University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
THE PEDIGREE OF MONTE BENI.

From the old butler, whom he found to be a very
gracious and affable personage, Kenyon soon learned
many curious particulars about the family history and
hereditary peculiarities of the Counts of Monte Beni.
There was a pedigree, the later portion of which — that
is to say, for a little more than a thousand years — a
genealogist would have found delight in tracing out, link
by link, and authenticating by records and documentary
evidences. It would have been as difficult, however, to
follow up the stream of Donatello's ancestry to its dim
source, as travellers have found it to reach the mysterious
fountains of the Nile. And, far beyond the region of
definite and demonstrable fact, a romancer might have
strayed into a region of old poetry, where the rich soil,
so long uncultivated and untrodden, had lapsed into
nearly its primeval state of wilderness. Among those

antique paths, now overgrown with tangled and riotous
vegetation, the wanderer must needs follow his own guidance,
and arrive nowhither at last.

The race of Monte Beni, beyond a doubt, was one of
the oldest in Italy, where families appear to survive at
least, if not to flourish, on their half-decayed roots, oftener
than in England or France. It came down in a
broad track from the Middle Ages; but, at epochs anterior
to those, it was distinctly visible in the gloom of
the period before chivalry put forth its flower; and farther
still, we are almost afraid to say, it was seen, though
with a fainter and wavering course, in the early morn of
Christendom, when the Roman Empire had hardly begun
to show symptoms of decline. At that venerable distance,
the heralds gave up the lineage in despair.

But where written record left the genealogy of Monte
Beni, tradition took it up, and carried it without dread or
shame beyond the Imperial ages into the times of the
Roman republic; beyond those, again, into the epoch of
kingly rule. Nor even so remotely among the mossy
centuries did it pause, but strayed onward into that gray
antiquity of which there is no token left, save its cavernous
tombs, and a few bronzes, and some quaintly wrought
ornaments of gold, and gems with mystic figures and inscriptions.
There, or thereabouts, the line was supposed
to have had its origin in the sylvan life of Etruria, while
Italy was yet guiltless of Rome.

Of course, as we regret to say, the earlier and very
much the larger portion of this respectable descent —
and the same is true of many briefer pedigrees — must

be looked upon as altogether mythical. Still, it threw a
romantic interest around the unquestionable antiquity of
the Monte Beni family, and over that tract of their own
vines and fig-trees, beneath the shade of which they had
unquestionably dwelt for immemorial ages. And there
they had laid the foundations of their tower, so long ago
that one half of its height was said to be sunken under
the surface and to hide subterranean chambers which once
were cheerful with the olden sunshine.

One story, or myth, that had mixed itself up with their
mouldy genealogy, interested the sculptor by its wild, and
perhaps grotesque, yet not unfascinating peculiarity. He
caught at it the more eagerly, as it afforded a shadowy
and whimsical semblance of explanation for the likeness
which he, with Miriam and Hilda, had seen or fancied,
between Donatello and the Faun of Praxiteles.

The Monte Beni family, as this legend averred, drew
their origin from the Pelasgic race, who peopled Italy in
times that may be called pre-historic. It was the same
noble breed of men, of Asiatic birth, that settled in
Greece; the same happy and poetic kindred who dwelt in
Arcadia, and — whether they ever lived such life or not
— enriched the world with dreams, at least, and fables,
lovely, if unsubstantial, of a Golden Age. In those delicious
times, when deities and demigods appeared familiarly
on earth, mingling with its inhabitants as friend with
friend — when nymphs, satyrs, and the whole train of classic
faith or fable, hardly took pains to hide themselves in the
primeval woods — at that auspicious period the lineage
of Monte Beni had its rise. Its progenitor was a being

not altogether human, yet partaking so largely of the
gentlest human qualities, as to be neither awful nor
shocking to the imagination. A sylvan creature, native
among the woods, had loved a mortal maiden, and — perhaps
by kindness, and the subtle courtesies which love
might teach to his simplicity, or possibly by a ruder
wooing — had won her to his haunts. In due time, he
gained her womanly affection; and, making their bridal
bower, for aught we know, in the hollow of a great tree,
the pair spent a happy wedded life in that ancient neighborhood
where now stood Donatello's tower.

From this union sprang a vigorous progeny that took
its place unquestioned among human families. In that
age, however, and long afterwards, it showed the ineffaceable
lineaments of its wild paternity: it was a pleasant
and kindly race of men, but capable of savage fierceness,
and never quite restrainable within the trammels of social
law. They were strong, active, genial, cheerful as
the sunshine, passionate as the tornado. Their lives
were rendered blissful by an unsought harmony with
nature.

But, as centuries passed away, the Faun's wild blood
had necessarily been attempered with constant intermixtures
from the more ordinary streams of human life. It
lost many of its original qualities, and served, for the
most part, only to bestow an unconquerable vigor which
kept the family from extinction, and enabled them to
make their own part good throughout the perils and rude
emergencies of their interminable descent. In the constant
wars with which Italy was plagued, by the dissensions

of her petty states and republics, there was a demand
for native hardihood.

The successive members of the Monte Beni family
showed valor and policy enough, at all events, to keep
their hereditary possessions out of the clutch of grasping
neighbors, and probably differed very little from the other
feudal barons with whom they fought and feasted. Such
a degree of conformity with the manners of the generations,
through which it survived, must have been essential
to the prolonged continuance of the race.

It is well known, however, that any hereditary peculiarity
— as a supernumerary finger, or an anomalous
shape of feature, like the Austrian lip — is wont to show
itself in a family after a very wayward fashion. It skips
at its own pleasure along the line, and, latent for half a
century or so, crops out again in a great-grandson. And
thus, it was said, from a period beyond memory or record,
there had ever and anon been a descendant of the Monte
Benis bearing nearly all the characteristics that were attributed
to the original founder of the race. Some traditions
even went so far as to enumerate the ears, covered with a
delicate fur, and shaped like a pointed leaf, among the
proofs of authentic descent which were seen in these
favored individuals. We appreciate the beauty of such
tokens of a nearer kindred to the great family of nature
than other mortals bear; but it would be idle to ask
credit for a statement which might be deemed to partake
so largely of the grotesque.

But it was indisputable that, once in a century, or
oftener, a son of Monte Beni gathered into himself the

scattered qualities of his race, and reproduced the character
that had been assigned to it from immemorial times.
Beautiful, strong, brave, kindly, sincere, of honest impulses,
and endowed with simple tastes and the love of
homely pleasures, he was believed to possess gifts by
which he could associate himself with the wild things of
the forests, and with the fowls of the air, and could feel
a sympathy even with the trees, among which it was his
joy to dwell. On the other hand, there were deficiencies
both of intellect and heart, and especially, as it seemed, in
the development of the higher portion of man's nature.
These defects were less perceptible in early youth, but
showed themselves more strongly with advancing age,
when, as the animal spirits settled down upon a lower
level, the representative of the Monte Benis was apt to
become sensual, addicted to gross pleasures, heavy, unsympathizing,
and insulated within the narrow limits of a
surly selfishness.

A similar change, indeed, is no more than what we
constantly observe to take place in persons who are not
careful to substitute other graces for those which they inevitably
lose along with the quick sensibility and joyous
vivacity of youth. At worst, the reigning Count of
Monte Beni, as his hair grew white, was still a jolly old
fellow over his flask of wine — the wine that Bacchus
himself was fabled to have taught his sylvan ancestor how
to express, and from what choicest grapes, which would
ripen only in a certain divinely favored portion of the
Monte Beni vineyard.

The family, be it observed, were both proud and

ashamed of these legends; but whatever part of them
they might consent to incorporate into their ancestral history,
they steadily repudiated all that referred to their
one distinctive feature, the pointed and furry ears. In a
great many years past, no sober credence had been
yielded to the mythical portion of the pedigree. It
might, however, be considered as typifying some such
assemblage of qualities — in this case, chiefly remarkable
for their simplicity and naturalness — as, when they
reappear in successive generations, constitute what we
call family character. The sculptor found, moreover, on
the evidence of some old portraits, that the physical features
of the race had long been similar to what he now
saw them in Donatello. With accumulating years, it is
true, the Monte Beni face had a tendency to look grim
and savage; and, in two or three instances, the family
pictures glared at the spectator in the eyes like some
surly animal, that had lost its good-humor when it outlived
its playfulness.

The young count accorded his guest full liberty to investigate
the personal annals of these pictured worthies,
as well as all the rest of his progenitors; and ample materials
were at hand in many chests of worm-eaten papers
and yellow parchments, that had been gathering into
larger and dustier piles ever since the dark ages. But,
to confess the truth, the information afforded by these
musty documents was so much more prosaic than what
Kenyon acquired from Tomaso's legends, that even the
superior authenticity of the former could not reconcile
him to its dulness.

What especially delighted the sculptor, was the analogy
between Donatello's character, as he himself knew it, and
those peculiar traits which the old butler's narrative assumed
to have been long hereditary in the race. He was
amused at finding, too, that not only Tomaso but the peasantry
of the estate and neighboring village recognized
his friend as a genuine Monte Beni, of the original type.
They seemed to cherish a great affection for the young
count, and were full of stories about his sportive childhood;
how he had played among the little rustics, and
been at once the wildest and the sweetest of them all;
and how, in his very infancy, he had plunged into the
deep pools of the streamlets and never been drowned,
and had clambered to the topmost branches of tall trees
without ever breaking his neck. No such mischance
could happen to the sylvan child, because, handling all
the elements of nature so fearlessly and freely, nothing
had either the power or the will to do him harm.

He grew up, said these humble friends, the playmate
not only of all mortal kind, but of creatures of the woods;
although, when Kenyon pressed them for some particulars
of this latter mode of companionship, they could remember
little more than a few anecdotes of a pet fox, which used
to growl and snap at everybody save Donatello himself.

But they enlarged — and never were weary of the
theme — upon the blithesome effects of Donatello's presence
in his rosy childhood and budding youth. Their
hovels had always glowed like sunshine when he entered
them; so that, as the peasants expressed it, their young
master had never darkened a door-way in his life. He

was the soul of vintage festivals. While he was a mere
infant, scarcely able to run alone, it had been the custom
to make him tread the wine-press with his tender little
feet, if it were only to crush one cluster of the grapes.
And the grape-juice that gushed beneath his childish
tread, be it ever so small in quantity, sufficed to impart a
pleasant flavor to a whole cask of wine. The race of
Monte Beni — so these rustic chroniclers assured the
sculptor — had possessed the gift from the oldest of old
times of expressing good wine from ordinary grapes, and
a ravishing liquor from the choice growth of their vineyard.

In a word, as he listened to such tales as these, Kenyon
could have imagined that the valleys and hill-sides about
him were a veritable Arcadia, and that Donatello was not
merely a sylvan faun, but the genial wine-god in his very
person. Making many allowances for the poetic fancies
of Italian peasants, he set it down for fact, that his friend,
in a simple way, and among rustic folks, had been an exceedingly
delightful fellow in his younger days.

But the contadini sometimes added, shaking their heads
and sighing, that the young count was sadly changed since
he went to Rome. The village girls now missed the
merry smile with which he used to greet them.

The sculptor inquired of his good friend Tomaso,
whether he, too, had noticed the shadow which was said
to have recently fallen over Donatello's life.

“Ah, yes, signor!” answered the old butler, “it is
even so, since he came back from that wicked and miserable
city. The world has grown either too evil, or else

too wise and sad, for such men as the old Counts of
Monte Beni used to be. His very first taste of it, as you
see, has changed and spoilt my poor young lord. There
had not been a single count in the family these hundred
years and more, who was so true a Monte Beni, of
the antique stamp, as this poor signorino; and now it
brings the tears into my eyes to hear him sighing over a
cup of Sunshine! Ah, it is a sad world now!”

“Then you think there was a merrier world once?”
asked Kenyon.

“Surely, signor,” said Tomaso; “a merrier world,
and merrier Counts of Monte Beni to live in it! Such
tales of them as I have heard, when I was a child on my
grandfather's knee! The good old man remembered a
lord of Monte Beni — at least, he had heard of such a
one, though I will not make oath upon the holy crucifix
that my grandsire lived in his time — who used to go
into the woods and call pretty damsels out of the fountains,
and out of the trunks of the old trees. That merry
lord was known to dance with them a whole long summer
afternoon! When shall we see such frolics in our
days?”

“Not soon, I am afraid,” acquiesced the sculptor.
“You are right, excellent Tomaso; the world is sadder
now!”

And, in truth, while our friend smiled at these wild
fables, he sighed in the same breath to think how the
once genial earth produces, in every successive generation,
fewer flowers than used to gladden the preceding
ones. Not that the modes and seeming possibilities of

human enjoyment are rarer in our refined and softened
era — on the contrary, they never before were nearly so
abundant — but that mankind are getting so far beyond
the childhood of their race that they scorn to be happy
any longer. A simple and joyous character can find no
place for itself among the sage and sombre figures that
would put his unsophisticated cheerfulness to shame.
The entire system of man's affairs, as at present established,
is built up purposely to exclude the careless and
happy soul. The very children would upbraid the wretched
individual who should endeavor to take life and the
world as — what we might naturally suppose them meant
for — a place and opportunity for enjoyment.

It is the iron rule in our day to require an object and
a purpose in life. It makes us all parts of a complicated
scheme of progress, which can only result in our arrival
at a colder and drearier region than we were born in. It
insists upon everybody's adding somewhat — a mite, perhaps,
but earned by incessant effort — to an accumulated
pile of usefulness, of which the only use will be, to burden
our posterity with even heavier thoughts and more
inordinate labor than our own. No life now wanders
like an unfettered stream; there is a mill-wheel for the
tiniest rivulet to turn. We go all wrong, by too strenuous
a resolution to go all right.

Therefore it was — so, at least, the sculptor thought,
although partly suspicious of Donatello's darker misfortune
— that the young count found it impossible now-a-days
to be what his forefathers had been. He could not
live their healthy life of animal spirits, in their sympathy

with nature, and brotherhood with all that breathed
around them. Nature, in beast, fowl, and tree, and earth,
flood, and sky, is what it was of old; but sin, care, and
self-consciousness have set the human portion of the
world askew; and thus the simplest character is ever the
soonest to go astray.

“At any rate, Tomaso,” said Kenyon, doing his best
to comfort the old man, “let us hope that your young lord
will still enjoy himself at vintage-time. By the aspect
of the vineyard, I judge that this will be a famous year
for the golden wine of Monte Beni. As long as your
grapes produce that admirable liquor, sad as you think
the world, neither the count nor his guests will quite forget
to smile.”

“Ah, signor,” rejoined the butler with a sigh, “but he
scarcely wets his lips with the sunny juice.”

“There is yet another hope,” observed Kenyon; “the
young count may fall in love, and bring home a fair and
laughing wife to chase the gloom out of yonder old, frescoed
saloon. Do you think he could do a better thing,
my good Tomaso?”

“Maybe not, signor,” said the sage butler, looking earnestly
at him; “and, maybe, not a worse!”

The sculptor fancied that the good old man had it
partly in his mind to make some remark, or communicate
some fact, which, on second thoughts, he resolved to keep
concealed in his own breast. He now took his departure
cellarward, shaking his white head and muttering to himself,
and did not reappear till dinner-time, when he favored
Kenyon, whom he had taken far into his good

graces, with a choicer flask of Sunshine than had yet
blessed his palate.

To say the truth, this golden wine was no unnecessary
ingredient towards making the life of Monte Beni palatable.
It seemed a pity that Donatello did not drink a
little more of it, and go jollily to bed at least, even if he
should awake with an accession of darker melancholy the
next morning.

Nevertheless, there was no lack of outward means for
leading an agreeable life in the old villa. Wandering
musicians haunted the precincts of Monte Beni, where
they seemed to claim a prescriptive right; they made the
lawn and shrubbery tuneful with the sound of fiddle, harp,
and flute, and now and then with the tangled squeaking
of a bagpipe. Improvvisatori likewise came and told
tales or recited verses to the contadini — among whom
Kenyon often was an auditor — after their day's work in
the vineyard. Jugglers, too, obtained permission to do
feats of magic in the hall, where they set even the sage
Tomaso, and Stella, Girolamo, and the peasant girls from
the farmhouse, all of a broad grin, between merriment
and wonder. These good people got food and lodging
for their pleasant pains, and some of the small wine of
Tuscany, and a reasonable handful of the Grand Duke's
copper coin, to keep up the hospitable renown of Monte
Beni. But very seldom had they the young count as a
listener, or a spectator.

There were sometimes dances by moonlight on the lawn,
but never since he came from Rome did Donatello's presence
deepen the blushes of the pretty contadinas, or his

footstep weary out the most agile partner or competitor as
once it was sure to do.

Paupers — for this kind of vermin infested the house
of Monte Beni worse than any other spot in beggar-haunted
Italy — stood beneath all the windows, making
loud supplication, or even establishing themselves on the
marble steps of the grand entrance. They ate and drank,
and filled their bags, and pocketed the little money that
was given them, and went forth on their devious ways,
showering blessings innumerable on the mansion and its
lord, and on the souls of his deceased forefathers, who
had always been just such simpletons as to be compassionate
to beggary. But, in spite of their favorable prayers
— by which Italian philanthropists set great store —
a cloud seemed to hang over these once Arcadian precincts,
and to be darkest around the summit of the tower
where Donatello was wont to sit and brood.