The Madonna of the Future

“Finely, finely!  I have here a friend whose sympathy and encouragement give me new faith and ardour.”

Our hostess turned to me, gazed at me a moment rather inscrutably, and then tapping her forehead with the gesture she had used a minute before, “He has a magnificent genius!” she said, with perfect gravity.

“I am inclined to think so,” I answered, with a smile.

“Eh, why do you smile?” she cried.  “If you doubt it, you must see the bambino!”  And she took the lamp and conducted me to the other side of the room, where on the wall, in a plain black frame, hung a large drawing in red chalk.  Beneath it was fastened a little howl for holy water.  The drawing represented a very young child, entirely naked, half nestling back against his mother’s gown, but with his two little arms outstretched, as if in the act of benediction.  It was executed with singular freedom and power, and yet seemed vivid with the sacred bloom of infancy.  A sort of dimpled elegance and grace, mingled with its boldness, recalled the touch of Correggio.  “That’s what he can do!” said my hostess.  “It’s the blessed little boy whom I lost.  It’s his very image, and the Signor Teobaldo gave it me as a gift.  He has given me many things besides!”

I looked at the picture for some time and admired it immensely.  Turning back to Theobald I assured him that if it were hung among the drawings in the Uffizi and labelled with a glorious name it would hold its own.  My praise seemed to give him extreme pleasure; he pressed my hands, and his eyes filled with tears.  It moved him apparently with the desire to expatiate on the history of the drawing, for he rose and made his adieux to our companion, kissing her band with the same mild ardour as before.  It occurred to me that the offer of a similar piece of gallantry on my own part might help me to know what manner of woman she was.  When she perceived my intention she withdrew her hand, dropped her eyes solemnly, and made me a severe curtsey.  Theobald took my arm and led me rapidly into the street.

“And what do you think of the divine Serafina?” he cried with fervour.

“It is certainly an excellent style of good looks!” I answered.

He eyed me an instant askance, and then seemed hurried along by the current of remembrance.  “You should have seen the mother and the child together, seen them as I first saw them—the mother with her head draped in a shawl, a divine trouble in her face, and the bambino pressed to her bosom.  You would have said, I think, that Raphael had found his match in common chance.  I was coming in, one summer night, from a long walk in the country, when I met this apparition at the city gate.  The woman held out her hand.  I hardly knew whether to say, ‘What do you want?’ or to fall down and worship.  She asked for a little money.  I saw that she was beautiful and pale; she might have stepped out of the stable of Bethlehem!  I gave her money and helped her on her way into the town.  I had guessed her story.  She, too, was a maiden mother, and she had been turned out into the world in her shame.  I felt in all my pulses that here was my subject marvellously realised.  I felt like one of the old monkish artists who had had a vision.  I rescued the poor creatures, cherished them, watched them as I would have done some precious work of art, some lovely fragment of fresco discovered in a mouldering cloister.  In a month—as if to deepen and sanctify the sadness and sweetness of it all—the poor little child died.  When she felt that he was going she held him up to me for ten minutes, and I made that sketch.  You saw a feverish haste in it, I suppose; I wanted to spare the poor little mortal the pain of his position.  After that I doubly valued the mother.  She is the simplest, sweetest, most natural creature that ever bloomed in this brave old land of Italy.  She lives in the memory of her child, in her gratitude for the scanty kindness I have been able to show her, and in her simple religion!  She is not even conscious of her beauty; my admiration has never made her vain.  Heaven knows that I have made no secret of it.  You must have observed the singular transparency of her expression, the lovely modesty of her glance.  And was there ever such a truly virginal brow, such a natural classic elegance in the wave of the hair and the arch of the forehead?  I have studied her; I may say I know her.  I have absorbed her little by little; my mind is stamped and imbued, and I have determined now to clinch the impression; I shall at last invite her to sit for me!”

“‘At last—at last’?” I repeated, in much amazement.  “Do you mean that she has never done so yet?”

“I have not really had—a—a sitting,” said Theobald, speaking very slowly.  “I have taken notes, you know; I have got my grand fundamental impression.  That’s the great thing!  But I have not actually had her as a model, posed and draped and lighted, before my easel.”

What had become for the moment of my perception and my tact I am at a loss to say; in their absence I was unable to repress a headlong exclamation.  I was destined to regret it.  We had stopped at a turning, beneath a lamp.  “My poor friend,” I exclaimed, laying my hand on his shoulder, “you have dawdled!  She’s an old, old woman—for a Madonna!”

It was as if I had brutally struck him; I shall never forget the long, slow, almost ghastly look of pain, with which he answered me.

“Dawdled?—old, old?” he stammered.  “Are you joking?”

“Why, my dear fellow, I suppose you don’t take her for a woman of twenty?”

He drew a long breath and leaned against a house, looking at me with questioning, protesting, reproachful eyes.  At last, starting forward, and grasping my arm—“Answer me solemnly: does she seem to you truly old?  Is she wrinkled, is she faded, am I blind?”

Then at last I understood the immensity of his illusion how, one by one, the noiseless years had ebbed away and left him brooding in charmed inaction, for ever preparing for a work for ever deferred.  It seemed to me almost a kindness now to tell him the plain truth.  “I should be sorry to say you are blind,” I answered, “but I think you are deceived.  You have lost time in effortless contemplation.  Your friend was once young and fresh and virginal; but, I protest, that was some years ago.  Still, she has de beaux restes.  By all means make her sit for you!” I broke down; his face was too horribly reproachful.

He took off his hat and stood passing his handkerchief mechanically over his forehead.  “De beaux restes?  I thank you for sparing me the plain English.  I must make up my Madonna out of de beaux restes!  What a masterpiece she will be!  Old—old!  Old—old!” he murmured.

“Never mind her age,” I cried, revolted at what I had done, “never mind my impression of her!  You have your memory, your notes, your genius.  Finish your picture in a month.  I pronounce it beforehand a masterpiece, and I hereby offer you for it any sum you may choose to ask.”

He stared, but he seemed scarcely to understand me.  “Old—old!” he kept stupidly repeating.  “If she is old, what am I?  If her beauty has faded, where—where is my strength?  Has life been a dream?  Have I worshipped too long—have I loved too well?”  The charm, in truth, was broken.  That the chord of illusion should have snapped at my light accidental touch showed how it had been weakened by excessive tension.  The poor fellow’s sense of wasted time, of vanished opportunity, seemed to roll in upon his soul in waves of darkness.  He suddenly dropped his head and burst into tears.

I led him homeward with all possible tenderness, but I attempted neither to check his grief, to restore his equanimity, nor to unsay the hard truth.  When we reached my hotel I tried to induce him to come so.

“We will drink a glass of wine,” I said, smiling, “to the completion of the Madonna.”

With a violent effort he held up his head, mused for a moment with a formidably sombre frown, and then giving me his hand, “I will finish it,” he cried, “in a month!  No, in a fortnight!  After all, I have it here!”  And he tapped his forehead.  “Of course she’s old!  She can afford to have it said of her—a woman who has made twenty years pass like a twelvemonth!  Old—old!  Why, sir, she shall be eternal!”

I wished to see him safely to his own door, but he waved me back and walked away with an air of resolution, whistling and swinging his cane.  I waited a moment, and then followed him at a distance, and saw him proceed to cross the Santa Trinità Bridge.  When he reached the middle he suddenly paused, as if his strength had deserted him, and leaned upon the parapet gazing over into the river.  I was careful to keep him in sight; I confess that I passed ten very nervous minutes.  He recovered himself at last, and went his way, slowly and with hanging head.

That I had really startled poor Theobald into a bolder use of his long-garnered stores of knowledge and taste, into the vulgar effort and hazard of production, seemed at first reason enough for his continued silence and absence; but as day followed day without his either calling or sending me a line, and without my meeting him in his customary haunts, in the galleries, in the Chapel at San Lorenzo, or strolling between the Arno side and the great hedge-screen of verdure which, along the drive of the Cascine, throws the fair occupants of barouche and phaeton into such becoming relief—as for more than a week I got neither tidings nor sight of him, I began to fear that I had fatally offended him, and that, instead of giving a wholesome impetus to his talent, I had brutally paralysed it.  I had a wretched suspicion that I had made him ill.  My stay at Florence was drawing to a close, and it was important that, before resuming my journey, I should assure myself of the truth.  Theobald, to the last, had kept his lodging a mystery, and I was altogether at a loss where to look for him.  The simplest course was to make inquiry of the beauty of the Mercato Vecchio, and I confess that unsatisfied curiosity as to the lady herself counselled it as well.  Perhaps I had done her injustice, and she was as immortally fresh and fair as be conceived her.  I was, at any rate, anxious to behold once more the ripe enchantress who had made twenty years pass as a twelvemonth.  I repaired accordingly, one morning, to her abode, climbed the interminable staircase, and reached her door.  It stood ajar, and as I hesitated whether to enter, a little serving-maid came clattering out with an empty kettle, as if she had just performed some savoury errand.  The inner door, too, was open; so I crossed the little vestibule and entered the room in which I had formerly been received.  It had not its evening aspect.  The table, or one end of it, was spread for a late breakfast, and before it sat a gentleman—an individual, at least, of the male sex—doing execution upon a beefsteak and onions, and a bottle of wine.  At his elbow, in friendly proximity, was placed the lady of the house.  Her attitude, as I entered, was not that of an enchantress.  With one hand she held in her lap a plate of smoking maccaroni; with the other she had lifted high in air one of the pendulous filaments of this succulent compound, and was in the act of slipping it gently down her throat.  On the uncovered end of the table, facing her companion, were ranged half a dozen small statuettes, of some snuff-coloured substance resembling terra-cotta.  He, brandishing his knife with ardour, was apparently descanting on their merits.

Evidently I darkened the door.  My hostess dropped liner maccaroni—into her mouth, and rose hastily with a harsh exclamation and a flushed face.  I immediately perceived that the Signora Serafina’s secret was even better worth knowing than I had supposed, and that the way to learn it was to take it for granted.  I summoned my best Italian, I smiled and bowed and apologised for my intrusion; and in a moment, whether or no I had dispelled the lady’s irritation, I had at least stimulated her prudence.  I was welcome, she said; I must take a seat.  This was another friend of hers—also an artist, she declared with a smile which was almost amiable.  Her companion wiped his moustache and bowed with great civility.  I saw at a glance that he was equal to the situation.  He was presumably the author of the statuettes on the table, and he knew a money-spending forestiére when he saw one.  He was a small wiry man, with a clever, impudent, tossed-up nose, a sharp little black eye, and waxed ends to his moustache.  On the side of his head he wore jauntily a little crimson velvet smoking-cap, and I observed that his feet were encased in brilliant slippers.  On Serafina’s remarking with dignity that I was the friend of Mr. Theobald, he broke out into that fantastic French of which certain Italians are so insistently lavish, and declared with fervour that Mr. Theobald was a magnificent genius.

“I am sure I don’t know,” I answered with a shrug.  “If you are in a position to affirm it, you have the advantage of me.  I have seen nothing from his hand but the bambino yonder, which certainly is fine.”

He declared that the bambino was a masterpiece, a pure Corregio.  It was only a pity, he added with a knowing laugh, that the sketch had not been made on some good bit of honeycombed old panel.  The stately Serafina hereupon protested that Mr. Theobald was the soul of honour, and that he would never lend himself to a deceit.  “I am not a judge of genius,” she said, “and I know nothing of pictures.  I am but a poor simple widow; but I know that the Signor Teobaldo has the heart of an angel and the virtue of a saint.  He is my benefactor,” she added sententiously.  The after-glow of the somewhat sinister flush with which she had greeted me still lingered in her cheek, and perhaps did not favour her beauty; I could not but fancy it a wise custom of Theobald’s to visit her only by candle-light.  She was coarse, and her pour adorer was a poet.

“I have the greatest esteem for him,” I said; “it is for this reason that I have been uneasy at not seeing him for ten days.  Have you seen him?  Is he perhaps ill?”

“Ill!  Heaven forbid!” cried Serafina, with genuine vehemence.

Her companion uttered a rapid expletive, and reproached her with not having been to see him.  She hesitated a moment; then she simpered the least bit and bridled.  “He comes to see me—without reproach!  But it would not be the same for me to go to him, though, indeed, you may almost call him a man of holy life.”

“He has the greatest admiration for you,” I said.  “He would have been honoured by your visit.”

She looked at me a moment sharply.  “More admiration than you.  Admit that!”  Of course I protested with all the eloquence at my command, and my mysterious hostess then confessed that she had taken no fancy to me on my former visit, and that, Theobald not having returned, she believed I had poisoned his mind against her.  “It would be no kindness to the poor gentleman, I can tell you that,” she said.  “He has come to see me every evening for years.  It’s a long friendship!  No one knows him as well as I.”

“I don’t pretend to know him or to understand him,” I said.  “He’s a mystery!  Nevertheless, he seems to me a little—”  And I touched my forehead and waved my hand in the air.

Serafina glanced at her companion a moment, as if for inspiration.  He contented himself with shrugging his shoulders as he filled his glass again.  The padrona hereupon gave me a more softly insinuating smile than would have seemed likely to bloom on so candid a brow.  “It’s for that that I love him!” she said.  “The world has so little kindness for such persons.  It laughs at them, and despises them, and cheats them.  He is too good for this wicked life!  It’s his fancy that he finds a little Paradise up here in my poor apartment.  If he thinks so, how can I help it?  He has a strange belief—really, I ought to be ashamed to tell you—that I resemble the Blessed Virgin: Heaven forgive me!  I let him think what he pleases, so long as it makes him happy.  He was very kind to me once, and I am not one that forgets a favour.  So I receive him every evening civilly, and ask after his health, and let him look at me on this side and that!  For that matter, I may say it without vanity, I was worth looking at once!  And he’s not always amusing, poor man!  He sits sometimes for an hour without speaking a word, or else he talks away, without stopping, on art and nature, and beauty and duty, and fifty fine things that are all so much Latin to me.  I beg you to understand that he has never said a word to me that I mightn’t decently listen to.  He may be a little cracked, but he’s one of the blessed saints.”

“Eh!” cried the man, “the blessed saints were all a little cracked!”

Serafina, I fancied, left part of her story untold; but she told enough of it to make poor Theobald’s own statement seem intensely pathetic in its exalted simplicity.  “It’s a strange fortune, certainly,” she went on, “to have such a friend as this dear man—a friend who is less than a lover and more than a friend.”  I glanced at her companion, who preserved an impenetrable smile, twisted the end of his moustache, and disposed of a copious mouthful.  Was he less than a lover? “But what will you have?” Serafina pursued.  “In this hard world one must not ask too many questions; one must take what comes and keep what one gets.  I have kept my good friend for twenty years, and I do hope that, at this time of day, signore, you have not come to turn him against me!”

I assured her that I had no such design, and that I should vastly regret disturbing Mr. Theobald’s habits or convictions.  On the contrary, I was alarmed about him, and I should immediately go in search of him.  She gave me his address, and a florid account of her sufferings at his non-appearance.  She had not been to him for various reasons; chiefly because she was afraid of displeasing him, as he had always made such a mystery of his home.  “You might have sent this gentleman!” I ventured to suggest.

“Ah,” cried the gentleman, “he admires the Signora Serafina, but he wouldn’t admire me.”  And then, confidentially, with his finger on his nose, “He’s a purist!”

I was about to withdraw, after having promised that I would inform the Signora Serafina of my friend’s condition, when her companion, who had risen from table and girded his loins apparently for the onset, grasped me gently by the arm, and led me before the row of statuettes.  “I perceive by your conversation, signore, that you are a patron of the arts.  Allow me to request your honourable attention for these modest products of my own ingenuity.  They are brand-new, fresh from my atelier, and have never been exhibited in public.  I have brought them here to receive the verdict of this dear lady, who is a good critic, for all she may pretend to the contrary.  I am the inventor of this peculiar style of statuette—of subject, manner, material, everything.  Touch them, I pray you; handle them freely—you needn’t fear.  Delicate as they look, it is impossible they should break!  My various creations have met with great success.  They are especially admired by Americans.  I have sent them all over Europe—to London, Paris, Vienna!  You may have observed some little specimens in Paris, on the Boulevard, in a shop of which they constitute the specialty.  There is always a crowd about the window.  They form a very pleasing ornament for the mantel-shelf of a gay young bachelor, for the boudoir of a pretty woman.  You couldn’t make a prettier present to a person with whom you wished to exchange a harmless joke.  It is not classic art, signore, of course; but, between ourselves, isn’t classic art sometimes rather a bore?  Caricature, burlesque, la charge, as the French say, has hitherto been confined to paper, to the pen and pencil.  Now, it has been my inspiration to introduce it into statuary.  For this purpose I have invented a peculiar plastic compound which you will permit me not to divulge.  That’s my secret, signore!  It’s as light, you perceive, as cork, and yet as firm as alabaster!  I frankly confess that I really pride myself as much on this little stroke of chemical ingenuity as upon the other element of novelty in my creations—my types.  What do you say to my types, signore?  The idea is bold; does it strike you as happy?  Cats and monkeys—monkeys and cats—all human life is there!  Human life, of course, I mean, viewed with the eye of the satirist!  To combine sculpture and satire, signore, has been my unprecedented ambition.  I flatter myself that I have not egregiously failed.”

As this jaunty Juvenal of the chimney-piece delivered himself of his persuasive allocution, he took up his little groups successively from the table, held them aloft, turned them about, rapped them with his knuckles, and gazed at them lovingly, with his head on one side.  They consisted each of a cat and a monkey, fantastically draped, in some preposterously sentimental conjunction.  They exhibited a certain sameness of motive, and illustrated chiefly the different phases of what, in delicate terms, may be called gallantry and coquetry; but they were strikingly clever and expressive, and were at once very perfect cats and monkeys and very natural men and women.  I confess, however, that they failed to amuse me.  I was doubtless not in a mood to enjoy them, for they seemed to me peculiarly cynical and vulgar.  Their imitative felicity was revolting.  As I looked askance at the complacent little artist, brandishing them between finger and thumb and caressing them with an amorous eye, he seemed to me himself little more than an exceptionally intelligent ape.  I mustered an admiring grin, however, and he blew another blast.  “My figures are studied from life!  I have a little menagerie of monkeys whose frolics I contemplate by the hour.  As for the cats, one has only to look out of one’s back window!  Since I have begun to examine these expressive little brutes, I have made many profound observations.  Speaking, signore, to a man of imagination, I may say that my little designs are not without a philosophy of their own.  Truly, I don’t know whether the cats and monkeys imitate us, or whether it’s we who imitate them.”  I congratulated him on his philosophy, and he resumed: “You will do use the honour to admit that I have handled my subjects with delicacy.  Eh, it was needed, signore!  I have been free, but not too free—eh?  Just a hint, you know!  You may see as much or as little as you please.  These little groups, however, are no measure of my invention.  If you will favour me with a call at my studio, I think that you will admit that my combinations are really infinite.  I likewise execute figures to command.  You have perhaps some little motive—the fruit of your philosophy of life, signore—which you would like to have interpreted.  I can promise to work it up to your satisfaction; it shall be as malicious as you please!  Allow me to present you with my card, and to remind you that my prices are moderate.  Only sixty francs for a little group like that.  My statuettes are as durable as bronze—ære perennius, signore—and, between ourselves, I think they are more amusing!”

As I pocketed his card I glanced at Madonna Serafina, wondering whether she had an eye for contrasts.  She had picked up one of the little couples and was tenderly dusting it with a feather broom.

What I had just seen and heard had so deepened my compassionate interest in my deluded friend that I took a summary leave, making my way directly to the house designated by this remarkable woman.  It was in an obscure corner of the opposite side of the town, and presented a sombre and squalid appearance.  An old woman in the doorway, on my inquiring for Theobald, ushered me in with a mumbled blessing and an expression of relief at the poor gentleman having a friend.  His lodging seemed to consist of a single room at the top of the house.  On getting no answer to my knock, I opened the door, supposing that he was absent, so that it gave me a certain shock to find him sitting there helpless and dumb.  He was seated near the single window, facing an easel which supported a large canvas.  On my entering he looked up at me blankly, without changing his position, which was that of absolute lassitude and dejection, his arms loosely folded, his legs stretched before him, his head hanging on his breast.  Advancing into the room I perceived that his face vividly corresponded with his attitude.  He was pale, haggard, and unshaven, and his dull and sunken eye gazed at me without a spark of recognition.  I had been afraid that he would greet me with fierce reproaches, as the cruelly officious patron who had turned his contentment to bitterness, and I was relieved to find that my appearance awakened no visible resentment.  “Don’t you know me?” I asked, as I put out my hand.  “Have you already forgotten me?”

He made no response, kept his position stupidly, and left me staring about the room.  It spoke most plaintively for itself.  Shabby, sordid, naked, it contained, beyond the wretched bed, but the scantiest provision for personal comfort.  It was bedroom at once and studio—a grim ghost of a studio.  A few dusty casts and prints on the walls, three or four old canvases turned face inward, and a rusty-looking colour-box, formed, with the easel at the window, the sum of its appurtenances.  The place savoured horribly of poverty.  Its only wealth was the picture on the easel, presumably the famous Madonna.  Averted as this was from the door, I was unable to see its face; but at last, sickened by the vacant misery of the spot, I passed behind Theobald, eagerly and tenderly.  I can hardly say that I was surprised at what I found—a canvas that was a mere dead blank, cracked and discoloured by time.  This was his immortal work!  Though not surprised, I confess I was powerfully moved, and I think that for five minutes I could not have trusted myself to speak.  At last my silent nearness affected him; he stirred and turned, and then rose and looked at me with a slowly kindling eye.  I murmured some kind ineffective nothings about his being ill and needing advice and care, but he seemed absorbed in the effort to recall distinctly what had last passed between us.  “You were right,” he said, with a pitiful smile, “I am a dawdler!  I am a failure!  I shall do nothing more in this world.  You opened my eyes; and, though the truth is bitter, I bear you no grudge.  Amen!  I have been sitting here for a week, face to face with the truth, with the past, with my weakness and poverty and nullity.  I shall never touch a brush!  I believe I have neither eaten nor slept.  Look at that canvas!” he went on, as I relieved my emotion in an urgent request that he would come home with me and dine.  “That was to have contained my masterpiece!  Isn’t it a promising foundation?  The elements of it are all here.”  And he tapped his forehead with that mystic confidence which had marked the gesture before.  “If I could only transpose them into some brain that has the hand, the will!  Since I have been sitting here taking stock of my intellects, I have come to believe that I have the material for a hundred masterpieces.  But my hand is paralysed now, and they will never be painted.  I never began!  I waited and waited to be worthier to begin, and wasted my life in preparation.  While I fancied my creation was growing it was dying.  I have taken it all too hard!  Michael Angelo didn’t, when he went at the Lorenzo!  He did his best at a venture, and his venture is immortal.  That’s mine!”  And he pointed with a gesture I shall never forget at the empty canvas.  “I suppose we are a genus by ourselves in the providential scheme—we talents that can’t act, that can’t do nor dare!  We take it out in talk, in plans and promises, in study, in visions!  But our visions, let me tell you,” he cried, with a toss of his head, “have a way of being brilliant, and a man has not lived in vain who has seen the things I have seen!  Of course you will not believe in them when that bit of worm-eaten cloth is all I have to show for them; but to convince you, to enchant and astound the world, I need only the hand of Raphael.  His brain I already have.  A pity, you will say, that I haven’t his modesty!  Ah, let me boast and babble now; it’s all I have left!  I am the half of a genius!  Where in the wide world is my other half?  Lodged perhaps in the vulgar soul, the cunning, ready fingers of some dull copyist or some trivial artisan, who turns out by the dozen his easy prodigies of touch!  But it’s not for me to sneer at him; he at least does something.  He’s not a dawdler!  Well for me if I had been vulgar and clever and reckless, if I could have shut my eyes and taken my leap.”

What to say to the poor fellow, what to do for him, seemed hard to determine; I chiefly felt that I must break the spell of his present inaction, and remove him from the haunted atmosphere of the little room it was such a cruel irony to call a studio.  I cannot say I persuaded him to come out with me; he simply suffered himself to be led, and when we began to walk in the open air I was able to appreciate his pitifully weakened condition.  Nevertheless, he seemed in a certain way to revive, and murmured at last that he should like to go to the Pitti Gallery.  I shall never forget our melancholy stroll through those gorgeous halls, every picture on whose walls seemed, even to my own sympathetic vision, to glow with a sort of insolent renewal of strength and lustre.  The eyes and lips of the great portraits appeared to smile in ineffable scorn of the dejected pretender who had dreamed of competing with their triumphant authors; the celestial candour, even, of the Madonna of the Chair, as we paused in perfect silence before her, was tinged with the sinister irony of the women of Leonardo.  Perfect silence, indeed, marked our whole progress—the silence of a deep farewell; for I felt in all my pulses, as Theobald, leaning on my arm, dragged one heavy foot after the other, that he was looking his last.  When we came out he was so exhausted that instead of taking him to my hotel to dine, I called a carriage and drove him straight to his own poor lodging.  He had sunk into an extraordinary lethargy; he lay back in the carriage, with his eyes closed, as pale as death, his faint breathing interrupted at intervals by a sudden gasp, like a smothered sob or a vain attempt to speak.  With the help of the old woman who had admitted me before, and who emerged from a dark back court, I contrived to lead him up the long steep staircase and lay him on his wretched bed.  To her I gave him in charge, while I prepared in all haste to seek a physician.  But she followed me out of the room with a pitiful clasping of her hands.

“Poor, dear, blessed gentleman,” she murmured; “is he dying?”

“Possibly.  How long has he been thus?”

“Since a certain night he passed ten days ago.  I came up in the morning to make his poor bed, and found him sitting up in his clothes before that great canvas he keeps there.  Poor, dear, strange man, he says his prayers to it!  He had not been to bed, nor since then, properly!  What has happened to him?  Has he found out about the Serafina?” she whispered, with a glittering eye and a toothless grin.

“Prove at least that one old woman can be faithful,” I said, “and watch him well till I come back.”  My return was delayed, through the absence of the English physician, who was away on a round of visits, and whom I vainly pursued from house to house before I overtook him.  I brought him to Theobald’s bedside none too soon.  A violent fever had seized our patient, and the case was evidently grave.  A couple of hours later I knew that he had brain fever.  From this moment I was with him constantly; but I am far from wishing to describe his illness.  Excessively painful to witness, it was happily brief.  Life burned out in delirium.  One night in particular that I passed at his pillow, listening to his wild snatches of regret, of aspiration, of rapture and awe at the phantasmal pictures with which his brain seemed to swarm, comes back to my memory now like some stray page from a lost masterpiece of tragedy.  Before a week was over we had buried him in the little Protestant cemetery on the way to Fiesole.  The Signora Serafina, whom I had caused to be informed of his illness, had come in person, I was told, to inquire about its progress; but she was absent from his funeral, which was attended by but a scanty concourse of mourners.  Half a dozen old Florentine sojourners, in spite of the prolonged estrangement which had preceded his death, had felt the kindly impulse to honour his grave.  Among them was my friend Mrs. Coventry, whom I found, on my departure, waiting in her carriage at the gate of the cemetery.

“Well,” she said, relieving at last with a significant smile the solemnity of our immediate greeting, “and the great Madonna?  Have you seen her, after all?”

“I have seen her,” I said; “she is mine—by bequest.  But I shall never show her to you.”