The Ghost-Feeler E-Book

Edith Wharton

• Herausgeber: Peter Owen Publishers
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Diagnosed with typhoid fever at age of nine, Edith Wharton was beginning a long convalescence when she was given a book of ghost tales to read. Not only setting back her recovery, this reading opened up her fevered imagination to 'a world haunted by formless horrors'. So chronic was this paranoia that she was unable to sleep in a room with any book containing a ghost story. She was even moved to burn such volumes. These fears persisted until her late twenties. She outgrew them but retained a heightened or 'celtic' (her term) sense of the supernatural. Wharton considered herself not 'a ghostseer' - the term applied to those people who have claimed to have witnessed apparitions - but rather a 'ghostfeeler', someone who senses what cannot be seen. This experience and ability enabled Edith Wharton to write chilling tales that objectify this sense of unease. Far removed from the comfort and urbane elegance associated with the author's famous novels, the stories in this volume were praised by Henry James, L. P. Hartley, Graham Greene and many others.

Leseprobe

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PRAISE FORTHE GHOST-FEELER

‘Edith Wharton described herself as having an “intense Celtic sense of the supernatural.”The Ghost-Feeler: Stories of Terror and the Supernatural,selected and introduced by Peter Haining, contains nine stories that Wharton wrote between 1893 and 1935. While they display the elegant prose of her novels, these tales revolve around supernatural manifestations (vampires, doppelgangers) made credible by Wharton’s superb storytelling skills.’ –Publishers Weekly

‘Wharton is rich in implication ... the selection here is an excellent one.’ –Scotland on Sunday

THE GHOST-FEELERStories of Terror and the Supernatural

Diagnosed with typhoid fever at age of nine, Edith Wharton was beginning a long convalescence when she was given a book of ghost tales to read. Not only setting back her recovery, this reading opened up her fevered imagination to ‘a world haunted by formless horrors.’ So chronic was this paranoia that she was unable to sleep in a room with any book containing a ghost story. She was even moved to burn such volumes. These fears persisted until her late twenties.

She outgrew them but retained a heightened or ‘celtic’ (her term) sense of the supernatural. Wharton considered herself not ‘a ghost-seer’ – the term applied to those people who have claimed to have witnessed apparitions – but rather a ‘ghost-feeler,’ someone who senses what cannot be seen.

This experience and ability enabled Edith Wharton to write chilling tales that objectify this sense of unease. Far removed from the comfort and urbane elegance associated with the author’s famous novels, the stories in this volume deal with vampirism, isolation, and hallucination, and were praised by Henry James, L. P. Hartley, Graham Greene, and many others.

EDITH WHARTON

THE GHOST-FEELER

Stories of Terror and the Supernatural

Selected and Introduced byPeter Haining

PETER OWENLondon and Chicago

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Contents

Introduction

The Duchess at Prayer(1901)

The Fullness of Life(1893)

A Journey(1899)

The Lady’s Maid’s Bell(1904)

Afterwards(1910)

The Triumph of Night(1914)

Bewitched(1926)

A Bottle of Perrier(1930)

The Looking-Glass(1935)

What gives a ghost story its thrill? First I think itsphysicalsense and, secondly, a moral twist.

Graham GreeneThe Spectator, 1937

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Introduction

It is a strange fact that for the first twenty-seven years of her life, a woman who is today regarded by several authorities on ghost fiction as one of the foremost writers of supernatural stories of her time, was quite unable to sleep in any room that contained so much as a single book of such tales. So unnerved was Edith Wharton by supernatural fiction that she later admitted to destroying any that she came across at home. But it was from her childhood traumas and anxieties that Wharton drew the inspiration for her stories of ghosts and terror to produce a steady flow of work that spanned her entire literary career and which today is worthy of the highest praise.

Born into a wealthy New York family in January 1862, this sensitive, responsive and obedient young lady led a cosseted and strictly disciplined life until a cathartic experience in the summer of 1870. On holiday in Europe in the Black Forest, Wharton suddenly collapsed and was diagnosed with typhoid fever. For several days she was close to death before finally rallying and beginning a long period of convalescence. To pass the time she asked for some books to read, and among those given to her was one from two friends which she could only later describe with a shudder as a ‘robber story’. This book, with its tales of robbers and ghosts, deeply affected her ‘intense Celtic sense of the supernatural’ and not only caused a set-back in her recovery but opened up to her fevered imagination ‘a world haunted by formless horrors’. For years thereafter, she said, a dark undefinable menace dogged her footsteps. ‘I had been a naturally fearless child,’ she explained, ‘now I lived in a state of chronic fear. Fear ofwhat? I cannot say – and even at the time I was never able to formulate my terror.’

Wharton also had a fear of old houses. One of her aunts, a stern, humourless spinster lady who had also suffered a death-threatening illness as a child, lived in almost reclusive isolation in a twenty-four-roomed Gothic mansion at Rhinecliff, New York. The building was ugly, dark and uncomfortable and the little girl could never visit the place without having nightmares afterwards.

Both of these influences contributed to Wharton’s overwhelming fear of ghost and horror stories, a fear that persisted through her childhood, into her teens, and even her early twenties. ‘I could not sleep in a room with a book containing a ghost story,’ she confessed later. ‘I frequently had to burn books of this kind, because it frightened me to know that they were downstairs in the library!’ When, however, the urge to write possessed the young woman, she determined to exorcize the ghosts and goblins that haunted her.

Later in her life when Wharton was firmly established as a famous novelist and double-winner of the Pulitzer Prize, she could write freely of the terrors that had so affected her imagination as well as her convictions about the supernatural world.

The celebrated reply (I forget whose): ‘No, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them,’ is much more than the cheap paradox it seems to many. To ‘believe’, in that sense, is a conscious act of the intellect, and it is in the warm darkness of the pre-natal fluid far below our conscious reason that the faculty dwells with which we apprehend the ghosts we may not be endowed with the gift of seeing.

For this very reason, Edith Wharton considered herself not a ‘ghost-seer’ – to use the term so often applied to those people who claim to have witnessed a spirit – but rather a ‘ghost-feeler’, someone whosenseswhat cannot be seen. It is this fact which determined my choice of a title for this collection.

Between youth and old age, Wharton had plucked up the courage to read the works by the great masters of the genre and listed among her favourites three British authors, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Walter de la Mare, and two fellow Americans, Francis Marion Crawford and Fitz James O’Brien. At the very pinnacle, though, she placed Henry James and his novel,The Turn of the Screw; she considered no other writer had come near to equalling its imaginative handling of the supernatural. She might be considered biased, however, since James had, in fact, become her friend and the guiding light of her literary career.

Wharton has, in turn, earned her own coterie of admirers. The American critic George D. Meadows, for example, says that, ‘Mrs. Wharton works with the sure touch of an Emily Brontë, although with more restraint’; while the English novelist Anita Brookner believes she had ‘an abiding fascination for the comfortably established world of haunted houses and revenants, wives or husbands betrayed, or dead too soon’.

As I belong to this circle of admirers, assembling this collection has for me been a special pleasure. It has provided some surprises, too. For example, I spent one day wading through dusty copies of the early issues ofHarper’s Monthly Magazine, to which Wharton contributed a number of her short stories, in the hope that I might come across some undiscovered gems. And there, in the index to volume II (1851), I found an essay entitled ‘The Ghost That Appeared to Mrs. Wharton’. Of course, it had been published ten yearsbeforeWharton was born, but in succeeding volumes I came across a number of other supernatural stories by anonymous writers. I could not help wondering whether this magazine, popular with her parents and always to be found in the family library, had been another – until now – unacknowledged source of her inspiration?

In the stories that follow, Edith Wharton demonstrates her feeling for the supernatural and her knowledge of terror, both garnered from personal experience.

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‘The Duchess at Prayer’ is a story of terror and punishment that could just as easily have been written by Edgar Allan Poe, whose work clearly influenced Wharton. Both writers shared a love for the town of Newport, where both of them spent periods of their lives. It was here, during the summer of 1900, that ‘The Duchess at Prayer’ was written, and according to an anonymous reviewer in the American magazine,Independent(June 1901), the tale might have been based on an incident ‘which Balzac once developed somewhat differently’. In the same year,Harper’s Monthly Magazinecalled it a tale about ‘the brute facts of sin’ and added that ‘it could only have been written by one who has truly known horror’. In her recent study,Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life(1994), Eleanor Dwight suggests that the story reflects a plight familiar to Wharton and many young wives of the period, that of ‘The woman abandoned by her husband for long periods of time and then expected to be sexually available to him when he returns’.

There is little doubt that ‘The Fullness of Life’, published at the end of 1893, reflects the state of Wharton’s own married life at the time. She had been wed in 1885 to Edward Wharton, a man thirteen years older than her, who had little feeling for literature and art, preferred the company of other male New York socialites, and quickly lost interest in the artistic and physical needs of his young bride. Soon, in fact, the unsatisfactory state of her marriage was to cause Edith to form several intense friendships, and in 1907 she had a deeply passionate affair with a New York journalist named Morton Fullerton which released her sensuality and also had a profound effect upon the tenor of her later writing.

Some years after its publication, Wharton described ‘The Fullness of Life’ to her editor atScribner’s, Edward Burlingame, as ‘one long shriek – I may not write any better, but at least I hope that I write in a lower key’. And probably because of its intensely personal nature – not to mention the fact that it must have annoyed Teddy Wharton, who could hardly have failed to grasp its implict suggestion – Wharton suppressed the work from her subsequent collections of stories. I know of few other stories of the afterlife more absorbing than this one. Eleanor Dwight believes that the tale may also have been partly inspired by a supernatural experience the author had while visiting Florence. She marvelled at the architectural beauty of the Church of San Michele, ‘when she experienced a wonderful vision and felt herself being “borne onwards along a mighty current”’.

Wharton returned to the subject of death in ‘A Journey’, published in June 1899. Here again, Wharton’s sensitivity and the idea of death as a physical presence make the story memorable.

As in ‘The Duchess at Prayer’, there are elements of sexuality to be found in ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell’, written in 1904, and Wharton’s first true ghost story. Readers on both sides of the Atlantic were deeply moved by this tale of adultery mingled with supernatural protection, with its superbly evoked atmosphere of dark and mysterious events occurring in an unstable household.

Just how successfully Wharton had confronted the demons of her childhood is evident in ‘Afterwards’, a tale written in 1910 and generally considered to be her most successful ghost story. Jack Sullivan, writing inThe Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural(1986), believes that Wharton ‘converted the primal dread from her childhood into the haunted library scene’, which is the setting for one of the pivotal moments in the story.

New England in the grip of a blizzard is the backdrop for ‘The Triumph of Night’, published in 1914, and featuring the innovation of adoppelgänger.The ugly, malevolent spirit is the double of a well-known financier who has virtually imprisoned a young man suffering from advanced tuberculosis, in the hope of benefiting from his death. When the snow drives another traveller into the company of this pair and the man sees thedoppelgängerfor himself, he is faced with a stark choice: to save the stricken boy or flee from the house.

Interestingly, this story had been written several years earlier while Wharton was far away from America, staying in Paris. The French capital was then almost flooded from torrential rain, and this may well have set the tone of a piece that features fiscal misdealings, mysterious death and bloodstained hands.

Wharton returned to the locale of New England for ‘Bewitched’, a tale of vampirism, then a subject virtually untouched by women writers. The importance of the story was spotted on publication by theNew York Times’scritic who wrote on 2 May 1926: ‘“Bewitched” has much of the same tragic power which was the commanding feature ofEthan Frome.’

It is an atmospheric and disturbing tale about a distracted wife, Mrs Rutledge, who appeals to her local Deacon for help because her husband, Saul, is having an affair. But this is no ordinary affair: he is infatuated with a dead woman who is relentlessly draining away his vitality. Even in the superstitious backwoods of New England, the poor woman does not find it easy to come to terms with what is happening or to get others to take the necessary action to put a stop to the vampire’s activities. The influence of this story can be seen in a number of subsequent tales of the undead written by women – not the least of them the sensual and exotic vampire novels of Anne Rice.

The deceptive title of ‘A Bottle of Perrier’, which Wharton wrote in 1930, lures the reader almost unsuspectingly into a tale of murder and suspense set in a new locality: the African desert. This story was greatly admired by the late doyen of mystery fiction, Ellery Queen, who republished it in his magazine in 1948 with the following illuminating preface:

It has been said of Edith Wharton’s work that ‘her characters are given sharp, clear, consistent shape’. You will find that true of ‘A Bottle of Perrier’: young Medford, the velvet-foot Gosling, and especially the strange archaeologist, Henry Almodham, are sharp and clear and consistent against the shimmering background of the desert. It has also been said that Edith Wharton’s style is a ‘clear, luminous medium in which things are seen in precise and striking outline’. You will find that also true: the mystery and menace of the infinite sands, the enervating heat, the timelessness, the silence, the inaccessibility – all become luminous; but there is something else, something brooding and haunting, which becomes clear and finally emerges ‘in precise and striking outline’ ...

Small wonder that this story should have captivated many other literary figures including L. P. Hartley, who called it ‘an ingenious exercise in sustained suspense’ and Graham Greene, who referred to it as ‘that superb horror story’.

Wharton’s mentor, Henry James, was a particular admirer of the final story in this collection, ‘The Looking-Glass’, which he called a ‘diabolical little cleverness’. The story was contributed toThe Centuryin 1935 and, curiously, not included in the collections of Wharton’s work published immediately prior to and just after her death. It also appeared under the title ‘The Mirror’, and its heroine, Moyra Attlee, recounts the strange and unexpected visions she witnesses in an old looking-glass.

Edith Wharton died on 11 August 1937 at her French home in St Brice-sous-Fôret, just north of Paris, and she was buried at Versailles. Three months later, in a tribute to her work in the supernatural genre, the English critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor neatly encapsulated the secret of why her stories of ghosts and terror deserved to be read then and still do today, over half a century later:

She is a story-teller whose speech is naturally quiet and unhurried. Her stories have a half-eerie, half-cosy charm of their own. You begin to feel the silence around your chair; she is a past mistress of that curious art which makes you put the book down for an instant, poke the fire, and settle back with the thought: ‘Well, here I am, reading a ghost story – what could be more agreeable?’

There is nothing more for me to add beyond suggesting that the reader immediately take Mr Shawe-Taylor’s advice.

PETER HAINING Boxford, Suffolk

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The Duchess at Prayer

I

Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian house, that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priest behind which buzz the secrets of the confessional? Other houses declare the activities they shelter; they are the clear expressive cuticle of a life flowing close to the surface; but the old palace in its narrow street, the villa on its cypress-hooded hill, are as impenetrable as death. The tall windows are like blind eyes, the great door is a shut mouth. Inside there may be sunshine, the scent of myrtles, and a pulse of life through all the arteries of the huge frame; or a mortal solitude, where bats lodge in the disjointed stones and the keys rust in unused doors ...

II

From the loggia, with its vanishing frescoes, I looked down an avenue barred by a ladder of cypress shadows to the ducal escutcheon and mutilated vases of the gate. Flat noon lay on the gardens, on fountains, porticoes, and grottoes. Below the terrace, where a chrome-coloured lichen had sheeted the balustrade as with finelaminceof gold, vineyards stooped to the rich valley clasped in hills. The lower slopes were strewn with white villages like stars spangling a summer dusk; and beyond these, fold on fold of blue mountain, clear as gauze against the sky. The August air was lifeless, but it seemed light and vivifying after the atmosphere of the shrouded rooms through which I had been led. Their chill was on me and I hugged the sunshine.

‘The Duchess’s apartments are beyond,’ said the old man.

He was the oldest man I had ever seen; so sucked back into the past that he seemed more like a memory than a living being. The one trait linking him with the actual was the fixity with which his small saurian eye held the pocket that, as I entered, had yielded alirato the gatekeeper’s child. He went on, without removing his eye:

‘For two hundred years nothing has been changed in the apartments of the Duchess.’

‘And no one lives her now?’

‘No one, sir. The Duke goes to Como for the summer season.’

I had moved to the other end of the loggia. Below me, through hanging groves, white roofs and domes flashed like a smile.

‘And that’s Vicenza?’

‘Proprio!’ The old man extended fingers as lean as the hands fading from the walls behind us. ‘You see the palace roof over there, just to the left of the Basilica? The one with the row of statues like birds taking flight? That’s the Duke’s town palace, built by Palladio.’

‘And does the Duke come there?’

‘Never. In winter he goes to Rome.’

‘And the palace and the villa are always closed?’

‘As you see – always.’

‘How long has this been?’

‘Since I can remember.’

I looked into his eyes; they were like tarnished metal mirrors reflecting nothing. ‘That must be a long time,’ I said involuntarily.

‘A long time,’ he assented.

I looked down on the gardens. An opulence of dahlias overran the box-borders, between cypresses that cut the sunshine like basalt shafts. Bees hung above the lavender; lizards sunned themselves on the benches and slipped through the cracks of the dry basins. Everywhere were vanishing traces of that fantastic horticulture of which our dull age has lost the art. Down the alleys maimed statues stretched their arms like rows of whining beggars; fauneared terms grinned in the thickets, and above the laurustinus walls rose the mock ruin of a temple, falling into real ruin in the bright disintegrating air. The glare was blinding.

‘Let us go in,’ I said.

The old man pushed open a heavy door, behind which the cold lurked like a knife.

‘The Duchess’s apartments,’ he said.

Overhead and around us the same evanescent frescoes, under foot the same scagliola volutes, unrolled themselves interminably. Ebony cabinets, with inlay of precious marbles in cunning perspective, alternated down the room with the tarnished efflorescence of gilt consoles supporting Chinese monsters; and from the chimney-panel a gentleman in the Spanish habit haughtily ignored us.

‘Duke Ercole II,’ the old man explained, ‘by the Genoese Priest.’

It was a narrow-browed face, sallow as a wax effigy, highnosed and cautious-lidded, as though modelled by priestly hands; the lips weak and vain rather than cruel; a quibbling mouth that would have snapped at verbal errors like a lizard catching flies, but had never learned the shape of a round yes or no. One of the Duke’s hands rested on the head of a dwarf, a simian creature with pearl ear-rings and fantastic dress; the other turned the pages of a folio propped on a skull.

‘Beyond is the Duchess’s bedroom,’ the old man reminded me.

Here the shutters admitted but two narrow shafts of light, gold bars deepening the subaqueous gloom. On a daïs the bedstead, grim, nuptial, official, lifted its baldachin; a yellow Christ agonized between the curtains, and across the room a lady smiled at us from the chimney-breast.

The old man unbarred a shutter and the light touched her face. Such a face it was, with a flicker of laughter over it like the wind on a June meadow, and a singular tender pliancy of mien, as though one of Tiepolo’s lenient goddesses had been busked into the stiff sheath of a seventeenth-century dress!

‘No one has slept here’, said the old man, ‘since the Duchess Violante.’

‘And she was —?’

‘The lady there – first Duchess of Duke Ercole II.’

He drew a key from his pocket and unlocked a door at the farther end of the room. ‘The chapel,’ he said. ‘This is the Duchess’s balcony.’ As I turned to follow him the Duchess tossed me a sidelong smile.

I stepped into a grated tribune above a chapel festooned with stucco. Pictures of bituminous saints mouldered between the pilasters; the artificial roses in the altar vases were grey with dust and age, and under the cobwebby rosettes of the vaulting a bird’s nest clung. Before the altar stood a row of tattered armchairs and I drew back at sight of a figure kneeling near them.

‘The Duchess,’ the old man whispered. ‘By the Cavaliere Bernini.’

It was the image of a woman in furred robes and spreadingfraise, her hand lifted, her face addressed to the tabernacle. There was a strangeness in the sight of that immovable presence locked in prayer before an abandoned shrine. Her face was hidden, and I wondered whether it were grief or gratitude that raised her hands and drew her eyes to the altar, where no living prayer joined her marble invocation. I followed my guide down the tribune steps, impatient to see what mystic version of such terrestrial graces the ingenious artist had found – the Cavaliere was master of such arts. The Duchess’s attitude was one of transport, as though heavenly airs fluttered her laces and the love-locks escaping from her coif. I saw how admirably the sculptor had caught the pose of her head, the tender slope of the shoulder; then I crossed over and looked into her face – it was a frozen horror. Never have hate, revolt, and agony so possessed a human countenance ...

The old man crossed himself and shuffled his feet on the marble.

‘The Duchess Violante,’ he repeated.

‘The same as in the picture?’

‘Eh – the same.’

‘But the face – what does it mean?’

He shrugged his shoulders and turned deaf eyes on me. Then he shot a glance round the sepulchral place, clutched my sleeve and said, close to my ear: ‘It was not always so.’

‘What was not?’

‘The face – so terrible.’

‘The Duchess’s face?’

‘The statue’s. It changed after —”

‘After?’

‘It was put here.’

‘The statue’s facechanged—?’

He mistook my bewilderment for incredulity, and his confidential finger dropped from my sleeve. ‘Eh, that’s the story. I tell what I’ve heard. What do I know?’ He resumed his senile shuffle across the marble. This is a bad place to stay in – no one comes here. It’s too cold. But the gentleman said,I must see everything?’

I let theliresound. ‘So I must – and hear everything. This story, 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.’

‘You 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 watches by a deadbed. 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 humour 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 theater 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 theirabates. 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 for ever 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 anythingthey’llever see. As for the Duchess, she was all for music, play-acting, and young company. The Duke was a silent man, stepping quietly, with his eyes down, as though he’d just come from confession; when the Duchess’s lap-dog yapped at his heels he danced like a man in a swarm of hornets; when the Duchess laughed he winced as if you’d drawn a diamond across a window-pane. And the Duchess was always laughing.

‘When she first came to the villa she was very busy laying out the gardens, designing grottoes, planting groves and planning all manner of agreeable surprises in the way of water-jets that drenched you unexpectedly, and hermits in caves, and wild men that jumped at you out of thickets. She had a very pretty taste in such matters, but after a while she tired of it, and there being no one for her to talk to but her maids and the chaplain – a clumsy man deep in his books – why, she would have strolling players out from Vicenza, mountebanks and fortune-tellers from the market-place, travelling doctors and astrologers, and all manner of trained animals. Still it could be seen that the poor lady pined for company, and her waiting women, who loved her, were glad when the Cavaliere Ascanio, the Duke’s cousin, came to live at the vineyard across the valley – you see the pinkish house over there in the mulberries, with a red roof and a pigeon-cote?

‘The Cavaliere Ascanio was a cadet of one of the great Venetian houses,pezzi grossiof the Golden Book. He had been meant for the Church, I believe, but what! he set fighting above praying, and cast in his lot with the captain of the Duke of Mantua’sbravi,himself a Venetian of good standing, but a little at odds with the law. Well, the next I know, the Cavaliere was in Venice again, perhaps not in good odour on account of his connection with the gentleman I speak of. Some say he tried to carry off a nun from the convent of Santa Croce; how that may be I can’t say; but my grandmother declared he had enemies there, and the end of it was that on some pretext or other the Ten banished him to Vicenza. There, of course, the Duke, being his kinsman, had to show him a civil face; and that was how he first came to the villa.

‘He was a fine young man, beautiful as a Saint Sebastian, a rare musician, who sang his own songs to the lute in a way that used to make my grandmother’s heart melt and run through her body like mulled wine. He had a good word for everybody, too, and was always dressed in the French fashion, and smelt as sweet as a bean-field, and every soul about the place welcomed the sight of him.

‘Well, the Duchess, it seemed, welcomed it too; youth will have youth, and laughter turns to laughter; and the two matched each other like the candlesticks on an altar. The Duchess – you’ve seen her portrait – but to hear my grandmother, sir, it no more approached her than a weed comes up to a rose. The Cavaliere, indeed, as became a poet, paragoned her in his song to all the pagan goddesses of antiquity; and doubtless these were finer to look at than mere women; but so, it seemed, was she; for, to believe my grandmother, she made other women look no more than the big French fashion-doll that used to be shown on Ascension days in the Piazza. She was one, at any rate, that needed no outlandish finery to beautify her; whatever dress she wore became her as feathers fit the bird; and her hair didn’t get its colour by bleaching on the housetop. It glittered of itself like the threads in an Easter chasuble, and her skin was whiter than fine wheaten bread and her mouth as sweet as a ripe fig ...

‘Well, sir, you could no more keep them apart than the bees and the lavender. They were always together, singing, bowling, playing cup and ball, walking in the gardens, visiting the aviaries, and petting her Grace’s trick-dogs and monkeys. The Duchess was as gay as a foal, always playing pranks and laughing, tricking out her animals like comedians, disguising herself as a peasant or a nun (you should have seen her one day pass herself off to the chaplain as a mendicant sister), or teaching the lads and girls of the vineyards to dance and sing madrigals together. The Cavaliere had a singular ingenuity in planning such entertainments, and the days were hardly long enough for their diversions. But towards the end of the summer the Duchess fell quiet and would hear only sad music, and the two sat together much in the gazebo at the end of the garden. It was there the Duke found them one day when he drove out from Vicenza in his gilt coach. He came but once or twice a year to the villa, and it was, as my grandmother said, just a part of her poor lady’s ill-luck to be wearing that day the Venetian habit, which uncovered the shoulders in a way the Duke always scowled at, and her curls loose and powdered with gold. Well, the three drank chocolate in the gazebo, and what happened no one knew, except that the Duke, on taking leave, gave his cousin a seat in his carriage; but the Cavaliere never returned.