The Duchess at Prayer - Page 2

"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; faun-eared 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, high-nosed 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 dais 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