A Capillary Crime, and Other Stories

by Francis Davis Millet

With no settled purpose I took up a piece of an old spade I found there, and began to dig on one side of the cave near the largest alcove. The accumulation was not packed hard, and I easily threw it aside. I had removed a few feet of earth without finding anything to reward my labors, and then began to dig in the heap of rubbish which was piled in the alcove, nearly touching its low ceiling. Almost the first shovelful of earth I threw out had a number of small gray tesseræ in it. Gathering these up and taking them to the light, I found that part of them were of marble, or other light-colored stone; but that a few were of glass with a corroded surface, which could be clipped off with great ease, disclosing beautiful iridescent cubes underneath. The whole day was passed in this work, for I was much interested in my discovery. The tesseræ were of no great value, to be sure, but they proved that the cave had been used by the Romans, probably as a grotto of the nymphs, and they were certainly worth keeping in a private collection. Possibly not a little of the charm of the operation of excavating was due to the element of danger in it. The guard was stationed less than a rifle-shot away, and if I had been discovered, fine and possibly imprisonment would have been my lot.

To make a long story short, I made several excursions to the cave in the same manner, and dug nearly the whole ground in a systematic way, leaving until the last a small alcove near the mouth of the cave, because I found very few tesseræ anywhere in the strong daylight. Everything which was not a simple, uninteresting piece of stone or shell I stowed away in a bag and carried to my studio. In a few Sundays I had a peck or more of tesseræ, a quarter of them glass ones, and a great many bits of twisted glass rod and small pieces of glass vessels. One day the spade turned out, among other things, several small pieces of brown, porous substance which looked in the dim light like decayed wood. I put them in the bag with the rest, to be examined at my leisure at home. The next morning, when I came to turn out the collection gathered the day before, these curious pieces fell out with the rest, and immediately attracted my attention. In the strong light of day, I saw at once what they were. They were the decayed phalanges of a human hand. The story of Tedesco and Rubina was always in my mind; and I compared the bones with my own fingers, and found them to be without doubt the bones of an adult, and probably of a man.

I could scarcely wait for the next Sunday to arrive, but I did not dare to risk the descent of the cliff on a week-day lest I should be seen by the fishermen. When at last I did reach the cave again, I went at my work with vigor, continuing my search in the place where I left off the previous week. In a short time I unearthed several more bones similar to those I already had, but, although I thoroughly examined every cubic foot of earth which I had not previously dug over, I found no more of the skeleton.

In my studio that evening I arranged the little bones as well as I could in the positions they had occupied in the human hand. As far as I could make out, I had the thumb, the first and third fingers and one joint of the second, three of the bones of the hand, and one of the wrist-bones. There could be no question but these had once belonged to a human hand, and to the right hand, too. There was no means of knowing how long ago the person had died, neither could there be any possible way of identifying these human relics. The possession of the grewsome little objects seemed to set my imagination on fire. After going to bed at night I often worked myself into a state of disagreeable nervous tension by meditating on the history of the sculptor, and revolving in my mind the theories I had formed of the mystery of his life and the manner of his death. For some reason the old woman had never told me where his studio had been, and it never occurred to me to ask her until the thought suddenly came during one of these night-hours of wakefulness. When I put the question to her the next afternoon, she replied, simply:

“This studio was his, signor padrone.”

The poor old soul had been living her life over again, day after day, as she sat knitting and looking out to sea, her imagination quickened and her memory refreshed by the surroundings which in many decades had scarcely changed at all.

This information gave a new stimulus to my thoughts, and I lay awake and pondered and surmised more than ever. There seemed to be something hidden away in my own consciousness, which was endeavoring to work its way into recognition. It would almost come in range of my mental vision, and then would lose itself again, just as some well-known name will coquettishly elude the grasp of the memory. While lying awake in a real agony of thought, a vague feeling would enter my mind for an instant, that I had only to interpret what I already knew, and the mystery of my imagination would be clear to me. Then I would revolve and revolve again all the details of the story, but the fugitive idea always escaped me. With that discouraging persistence which is utterly beyond our control, whenever great anxiety weighs upon our minds, I would repeat, again and again, the same series of arguments and the same line of theories until at last, utterly worn out, I would go to sleep. It was quite inexplicable that I should think so much about a sculptor of whom I had never heard, except from Tedesco’s Rubina, and who died long before I was born; but, in spite of my reason, I could not rid myself of the vague consciousness that there was something I was unwittingly hiding from myself.

One warm night in summer I sat up quite late writing letters, and then, thinking I should go to sleep at once on account of my fatigue, went to bed. But sleep came only after some hours, and even then not until I had stood for a long time looking out of the window on the moonlit houses below, with my bare feet on the cold stone floor. The first thought that came to my head, as I awoke the next morning, was about that marble head I had seen in Rome a year before. The dark page of my mind became illuminated in an instant. I did not need to summon Lisa to note the resemblance of her face to the marble one which had so fascinated me, for I was familiar enough with her features to require no aid to my memory. Besides, I had a fairly accurate study of her head on my easel, and I compared the face on the canvas with the marble one which I now remembered so vividly. There was the identical contour of the cheeks and forehead, with the hyper-delicate chin; the nose, the mouth, the eyes, each repeated the forms of the marble bust. It was the color alone that gave the painting its modern aspect, and it had been, I now saw, my preoccupation with the color which had prevented my observing the resemblance before. The only thing my portrait lacked, as a representation of the model from whom the marble was made, was that fascinating expression of girlhood, which, I was obliged to confess to myself, I had not succeeded in catching.

Full of my discovery, I wrote at once to the authorities in Rome, asking for a history of the fragment.

In a few days I received the not unexpected information that it had been given by the Naples Museum in exchange for another piece of antique sculpture. I hurried across to Naples and interviewed the authorities there, requesting precise statements about the bust, on the plea that I was interested in the particular period of art which it represented. In the list of objects of antiquity excavated in the summer of 18—, I found this entry, under the head of Capri: