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.