The Clock and the Key

by A. H. Vesey

The gondolier leaned forward and touched my sleeve. He had observed our perplexity. He pointed to a palace we had just passed.

“Ecco, Signori, the House of the Angel! It is not this one. It is the third back.”

“The third back?” I repeated mechanically. I let my glance follow his outstretched finger. With a twist of the oar he had turned the gondola again toward the Grand Canal.

“Behold, Signore, the House of the Angel. Up there, in the niche over the door.”

I raised my eyes dully. I had no idea what the man was talking about. The palace at whose steps we had halted was a magnificent structure of the fourteenth century, so beautiful that in any other city than Venice it would have been worth a pilgrimage to see. Over the doorway was a triangular niche, a kind of shrine. A half figure of an angel was carved in the niche, and a kneeling child looked quaintly up into the angel’s face. The gondolier pointed to the shrine reverently.

“The angel is to drive away the evil spirits, Signore. The evil spirit of a pig once dwelt in this beautiful palace. I assure the Signore that I am telling him the truth, though there are many hundreds of years since the evil soul of the pig was conjured away by the angel and the little child. The house is now sweet and clean of all evil, and is called the House of the Angel. But look, Signore, you can see the unclean pigs that were carved in the wall by the wicked builder. Before they were broken, the house was called the House of the Pigs.”

We looked upward.

The house had a frieze made of a capriciously carved array of pigs. The posture of each two of the creatures was the same: the one recumbent, the other erect. The heads and the feet and most of the bodies had been stricken off.

“It is very simple,” cried St. Hilary exultingly. “Our husks of corn have simply become the bodies of pigs. We have found the second landmark.”

He held the photograph of the background of the second hour before me. That background, it will be remembered, was a hanging, and on this hanging a decorative scheme that we had supposed to be husks of corn.