CRUCIAL INSTANCES
BY
EDITH WHARTON
TABLE OF CONTENTS
| The Duchess At Prayer The Angel At The Grave The Recovery “Copy” The Rembrandt The Moving Finger The Confessional |
THE DUCHESS AT PRAYER
Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian house,that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priestbehind which buzz the secrets of the confessional? Other houses declare theactivities they shelter; they are the clear expressive cuticle of a lifeflowing close to the surface; but the old palace in its narrow street, thevilla on its cypress-hooded hill, are as impenetrable as death. The tallwindows are like blind eyes, the great door is a shut mouth. Inside theremay be sunshine, the scent of myrtles, and a pulse of life through all thearteries of the huge frame; or a mortal solitude, where bats lodge in thedisjointed stones and the keys rust in unused doors....
II
From the loggia, with its vanishing frescoes, I looked down an avenuebarred by a ladder of cypress-shadows to the ducal escutcheon and mutilatedvases of the gate. Flat noon lay on the gardens, on fountains, porticoesand grottoes. Below the terrace, where a chrome-colored lichen had sheetedthe balustrade as with fine laminae of gold, vineyards stooped tothe rich valley clasped in hills. The lower slopes were strewn with whitevillages like stars spangling a summer dusk; and beyond these, fold onfold of blue mountain, clear as gauze against the sky. The August air waslifeless, but it seemed light and vivifying after the atmosphere of theshrouded rooms through which I had been led. Their chill was on me and Ihugged 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 heseemed more like a memory than a living being. The one trait linking himwith the actual was the fixity with which his small saurian eye held thepocket that, as I entered, had yielded a lira to the gate-keeper’schild. He went on, without removing his eye:
“For two hundred years nothing has been changed in the apartments of theDuchess.”
“And no one lives here 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 hanginggroves, white roofs and domes flashed like a smile.
“And that’s Vicenza?”
“Proprio!” The old man extended fingers as lean as the hands fadingfrom the walls behind us. “You see the palace roof over there, just to theleft of the Basilica? The one with the row of statues like birds takingflight? 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