But I observed - listen to this, I pray! (and here
the courier dropped his voice) - I observed my mistress sometimes
brooding in a manner very strange; in a frightened manner; in an
unhappy manner; with a cloudy, uncertain alarm upon her. I think
that I began to notice this when I was walking up hills by the
carriage side, and master had gone on in front. At any rate, I
remember that it impressed itself upon my mind one evening in the
South of France, when she called to me to call master back; and
when he came back, and walked for a long way, talking encouragingly
and affectionately to her, with his hand upon the open window, and
hers in it. Now and then, he laughed in a merry way, as if he were
bantering her out of something. By-and-by, she laughed, and then
all went well again.
It was curious. I asked la bella Carolina, the pretty little one,
Was mistress unwell? - No. - Out of spirits? - No. - Fearful of bad
roads, or brigands? - No. And what made it more mysterious was,
the pretty little one would not look at me in giving answer, but
WOULD look at the view.
But, one day she told me the secret.
'If you must know,' said Carolina, 'I find, from what I have
overheard, that mistress is haunted.'
'How haunted?'
'By a dream.'
'What dream?'
'By a dream of a face. For three nights before her marriage, she
saw a face in a dream - always the same face, and only One.'
'A terrible face?'
'No. The face of a dark, remarkable-looking man, in black, with
black hair and a grey moustache - a handsome man except for a
reserved and secret air. Not a face she ever saw, or at all like a
face she ever saw. Doing nothing in the dream but looking at her
fixedly, out of darkness.'
'Does the dream come back?'
'Never. The recollection of it is all her trouble.'
'And why does it trouble her?'
Carolina shook her head.
'That's master's question,' said la bella. 'She don't know. She
wonders why, herself. But I heard her tell him, only last night,
that if she was to find a picture of that face in our Italian house
(which she is afraid she will) she did not know how she could ever
bear it.'
Upon my word I was fearful after this (said the Genoese courier) of
our coming to the old palazzo, lest some such ill-starred picture
should happen to be there. I knew there were many there; and, as
we got nearer and nearer to the place, I wished the whole gallery
in the crater of Vesuvius. To mend the matter, it was a stormy
dismal evening when we, at last, approached that part of the
Riviera. It thundered; and the thunder of my city and its
environs, rolling among the high hills, is very loud. The lizards
ran in and out of the chinks in the broken stone wall of the
garden, as if they were frightened; the frogs bubbled and croaked
their loudest; the sea-wind moaned, and the wet trees dripped; and
the lightning - body of San Lorenzo, how it lightened!
We all know what an old palace in or near Genoa is - how time and
the sea air have blotted it - how the drapery painted on the outer
walls has peeled off in great flakes of plaster - how the lower
windows are darkened with rusty bars of iron - how the courtyard is
overgrown with grass - how the outer buildings are dilapidated -
how the whole pile seems devoted to ruin. Our palazzo was one of
the true kind. It had been shut up close for months.
