V
To us it was unforgettable. Otherwise we must have flitted long before we did to scenes where we needed to walk less softly. Yet just that necessity of walking softly was part of the lure. Like so much else of life, however, it was in great part a thing of atmosphere, of colour, of accent, of states of feeling, of moments so real to us but so impossible to capture in word or line that I oftenest think of Castello Montughi in terms of music. It was another similarity of that episode to a piece of music that while the successive phases of it could hardly be labelled as chapters or acts, the transitions between them were perfectly clear. We had begun with an Andante. We had gone on to an Allegro ma non troppo. The third movement—it had settled down into a Scherzo, of the mellower kind. And the final resolution?
That was a Lamentoso. And the transition, when at last it came, was so unnerving that I was thankful my wife was not with me. She had been having a touch of malaria—due, I am afraid, to the dampness of the place. I was not really uneasy about her, though, beyond asking myself whether it were time for us to make a move. After she dropped to sleep, late in the evening, I went out to stretch my legs and get a breath of air.
Without any definite intention, I found myself walking up the valley. That was the direction I always liked best after sundown. The mountains stood out so solemnly against the stars, and the river made such a sound in the dark. I can hear it now. And I can see how sombre the castle and its merloned tower loomed before me when I went back that night. It put me in mind of the first time I had seen them. As I drew near the gate, too, I heard the dog. But it was no bark that came from him. It was a howl, long drawn and mournful. In a moment, however, I discovered what pulled me up short. For there were lights in the little chapel.
My first thought was of fire—until I had time to note that the light was perfectly steady, and to reflect that there was probably nothing left in the chapel to burn. Whereupon, as I watched the glimmer of the dusty old leaded panes, I grew extremely uncomfortable. In fact the hour, the uncanny noise of the dog, the unaccustomed circumstance of the illuminated chapel, all the other circumstances of the place, combined to give me a sensation I have rarely experienced. There have been times when I would be ashamed to make such a confession. But years have emboldened me to think that fearlessness is an insensibility of the nerves which a man should pray to be delivered from. His affair is to be scared as often and as violently as he pleases, but to keep his head. Which, I presume, was the reason why it seemed to me worthy to investigate. I therefore tiptoed around to the other entrance, where I almost yielded to a temptation to wake up the peasants. Luckily Abracadabra saved me from it by bounding at me out of the dark with a growl. When he recognised me he trotted quietly along beside me. That growl, however, reminded me of another time when I had investigated, and had been sorry for it. I gave Abracadabra a good-night pat and went into the house.
I found my wife still asleep. I could make out her quiet breathing, and the soft curve of her arm across the pillow. As I bent over her I heard Abracadabra again. I went out to the loggia. It was too late for nightingales. There were cicadas, now, in the cypresses. The melancholy shrilling of them, out of the black shadow, affected me almost as much as the dog. He had stopped his noise, though. I could see the ghostly shape of him down on the terrace, waiting. I don’t know—I felt a sudden shame of my retreat. I tiptoed back to my room, picked up my revolver, touched the soft arm on the pillow with my lips, and stole down stairs.
The dog ran to meet me at the terrace door, wagging his tail and sticking his cold nose into my hand. We turned the corner, we passed the low arch leading into the kitchen. The two little windows beside it were dark. So were the loopholes of the tower. But, beyond that redoubtable angle, I found the light still burning in the chapel. I wished the door were open at least a crack. I also wished, in spite of Abracadabra’s company, that I had not undertaken to prove I was not a coward. I stood there looking, listening, seeing nothing but those faintly lighted panes, hearing nothing but the cicadas and the river. I wondered if it were the sound of my own blood, unwilling as I was to go forward or to go back.
Presently, from inside the chapel, I heard a violin. Of that, this time, there could be no doubt. And in the stillness I recognised that sobbing theme from the Sixth Symphony of Chaikovsky, which everybody knows and sentimentalises over or laughs at. But nobody ever heard it as I heard it that night in the shadow of Castello Montughi, while cicadas chanted ethereally in the black cypresses and the Brenta muttered among its rocks. I didn’t laugh. I stood quivering. The theme swept on to its climax, returned, flowered magically, tragically, into developments I had never listened to or dreamed. If I can’t play a violin myself, I have sat in front of all the Russians and Jews and Gypsies who can. But no one of them ever let loose with his bow such pent-up passion and misery. Not one, ever. There was no mere poetry in that violin. There was heartbreak in it. There was damnation in it. There were wild tears, pleading, hunger, hopelessness, remorse. There was in it all of life that is unfulfilled and not to be assuaged and beyond utterance. And all poured out in a tone of gold, with the stroke of a god—or a demon.
No wonder that infernal dog started howling again. I could have howled myself. I’m not sure that I didn’t. However, before I could stop him the dog broke away from me. He leaped forward to the chapel door, scratched at it, finally threw his big body against it. The latch gave and the door flew open. The dog disappeared inside. As he did so I heard, instead of the music, a sort of crack and a brief whine. But what I saw, across the dark court, left me no time to think of that. For the moment I was too astonished even to be startled. Little as I had expected what lay behind the door, I expected nothing less than those two great candles and that statuesque profile upturned between them. The delicate line of the profile was incredibly white against the frescoed wall of the chapel. Then it came over me that she was not carved in marble, on a mediæval tomb, but that she was dead, lying there on her bier, in her capella ardente—that woman whose exquisitely cut features wore such an air of race.
For what I did afterward I don’t know whether I had an excuse or not. At first I was absurdly, horribly, shaken. I have a physical shrinking from death that is too much for me. I would rather have faced any marauder than that dead princess whom I had never seen, lying so white and silent between her candles, with her black hair sweeping down about her. Then the violin: there had been about it something unearthly. Could I have been imagining again? Could that have been a music of the supernatural? But as my senses grew calmer, as there came back to me the remembrance of all that had set this place so apart in my life, as I thought of the warm arm I had kissed a few minutes ago, watching that profile whose still beauty seemed the very image of a pure and noble pride, the mystery and awesomeness of it moved me less than a kind of passion of pity—that she should be lying alone there in the night, with no one but a dog beside her. And, yielding to a sudden impulse, I walked into the chapel.
Never, but never, did I regret an impulse more.
Principe Montughi was standing at the foot of the bier, his great head sunk between his powerful shoulders, his strange pale eyes on the white face between the candles. My own astounded eyes took him in, the two pieces of a violin bow in the hands clasped before him, the broken violin between the paws of the dog lying at his feet. My emotion flashed into an embarrassment so acute that I could neither speak nor move. But he did not break out on me as I expected—as I deserved. He did not even look at me, at first. And when he did it was as if I were not there.
“Too late,” he muttered. “Too late. She will not hear me, now. And when she could I would not play to her.”
His eyes were stranger and paler than ever. In the candle light they were like two spots of phosphorescence. Then they changed. I could see him slowly search my face, the revolver in my hand, the night behind me. Something of it was in his eyes when they came back to my face. Finally he spoke again.
“Is your wife honest?” he asked.
For very amazement I failed to realise the import of his question. The scene and the man appalled me. He had met me a few hours before, with the same self-possession. He could not long have put off that grotesque masquerade which secretly amused me. Yet the Princess must have been already dead, or dying. I began—I don’t know what I began to think. Then I suddenly recollected that in Italian the Prince’s adjective had a particular meaning, as applied to a woman.
“Is that why you shut her up here?” I burst out in indignation, in divination.
But I grew humble as he continued to stare at me. It was as if I could look through his blank eyes into a place of extremity which was not good to see.
“No,” he replied at last. “That is—she never would tell me.”
He said it quite simply, gazing down at the proud white face on the bier with a hypnotic intensity of demand. It made my anger shrivel away into nothing. It made me shiver. I saw something dreadful in the smile just touching the dead woman’s lips—a smile of Leonardo that was what you chose. But to me it was less dreadful than the sighing admission of the man’s words. They somehow grew up monstrously before me in the candle-light of the little painted chapel. They painted for me a picture of pride more terrifying than anything I had conceived. Inscrutably they unlocked the tower into which I had never stepped, peopled the lonely castle, haunted that fairy aisle of cypresses. Inexorably they uncovered for me, behind the smiling mask of my own life, the ghosts of sorrow and defeat, forebodings blacker and more intolerable still.
The poignancy of that revelation choked me, blinded me. I staggered back into the dark, leaving Montughi to take what answer he could from the mute lips of his Princess.