Early Short Stories Vol. 1

by Edith Wharton

  A girl who was drawing water from the well in the court said that the English doctor lived on the first floor, and Wyant, passing through a glazed door, mounted the damp degrees of a vaulted stairway with a plaster AEsculapius mouldering in a niche on the landing. Facing the AEsculapius was another door, and as Wyant put his hand on the bell-rope he remembered his unknown friend’s injunction, and rang twice.

  His ring was answered by a peasant woman with a low forehead and small close-set eyes, who, after a prolonged scrutiny of himself, his card, and his letter of introduction, left him standing in a high, cold ante-chamber floored with brick. He heard her wooden pattens click down an interminable corridor, and after some delay she returned and told him to follow her.

  They passed through a long saloon, bare as the ante-chamber, but loftily vaulted, and frescoed with a seventeenth-century Triumph of Scipio or Alexander—martial figures following Wyant with the filmed melancholy gaze of shades in limbo. At the end of this apartment he was admitted to a smaller room, with the same atmosphere of mortal cold, but showing more obvious signs of occupancy. The walls were covered with tapestry which had faded to the gray-brown tints of decaying vegetation, so that the young man felt as though he were entering a sunless autumn wood. Against these hangings stood a few tall cabinets on heavy gilt feet, and at a table in the window three persons were seated: an elderly lady who was warming her hands over a brazier, a girl bent above a strip of needle-work, and an old man.

  As the latter advanced toward Wyant, the young man was conscious of staring with unseemly intentness at his small round-backed figure, dressed with shabby disorder and surmounted by a wonderful head, lean, vulpine, eagle-beaked as that of some art-loving despot of the Renaissance: a head combining the venerable hair and large prominent eyes of the humanist with the greedy profile of the adventurer. Wyant, in musing on the Italian portrait-medals of the fifteenth century, had often fancied that only in that period of fierce individualism could types so paradoxical have been produced; yet the subtle craftsmen who committed them to the bronze had never drawn a face more strangely stamped with contradictory passions than that of Doctor Lombard.

  “I am glad to see you,” he said to Wyant, extending a hand which seemed a mere framework held together by knotted veins. “We lead a quiet life here and receive few visitors, but any friend of Professor Clyde’s is welcome.” Then, with a gesture which included the two women, he added dryly: “My wife and daughter often talk of Professor Clyde.”

  “Oh yes—he used to make me such nice toast; they don’t understand toast in Italy,” said Mrs. Lombard in a high plaintive voice.

  It would have been difficult, from Doctor Lombard’s manner and appearance to guess his nationality; but his wife was so inconsciently and ineradicably English that even the silhouette of her cap seemed a protest against Continental laxities. She was a stout fair woman, with pale cheeks netted with red lines. A brooch with a miniature portrait sustained a bogwood watch-chain upon her bosom, and at her elbow lay a heap of knitting and an old copy of The Queen.

  The young girl, who had remained standing, was a slim replica of her mother, with an apple-cheeked face and opaque blue eyes. Her small head was prodigally laden with braids of dull fair hair, and she might have had a kind of transient prettiness but for the sullen droop of her round mouth. It was hard to say whether her expression implied ill-temper or apathy; but Wyant was struck by the contrast between the fierce vitality of the doctor’s age and the inanimateness of his daughter’s youth.

  Seating himself in the chair which his host advanced, the young man tried to open the conversation by addressing to Mrs. Lombard some random remark on the beauties of Siena. The lady murmured a resigned assent, and Doctor Lombard interposed with a smile: “My dear sir, my wife considers Siena a most salubrious spot, and is favorably impressed by the cheapness of the marketing; but she deplores the total absence of muffins and cannel coal, and cannot resign herself to the Italian method of dusting furniture.”

  “But they don’t, you know—they don’t dust it!” Mrs. Lombard protested, without showing any resentment of her husband’s manner.

  “Precisely—they don’t dust it. Since we have lived in Siena we have not once seen the cobwebs removed from the battlements of the Mangia. Can you conceive of such housekeeping? My wife has never yet dared to write it home to her aunts at Bonchurch.”

  Mrs. Lombard accepted in silence this remarkable statement of her views, and her husband, with a malicious smile at Wyant’s embarrassment, planted himself suddenly before the young man.

  “And now,” said he, “do you want to see my Leonardo?”

  “DO I?” cried Wyant, on his feet in a flash.

  The doctor chuckled. “Ah,” he said, with a kind of crooning deliberation, “that’s the way they all behave—that’s what they all come for.” He turned to his daughter with another variation of mockery in his smile. “Don’t fancy it’s for your beaux yeux, my dear; or for the mature charms of Mrs. Lombard,” he added, glaring suddenly at his wife, who had taken up her knitting and was softly murmuring over the number of her stitches.

  Neither lady appeared to notice his pleasantries, and he continued, addressing himself to Wyant: “They all come—they all come; but many are called and few are chosen.” His voice sank to solemnity. “While I live,” he said, “no unworthy eye shall desecrate that picture. But I will not do my friend Clyde the injustice to suppose that he would send an unworthy representative. He tells me he wishes a description of the picture for his book; and you shall describe it to him—if you can.”

  Wyant hesitated, not knowing whether it was a propitious moment to put in his appeal for a photograph.

  “Well, sir,” he said, “you know Clyde wants me to take away all I can of it.”

  Doctor Lombard eyed him sardonically. “You’re welcome to take away all you can carry,” he replied; adding, as he turned to his daughter: “That is, if he has your permission, Sybilla.”

  The girl rose without a word, and laying aside her work, took a key from a secret drawer in one of the cabinets, while the doctor continued in the same note of grim jocularity: “For you must know that the picture is not mine—it is my daughter’s.”

  He followed with evident amusement the surprised glance which Wyant turned on the young girl’s impassive figure.

  “Sybilla,” he pursued, “is a votary of the arts; she has inherited her fond father’s passion for the unattainable. Luckily, however, she also recently inherited a tidy legacy from her grandmother; and having seen the Leonardo, on which its discoverer had placed a price far beyond my reach, she took a step which deserves to go down to history: she invested her whole inheritance in the purchase of the picture, thus enabling me to spend my closing years in communion with one of the world’s masterpieces. My dear sir, could Antigone do more?”

  The object of this strange eulogy had meanwhile drawn aside one of the tapestry hangings, and fitted her key into a concealed door.

  “Come,” said Doctor Lombard, “let us go before the light fails us.”

  Wyant glanced at Mrs. Lombard, who continued to knit impassively.

  “No, no,” said his host, “my wife will not come with us. You might not suspect it from her conversation, but my wife has no feeling for art—Italian art, that is; for no one is fonder of our early Victorian school.”

  “Frith’s Railway Station, you know,” said Mrs. Lombard, smiling. “I like an animated picture.”

  Miss Lombard, who had unlocked the door, held back the tapestry to let her father and Wyant pass out; then she followed them down a narrow stone passage with another door at its end. This door was iron-barred, and Wyant noticed that it had a complicated patent lock. The girl fitted another key into the lock, and Doctor Lombard led the way into a small room. The dark panelling of this apartment was irradiated by streams of yellow light slanting through the disbanded thunder clouds, and in the central brightness hung a picture concealed by a curtain of faded velvet.

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p; “A little too bright, Sybilla,” said Doctor Lombard. His face had grown solemn, and his mouth twitched nervously as his daughter drew a linen drapery across the upper part of the window.

  “That will do—that will do.” He turned impressively to Wyant. “Do you see the pomegranate bud in this rug? Place yourself there—keep your left foot on it, please. And now, Sybilla, draw the cord.”

  Miss Lombard advanced and placed her hand on a cord hidden behind the velvet curtain.

  “Ah,” said the doctor, “one moment: I should like you, while looking at the picture, to have in mind a few lines of verse. Sybilla—”

  Without the slightest change of countenance, and with a promptness which proved her to be prepared for the request, Miss Lombard began to recite, in a full round voice like her mother’s, St. Bernard’s invocation to the Virgin, in the thirty-third canto of the Paradise.

  “Thank you, my dear,” said her father, drawing a deep breath as she ended. “That unapproachable combination of vowel sounds prepares one better than anything I know for the contemplation of the picture.”

  As he spoke the folds of velvet slowly parted, and the Leonardo appeared in its frame of tarnished gold:

  From the nature of Miss Lombard’s recitation Wyant had expected a sacred subject, and his surprise was therefore great as the composition was gradually revealed by the widening division of the curtain.

  In the background a steel-colored river wound through a pale calcareous landscape; while to the left, on a lonely peak, a crucified Christ hung livid against indigo clouds. The central figure of the foreground, however, was that of a woman seated in an antique chair of marble with bas-reliefs of dancing maenads. Her feet rested on a meadow sprinkled with minute wild-flowers, and her attitude of smiling majesty recalled that of Dosso Dossi’s Circe. She wore a red robe, flowing in closely fluted lines from under a fancifully embroidered cloak. Above her high forehead the crinkled golden hair flowed sideways beneath a veil; one hand drooped on the arm of her chair; the other held up an inverted human skull, into which a young Dionysus, smooth, brown and sidelong as the St. John of the Louvre, poured a stream of wine from a high-poised flagon. At the lady’s feet lay the symbols of art and luxury: a flute and a roll of music, a platter heaped with grapes and roses, the torso of a Greek statuette, and a bowl overflowing with coins and jewels; behind her, on the chalky hilltop, hung the crucified Christ. A scroll in a corner of the foreground bore the legend: Lux Mundi.

  Wyant, emerging from the first plunge of wonder, turned inquiringly toward his companions. Neither had moved. Miss Lombard stood with her hand on the cord, her lids lowered, her mouth drooping; the doctor, his strange Thoth-like profile turned toward his guest, was still lost in rapt contemplation of his treasure.

  Wyant addressed the young girl.

  “You are fortunate,” he said, “to be the possessor of anything so perfect.”

  “It is considered very beautiful,” she said coldly.

  “Beautiful—BEAUTIFUL!” the doctor burst out. “Ah, the poor, worn out, overworked word! There are no adjectives in the language fresh enough to describe such pristine brilliancy; all their brightness has been worn off by misuse. Think of the things that have been called beautiful, and then look at THAT!”

  “It is worthy of a new vocabulary,” Wyant agreed.

  “Yes,” Doctor Lombard continued, “my daughter is indeed fortunate. She has chosen what Catholics call the higher life—the counsel of perfection. What other private person enjoys the same opportunity of understanding the master? Who else lives under the same roof with an untouched masterpiece of Leonardo’s? Think of the happiness of being always under the influence of such a creation; of living INTO it; of partaking of it in daily and hourly communion! This room is a chapel; the sight of that picture is a sacrament. What an atmosphere for a young life to unfold itself in! My daughter is singularly blessed. Sybilla, point out some of the details to Mr. Wyant; I see that he will appreciate them.”

  The girl turned her dense blue eyes toward Wyant; then, glancing away from him, she pointed to the canvas.

  “Notice the modeling of the left hand,” she began in a monotonous voice; “it recalls the hand of the Mona Lisa. The head of the naked genius will remind you of that of the St. John of the Louvre, but it is more purely pagan and is turned a little less to the right. The embroidery on the cloak is symbolic: you will see that the roots of this plant have burst through the vase. This recalls the famous definition of Hamlet’s character in Wilhelm Meister. Here are the mystic rose, the flame, and the serpent, emblem of eternity. Some of the other symbols we have not yet been able to decipher.”

  Wyant watched her curiously; she seemed to be reciting a lesson.

  “And the picture itself?” he said. “How do you explain that? Lux Mundi—what a curious device to connect with such a subject! What can it mean?”

  Miss Lombard dropped her eyes: the answer was evidently not included in her lesson.

  “What, indeed?” the doctor interposed. “What does life mean? As one may define it in a hundred different ways, so one may find a hundred different meanings in this picture. Its symbolism is as many-faceted as a well-cut diamond. Who, for instance, is that divine lady? Is it she who is the true Lux Mundi—the light reflected from jewels and young eyes, from polished marble and clear waters and statues of bronze? Or is that the Light of the World, extinguished on yonder stormy hill, and is this lady the Pride of Life, feasting blindly on the wine of iniquity, with her back turned to the light which has shone for her in vain? Something of both these meanings may be traced in the picture; but to me it symbolizes rather the central truth of existence: that all that is raised in incorruption is sown in corruption; art, beauty, love, religion; that all our wine is drunk out of skulls, and poured for us by the mysterious genius of a remote and cruel past.”

  The doctor’s face blazed: his bent figure seemed to straighten itself and become taller.

  “Ah,” he cried, growing more dithyrambic, “how lightly you ask what it means! How confidently you expect an answer! Yet here am I who have given my life to the study of the Renaissance; who have violated its tomb, laid open its dead body, and traced the course of every muscle, bone, and artery; who have sucked its very soul from the pages of poets and humanists; who have wept and believed with Joachim of Flora, smiled and doubted with AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini; who have patiently followed to its source the least inspiration of the masters, and groped in neolithic caverns and Babylonian ruins for the first unfolding tendrils of the arabesques of Mantegna and Crivelli; and I tell you that I stand abashed and ignorant before the mystery of this picture. It means nothing—it means all things. It may represent the period which saw its creation; it may represent all ages past and to come. There are volumes of meaning in the tiniest emblem on the lady’s cloak; the blossoms of its border are rooted in the deepest soil of myth and tradition. Don’t ask what it means, young man, but bow your head in thankfulness for having seen it!”

  Miss Lombard laid her hand on his arm.

  “Don’t excite yourself, father,” she said in the detached tone of a professional nurse.

  He answered with a despairing gesture. “Ah, it’s easy for you to talk. You have years and years to spend with it; I am an old man, and every moment counts!”

  “It’s bad for you,” she repeated with gentle obstinacy.

  The doctor’s sacred fury had in fact burnt itself out. He dropped into a seat with dull eyes and slackening lips, and his daughter drew the curtain across the picture.

  Wyant turned away reluctantly. He felt that his opportunity was slipping from him, yet he dared not refer to Clyde’s wish for a photograph. He now understood the meaning of the laugh with which Doctor Lombard had given him leave to carry away all the details he could remember. The picture was so dazzling, so unexpected, so crossed with elusive and contradictory suggestions, that the most alert observer, when placed suddenly before it, must lose his coordinating faculty in a sense of confused wonde
r. Yet how valuable to Clyde the record of such a work would be! In some ways it seemed to be the summing up of the master’s thought, the key to his enigmatic philosophy.

  The doctor had risen and was walking slowly toward the door. His daughter unlocked it, and Wyant followed them back in silence to the room in which they had left Mrs. Lombard. That lady was no longer there, and he could think of no excuse for lingering.

  He thanked the doctor, and turned to Miss Lombard, who stood in the middle of the room as though awaiting farther orders.

  “It is very good of you,” he said, “to allow one even a glimpse of such a treasure.”

  She looked at him with her odd directness. “You will come again?” she said quickly; and turning to her father she added: “You know what Professor Clyde asked. This gentleman cannot give him any account of the picture without seeing it again.”

  Doctor Lombard glanced at her vaguely; he was still like a person in a trance.

  “Eh?” he said, rousing himself with an effort.

  “I said, father, that Mr. Wyant must see the picture again if he is to tell Professor Clyde about it,” Miss Lombard repeated with extraordinary precision of tone.