of the passion that agitated her whole being. She was its slave, but know not how to obey it. The night waned, and she stood musing, her hands still clasped, her head leaning, when suddenly she heard a chorus of late revellers, artists returning from a festa:
The song was very distant and passed slowly out of hearing. Yet it lingered and lingered. It haunted the moonlight; beseeching, yearning, wailing; a whole history singing and sighing in its measures; a whole history, at least, when a heart listened in which all passionate powers thrilled and throbbed in answer.
Maddalena turned from her window, and walked slowly up and down the chamber. She paused and loosened her dress. It fell away from her like a cloud, and around her in the dark of the chamber, the dim outline of the furniture was not more still than the statuesque repose of her form. A faint, heavy odor from a vase of flowers filled the room. She moved slowly away, and slowly seated herself upon the edge of the bed, resting her head upon her hand, and murmuring almost inaudibly, as if dreaming:
The Marquis di Sangrido waited until he supposed that his wife had reached her chamber. Then he passed quietly through another door to a farther part of the palace, and entering a room which he unlocked with a key that he took from his pocket, he closed and locked it carefully behind him; then opening the small door of a cupboard in the wall, he took from a shelf a large glass jar, full of a green liquor, which he carefully examined; then closed and locked the cupboard-door, and left the room. When he reached the dining-hall, he summoned his valet, and ordered him to assemble all the servants, who instantly came thronging in. After looking at them sternly for a few moments, the Marquis said:
"I wish you all to return to Rome at an early hour in the morning. I shall follow you two days hence. Vincenzo," he said to his valet, "you will remain."
As the servants were leaving the room, he said to them with a kind of hiss,
"If any man remains behind after to-morrow morning, he will never see Rome again."
And with a shudder of fear the servants withdrew.
By dawn the next morning, they had all left the palazzo, and at sunrise were crossing the Campagna toward Rome. As the Marquis was finishing his breakfast, he ordered his valet to tell the maid of the Marchioness that he wished to know when her mistress was awake. As he arose from table, he gave the valet a letter for the Countess Ondella, sealed with black, which he charged him to deliver as soon as possible, and to make no delay in mounting and taking the road to Rome. The valet bowed, took the letter, and in ten minutes was galloping out of the town.
A little before noon, the maid appeared to say that her mistress was awake. The Marquis bade her remain for a moment. He went toward his wife's room, but immediately returning, told the maid that her mistress preferred to dress alone, and wished her to go with the custode to visit her sick child among the mountains.
"Stop and ask Padre Luigi to come instantly to the palace," said he, "and return by evening, but not before, or you will take the fever in the sun."
The maid and the old custode instantly departed. The suggestions of the Marquis di Sangrido were the sternest commands to his dependents.
He sat quietly for some time, until he heard a tap at the gate, and, descending, he opened to the Padre Luigi. The priest muttered a blessing as he entered, and followed the Marquis up the staircase. They advanced together through the rooms until they reached the chamber of the Marchioness. The priest paused a moment while the Marquis passed in.
"Maddalena," said he to his wife, who was kneeling at her Prie-Dieu, "Padre Luigi is here to receive your confession."
"I have none to make," returned she in a whisper, as a deathly pallor settled upon her cheek.
The Marquis did not respond, but, opening the door, he beckoned to the priest, who entered, and the Marquis retired.
"Why are you here" demanded Maddalena, suddenly springing up. "Signora, to hear your confession," replied the priest quietly.
"Go!" she said with a startled horror in her eyes, and pointing toward the door.
In vain the priest expostulated and besought her to confide to him the grief that weighed upon her conscience, and to receive his consolation. She said nothing but "Go!" and waved him away.
Padre Luigi passed out of the chamber. The Marquis waited in the adjoining room, and, without speaking, led the way toward the grand staircase. Still without speaking, they descended. The host opened the gate; the priest murmured a benedicite, and departed. Then the Marquis fastened the bolts and bars, locked the world out from himself and his wife, and slowly ascended the staircase. He went to the secret cupboard, where he had seen, on the previous evening, that the jar full of a green liquid was safe, and taking it in his hands, glided through the vast, silent rooms as spectrally still as when in Rome he had entered his wife's chamber suddenly.
The Marchioness Maddalena was still kneeling at her Prieu-Dieu.
"You have made your peace with God?" demanded the Marquis, as he closed the door, and stood before her, holding the jar.
She rose slowly, with her eyes fastened upon his; and tottering across the room, fell at his feet, and still staring in his face, gasped in a piteous whisper:
"What do you mean?"
He did not reply; but placing the jar upon the ground, he raised his wife from the floor, and leading her toward a huge, carved, oaken chair, he placed her upon it, and said in a voice cold and hard as his rigid face:
"Maddalena, you must die!"
With silken cords which he drew from his pocket, he bound her with inconceivable rapidity and firmness to the chair. She moaned like a dying child. The suddenness and hopelessness of her fate crushed her at once.
Tapestries and curtains hung about the chamber, and the summer light streamed golden through the windows. But it was spectral and dim to those young eyes. Upon the cypress terraces of the garden fountains were plashing in the sunshine, and in the deep shade of the trees cicadas sang. She thought of them all; she knew it well; but not a sound reached her ears.
Her whole short life lay clearly before her: the Venetian garden, the dream, the marriage, the blight, the new hope, the love, Giulio.
The Marquis raised the jar. The green liquor was vitriol. He stood over her, behind, where he did not see her face. The first drop fell upon her head.
"O my God!" she said slowly, "forgive my sins, but I love him with my whole soul."
In startled Rieti there was constant and terrified surmise all the day after the return of the Marquis and his wife. It was one of the breathless, glaring days of midsummer; a day of preternatural silence, when the sultry glare is a spell of terror, and men instinctively talk in whispers. Not a wind sighed; not a bird sang. Only at intervals a solitary cicada stung the ear with its dry, sad tone, There was no dancing at the Osteria; the cattle and the dogs lay listless in the shade; and as the awful heats deepened to noon, the inhabitants were stretched in the shadow of the houses uneasily dozing, or, starting suddenly from hot sleep, glanced with vague apprehension about the sky, as if a fearful tempest were gathering.
Suddenly a sharp, agonized, muffled scream pierced the very heart of that silence, and curdled the blood in the veins of the awe-stricken peasants. They stared at each other speechlessly, sat transfixed as if awaiting another sound; then, after long, breathless minutes, turned their pale faces and whispered stealthily together—not quite sure if that shriek were earthly; but muttering Ave Marias, and making the sign of the cross, their eyes gradually turned, as by tacit conviction, toward the grim palazzo Sangrido, standing sullen in the sun.
Vincenzo, the valet, upon his arrival in Rome, delivered to the Countess Ondella the letter of the Marquis sealed with a black seal, and informing her of the death of her niece, the Marchioness Maddalena. The next evening, Padre Luigi and his brother monks celebrated a funeral mass in the little church of Rieti.
I heard this history after I had left the little town, but I was glad of an opportunity of returning two years afterward. I found the same padrone at the Osteria, and endeavored to learn from him and from the peasants something farther about the Marquis di Sangrido. He was an old man, they said—hideously ugly. They believed, evidently, that he had horns and hoofs. But no one confessed that he had over seen him.
The day after my arrival, I went again to the palazzo. The same old woman examined and admitted me, evidently without recognizing me as the audacious stranger who had penetrated to the black and solemn chamber. She told me that I could not go into the palace, because the Marquis was living there, and would not go to Rome for several weeks; but I had her permission to stroll in the garden.
It was even more ruinous than before. Everywhere reigned the same desolation and sadness—doubly sad and desolate now that I knew the story. Yet everywhere in Italy you feel the possibility of such tragedies. Robert Browning's poem of "My Last Duchess" and Beckford's tale of the old woman near Naples are simple studies from life. The old villas and gardens crumbling in that hot southern sun are like memorials of the fierce excesses of hot southern passion. Love, hate, enthusiasm, revenge, despair, dark eyes, black hair, the stiletto, ignorance and mystery, ambition and superstition—these are the quick-glancing threads of which that life is spun. Venice explains Venice. The Council of Ten, the Bridge of Sighs, the Piombi, Marino Faliero, as well as Titian and Don Juan, are all bred of that silence, splendor, and isolation.
Suddenly, as I turned into a neglected ilex-path, I met an old man. He might have been seventy years of age; he was still erect, and long white hairs clustered around his cold, hard face. He paused courteously, saluted me with dignity, and bade me good day. Perceiving from my reply that I was a foreigner, he stopped and fell into conversation. In all that he said the shrewd observation of the man of the world was evident. He was familiar with the current gossip, spoke of society in Rome, of the belles and the beauties. Passing to pictures and the subjects that most interest strangers, he showed himself a judicious critic and connoisseur. Of certain pictures he spoke with a kind of cold ardor that was very singular, and as I mentioned one that I had seen in the palazzo Mazzo in Rome, he discovered that his friend, the Cardinal Mazzo, was also a friend of mine, and immediately invited me to dine with him on the following day; but I hastily declined upon plea of my early departure.
After a little more conversation, he bowed and wished me good morning.
"I am sorry that my pictures are all in Rome," said he, as he turned away. "There are none in the house yonder," he continued, pointing toward it through the cypresses, "of any interest to those out of the family."
So saying, the Marquis di Sangrido disappeared down the terraces.
But I remained in the solitary, sunny garden, remembering the black-shrouded picture, looking along the paths that Maddalena had paced. The tragedy of Maddalena was wringing my heart, but the sun shone bright, the nightingales sang, the wind blew gently, and the courteous tones of the Marquis were ringing in my cars.
"God forgive us all our sins! I said as I recalled the words of the padrone; and I passed swiftly and for ever out of the garden and the gate of the Palazzo Sangrido.