CRUCIAL INSTANCES
BY
EDITH WHARTON
THE DUCHESS AT PRAYER
Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian house,
that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priest
behind which buzz the secrets of the confessional? Other houses declare the
activities they shelter; they are the clear expressive cuticle of a life
flowing close to the surface; but the old palace in its narrow street, the
villa on its cypress-hooded hill, are as impenetrable as death. The tall
windows are like blind eyes, the great door is a shut mouth. Inside there
may be sunshine, the scent of myrtles, and a pulse of life through all the
arteries of the huge frame; or a mortal solitude, where bats lodge in the
disjointed stones and the keys rust in unused doors....
II
From the loggia, with its vanishing frescoes, I looked down an avenue
barred by a ladder of cypress-shadows to the ducal escutcheon and mutilated
vases of the gate. Flat noon lay on the gardens, on fountains, porticoes
and grottoes. Below the terrace, where a chrome-colored lichen had sheeted
the balustrade as with fine _laminae_ of gold, vineyards stooped to
the rich valley clasped in hills. The lower slopes were strewn with white
villages like stars spangling a summer dusk; and beyond these, fold on
fold of blue mountain, clear as gauze against the sky. The August air was
lifeless, but it seemed light and vivifying after the atmosphere of the
shrouded rooms through which I had been led. Their chill was on me and I
hugged the sunshine.
"The Duchess's apartments are beyond," said the old man.
He was the oldest man I had ever seen; so sucked back into the past that he
seemed more like a memory than a living being. The one trait linking him
with the actual was the fixity with which his small saurian eye held the
pocket that, as I entered, had yielded a _lira_ to the gate-keeper's
child. He went on, without removing his eye:
"For two hundred years nothing has been changed in the apartments of the
Duchess."
"And no one lives here now?"
"No one, sir. The Duke, goes to Como for the summer season."
I had moved to the other end of the loggia. Below me, through hanging
groves, white roofs and domes flashed like a smile.
"And that's Vicenza?"
"_Proprio_!" The old man extended fingers as lean as the hands fading
from the walls behind us. "You see the palace roof over there, just to the
left of the Basilica? The one with the row of statues like birds taking
flight? That's the Duke's town palace, built by Palladio."
"And does the Duke come there?"
"Never. In winter he goes to Rome."
"And the palace and the villa are always closed?"
"As you see--always."
"How long has this been?"
"Since I can remember."
I looked into his eyes: they were like tarnished metal mirrors reflecting
nothing. "That must be a long time," I said involuntarily.
"A long time," he assented.
I looked down on the gardens. An opulence of dahlias overran the
box-borders, between cypresses that cut the sunshine like basalt shafts.
Bees hung above the lavender; lizards sunned themselves on the benches and
slipped through the cracks of the dry basins. Everywhere were vanishing
traces of that fantastic horticulture of which our dull age has lost the
art. Down the alleys maimed statues stretched their arms like rows of
whining beggars; faun-eared terms grinned in the thickets, and above the
laurustinus walls rose the mock ruin of a temple, falling into real ruin
in the bright disintegrating air. The glare was blinding.
"Let us go in," I said.
The old man pushed open a heavy door, behind which the cold lurked like a
knife.
"The Duchess's apartments," he said.
Overhead and around us the same evanescent frescoes, under foot the same
scagliola volutes, unrolled themselves interminably. Ebony cabinets, with
inlay of precious marbles in cunning perspective, alternated down the
room with the tarnished efflorescence of gilt consoles supporting Chinese
monsters; and from the chimney-panel a gentleman in the Spanish habit
haughtily ignored us.
"Duke Ercole II.," the old man explained, "by the Genoese Priest."
It was a narrow-browed face, sallow as a wax effigy, high-nosed and
cautious-lidded, as though modelled by priestly hands; the lips weak and
vain rather than cruel; a quibbling mouth that would have snapped at verbal
errors like a lizard catching flies, but had never learned the shape of a
round yes or no. One of the Duke's hands rested on the head of a dwarf, a
simian creature with pearl ear-rings and fantastic dress; the other turned
the pages of a folio propped on a skull.
"Beyond is the Duchess's bedroom," the old man reminded me.
Here the shutters admitted but two narrow shafts of light, gold bars
deepening the subaqueous gloom. On a dais the bedstead, grim, nuptial,
official, lifted its baldachin; a yellow Christ agonized between the
curtains, and across the room a lady smiled at us from the chimney-breast.
The old man unbarred a shutter and the light touched her face. Such a face
it was, with a flicker of laughter over it like the wind on a June meadow,
and a singular tender pliancy of mien, as though one of Tiepolo's lenient
goddesses had been busked into the stiff sheath of a seventeenth century
dress!
"No one has slept here," said the old man, "since the Duchess Violante."
"And she was--?"
"The lady there--first Duchess of Duke Ercole II."
He drew a key from his pocket and unlocked a door at the farther end of the
room. "The chapel," he said. "This is the Duchess's balcony." As I turned
to follow him the Duchess tossed me a sidelong smile.
I stepped into a grated tribune above a chapel festooned with stucco.
Pictures of bituminous saints mouldered between the pilasters; the
artificial roses in the altar-vases were gray with dust and age, and under
the cobwebby rosettes of the vaulting a bird's nest clung. Before the altar
stood a row of tattered arm-chairs, and I drew back at sight of a figure
kneeling near them.
"The Duchess," the old man whispered. "By the Cavaliere Bernini."
It was the image of a woman in furred robes and spreading fraise, her hand
lifted, her face addressed to the tabernacle. There was a strangeness in
the sight of that immovable presence locked in prayer before an abandoned
shrine. Her face was hidden, and I wondered whether it were grief or
gratitude that raised her hands and drew her eyes to the altar, where no
living prayer joined her marble invocation. I followed my guide down the
tribune steps, impatient to see what mystic version of such terrestrial
graces the ingenious artist had found--the Cavaliere was master of such
arts. The Duchess's attitude was one of transport, as though heavenly airs
fluttered her laces and the love-locks escaping from her coif. I saw how
admirably the sculptor had caught the poise of her head, the tender slope
of the shoulder; then I crossed over and looked into her face--it was a
frozen horror. Never have hate, revolt and agony so possessed a human
countenance....
The old man crossed himself and shuffled his feet on the marble.
"The Duchess Violante," he repeated.
"The same as in the picture?"
"Eh--the same."
"But the face--what does it mean?"
He shrugged his shoulders and turned deaf eyes on me. Then he shot a glance
round the sepulchral place, clutched my sleeve and said, close to my ear:
"It was not always so."
"What was not?"
"The face--so terrible."
"The Duchess's face?"
"The statue's. It changed after--"
"After?"
"It was put here."
"The statue's face _changed_--?"
He mistook my bewilderment for incredulity and his confidential finger
dropped from my sleeve. "Eh, that's the story. I tell what I've heard. What
do I know?" He resumed his senile shuffle across the marble. "This is a bad
place to stay in--no one comes here. It's too cold. But the gentleman said,
_I must see everything_!"
I let the _lire_ sound. "So I must--and hear everything. This story,
now--from whom did you have it?"
His hand stole back. "One that saw it, by God!"
"That saw it?"
"My grandmother, then. I'm a very old man."
"Your grandmother? Your grandmother was--?"
"The Duchess's serving girl, with respect to you."
"Your grandmother? Two hundred years ago?"
"Is it too long ago? That's as God pleases. I am a very old man and she
was a very old woman when I was born. When she died she was as black as a
miraculous Virgin and her breath whistled like the wind in a keyhole. She
told me the story when I was a little boy. She told it to me out there in
the garden, on a bench by the fish-pond, one summer night of the year she
died. It must be true, for I can show you the very bench we sat on...."
