"All this was simply vague rumor, for my father and other mechanics whom she employed laughed at these stories, and declared that she was the same as always. But my youthful brain was affected, none the less, by these contradictory reports, and my desire to see that woman was blended with an indefinable dread which prepared me by slow degrees for the madness of falling in love with her.
"One fact in particular added to my ardent longing. My father, who went often to the palace, as a simple journeyman, to assist the master upholsterer to hang and drape curtains and the like, refused to take me there with him, although I was accustomed to go everywhere else with him. He had often put me off with excuses which I accepted without examining them; but when my longing to find my way into that sanctuary became overpowering, he was compelled to admit that the princess did not like to see young people in her house, and that the master upholsterer carefully excluded them when he went there with his workmen. This extraordinary restriction served only to inflame my desire. One morning I resolutely took my hammer and my apron and entered the Palmarosa palace, carrying a prie-Dieu covered with velvet, which my father had just finished in his employer's workshop. I knew that it was made for Signora Agatha; I consulted nobody, but took possession of it and started.
"That was five years ago, Michel! The palace which you see at this moment, so resplendent, with its doors wide open, and filled with people, was just the same a month ago as it was at the time of which I am telling you, just the same as it had then been during the five years that had passed since she was left an orphan and mistress of her own life, and as it probably will be again to-morrow. It was a tomb in which she seemed to have buried herself alive. All the treasures to-day spread out for everyone to see were buried in darkness under layers of dust, like relics of the dead in a tomb. Two or three servants, dismal and silent, walked noiselessly through the long galleries closed to the sunlight and the outer air. On all sides thick curtains hanging before the windows, doors which refused to swing on their rusty hinges, an air of solemn neglect, statues standing erect in the shadow like ghosts, family portraits that followed you with their eyes with a distrustful air. I was frightened, and yet I walked on. The house was not so jealously guarded as I expected. It had invisible sentinels in its reputation for inhospitable gloom and the dread of its loneliness. I carried thither the insane audacity of my twenty years, the ill-fated rashness of a heart enamored in anticipation, and rushing headlong to its destruction.
"By a chance which seemed like fatality, I was not questioned by anyone. The few servants of that dismal abode did not see me, or did not think of preventing me from proceeding, relying, perhaps, upon some Cerberus nearer to the person of their mistress, whose duty it was to guard the door of her apartments, and who, by some miracle, happened not to be there.
"Instinct or destiny guided me. I passed through several rooms, I put aside heavy, dust-covered portières; I passed through one more open door and found myself in a very richly furnished room, where a full-length portrait of a man occupied a panel of the wall directly opposite me. I stopped. That portrait sent a shudder through my veins. I recognized it from my father's description of the original, whose character was then a much more common subject of anecdote and gossip among our people than the peculiarities of the princess. It was the portrait of Dionigi Palmarosa, Princess Agatha's father, and I must tell you something of that terrible man, Michel; for it may be that you have not as yet heard his name in this country, where nobody mentions it except in fear and trembling. Indeed, I see that I should have mentioned him to you before, for the hatred and terror which his memory inspires would have explained to you in some measure the distrust, and even malevolence with which his daughter, despite all her virtues, is regarded by some persons of our station in life.
"Prince Dionigi was a fierce, despotic, cruel and overbearing man. The pride of birth made him almost insane, and every indication of spirit or of resistance on the part of his inferiors was punished with incredible arrogance and severity. Vindictive to excess, he had, it was said, killed his wife's lover with his own hand, and worried her to death, poor creature, in a sort of captivity. He was bitterly detested by his equals, and still more bitterly by the poor, whom he assisted, however, on occasion, with lordly liberality, but in such a humiliating way that one felt degraded by his benefactions.
"Now you will understand better the small degree of sympathy which his daughter has acquired. It seems to me that the constraint in which she passed her early youth, under the iron rule of such a detestable father, may well explain her reserved disposition, and what I may call the premature withering or repression of her heart. Doubtless she is afraid of reawakening antipathies connected with the name she bears, by entering into relations with other people; and if she avoids intercourse with her fellow men, it is for reasons which should arouse the compassion and deep interest of fair-minded persons.
"A single other fact will serve to exhibit Prince Dionigi's disposition. About fifteen or sixteen years ago, I think—it is all very vague in my boyish memories,—a young mountaineer in his service, being maddened beyond endurance by the harshness of his language, ventured, they say, to shrug his shoulders as he held the stirrup for the prince to dismount from his horse. He was a worthy, honest fellow, but proud and of violent temper. The prince struck him a vicious blow. Thereafter they hated each other intensely, and the groom—his name was Ercolano—left the Palmarosa palace, saying that he knew the great secret of the family and that he would soon have his revenge. What was that secret? He had no time to reveal it, and no one ever knew what he had to reveal; for they found Ercolano the next morning on the seashore, murdered, with a dagger bearing the Palmarosa arms in his breast. His relations dared not demand justice, they were poor!"
Magnani had reached this point when the white figure they had seen wandering about the terrace crossed the flower-garden once more and went inside. Michel shuddered from head to foot.
"I don't know why your story has such an effect upon me," he said. "I seem to feel the cold blade of that dagger in my breast. That woman terrifies me. A strange superstition is creeping into my mind. A person cannot have a murderer's blood in her veins without having either a wicked heart or an unhinged mind. Give me a chance to breathe, Magnani, before you finish your story."