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 watchers
by a death-bed. 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