The Shrouded Portrait.

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BY GEORGE W. CURTIS.

The Marquis di Sangrido owns the grim old palace that
fronts the public square in Rieti. He is not a favorite with the
peasants. Even the children of that little Italian town pass the
great door or portone of the palace hurriedly, and their prattle sinks
into a whisper beneath those gloomy windows. No guests ever come
from Rome and pass into the palace with festal welcome to visit the
Marquis di Sangrido. Those heavily-framed, gloomy windows never
flash with the brilliancy of revels within. They are like deadlights—
like the staring eyes of a corpse.

When the summer-storms burst among the hills, and the gleaming
lightning and rattling thunders appal the superstitious peasants,
while the church-bell rings solemnly in the storm, and kneeling, with
muttered prayers, the poor people of Rieti shudder and make the
sign of the cross, the yellow palace of the Marquis di Sangrido
stands sullen in the tempest, sardonic with a sickly glare, against
the heavy black cloud that rises behind it.

On the holy feast-days, when the sun lies lazily in the great
square of Rieti all the long Italian morning, and the peasants, in gay

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costume, dance the Tarantella and the Saltarella, and with music and
flowers go into the church to hang votive pictures to the Madonna,
one suspending the shoe which he wore when Our Blessed Lady saved
him from drowning; and another, the cap of the child whom the
Holy Virgin raised from sickness; and another, the necklace which
her lover gave her when he went to the wars, from which he returned
safely; the Marquis di Sangrido does not come, nor look out of
those gloomy windows, nor send wine and money. But often in the
midst of the festival a fear falls upon the peasants, like a cloudshadow
upon a waving, glittering rye-field; they look furtively at the
sullen yellow palace, which watches them in malicious silence; a
sudden horror seizes them all, as if they expected the great gates to
swing open, creaking upon rusty hinges, and a black procession of
death and despair to issue forth and chill the summer day.

It is in vain that the servants of the Marquis di Sangrido endeavor
to be friendly and sociable with the people of Rieti. They
are regarded as parts of that gloom and mystery which envelop the
palace and its master. Their most cheerful smile is suspected; their
jokes make the people shudder, for they believe them to be magic
spells in grinning masks. They move in a circle of solitude, for
every inhabitant of the town instinctively withdraws, until the servants,
too, gradually grow sardonic and gloomy; and when they
appear it is as if the yellow old palace were taking a walk, and
sullenly cursing the little cowering town of Rieti, that hides upon the
plain beyond the Campagna.

Twice a year the great gate of the palace opens. Then the people
shrink into their houses and peer through the windows and doors;
for the heavy lumbering state-carriage of the Marquis di Sangrido
rolls clumsily out, with a flaring chasseur riding before, and a dozen
servants on horseback grouped behind and around like a body-guard.
The doors are closed; the blinds are drawn up; nothing is seen within
the carriage; but the people of Rieti know that the Marquis is
sitting there, alone, in the shadow; and their terrified and bewitched
imaginations enter and sit beside him, and try to see the expression
of that face, and to conceive the grimness of his smile, and the
demoniacal horror of his frown. But not even their imaginations can

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figure him. The Marquis di Sangrido sits inscrutable, wrapped in a
cloud, and the lumbering state-carriage thunders out of the staring,
wondering town, and rolls across the Campagna toward Rome, where
the Marquis has another palace. Rieti is then very cheerful, for the
Marquis di Sangrido has gone to Rome.

Once again during the year the grim gates open, and the heavy
carriage, and the little group of servants, and the flaring chasseur
leading the way, are absorbed within the mysterious yellow walls;
and the little town of Rieti is chilled and trembles because the Marquis
di Sangrido has returned from Rome.

It was a pleasant summer-day when I came to Rieti, and after
eating the frittata and prosciutto crudo at the albergo, I looked id'y
out of the window into the great square of the town. The sun
blazed upon the open place, and there was perfect silence in the air.
My eyes were dazzled, as I gazed, by the yellow wall of the palace;
and I called the landlord and asked the name of the owner.

“The Marquis di Sangrido,” replied the padrone, with a shudder.

“Is he here?” I inquired.

“Excellency, no,” returned the host as he moved away.

“But tell me, can I get into the house? there may be pictures —
or into the grounds?”

“Excellency, God forgive us our sins! I know nothing,” answered
the padrone, with such undisguised fear that I pressed him no farther,
and he withdrew.

Of course I sauntered out immediately toward the Sangrido
palace. I was sure that I had struck the trail of a romance; for
what are anguish, doubts, despairs, years of life lost in misery, all the
acutest forms of human woe, but romances to the traveller who
saunters out on warm summer mornings, when they are the tears and
the woes of other people and other years?

I paused before the great gate, sheltered from the sun by the
shade of the heavily-projecting mouldings, and almost feared to rattle
with my stick upon the massive panels. After a few moments the
slide was slipped, and a curious restless glance danced over my face
and figure, while a sharp low female voice inquired my business. I
answered that I was a stranger passing through Rieti, and wished to

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see the pictures in the palace, and also the garden, if it were possible.

After some sharp questioning, which I answered very simply and
directly, the gate was opened, and I entered the court. The garden
rose behind the palace in broad terraces upon the hill-side, and I went
directly toward it. The custode, who told me she was the only servant
left in the house, the Marquis being in Rome, disappeared, and I
passed up the broken, crumbling steps of the terrace in entire solitude.

The garden was fallen into decay. Weeds grew and glittered
in the walks. The long, narrow avenues of cypress and ilex
were not smooth and clipped, but untrimmed boughs and shoots
leaned out beyond the line and towered in slim, swaying twigs
above. In the misshapen niches of this green wall stood broken
statues of discolored marble; fauns holding to their mouths hands
whence the pipes had fallen; and nymphs who held vases and flowers
no longer. In carrefours, where the paths crossed, were huge globular
vases, broken and stained, but overflowing with the leathery leaves
of the aloe, like jagged green flame flaring and falling. The great
plants burst out luxuriantly from the crevices of the walls, and lay
sprawled over them, lazily sucking the sun, while the lizards darted
among them, half-loathsome miniatures of crocodiles; and high over
all, the dome-topped stone-pines lay like heavy bars of cloud in the
glittering air. In the universal sunshine and ruin, there were only
silence, sadness, and decay.

I passed along, perplexed with a strange and nameless sorrow,
and sat down upon the crumbling stone margin of a fountain, long
since dry, and in whose basin lay pebbles and twigs. A reverie in a
decayed garden naturally decks the trees again with the splendor of
long-vanished summers, trims them as they had once been trimmed,
and throngs the paths and the arbors with that host of the young
and beautiful which the imagination accords to all gardens, and
palaces, and happy haunts. But as I sat and dreamed, I felt myself
seized with the spell of mysterious horror which I had perceived
in the padrone at the inn, and saying with him, “God forgive us all
our sins!” I arose and strolled along the melancholy avenues, and
descending the terraces, entered the house.

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I saw no custode. The old woman, I fancied, sure that I was no
thief, did not intend to disturb her siesta to look farther after me.
So I walked slowly on, and passing up the grand stone-staircase in
the cold hall, I entered the suite of state apartments. They were
lofty and spacious. The ceilings were painted in fresco, and there
was an unnatural freshness in the color, as if it was not the work of
many years before. The windows were heavily and richly draped.
The furniture was stately and costly, and the walls were tapestried.
There was an oppressive air of cold regal magnificence in each
apartment. There was nothing domestic; no pleasant disorder; no
gentle confusion, as if children had just fled from the rooms; nothing
that indicated a home; every thing that bespoke a ceremonial palace.
Some of the walls were not tapestried, and upon them hung pictures—
mainly portraits — soldiers in uniforms, and noblemen in
robes, or dignified Italian ladies in the stiff fashions of dead centuries.
At length I reached the state bed-chamber. In the centre of the
room stood the bed, ascended by steps, and muffled in thick clustering
draperies, covered with the crest of Sangrido. There was an
oratory adjoining, with a massive silver crucifix and a carved priedieu.
But my eyes clung with a painful curiosity to the solemnlydraped
bed. The curtains were black, and folded over it like a heavy
cloud; and as I gazed, the whole seemed to me to form a funeral
catafalque. Through the thick glass of the windows, rimed with the
gathered dust of years, and through the plain white muslin curtains
that hung over them like shrouds, the light came sickly and thin, and
the funeral drapery apparently thickened the air of the room. Instinctively
I stepped to the window, but I could not open it, and it
was so coated with obscurity that I could not look down into the
sunny square. I listened for a sound, but there was nothing to hear.
My own respiration was as audible as at midnight, and I turned back
into the solemn chamber. Almost involuntarily, and as if drawn by
an irresistible fascination, I climbed the steps that ascended to the
bed, and laying hold of the heavy black curtains, pulled them aside
and looked within them. There was nothing to be seen but a bed
fairly made; the linen yellow, as with time. But as I looked up I
saw something black hanging from the ring in the ceiling which held

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the drapery, so that the curtains made a funeral tabernacle for it. It
was beyond my reach, but I could see that it was a frame shrouded
in a black bag. It was evidently a picture: it must be a portrait.
Why shrouded in black? Why there?

As I stood upon the steps, still holding back the curtains, still
staring upward and wondering, I felt my foot forcibly seized, and
looking down, saw a shrivelled, bony hand grasping it. It was the
hand of the old custode, whose withered face, white and terrified, was
turned beseechingly toward me. The forefinger of one hand was
pressed over the mouth in sign of silence, while the other grasped
my foot. I descended the steps, and the old woman seized both my
hands with frenzied earnestness, and glared into my eyes, while her
frame trembled, and upon her wan lips quivered the words:

“For the love of God, signor! For the love of God, signor!”

I waited patiently for her to speak, which she did at length, in a
low, hurried, and appalled tone, begging me to leave the palace upon
the moment, and if I had the slightest regard for the life of a miserable
sinner, never to betray that I had penetrated so far as to see the
bed and the shrouded portrait.

“I fell asleep, signor, and did not hear you when you came in
from the garden. O Dio! O Dio!”

I left the yellow palace, and left Rieti, but not until I had learned
the secret of that picture.

Ten years before, the Marquis di Sangrido concluded to marry.
He was then sixty years old, a man of high family, of large fortune,
of good person. He ordered the state carriage and drove to Rome.
He was known everywhere, and was especially intimate with the
Countess Ondella, who was the guardian of her orphan niece, Maddalena.
The girl had grown up in a Venetian convent. She had
seen no man but Padre Giuseppe, who wore long clothes like the
women, and droned all the morning, and dozed all the afternoon, and
did not seem to be a man. To him she confessed regularly every
week. The old man usually went to sleep before the tale was over,
for there were no very startling sins to confess, but occasionally
strange thoughts and emotions, which Maddalena did not understand,
nor the good Giuseppe either. On the whole, it was pleasant childish

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tattle, which soothed him to sleep, in which he dreamed of other
times and other children, among whom was one child early habited
in a solemn separate robe and divorced from life. In the face of that
dream-child Padre Giuseppe seemed to see his own features, but delicate
and youthful, without wrinkles and snuff-stains. And so the
placid confessor dreamed until dinner-time, and feared, as he arose
and found that he must wipe the moisture from his eyes, that he was
getting old and rheumy.

Maddalena was taught the duty of all good children — to confess
and pray, and guard her mind from thoughts of men; never to tell
lies, and always to obey her elders. She listened and learned. In
the silent old convent-garden she read and mused, and vague hopes
and yearnings fluttered sometimes across her mind as she saw birds
floating in the sky, or bright leaves whirling and whirling, and then
dropping, dropping, until they were lost upon the ground. Sixteen
eventless years thus passed, and Maddalena Ondella was a woman.

One day, after having confessed to Padre Giuseppe, she went into
the garden at sunset, and sat upon a pedestal whence a statue had
long ago fallen. The vesper bell had ceased ringing; there was no
wind to stir the leaves, and the darkening twilight touched her beauty
with more exquisite grace as she sat motionless, gazing at the West,
longing and hoping, with all the passionate possibilities of life glimmering
in her luscious lips. That moment she was summoned by
the superior, and informed that she was to go to Rome immediately.

“Thank the Holy Virgin, Maddalena,” said the abbess, “that you
are to be married to a noble and worthy man. In all things, my
child, remember our instructions, and obey your husband.”

Padre Guiseppe's soft soul was touched. He shed tears as Maddalena
bade him farewell. The good Padre did not know how
beautiful she was, but the Marquis di Sangrido had accompanied the
Countess Ondella to Venice, three years before, and had then seen
her niece. Three years being past, he considered that he was sixty,
and concluded to marry. He came to Rome in the state-carriage,
and proposed to the Countess for Maddalena.

The aunt apprised the niece, and the day for the nuptials was
appointed. The Marquis di Sangrido had returned to his

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countrypalace at Rieti after his proposals were accepted, and carried with
him workmen to decorate his house. Rieti was gay in the prospect
of a bride who would bring youth, beauty, and society to cheer its
loneliness. No one was permitted to see the work going on in the
yellow palace, but it did not lose in splendor by the eager gossip of
the town. One morning the workmen did not come. The work was
finished. The next morning the old state-carriage, newly burnished,
and drawn by the old horses in new and glittering harness, passed
out of the gates. The servants wore bridal-favors. The blinds were
drawn down, and the hard face of the Marquis di Sangrido returned
the gratulations of the town.

A few days afterward a courier came dashing into Rieti, and disappeared
in the palazzo Sangrido. It was rumored that the bride
would arrive before night, and at sunset the bridal cortége appeared.
A face more radiantly beautiful than they had ever seen beamed
gratitude upon the peasants, who threw flowers before the bride's
carriage, and the Marchioness Maddalena di Sangrido went into her
palace. There were money and wine distributed in the square of
Rieti that night, and prayers were uttered for the bride in the church
next morning by those she never saw.

From an old convent in Venice to an old palace in Rieti the
change was not great. But the change was entire in all the habits of
life; and sometimes, when Maddalena stole away to a lonely corner
of the garden, which had been trimmed and beautified in her honor,
she looked wistfully at the long range of hills undulating into the blue
distance; and, longing for a richer experience, shuddered as she
reflected that, while dreaming in the convent-garden, everything was
possible; but that, sitting in the garden of the palace, her future was
an endless iteration of the present. She grew sad and silent in the
rural splendors of Rieti.

The Marquis di Sangrido watched his wife with an intentness that
seemed ferocity. If she went alone into the garden he presently
appeared, and taking her arm led her back to the house, or paced
solemnly and silently at her side, along the stately green avenues.

He was of high family, and great fortune, and of good person.
The girls at the convent in Venice sauntered in the sunny garden, and

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talked, by stealth, of the happy Maddalena, and envied her splendid
fortune and career. Maddalena, in the sunny garden of Rieti, longed
for Venice, for companions, for life, for any thing. She grew pale,
like a flower in the dark.

The time came to go to Rome. Before ordering the carriage the
Marquis di Sangrido warned the Marchioness of the dangers of
society, and the duties of wives. Her eyes flashed alternate scorn
and longing as he spoke, and with a heart yearning and bursting, she
leaped into the carriage, while her brain swam with the sudden and
gorgeous hope of a new life. They reached Rome, and took possession
of the palace. Fête followed fête. Everywhere Maddalena
was the idol of admiration. The elastic Italian tongue was compelled
into new forms of compliment; and she, like a thirst-stricken victim,
plunged into the stream of life and madly revelled. She tasted new
and wild experience, and quaffed it fiercely like burning wine. She
had scarcely reached Rome when she saw Giulio. Their eyes met,
then their hands. A week had not passed before they were ardent
lovers. The whole restrained passion of her nature rose at once to
flood-tide. The arrears of years were paid in moments. There was
imperial splendor in her beauty. At home, at church, at the opera,
upon the promenade, she was radiant, and wherever she was, Giulio
was by her side and in her heart. She did not try to disguise it.
The dames of high society thought her audacious, shook their fans,
and recommended prudence. Maddalena scoffed at their suggestions,
laughed prudence to scorn, and gloried in the tumult of her new life.

Before the shrewdest dame had even suspected, however, the Marquis
di Sangrido was sure. His eye grew like a serpent's eye, and
women shuddered as its livid glare fell upon them. His movements
became sinuous and stealthy. Like a reptile, he chilled the sunshine
as he slipped along the street to the Casino or the Café. To see him
was like being smitten with disease. At the opera, in church, upon the
promenade, he watched the young Giulio with his wife. Flowers
were not fair enough, nor the sun bright enough, nor the day long
enough for them.

The Marquis di Sangrido came home quietly one day an hour
before the time he had mentioned. He entered softly, and glided

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through the apartments, with spectral stillness, toward his wife's
room. His hard, cold face had a glacial intensity that froze with
horror the valet who saw him pass. Reaching the door of his wife's
room, he entered without knocking.

The Marchioness was not at the opera in the evening, nor at the
ball afterward, nor was she seen during the next day. The Marquis
and Marchioness di Sangrido had returned to Rieti. As the carriage
thundered into the town, the blinds were closed; there was no beaming
bridal face at the window; there were hurry and stern command,
and the great gate closed behind the carriage in sullen gloom.

In was a solemn and melancholy supper that the Marquis and his
wife eat that night. From his cold, hard face the snake had vanished,
but its frigid ferocity was more terrible; and the pale marble rigidity
of his wife was sadder to see. She rose from the table and passed
alone through the vast, cold, silent apartments toward her chamber.
Her heart was stony with the fixed resolve not to be baulked of life,
and love, and happiness, but at some time, by some means, to escape
the imprisonment of that palace, and dare the worst for Giulio.
She reached her room and dismissed her maid, who withdrew, leaving
her alone. Through the lofty windows the full moonlight streamed,
and flooded that young beautiful woman who stood with her hands
clasped before her, and her head leaning against the window-frame.
She was entirely abandoned to the glowing remembrance of the last
few weeks. One image, one memory, one hope, one thought, possessed
her. She was a child in knowledge and in power, but a
woman in passionate emotion. Like a stormy sea ebbing and flowing
fiercely in a cavern, her feelings, and wishes, and vows, fluctuated
through her mind, and she stood confounded by the greatness and
glory of the passion that agitated her whole being. She was its
slave, but knew not how to obey it. The night waned, and she stood
musing, her hands still clasped, her head leaning, when suddenly she
heard a chorus of late revellers, artists returning from a festa:

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The song was very distant and passed slowly out of hearing. Yet
it lingered and lingered. It haunted the moonlight; beseeching,
yearning, wailing; a whole history singing and sighing in its measures;
a whole history, at least, when a heart listened in which all
passionate powers thrilled and throbbed in answer.

Maddalena turned from her window, and walked slowly up and
down the chamber. She paused and loosened her dress. It fell away
from her like a cloud, and around her in the dark of the chamber, the
dim outline of the furniture was not more still than the statuesque
repose of her form. A faint, heavy odor from a vase of flowers filled
the room. She moved slowly away, and slowly seated herself upon
the edge of the bed, resting her head upon her hand, and murmuring
almost inaudibly, as if dreaming:

“Ah! senza amare!”

The Marquis di Sangrido waited until he supposed that his wife
had reached her chamber. Then he passed quietly through another
door to a farther part of the palace, and entering a room which he
unlocked with a key that he took from his pocket, he closed and
locked it carefully behind him; then opening the small door of a cupboard
in the wall, he took from a shelf a large glass jar, full of a
green liquor, which he carefully examined; then closed and locked
the cupboard-door, and left the room. When he reached the dining-hall,
he summoned his valet, and ordered him to assemble all the
servants, who instantly came thronging in. After looking at them
sternly for a few moments, the Marquis said:

“I wish you all to return to Rome at an early hour in the morning.
I shall follow you two days hence. Vincenzo,” he said to his
valet, “you will remain.”

As the servants were leaving the room, he said to them with a
kind of hiss,

“If any man remains behind after to-morrow morning, he will
never see Rome again.”

And with a shudder of fear the servants withdrew.

By dawn the next morning, they had all left the palazzo, and at

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sunrise were crossing the Campagna toward Rome. As the Marquis
was finishing his breakfast, he ordered his valet to tell the maid of the
Marchioness that he wished to know when her mistress was awake.
As he arose from table, he gave the valet a letter for the Countess
Ondella, sealed with black, which he charged him to deliver as soon
as possible, and to make no delay in mounting and taking the road to
Rome. The valet bowed, took the letter, and in ten minutes was galloping
out of the town.

A little before noon, the maid appeared to say that her mistress
was awake. The Marquis bade her remain for a moment. He went
toward his wife's room, but immediately returning, told the maid
that her mistress preferred to dress alone, and wished her to go with
the custode to visit her sick child among the mountains.

“Stop and ask Padre Luigi to come instantly to the palace,” said
he, “and return by evening, but not before, or you will take the fever
in the sun.”

The maid and the old custode instantly departed. The suggestions
of the Marquis di Sangrido were the sternest commands to his
dependents.

He sat quietly for some time, until he heard a tap at the gate,
and, descending, he opened to the Padre Luigi. The priest muttered
a blessing as he entered, and followed the Marquis up the staircase.
They advanced together through the rooms until they reached the
chamber of the Marchioness. The priest paused a moment while the
Marquis passed in.

“Maddalena,” said he to his wife, who was kneeling at her Prie-Dieu,
“Padre Luigi is here to receive your confession.”

“I have none to make,” returned she in a whisper, as a deathly
pallor settled upon her cheek.

The Marquis did not respond, but, opening the door, he beckoned
to the priest, who entered, and the Marquis retired.

“Why are you here?” demanded Maddalena, suddenly springing
up.

“Signora, to hear your confession,” replied the priest quietly.

“Go!” she said with a startled horror in her eyes, and pointing
toward the door.

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In vain the priest expostulated and besought her to confide to him
the grief that weighed upon her conscience, and to receive his consolation.
She said nothing but “Go!” and waved him away.

Padre Luigi passed out of the chamber. The Marquis waited in
the adjoining room, and, without speaking, led the way toward the
grand staircase. Still without speaking, they descended. The host
opened the gate; the priest murmured a benedicite, and departed.
Then the Marquis fastened the bolts and bars, locked the world out
from himself and his wife, and slowly ascended the staircase. He
went to the secret cupboard, where he had seen, on the previous evening,
that the jar full of a green liquid was safe, and taking it in his
hands, glided through the vast, silent rooms as spectrally still as
when in Rome he had entered his wife's chamber suddenly.

The Marchioness Maddalena was still kneeling at her Prieu-Dieu.

“You have made your peace with God?” demanded the Marquis,
as he closed the door, and stood before her, holding the jar.

She rose slowly, with her eyes fastened upon his; and tottering
across the room, fell at his feet, and still staring in his face, gasped in
a piteous whisper:

“What do you mean?”

He did not reply; but placing the jar upon the ground, he raised
his wife from the floor, and leading her toward a huge, carved, oaken
chair, he placed her upon it, and said in a voice cold and hard as his
rigid face:

“Maddalena, you must die!”

With silken cords which he drew from his pocket, he bound her
with inconceivable rapidity and firmness to the chair. She moaned
like a dying child. The suddenness and hopelessness of her fate
crushed her at once.

Tapestries and curtains hung about the chamber, and the summer
light streamed golden through the windows. But it was spectral and
dim to those young eyes. Upon the cypress terraces of the garden
fountains were plashing in the sunshine, and in the deep shade of the
trees cicadas sang. She thought of them all; she knew it well; but
not a sound reached her ears.

Her whole short life lay clearly before her: the Venetian garden,

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the dream, the marriage, the blight, the new hope, the love,
Giulio.

The Marquis raised the jar. The green liquor was vitriol. He
stood over her, behind, where he did not see her face. The first drop
fell upon her head.

“O my God!” she said slowly, “forgive my sins, but I love him
with my whole soul.”

In startled Rieti there was constant and terrified surmise all the
day after the return of the Marquis and his wife. It was one of the
breathless, glaring days of midsummer; a day of preternatural
silence, when the sultry glare is a spell of terror, and men instinctively
talk in whispers. Not a wind sighed; not a bird sang. Only
at intervals a solitary cicada stung the ear with its dry, sad tone.
There was no dancing at the Osteria; the cattle and the dogs lay listless
in the shade; and as the awful heats deepened to noon, the inhabitants
were stretched in the shadow of the houses uneasily dozing, or,
starting suddenly from hot sleep, glanced with vague apprehension
about the sky, as if a fearful tempest were gathering.

Suddenly a sharp, agonized, muffled scream pierced the very heart
of that silence, and curdled the blood in the veins of the awe-stricken
peasants. They stared at each other speechlessly, sat transfixed as if
awaiting another sound; then, after long, breathless minutes, turned
their pale faces and whispered stealthily together — not quite sure if
that shriek were earthly; but muttering Ave Marias, and making the
sign of the cross, their eyes gradually turned, as by tacit conviction,
toward the grim palazzo Sangrido, standing sullen in the sun.

Vincenzo, the valet, upon his arrival in Rome, delivered to the
Countess Ondella the letter of the Marquis sealed with a black seal,
and informing her of the death of her niece, the Marchioness Maddalena.
The next evening, Padre Luigi and his brother monks celebrated
a funeral mass in the little church of Rieti.

I heard this history after I had left the little town, but I was glad
of an opportunity of returning two years afterward. I found the
same padrone at the Osteria, and endeavored to learn from him and
from the peasants something farther about the Marquis di Sangrido.

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He was an old man, they said — hideously ugly. They believed,
evidently, that he had horns and hoofs. But no one confessed that he
had ever seen him.

The day after my arrival, I went again to the palazzo. The same
old woman examined and admitted me, evidently without recognizing
me as the audacious stranger who had penetrated to the black and
solemn chamber. She told me that I could not go into the palace,
because the Marquis was living there, and would not go to Rome for
several weeks; but I had her permission to stroll in the garden.

It was even more ruinous than before. Everywhere reigned the
same desolation and sadness — doubly sad and desolate now that I
knew the story. Yet everywhere in Italy you feel the possibility of
such tragedies. Robert Browning's poem of “My Last Duchess”
and Beckford's tale of the old woman near Naples are simple studies
from life. The old villas and gardens crumbling in that hot southern
sun are like memorials of the fierce excesses of hot southern passion.
Love, hate, enthusiasm, revenge, despair, dark eyes, black hair, the
stiletto, ignorance and mystery, ambition and superstition — these are
the quick-glancing threads of which that life is spun. Venice explains
Venice. The Council of Ten, the Bridge of Sighs, the Piombi, Marino
Faliero, as well as Titian and Don Juan, are all bred of that silence,
splendor, and isolation.

Suddenly, as I turned into a neglected ilex-path, I met an old man.
He might have been seventy years of age; he was still erect, and
long white hairs clustered around his cold, hard face. He paused
courteously, saluted me with dignity, and bade me good day. Perceiving
from my reply that I was a foreigner, he stopped and fell into
conversation. In all that he said the shrewd observation of the man
of the world was evident. He was familiar with the current gossip,
spoke of society in Rome, of the belles and the beauties. Passing to
pictures and the subjects that most interest strangers, he showed himself
a judicious critic and connoisseur. Of certain pictures he spoke
with a kind of cold ardor that was very singular, and as I mentioned
one that I had seen in the palazzo Mazzo in Rome, he discovered that
his friend, the Cardinal Mazzo, was also a friend of mine, and

[figure description] Page 344.[end figure description]

immediately invited me to dine with him on the following day; but I
hastily declined upon plea of my early departure.

After a little more conversation, he bowed and wished me good
morning.

“I am sorry that my pictures are all in Rome,” said he, as he
turned away. “There are none in the house yonder,” he continued,
pointing toward it through the cypresses, “of any interest to those
out of the family.”

So saying, the Marquis di Sangrido disappeared down the terraces.

But I remained in the solitary, sunny garden, remembering the
black-shrouded picture, looking along the paths that Maddalena had
paced. The tragedy of Maddalena was wringing my heart, but the
sun shone bright, the nightingales sang, the wind blew gently, and the
courteous tones of the Marquis were ringing in my ears.

“God forgive us all our sins!” I said as I recalled the words of
the padrone; and I passed swiftly and for ever out of the garden and
the gate of the Palazzo Sangrido.