ANTIGNONE.
Yet never, never, never was Silentia Leatherstonepaugh known to break that dreadful silence, even though honored guests spoke to her kindly, and although young Cain Leatherstonepaugh repeatedly reviled her as had she been Abel's wife. One day came an old Spanish monk of whom Leah and Rachel would learn the language of Castile. Silentia gloomed in her dusky corner unseen of the monk, who was left with her an instant alone. A few moments before, moved perhaps by a dawning comprehension of the unspeakable pathos of her fate, young Cain had given her a dagger. When, two minutes after the monk's arrival, Leah and Rachel entered the room, a black sighing mass cowered in a corner of the sofa, while Silentia rose spectre-like in the dimness, the dagger pointed toward her heart.
SILENTIA LEATHERSTONEPAUGH.
"Madonna mia!" giggled the monk hysterically when his petticoats were pulled decorously about him and he was set on his feet again, "I thought I should be arrested for murder—poverino mio!"
Another day came one of the Beelzebub girls—Lady Diavoletta—who wished to coax some of the Leatherstonepaughs to paint her a series of fans with the torments of Dante's Inferno. When the doorbell rang, and while Cain cried "Chi è?" at the peephole, Leah, who was just posing for Rachel's barelegged gypsy, hastily pulled a long silk skirt from haughty but unresisting Silentia and hurried it over her own head before Lady Diavoletta was admitted. The heiress of the Beelzebubs tarried but a moment, then took her departure grimly, without hinting a word of her purpose. Said Lady Diavoletta afterward to the Cherubim sisters, "Would you believe it? I called one day upon those Leatherstonepaughs, and they never even apologized for receiving me in a room where there was an insane American just escaped from her keeper, tray beang arrangée pore doncy le cong cong!"
SILENTIA AS SHE APPEARED TO LADY DIAVOLETTA BEELZEBUB.
Dismal and grim though the exterior of that palazzo was, needing but towers and machicolated parapets to seem a fortress, or an encircling wall to seem a frowning monastery where cowled figures met each other only to whisper sepulchrally, "Brother, we must die," it was yet the scene of not a few laughable experiences. And perhaps even in this respect it may not have differed so widely as one might think from cloistered shades of other days, when out of sad, earth-colored raiment and the habit of dismal speech human sentiment painted pictures while yet the fagots grew apace for their destruction as well as for the funeral-pyre of their scolding and bellowing enemy, Savonarola. For where Fra Angelico, working from the life, could create a San Sebastian so instinct with earthly vitality and earthly bloom that pious Florentine women could not say their prayers in peace in its presence, there were three easels, each bearing a canvas, in different parts of the room. Before each easel worked a Leatherstonepaugh, each clad with classic simplicity in a long blue cotton garment, decorated with many colors and smelling strongly of retouching varnish, that covered her from the white ruffle at her throat to the upper edge of her black alpaca flounce.
The room was silent, and, except for the deft action of brushes, motionless. Only that from below was heard the musical splash of the Barberini Tritons, and that from the windows could be seen the sombre pines of the Ludovisi gardens swaying in solemn rhythmic measure must have been sometimes unbending from the dole and drear of mediæval asceticism into something very like human fun.