 | A passionate pilgrim |  |
The Last of the Valerii.
I HAD had occasion to declare more than once that
if my god-daughter married a foreigner I should
refuse to give her away. And yet when the young
Conte Valerio was presented to me, in Rome, as her
accepted and plighted lover, I found myself looking at
the happy fellow, after a momentary stare of amazement,
with a certain paternal benevolence; thinking,
indeed, that from the picturesque point of view (she
with her yellow locks and he with his dusky ones),
they were a strikingly well-assorted pair. She brought
him up to me half proudly, half timidly, pushing him
before her, and begging me with one of her dovelike
glances to be very polite. I don't know that I am
particularly addicted to rudeness; but she was so
deeply impressed with his grandeur that she thought
it impossible to do him honor enough. The Conte
Valerio's grandeur was doubtless nothing for a young
American girl, who had the air and almost the habits
was desperately in love with him, and not only her
heart, but her imagination, was touched. He was
extremely handsome, and with a more significant sort
of beauty than is common in the handsome Roman
race. He had a sort of sunken depth of expression,
and a grave, slow smile, suggesting no great quickness
of wit, but an unimpassioned intensity of feeling which
promised well for Martha's happiness. He had little
of the light, inexpensive urbanity of his countrymen,
and more of a sort of heavy sincerity in his gaze which
seemed to suspend response until he was sure he understood
you. He was perhaps a little stupid, and I fancied
that to a political or æsthetic question the response
would be particularly slow. “He is good, and strong,
and brave,” the young girl however assured me; and
I easily believed her. Strong the Conte Valerio certainly
was; he had a head and throat like some of the
busts in the Vatican. To my eye, which has looked at
things now so long with the painter's purpose, it was
a real perplexity to see such a throat rising out of the
white cravat of the period. It sustained a head as
massively round as that of the familiar bust of the
Emperor Caracalla, and covered with the same dense
sculptural crop of curls. The young man's hair grew
superbly; it was such hair as the old Romans must
have had when they walked bareheaded and bronzed
clear forehead, and prolonged itself on cheek and chin
in a close, crisp beard, strong with its own strength and
unstiffened by the razor. Neither his nose nor his
mouth was delicate; but they were powerful, shapely,
and manly. His complexion was of a deep glowing
brown which no emotion would alter, and his large,
lucid eyes seemed to stare at you like a pair of polished
agates. He was of middle stature, and his chest
was of so generous a girth that you half expected to
hear his linen crack with its even respirations. And
yet, with his simple human smile, he looked neither
like a young bullock nor a gladiator. His powerful
voice was the least bit harsh, and his large, ceremonious
reply to my compliment had the massive sonority
with which civil speeches must have been uttered in
the age of Augustus. I had always considered my
god-daughter a very American little person, in all
delightful meanings of the word, and I doubted if
this sturdy young Latin would understand the transatlantic
element in her nature; but, evidently, he
would make her a loyal and ardent lover. She seemed
to me, in her blond prettiness, so tender, so appealing,
so bewitching, that it was impossible to believe he had
not more thoughts for all this than for the pretty fortune
which it yet bothered me to believe that he must,
like a good Italian, have taken the exact measure of.
a villa within the walls of Rome, which his scanty
funds had suffered to fall into sombre disrepair. “It 's
the Villa she 's in love with, quite as much as the
Count,” said her mother. “She dreams of converting
the Count; that 's all very well. But she dreams of
refurnishing the Villa!”
The upholsterers were turned into it, I believe, before
the wedding, and there was a great scrubbing and
sweeping of saloons and raking and weeding of alleys
and avenues. Martha made frequent visits of inspection
while these ceremonies were taking place; but one
day, on her return, she came into my little studio with
an air of amusing horror. She had found them scraping
the sarcophagus in the great ilex-walk; divesting it
of its mossy coat, disincrusting it of the sacred green
mould of the ages! This was their idea of making the
Villa comfortable. She had made them transport it to
the dampest place they could find; for, next after that
slow-coming, slow-going smile of her lover, it was the
rusty complexion of his patrimonial marbles that she
most prized. The young Count's conversion proceeded
less rapidly, and indeed I believe that his betrothed
brought little zeal to the affair. She loved him so
devoutly that she believed no change of faith could
better him, and she would have been willing for his
sake to say her prayers to the sacred Bambino at
such sacrifice, and I was struck with the happy promise
of a scene of which I was an accidental observer.
It was at St. Peter's, one Friday afternoon, during the
vesper service which takes place in the chapel of the
Choir. I met my god-daughter wandering happily on
her lover's arm, her mother being established on her
camp-stool near the chapel door. The crowd was collected
thereabouts, and the body of the church was
empty. Now and then the high voices of the singers
escaped into the outer vastness and melted slowly
away in the incense-thickened air. Something in the
young girl's step and the clasp of her arm in her lover's
told me that her contentment was perfect. As she
threw back her head and gazed into the magnificent
immensity of vault and dome, I felt that she was in
that enviable mood in which all consciousness revolves
on a single centre, and that her sense of the splendors
around her was one with the ecstasy of her trust.
They stopped before that sombre group of confessionals
which proclaims so portentously the world's sinfulness,
and Martha seemed to make some almost passionate
protestation. A few minutes later I overtook them.
“Don't you agree with me, dear friend,” said the
Count, who always addressed me with the most affectionate
deference, “that before I marry so pure and
sweet a creature as this, I ought to go into one of
of, — every evil thought and impulse and desire of my
grossly evil nature?”
Martha looked at him, half in deprecation, half in
homage, with a look which seemed at once to insist
that her lover could have no vices, and to plead that,
if he had, there would be something magnificent in
them. “Listen to him!” she said, smiling. “The list
would be long, and if you waited to finish it, you
would be late for the wedding! But if you confess
your sins for me, it 's only fair I should confess mine
for you. Do you know what I have been saying to
Camillo?” she added, turning to me with the half-filial
confidence she had always shown me and with a rosy
glow in her cheeks; “that I want to do something
more for him than girls commonly do for their lovers,
— to take some step, to run some risk, to break some
law, even! I 'm willing to change my religion, if he
bids me. There are moments when I 'm terribly tired
of simply staring at Catholicism; it will be a relief to
come into a church to kneel. That 's, after all, what
they are meant for! Therefore, Camillo mio, if it casts
a shade across your heart to think that I 'm a heretic,
I 'll go and kneel down to that good old priest who
has just entered the confessional yonder and say to
him, `My father, I repent, I abjure, I believe. Baptize
me in the only faith.”'
“If it 's as a compliment to the Count,” I said, “it
seems to me he ought to anticipate it by turning Protestant.”
She had spoken lightly and with a smile, and yet
with an undertone of girlish ardor. The young man
looked at her with a solemn, puzzled face and shook
his head. “Keep your religion,” he said. “Every one
his own. If you should attempt to embrace mine, I 'm
afraid you would close your arms about a shadow.
I 'm a poor Catholic! I don't understand all these
chants and ceremonies and splendors. When I was a
child I never could learn my catechism. My poor old
confessor long ago gave me up; he told me I was a
good boy but a pagan! You must not be a better
Catholic than your husband. I don't understand your
religion any better, but I beg you not to change it for
mine. If it has helped to make you what you are,
it must be good.” And taking the young girl's hand,
he was about to raise it affectionately to his lips; but
suddenly remembering that they were in a place unaccordant
with profane passions, he lowered it with a
comical smile. “Let us go!” he murmured, passing
his hand over his forehead. “This heavy atmosphere
of St. Peter's always stupefies me.”
They were married in the month of May, and
we separated for the summer, the Contessa's mamma
going to illuminate the domestic circle in New
to Rome in the autumn, I found the young couple
established at the Villa Valerio, which was being
gradually reclaimed from its antique decay. I begged
that the hand of improvement might be lightly laid
on it, for as an unscrupulous old genre painter, with
an eye to “subjects,” I preferred that ruin should
accumulate. My god-daughter was quite of my way
of thinking, and she had a capital sense of the
picturesque. Advising with me often as to projected
changes, she was sometimes more conservative than
myself; and I more than once smiled at her archæ
ological zeal, and declared that I believed she had
married the Count because he was like a statue of
the Decadence. I had a constant invitation to spend
my days at the Villa, and my easel was always
planted in one of the garden-walks. I grew to have
a painter's passion for the place, and to be intimate
with every tangled shrub and twisted tree, every
moss-coated vase and mouldy sarcophagus and sad,
disfeatured bust of those grim old Romans who could
so ill afford to become more meagre-visaged. The
place was of small extent; but though there were
many other villas more pretentious and splendid, none
seemed to me more deeply picturesque, more romantically
idle and untrimmed, more encumbered with precious
antique rubbish, and haunted with half-historic
used religiously to spend half an hour every day, —
half an hour being, I confess, just as long as I could
stay without beginning to sneeze. The trees arched
and intertwisted here along their dusky vista in the
quaintest symmetry; and as it was exposed uninterruptedly
to the west, the low evening sun used
to transfuse it with a sort of golden mist and play
through it — over leaves and knotty boughs and
mossy marbles — with a thousand crimson fingers.
It was filled with disinterred fragments of sculpture,
— nameless statues and noseless heads and rough-hewn
sarcophagi, which made it deliciously solemn.
The statues used to stand there in the perpetual
twilight like conscious things, brooding on their gathered
memories. I used to linger about them, half
expecting they would speak and tell me their stony
secrets, — whisper heavily the whereabouts of their
mouldering fellows, still unrecovered from the soil.
My god-daughter was idyllically happy and absolutely
in love. I was obliged to confess that even
rigid rules have their exceptions, and that now and
then an Italian count is an honest fellow. Camillo
was one to the core, and seemed quite content to
be adored. Their life was a childlike interchange of
caresses, as candid and unmeasured as those of a
shepherd and shepherdess in a bucolic poem. To
about her waist and his shoulder against her cheek;
to roll cigarettes for him while he puffed them in
the great marble-paved rotunda in the centre of the
house; to fill his glass from an old rusty red amphora,
— these graceful occupations satisfied the young
Countess.
She rode with him sometimes in the grassy shadow
of aqueducts and tombs, and sometimes suffered him
to show his beautiful wife at Roman dinners and
balls. She played dominos with him after dinner,
and carried out in a desultory way a daily scheme
of reading him the newspapers. This observance was
subject to fluctuations caused by the Count's invincible
tendency to go to sleep, — a failing his wife never
attempted to disguise or palliate. She would sit and
brush the flies from him while he lay picturesquely
snoozing, and, if I ventured near him, would place
her finger on her lips and whisper that she thought
her husband was as handsome asleep as awake. I
confess I often felt tempted to reply to her that he
was at least as entertaining, for the young man's
happiness had not multiplied the topics on which he
readily conversed. He had plenty of good sense, and
his opinions on practical matters were always worth
having. He would often come and sit near me while
I worked at my easel and offer a friendly criticism.
and his measurement of the resemblance between some
point of my copy and the original as trustworthy as
that of a mathematical instrument. But he seemed
to me to have either a strange reserve or a strange
simplicity; to be fundamentally unfurnished with
“ideas.” He had no beliefs nor hopes nor fears, —
nothing but senses, appetites, and serenely luxurious
tastes. As I watched him strolling about looking at
his finger-nails, I often wondered whether he had
anything that could properly be termed a soul, and
whether good health and good-nature were not the
sum of his advantages. “It 's lucky he 's good-natured,”
I used to say to myself; “for if he were
not, there is nothing in his conscience to keep him
in order. If he had irritable nerves instead of quiet
ones, he would strangle us as the infant Hercules
strangled the poor little snakes. He 's the natural
man! Happily, his nature is gentle; I can mix my
colors at my ease.” I wondered what he thought
about and what passed through his mind in the sunny
leisure which seemed to shut him in from that modern
work-a-day world of which, in spite of my passion
for bedaubing old panels with ineffective portraiture
of mouldy statues against screens of box, I still flattered
myself I was a member. I went so far as to
believe that he sometimes withdrew from the world
seemed so remote and his mind so irresponsive
and dumb, that nothing but a powerful caress or a
sudden violence was likely to arouse him. Even his
lavish tenderness for his wife had a quality which I
but half relished. Whether or no he had a soul
himself, he seemed not to suspect that she had one.
I took a godfatherly interest in what it had not always
seemed to me crabbed and pedantic to talk of as her
moral development. I fondly believed her to be a
creature susceptible of the finer spiritual emotions.
But what was becoming of her spiritual life in this
interminable heathenish honeymoon? Some fine day
she would find herself tired of the Count's beaux yeux
and make an appeal to his mind. She had, to my
knowledge, plans of study, of charity, of worthily playing
her part as a Contessa Valerio, — a position as to
which the family records furnished the most inspiring
examples. But if the Count found the newspapers
soporific, I doubted if he would turn Dante's pages
very fast for his wife, or smile with much zest at
the anecdotes of Vasari. How could he advise her,
instruct her, sustain her? And if she became a
mother, how could he share her responsibilities? He
doubtless would assure his little son and heir a stout
pair of arms and legs and a magnificent crop of curls,
and sometimes remove his cigarette to kiss a dimpled
voice to teach the lusty urchin his alphabet or his
prayers, or the rudiments of infant virtue. One accomplishment
indeed the Count possessed which
would make him an agreeable playfellow: he carried
in his pocket a collection of precious fragments of
antique pavement, — bits of porphyry and malachite
and lapis and basalt, — disinterred on his own soil
and brilliantly polished by use. With these you
might see him occupied by the half-hour, playing the
simple game of catch-and-toss, ranging them in a
circle, tossing them in rotation, and catching them on
the back of his hand. His skill was remarkable; he
would send a stone five feet into the air, and pitch
and catch and transpose the rest before he received
it again. I watched with affectionate jealousy for
the signs of a dawning sense, on Martha's part, that
she was the least bit strangely mated. Once or
twice, as the weeks went by, I fancied I read them,
and that she looked at me with eyes which seemed
to remember certain old talks of mine in which I
had declared — with such verity as you please — that
a Frenchman, an Italian, a Spaniard, might be a very
good fellow, but that he never really respected the
woman he pretended to love. For the most part,
however, these dusky broodings of mine spent themselves
easily in the charmed atmosphere of our romantic
had no business with modern scruples. The place
was so bright, so still, so sacred to the silent, imperturbable
past, that drowsy contentment seemed a natural
law; and sometimes when, as I sat at my work,
I saw my companions passing arm-in-arm across the
end of one of the long-drawn vistas, and, turning
back to my palette, found my colors dimmer for the
radiant vision, I could easily believe that I was some
loyal old chronicler of a perfectly poetical legend.
It was a help to ungrudging feelings that the Count,
yielding to his wife's urgency, had undertaken a series
of systematic excavations. To excavate is an expensive
luxury, and neither Camillo nor his latter forefathers
had possessed the means for a disinterested
pursuit of archæology. But his young wife had persuaded
herself that the much-trodden soil of the Villa
was as full of buried treasures as a bride-cake of plums,
and that it would be a pretty compliment to the
ancient house which had accepted her as mistress, to
devote a portion of her dowry to bringing its mouldy
honors to the light. I think she was not without a
fancy that this liberal process would help to disinfect
her Yankee dollars of the impertinent odor of trade.
She took learned advice on the subject, and was soon
ready to swear to you, proceeding from irrefutable
premises, that a colossal gilt-bronze Minerva mentioned
at a point twenty rods from the northwest angle of
the house. She had a couple of grotesque old antiquaries
to lunch, whom having plied with unwonted
potations, she walked off their legs in the grounds;
and though they agreed on nothing else in the world,
they individually assured her that properly conducted
researches would probably yield an unequalled harvest
of discoveries. The Count had been not only indifferent,
but even averse, to the scheme, and had more than
once arrested his wife's complacent allusions to it by
an unaccustomed acerbity of tone. “Let them lie, the
poor disinherited gods, the Minerva, the Apollo, the
Ceres you are so sure of finding,” he said, “and don't
break their rest. What do you want of them? We
can't worship them. Would you put them on pedestals
to stare and mock at them? If you can't believe
in them, don't disturb them. Peace be with them!”
I remember being a good deal impressed by a vigorous
confession drawn from him by his wife's playfully declaring
in answer to some remonstrances in this strain
that he was absolutely superstitious. “Yes, by Bacchus,
I am superstitious!” he cried. “Too much so,
perhaps! But I 'm an old Italian, and you must take
me as you find me. There have been things seen and
done here which leave strange influences behind!
They don't touch you, doubtless, who come of another
the leaves and the odor of the mouldy soil and the
blank eyes of the old statues. I can't bear to look
the statues in the face. I seem to see other strange
eyes in the empty sockets, and I hardly know what
they say to me. I call the poor old statues ghosts.
In conscience, we 've enough on the place already,
lurking and peering in every shady nook. Don't
dig up any more, or I won't answer for my wits!”
This account of Camillo's sensibilities was too fantastic
not to seem to his wife almost a joke; and
though I imagined there was more in it, he made a
joke so seldom that I should have been sorry to cut
short the poor girl's smile. With her smile she carried
her point, and in a few days arrived a kind of archæological
detective, with a dozen workmen armed with
pickaxes and spades. For myself, I was secretly vexed
at these energetic measures; for, though fond of disinterred
statues, I disliked the disinterment, and deplored
the profane sounds which were henceforth to jar upon
the sleepy stillness of the gardens. I especially objected
to the personage who conducted the operations;
an ugly little dwarfish man who seemed altogether a
subterranean genius, an earthy gnome of the underworld,
and went prying about the grounds with a malicious
smile which suggested more delight in the
money the Signor Conte was going to bury than in the
had been turned, the Count's mood seemed to alter,
and his curiosity got the better of his scruples. He
sniffed delightedly the odor of the humid earth, and
stood watching the workmen, as they struck constantly
deeper, with a kindling wonder in his eyes. Whenever
a pickaxe rang against a stone he would utter a
sharp cry, and be deterred from jumping into the
trench only by the little explorer's assurance that it
was a false alarm. The near prospect of discoveries
seemed to act upon his nerves, and I met him more
than once strolling restlessly among his cedarn alleys,
as if at last he had fallen a thinking. He took me by
the arm and made me walk with him, and discoursed
ardently of the chance of a “find.” I rather marvelled
at his sudden zeal, and wondered whether he had an
eye to the past or to the future, — to the beauty of possible
Minervas and Apollos or to their market value.
Whenever the Count would come and denounce his
little army of spadesmen for a set of loitering vagabonds,
the little explorer would glance at me with a
sarcastic twinkle which seemed to hint that excavations
were a snare. We were kept some time in suspense,
for several false beginnings were made. The
earth was probed in the wrong places. The Count
began to be discouraged and to prolong his abbreviated
siesta. But the little expert, who had his own ideas,
easel I heard the spades ringing against the dislodged
stones. Now and then I would pause, with an uncontrollable
acceleration of my heart-beats. “It may
be,” I would say, “that some marble masterpiece is
stirring there beneath its lightening weight of earth!
There are as good fish in the sea....! I may be
summoned to welcome another Antinous back to fame,
— a Venus, a Faun, an Augustus!”
One morning it seemed to me that I had been hearing
for half an hour a livelier movement of voices than
usual; but as I was preoccupied with a puzzling bit
of work, I made no inquiries. Suddenly a shadow fell
across my canvas, and I turned round. The little explorer
stood beside me, with a glittering eye, cap in
hand, his forehead bathed in perspiration. Resting in
the hollow of his arm was an earth-stained fragment
of marble. In answer to my questioning glance he
held it up to me, and I saw it was a woman's shapely
hand. “Come!” he simply said, and led the way to
the excavation. The workmen were so closely gathered
round the open trench that I saw nothing till he
made them divide. Then, full in the sun and flashing
it back, almost, in spite of her dusky incrustations, I
beheld, propped up with stones against a heap of earth,
a majestic marble image. She seemed to me almost
colossal, though I afterwards perceived that she was of
for I felt she was something great, and that it was
great to be among the first to know her. Her marvellous
beauty gave her an almost human look, and her
absent eyes seemed to wonder back at us. She was
amply draped, so that I saw that she was not a Venus.
“She 's a Juno,” said the excavator, decisively; and
she seemed indeed an embodiment of celestial supremacy
and repose. Her beautiful head, bound with a
single band, could have bent only to give the nod of
command; her eyes looked straight before her; her
mouth was implacably grave; one hand, outstretched,
appeared to have held a kind of imperial wand, the
arm from which the other had been broken hung at
her side with the most classical majesty. The workmanship
was of the rarest finish; and though perhaps
there was a sort of vaguely modern attempt at character
in her expression, she was wrought, as a whole, in
the large and simple manner of the great Greek period.
She was a masterpiece of skill and a marvel of preservation.
“Does the Count know?” I soon asked, for I
had a guilty sense that our eyes were taking something
from her.
“The Signor Conte is at his siesta,” said the explorer,
with his sceptical grin. “We don't like to
disturb him.”
“Here he comes!” cried one of the workmen, and
suddenly broken, for his face was flushed and his
hair disordered.
“Ah, my dream — my dream was right, then!” he
cried, and stood staring at the image.
“What was your dream?” I asked, as his face
seemed to betray more dismay than delight.
“That they 'd found a Juno; and that she rose
and came and laid her marble hand on mine. Eh?”
said the Count, excitedly.
A kind of awe-struck, guttural a-ah! burst from
the listening workmen.
“This is the hand!” said the little explorer, holding
up his perfect fragment. “I 've had it this half-hour,
so it can't have touched you.”
“But you 're apparently right as to her being a
Juno,” I said. “Admire her at your leisure.” And
I turned away; for if the Count was superstitious, I
wished to leave him free to relieve himself. I repaired
to the house to carry the news to my god-daughter,
whom I found slumbering — dreamlessly,
it appeared — over a great archæological octavo.
“They 've touched bottom,” I said. “They 've found
a Juno of Praxiteles at the very least!” She dropped
her octavo, and rang for a parasol. I described the
statue, but not graphically, I presume, for Martha
gave a little sarcastic grimace.
“A long, fluted peplum?” she said. “How very
odd! I don't believe she 's beautiful.”
“She 's beautiful enough, figlioccia mia,” I answered,
“to make you jealous.”
We found the Count standing before the resurgent
goddess in fixed contemplation, with folded arms. He
seemed to have recovered from the irritation of his
dream, but I thought his face betrayed a still deeper
emotion. He was pale, and gave no response as his
wife caressingly clasped his arm. I 'm not sure,
however, that his wife's attitude was not a livelier
tribute to the perfection of the image. She had been
laughing at my rhapsody as we walked from the
house, and I had bethought myself of a statement
I had somewhere seen, that women lacked the perception
of the purest beauty. Martha, however,
seemed slowly to measure our Juno's infinite stateliness.
She gazed a long time silently, leaning against
her husband, and then stepped half timidly down on
the stones which formed a rough base for the figure.
She laid her two rosy, ungloved hands upon the stony
fingers of the goddess, and remained for some moments
pressing them in her warm grasp, and fixing
her living eyes upon the inexpressive brow. When
she turned round her eyes were bright with an admiring
tear, — a tear which her husband was too deeply
absorbed to notice. He had apparently given orders
in honor of their discovery. It was now brought and
opened on the spot, and the little explorer, having
drawn the first glass, stepped forward, hat in hand, and
obsequiously presented it to the Countess. She only
moistened her lips with it and passed it to her husband.
He raised it mechanically to his own; then
suddenly he stopped, held it a moment aloft, and
poured it out slowly and solemnly at the feet of the
Juno.
“Why, it 's a libation!” I cried. He made no answer,
and walked slowly away.
There was no more work done that day. The laborers
lay on the grass, gazing with the native Roman
relish of a fine piece of sculpture, but wasting no wine
in pagan ceremonies. In the evening the Count paid
the Juno another visit, and gave orders that on the
morrow she should be transferred to the Casino. The
Casino was a deserted garden-house, built in not ungraceful
imitation of an Ionic temple, in which Camillo's
ancestors must often have assembled to drink cool
syrups from Venetian glasses, and listen to learned
madrigals. It contained several dusty fragments of
antique sculpture, and it was spacious enough to enclose
that richer collection of which I began fondly to
regard the Juno as but the nucleus. Here, with short
delay, this fine creature was placed, serenely upright,
pedestal. The little explorer, who seemed an expert
in all the offices of restoration, rubbed her and scraped
her with mysterious art, removed her earthy stains,
and doubled the lustre of her beauty. Her mellow
substance seemed to glow with a kind of renascent
purity and bloom, and, but for her broken hand, you
might have fancied she had just received the last
stroke of the chisel. Her fame remained no secret.
Within two or three days half a dozen inquisitive conoscenti
posted out to obtain sight of her. I happened
to be present when the first of these gentlemen (a German
in blue spectacles, with a portfolio under his arm)
presented himself at the Villa. The Count, hearing
his voice at the door, came forward and eyed him coldly
from head to foot.
“Your new Juno, Signor Conte,” began the German,
“is, in my opinion, much more likely to be a
certain Proserpine —”
“I 've neither a Juno nor a Proserpine to discuss
with you,” said the Count, curtly. “You 're misinformed.”
“You 've dug up no statue?” cried the German.
“What a scandalous hoax!”
“None worthy of your learned attention. I 'm
sorry you should have the trouble of carrying your
little note-book so far.” The Count had suddenly
become witty!
“But you 've something, surely. The rumor is
running through Rome.”
“The rumor be damned!” cried the Count, savagely.
“I 've nothing, — do you understand? Be so good
as to say so to your friends.”
The answer was explicit, and the poor archæologist
departed, tossing his flaxen mane. But I pitied him,
and ventured to remonstrate with the Count. “She
might as well be still in the earth, if no one is to
see her,” I said.
“I 'm to see her: that 's enough!” he answered
with the same unnatural harshness. Then, in a moment,
as he caught me eying him askance in troubled
surprise, “I hated his great portfolio. He was going
to make some hideous drawing of her.”
“Ah, that touches me,” I said. “I too have been
planning to make a little sketch.”
He was silent for some moments, after which he
turned and grasped my arm, with less irritation, but
with extraordinary gravity. “Go in there towards
twilight,” he said, “and sit for an hour and look at
her. I think you 'll give up your sketch. If you
don't, my good old friend, — you 're welcome!”
I followed his advice, and, as a friend, I gave up
my sketch. But an artist is an artist, and I secretly
longed to attempt one. Orders strictly in accordance
with the Count's reply to our German friend were
and a gracious Italian persuasiveness, assured
all subsequent inquirers that they had been regrettably
misinformed. I have no doubt, indeed, that, in
default of larger opportunity, they made condolence
remunerative. Further excavation was, for the present,
suspended, as implying an affront to the incomparable
Juno. The workmen departed, but the little
explorer still haunted the premises and sounded the
soil for his own entertainment. One day he came to
me with his usual ambiguous grimace. “The beautiful
hand of the Juno,” he murmured; “what has
become of it?”
“I 've not seen it since you called me to look at
her. I remember when I went away it was lying
on the grass near the excavation.”
“Where I placed it myself! After that it disappeared.
Ecco!”
“Do you suspect one of your workmen? Such a
fragment as that would bring more scudi than most
of them ever looked at.”
“Some, perhaps, are greater thieves than the others.
But if I were to call up the worst of them and accuse
him, the Count would interfere.”
“He must value that beautiful hand, nevertheless.”
The little expert in disinterment looked about him
and winked. “He values it so much that he himself
less we say about it the better.”
“Purloined it, my dear sir? After all, it 's his
own property.”
“Not so much as that comes to! So beautiful a
creature is more or less the property of every one;
we 've all a right to look at her. But the Count
treats her as if she were a sacro-sanct image of the
Madonna. He keeps her under lock and key, and
pays her solitary visits. What does he do, after all?
When a beautiful woman is in stone, all he can do
is to look at her. And what does he do with that
precious hand? He keeps it in a silver box; he has
made a relic of it!” And this cynical personage
began to chuckle grotesquely and walked away.
He left me musing uncomfortably, and wondering
what the deuce he meant. The Count certainly
chose to make a mystery of the Juno, but this
seemed a natural incident of the first rapture of possession.
I was willing to wait for a free access to
her, and in the mean time I was glad to find that
there was a limit to his constitutional apathy. But
as the days elapsed I began to be conscious that his
enjoyment was not communicative, but strangely cold
and shy and sombre. That he should admire a marble
goddess was no reason for his despising mankind;
yet he really seemed to be making invidious comparisons
his charming wife was not excepted. At moments
when I tried to persuade myself that he was neither
worse nor better company than usual, her face condemned
my optimism. She said nothing, but she wore
a constant look of pathetic perplexity. She sat at times
with her eyes fixed on him with a kind of imploring
curiosity, as if pitying surprise held resentment yet
awhile in check. What passed between them in
private, I had, of course, no warrant to inquire. Nothing,
I imagined, — and that was the misery! It was
part of the misery, too, that he seemed impenetrable
to these mute glances, and looked over her head
with an air of superb abstraction. Occasionally he
noticed me looking at him in urgent deprecation,
and then for a moment his heavy eye would sparkle,
half, as it seemed, in defiant irony and half with a
strangely stifled impulse to justify himself. But from
his wife he kept his face inexorably averted; and
when she approached him with some persuasive caress,
he received it with an ill-concealed shudder. I
inwardly protested and raged. I grew to hate the
Count and everything that belonged to him. “I was
a thousand times right,” I cried; “an Italian count
may be mighty fine, but he won't wear! Give us
some wholesome young fellow of our own blood,
who 'll play us none of these dusky old-world tricks.
husband!” I lost my pleasure in the Villa, in the
purple shadows and glowing lights, the mossy marbles
and the long-trailing profile of the Alban Hills.
My painting stood still; everything looked ugly. I
sat and fumbled with my palette, and seemed to be
mixing mud with my colors. My head was stuffed
with dismal thoughts; an intolerable weight seemed
to lie upon my heart. The Count became, to my
imagination, a dark efflorescence of the evil germs
which history had implanted in his line. No wonder
he was foredoomed to be cruel. Was not cruelty a
tradition in his race, and crime an example? The
unholy passions of his forefathers stirred blindly in
his untaught nature and clamored dumbly for an
issue. What a heavy heritage it seemed to me, as I
reckoned it up in my melancholy musings, the Count's
interminable ancestry! Back to the profligate revival
of arts and vices, — back to the bloody medley of
mediæval wars, — back through the long, fitfully glaring
dusk of the early ages to its ponderous origin in
the solid Roman state, — back through all the darkness
of history it seemed to stretch, losing every
feeblest claim on my sympathies as it went. Such a
record was in itself a curse; and my poor girl had
expected it to sit as lightly and gratefully on her
consciousness as her feather on her hat! I have
seemed the longer from my god-daughter's continued
reserve, and my inability to offer her a word of consolation.
A sensitive woman, disappointed in marriage,
exhausts her own ingenuity before she takes
counsel. The Count's preoccupations, whatever they
were, made him increasingly restless; he came and
went at random, with nervous abruptness; he took
long rides alone, and, as I inferred, rarely went through
the form of excusing himself to his wife; and still, as
time went on, he came no nearer explaining his mystery.
With the lapse of time, however, I confess that
my apprehensions began to be tempered with pity.
If I had expected to see him propitiate his urgent
ancestry by a crime, now that his native rectitude
seemed resolute to deny them this satisfaction, I felt
a sort of grudging gratitude. A man could n't be so
gratuitously sombre without being unhappy. He had
always treated me with that antique deference to
a grizzled beard for which elderly men reserve the
flower of their general tenderness for waning fashions,
and I thought it possible he might suffer me to lay
a healing hand upon his trouble. One evening, when
I had taken leave of my god-daughter and given her
my useless blessing in a silent kiss, I came out and
found the Count sitting in the garden in the mild
starlight, and staring at a mouldy Hermes, nestling
him roundly that his conduct needed an explanation.
He half turned his head, and his dark pupil
gleamed an instant.
“I understand,” he said, “you think me crazy!”
And he tapped his forehead.
“No, not crazy, but unhappy. And if unhappiness
runs its course too freely, of course, our poor wits are
sorely tried.”
He was silent awhile, and then, “I 'm not unhappy!”
he cried abruptly. “I 'm prodigiously happy.
You would n't believe the satisfaction I take in sitting
here and staring at that old weather-worn Hermes.
Formerly I used to be afraid of him: his frown used
to remind me of a little bushy-browed old priest who
taught me Latin and looked at me terribly over the
book when I stumbled in my Virgil. But now it
seems to me the friendliest, jolliest thing in the
world, and suggests the most delightful images. He
stood pouting his great lips in some old Roman's
garden two thousand years ago. He saw the sandalled
feet treading the alleys and the rose-crowned
heads bending over the wine; he knew the old feasts
and the old worship, the old Romans and the old gods.
As I sit here he speaks to me, in his own dumb way,
and describes it all! No, no, my friend, I 'm the
happiest of men!”
I had denied that I thought he was crazy, but I
suddenly began to suspect it, for I found nothing reassuring
in this singular rhapsody. The Hermes, for
a wonder, had kept his nose; and when I reflected
that my dear Countess was being neglected for this
senseless pagan block, I secretly promised myself to
come the next day with a hammer and deal him
such a lusty blow as would make him too ridiculous
for a sentimental tête-à-tête. Meanwhile, however, the
Count's infatuation was no laughing matter, and I expressed
my sincerest conviction when I said, after a
pause, that I should recommend him to see either a
priest or a physician.
He burst into uproarious laughter. “A priest!
What should I do with a priest, or he with me? I
never loved them, and I feel less like beginning than
ever. A priest, my dear friend,” he repeated, laying
his hand on my arm, “don't set a priest at
me, if you value his sanity! My confession would
frighten the poor man out of his wits. As for a doctor,
I never was better in my life; and unless,” he
added abruptly, rising, and eying me askance, “you
want to poison me, in Christian charity I advise you
to leave me alone.”
Decidedly, the Count was unsound, and I had no
heart, for some days, to go back to the Villa. How
should I treat him, what stand should I take, what
I wandered about Rome, revolving these questions,
and one afternoon found myself in the Pantheon. A
light spring shower had begun to fall, and I hurried
for refuge into the great temple which its Christian
altars have but half converted into a church. No
Roman monument retains a deeper impress of ancient
life, or verifies more forcibly those prodigious beliefs
which we are apt to regard as dim fables. The huge
dusky dome seems to the spiritual ear to hold a
vague reverberation of pagan worship, as a gathered
shell holds the rumor of the sea. Three or four persons
were scattered before the various altars; another
stood near the centre, beneath the aperture in the
dome. As I drew near I perceived this was the
Count. He was planted with his hands behind him,
looking up first at the heavy rain-clouds, as they
crossed the great bull's-eye, and then down at the
besprinkled circle on the pavement. In those days
the pavement was rugged and cracked and magnificently
old, and this ample space, in free communion
with the weather, had become as mouldy and mossy
and verdant as a strip of garden soil. A tender
herbage had sprung up in the crevices of the slabs,
and the little microscopic shoots were twinkling in
the rain. This great weather-current, through the uncapped
vault, deadens most effectively the customary
a faith that was on friendly terms with nature. It
seemed to have performed this office for the Count;
his face wore an indefinable expression of ecstasy,
and he was so rapt in contemplation that it was
some time before he noticed me. The sun was struggling
through the clouds without, and yet a thin rain
continued to fall and came drifting down into our
gloomy enclosure in a sort of illuminated drizzle.
The Count watched it with the fascinated stare of a
child watching a fountain, and then turned away,
pressing his hand to his brow, and walked over to
one of the ornamental altars. Here he again stood
staring, but in a moment wheeled about and returned
to his former place. Just then he recognized me,
and perceived, I suppose, the puzzled gaze I must
have fixed on him. He saluted me frankly with his
hand, and at last came toward me. I fancied that he
was in a kind of nervous tremor and was trying to
appear calm.
“This is the best place in Rome,” he murmured.
“It 's worth fifty St. Peters'. But do you know I
never came here till the other day? I left it to the
forestieri. They go about with their red books, and
read about this and that, and think they know it.
Ah! you must feel it, — feel the beauty and fitness
of that great open skylight. Now, only the wind and
— of old” — and he touched my arm and gave me a
strange smile — “the pagan gods and goddesses used
to come sailing through it and take their places at
their altars. What a procession, when the eyes of
faith could see it! Those are the things they have
given us instead!” And he gave a pitiful shrug. “I
should like to pull down their pictures, overturn their
candlesticks, and poison their holy-water!”
“My dear Count,” I said gently, “you should tolerate
people's honest beliefs. Would you renew the
Inquisition, and in the interest of Jupiter and Mercury?”
“People would n't tolerate my belief, if they guessed
it!” he cried. “There 's been a great talk about the
pagan persecutions; but the Christians persecuted as
well, and the old gods were worshipped in caves and
woods as well as the new. And none the worse for
that! It was in caves and woods and streams, in earth
and air and water, they dwelt. And there — and here,
too, in spite of all your Christian lustrations — a son
of old Italy may find them still!”
He had said more than he meant, and his mask had
fallen. I looked at him hard, and felt a sudden outgush
of the compassion we always feel for a creature
irresponsibly excited. I seemed to touch the source
of his trouble, and my relief was great, for my discovery
I contented myself with smiling benignantly. He
looked back at me suspiciously, as if to judge how far
he had betrayed himself; and in his glance I read,
somehow, that he had a conscience we could take hold
of. In my gratitude, I was ready to thank any gods
he pleased. “Take care, take care,” I said, “you 're
saying things which if the sacristan there were to hear
and report —!” And I passed my hand through his
arm and led him away.
I was startled and shocked, but I was also amused
and comforted. The Count had suddenly become for
me a delightfully curious phenomenon, and I passed
the rest of the day in meditating on the strange ineffaceability
of race-characteristics. A sturdy young
Latin I had called Camillo; sturdier, indeed, than I
had dreamed him! Discretion was now misplaced, and
on the morrow I spoke to my god-daughter. She had
lately been hoping, I think, that I would help her to
unburden her heart, for she immediately gave way to
tears and confessed that she was miserable. “At first,”
she said, “I thought it was all fancy, and not his tenderness
that was growing less, but my exactions that
were growing greater. But suddenly it settled upon
me like a mortal chill, — the conviction that he had
ceased to care for me, that something had come between
us. And the puzzling thing has been the want
there is another woman in the case. I have racked my
brain to discover what I had said or done or thought
to displease him! And yet he goes about like a man
too deeply injured to complain. He has never uttered
a harsh word or given me a reproachful look. He has
simply renounced me. I have dropped out of his
life.”
She spoke with such an appealing tremor in her
voice that I was on the point of telling her that I had
guessed the riddle, and that this was half the battle.
But I was afraid of her incredulity. My solution was
so fantastic, so apparently far-fetched, so absurd, that I
resolved to wait for convincing evidence. To obtain
it, I continued to watch the Count, covertly and cautiously,
but with a vigilance which disinterested curiosity
now made intensely keen. I returned to my
painting, and neglected no pretext for hovering about
the gardens and the neighborhood of the Casino. The
Count, I think, suspected my designs, or at least my
suspicions, and would have been glad to remember just
what he had suffered himself to say to me in the Pantheon.
But it deepened my interest in his extraordinary
situation that, in so far as I could read his deeply
brooding face, he seemed to have grudgingly pardoned
me. He gave me a glance occasionally, as he passed
me, in which a sort of dumb desire for help appeared
enough to help him, but the case was prodigiously delicate,
and I wished to master the symptoms. Meanwhile
I worked and waited and wondered. Ah! I
wondered, you may be sure, with an interminable wonder;
and, turn it over as I would, I could n't get used
to my idea. Sometimes it offered itself to me with
a perverse fascination which deprived me of all wish to
interfere. The Count took the form of a precious psychological
study, and refined feeling seemed to dictate
a tender respect for his delusion. I envied him the
force of his imagination, and I used sometimes to close
my eyes with a vague desire that when I opened them
I might find Apollo under the opposite tree, lazily kissing
his flute, or see Diana hurrying with long steps
down the ilex-walk. But for the most part my host
seemed to me simply an unhappy young man, with an
unwholesome mental twist which should be smoothed
away as speedily as possible. If the remedy was to
match the disease, however, it would have to be an ingenious
compound!
One evening, having bidden my god-daughter good
night, I had started on my usual walk to my lodgings
in Rome. Five minutes after leaving the villa-gate I
discovered that I had left my eye-glass — an object
in constant use — behind me. I immediately remembered
that, while painting, I had broken the string
provisionally upon a twig of a flowering-almond tree
within arm's reach. Shortly afterwards I had gathered
up my things and retired, unmindful of the glass; and
now, as I needed it to read the evening paper at the
Caffè Greco, there was no alternative but to retrace my
steps and detach it from its twig. I easily found it,
and lingered awhile to note the curious night-aspect of
the spot I had been studying by daylight. The night
was magnificent, and full-charged with the breath of
the early Roman spring. The moon was rising fast and
flinging her silver checkers into the heavy masses of
shadow. Watching her at play, I strolled farther and
suddenly came in sight of the Casino.
Just then the moon, which for a moment had been
concealed, touched with a white ray a small marble
figure which adorned the pediment of this rather factitious
little structure. Its sudden illumination suggested
that a rarer spectacle was at hand, and that the
same influence must be vastly becoming to the imprisoned
Juno. The door of the Casino was, as usual,
locked, but the moonlight was flooding the high-placed
windows so generously that my curiosity became obstinate
— and inventive. I dragged a garden-seat round
from the portico, placed it on end, and succeeded in
climbing to the top of it and bringing myself abreast
of one of the windows. The casement yielded to my
I had been looking for, — Juno visited by Diana. The
beautiful image stood bathed in the radiant flood and
shining with a purity which made her most persuasively
divine. If by day her mellow complexion suggested
faded gold, her substance now might have
passed for polished silver. The effect was almost terrible;
beauty so eloquent could hardly be inanimate.
This was my foremost observation. I leave you to
fancy whether my next was less interesting. At some
distance from the foot of the statue, just out of the
light, I perceived a figure lying flat on the pavement,
prostrate apparently with devotion. I can hardly tell
you how it completed the impressiveness of the scene
It marked the shining image as a goddess indeed, and
seemed to throw a sort of conscious pride into her
stony mask. I of course immediately recognized this
recumbent worshipper as the Count, and while I stood
gazing, as if to help me to read the full meaning of
his attitude, the moonlight travelled forward and covered
his breast and face. Then I saw that his eyes
were closed, and that he was either asleep or swooning.
Watching him attentively, I detected his even
respirations, and judged there was no reason for alarm.
The moonlight blanched his face, which seemed already
pale with weariness. He had come into the presence
of the Juno in obedience to that fabulous passion of
exhausted either by compliance or resistance, he had
sunk down at her feet in a stupid sleep. The bright
moonshine soon aroused him, however; he muttered
something and raised himself, vaguely staring. Then
recognizing his situation, he rose and stood for some
time gazing fixedly at the glowing image with an
expression which I fancied was not that of wholly
unprotesting devotion. He uttered a string of broken
words of which I was unable to catch the meaning,
and then, after another pause and a long, melancholy
moan, he turned slowly to the door. As rapidly and
noiselessly as possible I descended from my post of
vigilance and passed behind the Casino, and in a moment
I heard the sound of the closing lock and of
his departing footsteps.
The next day, meeting the little antiquarian in the
grounds, I shook my finger at him with what I meant
he should consider portentous gravity. But he only
grinned like the malicious earth-gnome to which I
had always compared him, and twisted his mustache
as if my menace was a capital joke. “If you dig any
more holes here,” I said, “you shall be thrust into the
deepest of them, and have the earth packed down on
top of you. We have made enough discoveries, and
we want no more statues. Your Juno has almost
ruined us.”
He burst out laughing. “I expected as much,” he
cried; “I had my notions!”
“What did you expect?”
“That the Signor Conte would begin and say his
prayers to her.”
“Good heavens! Is the case so common? Why
did you expect it?”
“On the contrary, the case is rare. But I 've fumbled
so long in the monstrous heritage of antiquity,
that I have learned a multitude of secrets; learned that
ancient relics may work modern miracles. There 's
a pagan element in all of us, — I don't speak for
you, illustrissimi forestieri, — and the old gods have
still their worshippers. The old spirit still throbs
here and there, and the Signor Conte has his share
of it. He 's a good fellow, but, between ourselves,
he 's an impossible Christian!” And this singular
personage resumed his impertinent hilarity.
“If your previsions were so distinct,” I said,
“you ought to have given me a hint of them. I
should have sent your spadesmen walking.”
“Ah, but the Juno is so beautiful!”
“Her beauty be blasted! Can you tell me what
has become of the Contessa's? To rival the Juno,
she 's turning to marble herself.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Ah, but the Juno
is worth fifty thousand scudi!”
“I 'd give a hundred thousand,” I said, “to have
her annihilated. Perhaps, after all, I shall want you
to dig another hole.”
“At your service!” he answered, with a flourish;
and we separated.
A couple of days later I dined, as I often did,
with my host and hostess, and met the Count face
to face for the first time since his prostration in
the Casino. He bore the traces of it, and sat plunged
in sombre distraction. I fancied that the path of
the antique faith was not strewn with flowers, and
that the Juno was becoming daily a harder mistress
to serve. Dinner was scarcely over before he rose
from table and took up his hat. As he did so,
passing near his wife, he faltered a moment, stopped
and gave her — for the first time, I imagine — that
vaguely imploring look which I had often caught.
She moved her lips in inarticulate sympathy and
put out her hands. He drew her towards him,
kissed her with a kind of angry ardor, and strode
away. The occasion was propitious, and further delay
unnecessary.
“What I have to tell you is very strange,” I
said to the Countess, “very fantastic, very incredible.
But perhaps you 'll not find it so bad as you feared.
There is a woman in the case! Your enemy is the
Juno. The Count — how shall I say it?—the Count
moment she touched my arm with her hand, and
I knew she meant that I had spoken her own belief.
“You admired his antique simplicity: you see
how far it goes. He has reverted to the faith of
his fathers. Dormant through the ages, that imperious
statue has silently aroused it. He believes in
the pedigrees you used to dog's-ear your School Mythology
with trying to get by heart. In a word,
dear child, Camillo is a pagan!”
“I suppose you 'll be terribly shocked,” she answered,
“if I say that he 's welcome to any faith, if
he will only share it with me. I 'll believe in Jupiter,
if he 'll bid me! My sorrow 's not for that:
let my husband be himself! My sorrow is for the
gulf of silence and indifference that has burst open between
us. His Juno 's the reality; I 'm the fiction!”
“I 've lately become reconciled to this gulf of silence,
and to your fading for a while into a fiction.
After the fable, the moral! The poor fellow has but
half succumbed: the other half protests. The modern
man is shut out in the darkness with his incomparable
wife. How can he have failed to feel —
vaguely and grossly if it must have been, but in
every throb of his heart — that you are a more perfect
experiment of nature, a riper fruit of time, than
those primitive persons for whom Juno was a terror
of believing you an inconvertible modern. He
has crossed the Acheron, but he has left you behind,
as a pledge to the present. We 'll bring him
back to redeem it. The old ancestral ghosts ought
to be propitiated when a pretty creature like you
has sacrificed the fragrance of her life. He has
proved himself one of the Valerii; we shall see to
it that he is the last, and yet that his decease
shall leave the Conte Camillo in excellent health.”
I spoke with confidence which I had partly felt,
for it seemed to me that if the Count was to be
touched, it must be by the sense that his strange
spiritual excursion had not made his wife detest him.
We talked long and to a hopeful end, for before I
went away my god-daughter expressed the desire to
go out and look at the Juno. “I was afraid of her
almost from the first,” she said, “and have hardly
seen her since she was set up in the Casino. Perhaps
I can learn a lesson from her, — perhaps I can
guess how she charms him!”
For a moment I hesitated, with the fear that we
might intrude upon the Count's devotions. Then, as
something in the poor girl's face suggested that she
had thought of this and felt a sudden impulse to
pluck victory from the heart of danger, I bravely
offered her my arm. The night was cloudy, and on
to depend upon her own lustre. But as we approached
the Casino I saw that the door was ajar, and that there
was lamplight within. The lamp was suspended in
front of the image, and it showed us that the place
was empty. But the Count had lately been there.
Before the statue stood a roughly extemporized altar,
composed of a nameless fragment of antique marble,
engraved with an illegible Greek inscription. We
seemed really to stand in a pagan temple, and we
gazed at the serene divinity with an impulse of spiritual
reverence. It ought to have been deepened, I
suppose, but it was rudely checked, by our observing
a curious glitter on the face of the low altar. A second
glance showed us it was blood!
My companion looked at me in pale horror, and
turned away with a cry. A swarm of hideous conjectures
pressed into my mind, and for a moment I
was sickened. But at last I remembered that there
is blood and blood, and the Latins were posterior to
the cannibals.
“Be sure it 's very innocent,” I said; “a lamb, a kid,
or a sucking calf!” But it was enough for her nerves
and her conscience that it was a crimson trickle, and
she returned to the house in sad agitation. The rest
of the night was not passed in a way to restore her
to calmness. The Count had not come in, and she
her and smoked my cigar as composedly as I might;
but internally I wondered what in horror's name had
become of him. Gradually, as the hours wore away,
I shaped a vague interpretation of these dusky portents,
— an interpretation none the less valid and devoutly
desired for its being tolerably cheerful. The
blood-drops on the altar, I mused, were the last instalment
of his debt and the end of his delusion. They
had been a happy necessity, for he was, after all, too
gentle a creature not to hate himself for having shed
them, not to abhor so cruelly insistent an idol. He
had wandered away to recover himself in solitude,
and he would come back to us with a repentant heart
and an inquiring mind! I should certainly have believed
all this more easily, however, if I could have
heard his footstep in the hall. Toward dawn, scepticism
threatened to creep in with the gray light, and
I restlessly betook myself to the portico. Here in a
few moments I saw him cross the grass, heavy-footed,
splashed with mud, and evidently excessively tired.
He must have been walking all night, and his face
denoted that his spirit had been as restless as his body.
He paused near me, and before he entered the house
he stopped, looked at me a moment, and then held
out his hand. I grasped it warmly, and it seemed to
me to throb with all that he could not utter.
“Will you see your wife?” I asked.
He passed his hand over his eyes and shook his
head. “Not now — not yet — some time!” he answered.
I was disappointed, but I convinced her, I think,
that he had cast out the devil. She felt, poor girl, a
pardonable desire to celebrate the event. I returned
to my lodging, spent the day in Rome, and came
back to the Villa toward dusk. I was told that the
Countess was in the grounds. I looked for her
cautiously at first, for I thought it just possible I
might interrupt the natural consequences of a reconciliation;
but failing to meet her, I turned toward
the Casino, and found myself face to face with the
little explorer.
“Does your excellency happen to have twenty yards
of stout rope about him?” he asked gravely.
“Do you want to hang yourself for the trouble
you 've stood sponsor to?” I answered.
“It 's a hanging matter, I promise you. The Countess
has given orders. You 'll find her in the Casino.
Sweet-voiced as she is, she knows how to make her
orders understood.”
At the door of the Casino stood half a dozen of
the laborers on the place, looking vaguely solemn,
like outstanding dependants at a superior funeral.
The Countess was within, in a position which was an
eyes fixed on the Juno, who had been removed from
her pedestal and lay stretched in her magnificent length
upon a rude litter.
“Do you understand?” she said. “She 's beautiful,
she 's noble, she 's precious, but she must go back!”
And, with a passionate gesture, she seemed to indicate
an open grave.
I was hugely delighted, but I thought it discreet
to stroke my chin and look sober. “She 's worth fifty
thousand scudi.”
She shook her head sadly. “If we were to sell
her to the Pope and give the money to the poor, it
would n't profit us. She must go back, — she must
go back! We must smother her beauty in the dreadful
earth. It makes me feel almost as if she were
alive; but it came to me last night with overwhelming
force, when my husband came in and refused to
see me, that he 'll not be himself as long as she is
above ground. To cut the knot we must bury her!
If I had only thought of it before!”
“Not before!” I said, shaking my head in turn.
“Heaven reward our sacrifice now!”
The little surveyor, when he reappeared, seemed
hardly like an agent of the celestial influences, but
he was deft and active, which was more to the point.
Every now and then he uttered some half-articulate
cruelty; but I saw him privately scanning the recumbent
image with an eye which seemed to foresee
a malicious glee in standing on a certain unmarked
spot on the turf and grinning till people stared. He
had brought back an abundance of rope, and having
summoned his assistants, who vigorously lifted the
litter, he led the way to the original excavation,
which had been left unclosed with the project of
further researches. By the time we reached the
edge of the grave the evening had fallen and the
beauty of our marble victim was shrouded in a
dusky veil. No one spoke, — if not exactly for shame,
at least for regret. Whatever our plea, our performance
looked, at least, monstrously profane. The ropes
were adjusted and the Juno was slowly lowered into
her earthy bed. The Countess took a handful of earth
and dropped it solemnly on her breast. “May it lie
lightly, but forever!” she said.
“Amen!” cried the little surveyor with a strange
mocking inflection; and he gave us a bow, as he departed,
which betrayed an agreeable consciousness of
knowing where fifty thousand scudi were buried. His
underlings had another cask of wine, the result of
which, for them, was a suspension of all consciousness,
and a subsequent irreparable confusion of memory
as to where they had plied their spades.
The Countess had not yet seen her husband, who
had again apparently betaken himself to communion
with the great god Pan. I was of course unwilling
to leave her to encounter alone the results of her
momentous deed. She wandered into the drawing-room
and pretended to occupy herself with a bit of
embroidery, but in reality she was bravely composing
herself for an “explanation.” I took up a book, but
it held my attention as feebly. As the evening wore
away I heard a movement on the threshold and saw
the Count lifting the tapestried curtain which masked
the door, and looking silently at his wife. His eyes
were brilliant, but not angry. He had missed the
Juno — and drawn a long breath! The Countess
kept her eyes fixed on her work, and drew her silken
stitches like an image of wifely contentment. The
image seemed to fascinate him: he came in slowly,
almost on tiptoe, walked to the chimney-piece, and
stood there in a sort of rapt contemplation. What
had passed, what was passing, in his mind, I leave
to your own apprehension. My god-daughter's hand
trembled as it rose and fell, and the color came into
her cheek. At last she raised her eyes and sustained
the gaze in which all his returning faith seemed concentrated.
He hesitated a moment, as if her very
forgiveness kept the gulf open between them, and
then he strode forward, fell on his two knees and
had come in, on tiptoe.
He never became, if you will, a thoroughly modern
man; but one day, years after, when a visitor to whom
he was showing his cabinet became inquisitive as to
a marble hand, suspended in one of its inner recesses,
he looked grave and turned the lock on it. “It is
the hand of a beautiful creature,” he said, “whom I
once greatly admired.”
“Ah, — a Roman?” said the gentleman, with a
smirk.
“A Greek,” said the Count, with a frown.
| A passionate pilgrim | |