We never would have seen the place if the idea had not beguiled us, at Trent, of driving through the Dolomites to Bassano. And I doubt whether we would have been so extravagant about it if we had not just come from Germany. Is any quiver quite like that with which the returning victim of Italy greets his first cypress, his first olive tree, his first campanile? We formed imperishable ties with our irredentista driver, chiefly because he told us that the inhabitants of his dark little mountain city had turned the back of their statue of Dante to the North. Moreover it was May; and I should perhaps confess that we were too recently married to be altogether responsible. So when we discovered the castle that afternoon as we jingled down the widening gorge of the Val Sugana, we agreed that a princess must be shut up in the tower. Whereupon, as if in confirmation of our insight, an invisible dragon suddenly made himself heard behind the walls.
Otherwise there was no sign of habitation about the place. The rusty wrought-iron gate through which we stopped to look, the weed-checkered flagging within, the ruinous little chapel half averted from us at the right, the cracked and discoloured shafts outlining the court, the gaunt old pile of dark stone with its machicolated tower, formed a picture of abandonment which the dog’s barking made a trifle uncanny. But severe and even formidable as the castle was, in spite of its neglect, it had the nobility of perfect proportion. It was not so much a castle, indeed, as a castellated villa. The great arched windows of the façade were scarcely of a period when Ezzelino da Romano scoured these valleys o’ nights. Neither were the quarterfoils piercing the parapet of the roof. I remember how exquisite the spring sky looked through them, and between the square merlons of the tower. That element of contrast, taken with all the other circumstances, gave the structure a curious intensity of expression. There was something tragic in the way it lifted itself against the light.
It was part of the effect, and of the incredible richness of Italy, that our friend the driver could tell us nothing about the place. It was merely a castello qualunque! Yet how little was it a castello qualunque we began to learn not long after we had started on, skirting the wall that hid the princess’s dragon until her castle suddenly revealed itself to us, at a turn of the road, under a second and more romantic aspect. And this in spite of the fact that nothing more romantic than a few strands of barbed wire closed what must once have been the state entrance. Of course we stopped again—to look at the semicircular recess in the wall, with its lichened stone seats and couchant lions. Between them opened an avenue, I don’t know how many hundred yards long, of cypresses I don’t know how many hundred years old, that marched and dipped and rose again with such an air to the steps of a balustrated terrace in front of the castle! This fairy arcade, jewel-green with moss as if no one had trodden it for a century and cross-lighted by a westering sun, seemed to lead to some palace of enchantment rather than to the melancholy place we just had passed. So different a face did the villa turn to us now, with a loggia lightening its upper story and the Alps spreading a veil of magic behind it, that even the tower lost its grimness in the golden air. We therefore changed our minds about the princess. We decided that she was lying asleep there as a princess should, waiting for her prince.
It was only when we perceived farther down the wall to the left an archway opening into a white farm court, and an old peasant woman looking out of it, that we came back to the ordinary affairs of life. Which, for ourselves, consisted in getting to Bassano. And we found it, after following out of our rocky gorge a river that no one would have suspected of being the lazy Venetian Brenta, one of the most seductive little towns in the universe. Its ivied walls, its capricious streets, its overshadowing eaves, its pictured façades, its covered bridge, its noisy green river, so ravished two wanderers fresh from the pseudo-classicism of Munich that they instantly resolved to spend there the remainder of their lives.
Certain obstacles, however, opposed this project. The hotels, otherwise perfect establishments of their kind, afforded no outlook save upon the blackest alleys. And these on market mornings were nothing less than bedlam. Moreover a heavenly apartment we had descried from afar, at the top of a house overhanging the Brenta, with a corner loggia that reminded us of the one we had seen in the Val Sugana—an apartment after which no other apartment in the world could make us happy—was occupied by an unnatural parent of many children who refused to entertain our polite proposal that she vacate in our favour, even when we proved to her that we would save her offspring’s lives in taking the lease off her hands.
So when our Dæmon led us, sad and destitute of matches, not only to the Caffè al Mondo but to the table next Principe Montughi, we fell as ripe plums into his mouth. But my phrase is far from happy if it lead the reader to imagine that he is about to be treated to a portrait of the dark and designing Italian of romance. In the first place, Principe Montughi might very well have been described as fair. In all his subsequent dealings with us he certainly was. In the second place, the suggestion that we should occupy a part of his villa had its origin, I remember, in the audacity of my wife. For the rest, I am ready to allow that he was one of the most imposing persons I ever met. The mere sight of his silk hat was a lesson in worldly wisdom, while the air with which he offered me—no: with which he proffered me—the match of destiny made me realise that I must be born again, and a Latin, to carry life off with such a hand. What was more striking about him, though, at least to my Anglo-Saxon eye, was the way he filled his immaculate morning-coat, as if no clothes could ever be big enough for his arms and shoulders. And his head, which was set close to them, looked better suited to batter in gates than to carry silk hats. But its size and squareness and general competence contrasted oddly, again, with the eyes. These were of so pale a blue that from a distance they had the emptiness of a statue’s gaze. I wondered whether it were the contiguity of them, or the extreme narrowness of the forehead above them, or the surprised flare of their nearly intermingled eyebrows, that gave them the look of trouble so magnificently contradicted by everything else about the Prince.
Therefore when I say that we fell as ripe plums into his mouth, I merely choose a less graceful, though perhaps less pompous, way of saying that fate had prepared us for him and him for us. And I shall waste no time in pretending that his villa was not the one we had seen up the river. That would make too light of an element of the fatal in our chance relation of which I, for one, became increasingly conscious. Yet after the way we had gone on about the place, he could scarcely do less than invite us to drive out the next day and see it.
If we secretly trembled lest our first impression were destined to suffer the common lot of first impressions, we proved that we had been right after all. We began to know it as soon as we clattered under the archway of the podere, passed out of the picturesque white court into an olive yard, skirted an old garden that had gone all to birds and bushes, and looked down from the terrace into the delicious morning freshness of the cypress avenue. But what really clinched us was the loggia. This was nothing less than a great marble room, opening out of the upper hall of the villa. There were windows on either hand of the door, and in each side wall a niche where statues once had been. As for the front, it was a triptych framed between the low marble parapet and the pillars supporting the roof, wherein were set, with all the art of an Italian May morning, the tangled green of the garden, and the valley shut in between its rocky walls, and the Brenta shining past vineyards and stone pines and scattered farms into a sea of misty sunlight that was the Lombard Plain.
Such a loggia—such a place to work in, to play in, to eat in, to sleep in, to live in—never was on sea or land. Once we set foot in it we forgot Bassano and the unnatural parent and every other human tie; and the Principe was lost. I don’t believe he could have got rid of us if he had wanted to. Though, for that matter, I have always wondered why he didn’t. Which is not saying that we did not discover reasons enough for his keeping us. But as it was he smiled indulgently at our enthusiasm over his barrack, as he called it, apologised for its dilapidated condition, and said that if we would give him time he would make a few necessary improvements. Such, for instance, as scraping the moss from the avenue of cypresses. This proposal we rejected in horror, crying out that we should never dream of using that entrance and that we would infinitely prefer him to scrape the tiles off the floors. We did agree, however, that he should supply service and an occasional carriage, in addition to our meals. With which understanding we took a reluctant leave, warning the Principe to expect us not later than the evening of the second day.
And thus it was that from a carriage hired in the whim of a honeymoon we alighted in an episode the most memorable of our lives.
When we returned to take possession, the first person we saw was Principe Montughi. No less suave and impeccable as landlord than as host, he showed us to our rooms, introduced Graziosa, the little peasant girl who was to be our maid, and said dinner would be served at seven o’clock. He was sorry he had neglected to ask what we wished, and at what time we wished it; but if we would be good enough to put up with our first repast, he hoped we could in the future suit ourselves so far as the resources of his inadequate establishment permitted. He then withdrew, and we proceeded to settle ourselves in our new domain.
Not that there was much settling to be done. Our belongings were no more numerous than could be carried in trunks, while the rooms in which we disposed them were preposterously bare. We suspected that the furniture had gone the way of the front gates, which had been so admired by a passing compatriot of ours that the Prince said he had parted with them for ten times their value and had not yet got around to replacing them. Neither had he yet found time to make other repairs that some people might have considered more pressing. But that was a part of our picnic, as we regarded it. We could have furniture and tight windows at home; but we couldn’t have such big cool echoing rooms, or such a loggia, or such a garden, or such a podere, or such an olive yard running down to such a river.
Accordingly we were the more surprised by the dinner which Graziosa presently came to tell us was served on the terrace. It was no picnic art with which our uninstructed underlings had set the table and arranged the flowers and the brass fiorentine we might need later on, with which they had chosen just the right point for looking down the avenue or catching the last light of sunset on the tower. So keenly did we realise it that we were ready to give them credit for the stately setting of the terrace, for the mellowness of cracked marble and foot-worn brick and weathered stone, for the rich evening stillness of the garden and the fluting of the birds among the trees. We felt rather like persons in a play, sitting down to a stage dinner. When the soup came on we wondered whether it would be real.
It was—like the delicious trout that followed it, like the dish of macaroni and frizzled eggplant that formed the irresistible piece of resistance, like the crisp salad which prepared the way for a Gorgonzola I would now commit crimes for, like the far from histrionic Verona which bore us through to the coffee. It was all so real, and so acute a sense of the joy of life filled us when at last Graziosa lighted the wicks of the fiorentine and left us to a platter of walnuts and a carafe of Marsala, that we hadn’t the heart to call her back for nut-crackers. Besides, my wife wanted the secret of that masterpiece of resistance. So she decided to go and ask the old woman herself. And I went along too.
There was more than one piece of foolishness between us, I remember, as we made for the corner of the villa—the one Graziosa had turned as she came and went with our plates. I remember it, and a nightingale in the garden, and our serious agreement that “it” was all “wonderful,” as one unaccountably remembers longest a few of the least serious moments of life. But I remember too the curious change in atmosphere, almost like a breath of chilled air, which we detected even in our foolishness and in that dim light, when the end of the castle lifted its stark mass above us, with the tower darkly overtopping the farther angle. We walked toward it. And presently we made out, beyond a black blotch that suggested a door, two little lighted windows. They twinkled like a pair of eyes, rather too far above the ground for us to look into. I fear we might have done so, then; for in the back of both our heads was a desire to become better acquainted with our romantic domain. A sudden growl in the darkness, however, decided us for the door.
It proved not to be locked. The enormous raftered room into which we stepped, hand still in hand, must have been the original kitchen of the castle. I caught a hasty impression of a vast fireplace, on a central platform under a chimney hood, of tins and coppers and brasses glimmering dully, of Graziosa standing statue-like with a candle. What almost immediately held my eye was a superb three-legged pot of hammered copper full of lettuce heads, standing in the fireplace. Going over to look at it more closely, I became aware that someone else was in the room. My surprise was the greater because this person was not at all the old woman of the farm, or her husband either. It was a man who sat in the shadow at one side in a chef’s white cap. He rose silently from the deal table at which he had been eating the remains of our dinner. And then, to my stupefaction, I recognised the Prince himself.
He took off his white cap and bowed, magnificent as ever. What a feat that was I cannot hope to make clear in a land where we are as used to great changes of fortune as we are to the somewhat inadequate service, at summer hotels, of young gentlemen from the universities. The sense of it flashed for me, as I took in the Prince’s masquerade, into a surprised consciousness of a parallel between the man and his house—in which a sense of strange and lamentable things mingled inarticulately with the recognition of a personal force even deeper than I had suspected.
I wish that had been the only reason for the open-mouthed spectacle we made of ourselves. But the transition from the silk hat to the white cap—under which the flare of the Prince’s eyebrows looked startlingly made up—was so abrupt, it so carried out our earlier stage illusion, that it is no satisfaction to recall how far we were from smiles. The stare we gave, the glances we involuntarily exchanged, were just as gross.
Of course after that first ignoble moment, which I hope was not so long as the telling of it, we were both eager to extend the right hand of fellowship. But Montughi cut the ground from under our feet.
“Graziosa,” he commanded, “the signori have lost their way. Show them up to their rooms.”
I don’t suppose it was five minutes from the time we left the table on the terrace before we found ourselves back in our loggia, watching the receding glimmer of Graziosa’s candle and listening to the echo of her footsteps die away in the dark house.
He showed us our place, did the Principe, and we sat in it.
I won’t say that we didn’t wriggle in it a little, at first. We naturally wanted to show him that if we had broken into his kitchen we were no pair of mere inquisitive snoopers, and that the fact of our having caught him in cap and apron could not make the slightest difference in our relations—unless to improve them. But that was precisely what the Principe would not let us do. Such overtures as we made in that direction encountered a stony impassivity which taught us our own unwilling rôle. This was to make two personages of our landlord and of our cook. The former was the impeccable gentleman of the world we had accidentally met at Bassano, who honoured us with an occasional call and who once a week drove splendidly away to town in the old caleche which remained the rest of the time at our disposal. The latter was an invisible chef of no less distinguished qualities. If when we took in the situation and realised that we would never be able to scold our cook we both felt a certain dismay, it was speedily dispelled by the discovery that our cook never required a scolding. But never did he in one character refer to the other. And never, after one or two futile attempts, did we.
The thing was really preposterous. There we were, the three of us, cut off from the world as if we had been castaways on a desert island, and the man went on to the end pretending now not to be Prince and now not to be cook. A hundred times I was on the edge of bursting out: “Come, my dear fellow, don’t make things so hard for yourself and for us.” Only—I never did! On the contrary, we sometimes went so far as to ask ourselves whether the two personages might not be separate after all.
We smiled when we recalled our simple anticipations in becoming co-tenants of Castello Montughi. One of them had been that we should at last see something of what the sojourner in Italy so rarely does, an Italian interior. Whereas we discovered that, like everybody else, we were to see nothing at all. Perhaps it was our pique at finding ourselves in so curious and unexpected a subjection that searched for any possible flaw in the Prince’s acting, that divined a secret source of indifference under his pride. More was there than we knew, but we didn’t much matter one way or the other. I presume we felt it because we thought—and I still think—one reason for our singular relation was that we brought him a breath, such as it was, from a wider world than Val Sugana. At all events it was impossible for us to be indifferent about him. Who on earth was he? We could not help asking each other that question, or feeling sure that it had an answer. And what had brought him to the straits in which we found him? And why, most of all, did he inhabit this tumble-down castle in the Dolomites when such a personality as his could not fail elsewhere to make its mark?
We kept our questions to ourselves, however. We also kept, after that first misadventure, to our part of the house. But I would create an entirely false impression if I seemed to insinuate that we breathed an air of Maeterlinck or of Poe. What would you? The year was yet young, we ourselves were by no means old, we happened to have stumbled at a moment not the least romantic in life into a setting of the most romantic. Nor did Montughi’s eccentricity make it less so. The half-ruined castle, the lonely valley, the rushing river, reacted upon our new-world sensitiveness to such stimuli in a way we could scarcely have resisted. Such twilights as darkened our deserted garden and our great echoing rooms demanded a ghost. And we devoutly continued to believe in the princess who should inhabit the tower.
We took her, like her tower and her loggia and her enchanted avenue of cypresses, for granted—as a piece of the Argument from Design, whereby all things existed for the edification of two wandering Americans who had not long been married. We also took her, it must be said in further disclaimer of that insinuation to which I have just alluded, with giggles. Was she not red-haired, whose head we were one day to behold in a casement or an embrasure of the tower? On that we usually agreed. My wife, however, held that the mysterious lady was a flame of Montughi’s for whom he had ruined himself and whom he had borne away to this solitary retreat to be free of the world and its conventions, to say nothing of importunate husbands. Whereas according to my own less decorative theory our princess was an elderly female relative, possibly a wife but probably a maiden aunt, who suffered from a Jane Eyre-ish disability of the mental organs, requiring a régime of country air and close surveillance.
In any case, she remained even more obstinately invisible than our princely cook. But while it of course kept alive our more or less humorous speculations to see, after dark, slits of light in the irregularly spaced loopholes of the tower, or sometimes to hear notes from a faraway violin which was doubtless a gramophone, we elaborately avoided the other side of the castle. Although we could laugh about Montughi, we did not wish to give him another occasion for putting us in the wrong. For the same reason we pretended at first to be cool toward Graziosa and the good old people at the podere. And I presume it was not wholly our imagination that sensed a reserve under their Latin manners. That pretense did not last long, however. There is a fatal affinity between exiles in Italy and those who serve them. Moreover our unwillingness to use the Prince’s gate too often, or to lacerate ourselves by crawling through the barbed wire of our own, made it necessary for us to go in and out of the farmyard. So we ended by becoming fast friends with the peasants who lived there. Also with their dragon, the watchdog of the place. This was a huge white shaggy creature whom my wife christened Abracadabra and whom we promptly set about corrupting. He was always let loose at night.
For the rest, we spent more and more time prowling about the country. One reason was the Principe. We had a rather absurd idea that he might like his place to himself, once in a while. Another was that we found the garden more charming to look at than to idle in, especially after dewfall. It was not for nothing that the moss of the avenue kept so fairy green. Dank that garden was, even beyond the shadow of its tall cypresses. The filmed statues showed it, and the weedy paths. But there were pleasant places along the river, we discovered, of sun-warmed or branch-shaded rocks. There were vineyards hanging on the slopes of the valley, there were cool chestnut glens, there were other farms and other villas—though none so noble as ours. At night, too, as spring lengthened into summer, we often strolled up the road toward Austria or down toward Bassano, stopping to chat at the podere on our way back. Graziosa would always light us upstairs, as she had done that first night. Then we always ended by sitting in the loggia by ourselves, not without more chatter. God knows where we found so much to say, but we were never through. Still, we also found time to listen to the river and the nightingales, to watch the fireflies in the garden, the stars above the jagged dark rim of the valley, the distant twinkle of the plain.
It was an unforgettable summer.
To us it was unforgettable. Otherwise we must have flitted long before we did to scenes where we needed to walk less softly. Yet just that necessity of walking softly was part of the lure. Like so much else of life, however, it was in great part a thing of atmosphere, of colour, of accent, of states of feeling, of moments so real to us but so impossible to capture in word or line that I oftenest think of Castello Montughi in terms of music. It was another similarity of that episode to a piece of music that while the successive phases of it could hardly be labelled as chapters or acts, the transitions between them were perfectly clear. We had begun with an Andante. We had gone on to an Allegro ma non troppo. The third movement—it had settled down into a Scherzo, of the mellower kind. And the final resolution?
That was a Lamentoso. And the transition, when at last it came, was so unnerving that I was thankful my wife was not with me. She had been having a touch of malaria—due, I am afraid, to the dampness of the place. I was not really uneasy about her, though, beyond asking myself whether it were time for us to make a move. After she dropped to sleep, late in the evening, I went out to stretch my legs and get a breath of air.
Without any definite intention, I found myself walking up the valley. That was the direction I always liked best after sundown. The mountains stood out so solemnly against the stars, and the river made such a sound in the dark. I can hear it now. And I can see how sombre the castle and its merloned tower loomed before me when I went back that night. It put me in mind of the first time I had seen them. As I drew near the gate, too, I heard the dog. But it was no bark that came from him. It was a howl, long drawn and mournful. In a moment, however, I discovered what pulled me up short. For there were lights in the little chapel.
My first thought was of fire—until I had time to note that the light was perfectly steady, and to reflect that there was probably nothing left in the chapel to burn. Whereupon, as I watched the glimmer of the dusty old leaded panes, I grew extremely uncomfortable. In fact the hour, the uncanny noise of the dog, the unaccustomed circumstance of the illuminated chapel, all the other circumstances of the place, combined to give me a sensation I have rarely experienced. There have been times when I would be ashamed to make such a confession. But years have emboldened me to think that fearlessness is an insensibility of the nerves which a man should pray to be delivered from. His affair is to be scared as often and as violently as he pleases, but to keep his head. Which, I presume, was the reason why it seemed to me worthy to investigate. I therefore tiptoed around to the other entrance, where I almost yielded to a temptation to wake up the peasants. Luckily Abracadabra saved me from it by bounding at me out of the dark with a growl. When he recognised me he trotted quietly along beside me. That growl, however, reminded me of another time when I had investigated, and had been sorry for it. I gave Abracadabra a good-night pat and went into the house.
I found my wife still asleep. I could make out her quiet breathing, and the soft curve of her arm across the pillow. As I bent over her I heard Abracadabra again. I went out to the loggia. It was too late for nightingales. There were cicadas, now, in the cypresses. The melancholy shrilling of them, out of the black shadow, affected me almost as much as the dog. He had stopped his noise, though. I could see the ghostly shape of him down on the terrace, waiting. I don’t know—I felt a sudden shame of my retreat. I tiptoed back to my room, picked up my revolver, touched the soft arm on the pillow with my lips, and stole down stairs.
The dog ran to meet me at the terrace door, wagging his tail and sticking his cold nose into my hand. We turned the corner, we passed the low arch leading into the kitchen. The two little windows beside it were dark. So were the loopholes of the tower. But, beyond that redoubtable angle, I found the light still burning in the chapel. I wished the door were open at least a crack. I also wished, in spite of Abracadabra’s company, that I had not undertaken to prove I was not a coward. I stood there looking, listening, seeing nothing but those faintly lighted panes, hearing nothing but the cicadas and the river. I wondered if it were the sound of my own blood, unwilling as I was to go forward or to go back.
Presently, from inside the chapel, I heard a violin. Of that, this time, there could be no doubt. And in the stillness I recognised that sobbing theme from the Sixth Symphony of Chaikovsky, which everybody knows and sentimentalises over or laughs at. But nobody ever heard it as I heard it that night in the shadow of Castello Montughi, while cicadas chanted ethereally in the black cypresses and the Brenta muttered among its rocks. I didn’t laugh. I stood quivering. The theme swept on to its climax, returned, flowered magically, tragically, into developments I had never listened to or dreamed. If I can’t play a violin myself, I have sat in front of all the Russians and Jews and Gypsies who can. But no one of them ever let loose with his bow such pent-up passion and misery. Not one, ever. There was no mere poetry in that violin. There was heartbreak in it. There was damnation in it. There were wild tears, pleading, hunger, hopelessness, remorse. There was in it all of life that is unfulfilled and not to be assuaged and beyond utterance. And all poured out in a tone of gold, with the stroke of a god—or a demon.
No wonder that infernal dog started howling again. I could have howled myself. I’m not sure that I didn’t. However, before I could stop him the dog broke away from me. He leaped forward to the chapel door, scratched at it, finally threw his big body against it. The latch gave and the door flew open. The dog disappeared inside. As he did so I heard, instead of the music, a sort of crack and a brief whine. But what I saw, across the dark court, left me no time to think of that. For the moment I was too astonished even to be startled. Little as I had expected what lay behind the door, I expected nothing less than those two great candles and that statuesque profile upturned between them. The delicate line of the profile was incredibly white against the frescoed wall of the chapel. Then it came over me that she was not carved in marble, on a mediæval tomb, but that she was dead, lying there on her bier, in her capella ardente—that woman whose exquisitely cut features wore such an air of race.
For what I did afterward I don’t know whether I had an excuse or not. At first I was absurdly, horribly, shaken. I have a physical shrinking from death that is too much for me. I would rather have faced any marauder than that dead princess whom I had never seen, lying so white and silent between her candles, with her black hair sweeping down about her. Then the violin: there had been about it something unearthly. Could I have been imagining again? Could that have been a music of the supernatural? But as my senses grew calmer, as there came back to me the remembrance of all that had set this place so apart in my life, as I thought of the warm arm I had kissed a few minutes ago, watching that profile whose still beauty seemed the very image of a pure and noble pride, the mystery and awesomeness of it moved me less than a kind of passion of pity—that she should be lying alone there in the night, with no one but a dog beside her. And, yielding to a sudden impulse, I walked into the chapel.
Never, but never, did I regret an impulse more.
Principe Montughi was standing at the foot of the bier, his great head sunk between his powerful shoulders, his strange pale eyes on the white face between the candles. My own astounded eyes took him in, the two pieces of a violin bow in the hands clasped before him, the broken violin between the paws of the dog lying at his feet. My emotion flashed into an embarrassment so acute that I could neither speak nor move. But he did not break out on me as I expected—as I deserved. He did not even look at me, at first. And when he did it was as if I were not there.
“Too late,” he muttered. “Too late. She will not hear me, now. And when she could I would not play to her.”
His eyes were stranger and paler than ever. In the candle light they were like two spots of phosphorescence. Then they changed. I could see him slowly search my face, the revolver in my hand, the night behind me. Something of it was in his eyes when they came back to my face. Finally he spoke again.
“Is your wife honest?” he asked.
For very amazement I failed to realise the import of his question. The scene and the man appalled me. He had met me a few hours before, with the same self-possession. He could not long have put off that grotesque masquerade which secretly amused me. Yet the Princess must have been already dead, or dying. I began—I don’t know what I began to think. Then I suddenly recollected that in Italian the Prince’s adjective had a particular meaning, as applied to a woman.
“Is that why you shut her up here?” I burst out in indignation, in divination.
But I grew humble as he continued to stare at me. It was as if I could look through his blank eyes into a place of extremity which was not good to see.
“No,” he replied at last. “That is—she never would tell me.”
He said it quite simply, gazing down at the proud white face on the bier with a hypnotic intensity of demand. It made my anger shrivel away into nothing. It made me shiver. I saw something dreadful in the smile just touching the dead woman’s lips—a smile of Leonardo that was what you chose. But to me it was less dreadful than the sighing admission of the man’s words. They somehow grew up monstrously before me in the candle-light of the little painted chapel. They painted for me a picture of pride more terrifying than anything I had conceived. Inscrutably they unlocked the tower into which I had never stepped, peopled the lonely castle, haunted that fairy aisle of cypresses. Inexorably they uncovered for me, behind the smiling mask of my own life, the ghosts of sorrow and defeat, forebodings blacker and more intolerable still.
The poignancy of that revelation choked me, blinded me. I staggered back into the dark, leaving Montughi to take what answer he could from the mute lips of his Princess.