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
dress!

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

"And she was--?"