Crucial Instances | Page 3

now--from whom did you have it?"
His hand stole back. "One that saw it, by God!"
"That saw it?"
"My grandmother, then. I'm a very old man."
"Your grandmother? Your grandmother was--?"
"The Duchess's serving girl, with respect to you."
"Your grandmother? Two hundred years ago?"

"Is it too long ago? That's as God pleases. I am a very old man and she
was a very old woman when I was born. When she died she was as
black as a miraculous Virgin and her breath whistled like the wind in a
keyhole. She told me the story when I was a little boy. She told it to me
out there in the garden, on a bench by the fish-pond, one summer night
of the year she died. It must be true, for I can show you the very bench
we sat on...."
III
Noon lay heavier on the gardens; not our live humming warmth but the
stale exhalation of dead summers. The very statues seemed to drowse
like watchers by a death-bed. Lizards shot out of the cracked soil like
flames and the bench in the laurustinus-niche was strewn with the blue
varnished bodies of dead flies. Before us lay the fish-pond, a yellow
marble slab above rotting secrets. The villa looked across it, composed
as a dead face, with the cypresses flanking it for candles....
IV
"Impossible, you say, that my mother's mother should have been the
Duchess's maid? What do I know? It is so long since anything has
happened here that the old things seem nearer, perhaps, than to those
who live in cities.... But how else did she know about the statue then?
Answer me that, sir! That she saw with her eyes, I can swear to, and
never smiled again, so she told me, till they put her first child in her
arms ... for she was taken to wife by the steward's son, Antonio, the
same who had carried the letters.... But where am I? Ah, well ... she
was a mere slip, you understand, my grandmother, when the Duchess
died, a niece of the upper maid, Nencia, and suffered about the Duchess
because of her pranks and the funny songs she knew. It's possible, you
think, she may have heard from others what she afterward fancied she
had seen herself? How that is, it's not for an unlettered man to say;
though indeed I myself seem to have seen many of the things she told
me. This is a strange place. No one comes here, nothing changes, and
the old memories stand up as distinct as the statues in the garden....
"It began the summer after they came back from the Brenta. Duke

Ercole had married the lady from Venice, you must know; it was a gay
city, then, I'm told, with laughter and music on the water, and the days
slipped by like boats running with the tide. Well, to humor her he took
her back the first autumn to the Brenta. Her father, it appears, had a
grand palace there, with such gardens, bowling-alleys, grottoes and
casinos as never were; gondolas bobbing at the water-gates, a stable
full of gilt coaches, a theatre full of players, and kitchens and offices
full of cooks and lackeys to serve up chocolate all day long to the fine
ladies in masks and furbelows, with their pet dogs and their
blackamoors and their abates. Eh! I know it all as if I'd been there, for
Nencia, you see, my grandmother's aunt, travelled with the Duchess,
and came back with her eyes round as platters, and not a word to say
for the rest of the year to any of the lads who'd courted her here in
Vicenza.
"What happened there I don't know--my grandmother could never get
at the rights of it, for Nencia was mute as a fish where her lady was
concerned--but when they came back to Vicenza the Duke ordered the
villa set in order; and in the spring he brought the Duchess here and left
her. She looked happy enough, my grandmother said, and seemed no
object for pity. Perhaps, after all, it was better than being shut up in
Vicenza, in the tall painted rooms where priests came and went as
softly as cats prowling for birds, and the Duke was forever closeted in
his library, talking with learned men. The Duke was a scholar; you
noticed he was painted with a book? Well, those that can read 'em make
out that they're full of wonderful things; as a man that's been to a fair
across the mountains will always tell his people at home it was beyond
anything _they'll_ ever see. As for the Duchess, she was all for music,
play-acting and young company. The Duke was a silent man,