To Be Read At Dusk | Page 5

find, from what I have overheard, that mistress is
haunted.'
'How haunted?'
'By a dream.'
'What dream?'
'By a dream of a face. For three nights before her marriage, she saw a face in a dream -
always the same face, and only One.'
'A terrible face?'
'No. The face of a dark, remarkable-looking man, in black, with black hair and a grey
moustache - a handsome man except for a reserved and secret air. Not a face she ever saw,
or at all like a face she ever saw. Doing nothing in the dream but looking at her fixedly,
out of darkness.'
'Does the dream come back?'
'Never. The recollection of it is all her trouble.'
'And why does it trouble her?'
Carolina shook her head.
'That's master's question,' said la bella. 'She don't know. She wonders why, herself. But I
heard her tell him, only last night, that if she was to find a picture of that face in our
Italian house (which she is afraid she will) she did not know how she could ever bear it.'

Upon my word I was fearful after this (said the Genoese courier) of our coming to the old
palazzo, lest some such ill-starred picture should happen to be there. I knew there were
many there; and, as we got nearer and nearer to the place, I wished the whole gallery in
the crater of Vesuvius. To mend the matter, it was a stormy dismal evening when we, at
last, approached that part of the Riviera. It thundered; and the thunder of my city and its
environs, rolling among the high hills, is very loud. The lizards ran in and out of the
chinks in the broken stone wall of the garden, as if they were frightened; the frogs
bubbled and croaked their loudest; the sea-wind moaned, and the wet trees dripped; and
the lightning - body of San Lorenzo, how it lightened!
We all know what an old palace in or near Genoa is - how time and the sea air have
blotted it - how the drapery painted on the outer walls has peeled off in great flakes of
plaster - how the lower windows are darkened with rusty bars of iron - how the courtyard
is overgrown with grass - how the outer buildings are dilapidated - how the whole pile
seems devoted to ruin. Our palazzo was one of the true kind. It had been shut up close for
months. Months? - years! - it had an earthy smell, like a tomb. The scent of the orange
trees on the broad back terrace, and of the lemons ripening on the wall, and of some
shrubs that grew around a broken fountain, had got into the house somehow, and had
never been able to get out again. There was, in every room, an aged smell, grown faint
with confinement. It pined in all the cupboards and drawers. In the little rooms of
communication between great rooms, it was stifling. If you turned a picture - to come
back to the pictures - there it still was, clinging to the wall behind the frame, like a sort of
bat.
The lattice-blinds were close shut, all over the house. There were two ugly, grey old
women in the house, to take care of it; one of them with a spindle, who stood winding
and mumbling in the doorway, and who would as soon have let in the devil as the air.
Master, mistress, la bella Carolina, and I, went all through the palazzo. I went first,
though I have named myself last, opening the windows and the lattice-blinds, and
shaking down on myself splashes of rain, and scraps of mortar, and now and then a
dozing mosquito, or a monstrous, fat, blotchy, Genoese spider.
When I had let the evening light into a room, master, mistress, and la bella Carolina,
entered. Then, we looked round at all the pictures, and I went forward again into another
room. Mistress secretly had great fear of meeting with the likeness of that face - we all
had; but there was no such thing. The Madonna and Bambino, San Francisco, San
Sebastiano, Venus, Santa Caterina, Angels, Brigands, Friars, Temples at Sunset, Battles,
White Horses, Forests, Apostles, Doges, all my old acquaintances many times repeated? -
yes. Dark, handsome man in black, reserved and secret, with black hair and grey
moustache, looking fixedly at mistress out of darkness? - no.
At last we got through all the rooms and all the pictures, and came out into the gardens.
They were pretty well kept, being rented by a gardener, and were large and shady. In one
place there was a rustic theatre, open to the sky; the stage a green slope; the coulisses,
three entrances upon a