The Best Short Stories of 1920 Part 56

My knock was answered by Antonio himself, his hat on his head and a motorcoat over his arm. He seemed burning with impatience.

"You have your overcoat? Good." And he locked the door on the outside.

We stepped into a limousine, which whirled us away through the twilight.

The weather made one remember that even in Florence the merging of March and April could be violent. To-night ma.s.ses of harsh-looking clouds sped across the sky before an icy wind from the mountains. A burial-party, a.s.sembled at a convent gate, had their black robes fluttering, their waxen torches blown out.

"Death!" muttered Antonio, with a sardonic grimace. "And they call it unconquerable!"

As we paused before a dwelling-house, two men emerged upon the pavement.

They were Leonello, the artist, and another friend of the old days, named Leonardo. The unusual occasion constrained our greetings. The newcomers, after pressing my hand, devoted themselves with grave solicitude to Antonio.

He burst forth at them like a man whose nervous tension is nearly unendurable:

"Yes, hang it all! I am quite well. Why the devil will you persist in coddling me?"

Leonello and Leonardo gave me a mournful look.

We now stopped at another door, where there joined us two ladies unknown to me. Both were comely, with delicate features full of sensibility.

Neither, I judged, had reached the age of thirty. In the moment of meeting--a moment notable for a stammering of incoherent phrases, a darting of sidelong looks at Antonio, a general effect of furtiveness and excitement--no one remembered to present me to these ladies.

However, while we were arranging ourselves in the limousine I gathered that the name of one of them was Laura, and that the other's name was Lina. In their faces, on which the street-lights cast intermittent flashes, I seemed to discern a struggle between apprehension and avidity for this adventure.

The silence, and the tension of all forms, continued even when we left the city behind us and found ourselves speeding northward along a country road.

"Northward. To the Castle of Manzecca, then?" I asked myself.

The rays from our lamps revealed the trees all bending toward the south.

The wind pressed against our car, as if to hold us back from the revelation awaiting us ahead, in the midst of the black night, whence this interminable whistling moan pervaded nature. Rain dashed against the gla.s.s. Through the blurred windows the lights of farms appeared, to be instantly engulfed by darkness. Then everything vanished except the illuminated streak of road. We seemed to be fleeing from the known world, across a span of radiance that trembled over an immeasurable void, into the supernatural.

The limousine glided to a standstill.

"Here we abandon the car."

We entered the kitchen of a humble farm-house. Strings of garlic hung from the ceiling, and on the floor lay some valises.

As the ladies departed into another room, Antonio mastered his emotion and addressed me.

"What we must do, and what I must ask you to promise, may at first seem to you ridiculous," he said. "Yet your acceptance of my conditions is a matter of life or death, not to any one here present, but to another, whom we are about to visit. What I require is this: you are to put on, as we shall, the costumes in these valises, which are after the fashion of the early sixteenth century. Indeed, when our journey is resumed, there must be about us nothing to suggest the present age. Moreover, I must have your most earnest promise that when we reach our destination you will refrain from giving the least hint, by word or action, that the sixteenth century has pa.s.sed away. If you feel unable to carry out this deception, we must leave you here. The slightest blunder would be fatal."

No sooner had Antonio uttered these words than he turned in a panic to Leonello and Leonardo.

"Am I wrong to have brought him?" he demanded, distractedly. "Can I depend on him at every point? You two, and Laura and Lina, know what it would mean if he should make a slip."

Much disturbed, I declared that I wished for nothing better than to return to Florence at once. But Leonardo restrained me, while Leonello, patting Antonio's shoulder in rea.s.surance, responded:

"Trust him. You do his quick wit an injustice."

Finally Antonio, with a heavy sigh, unlocked the valises.

Hitherto I had a.s.sociated masquerade with festive expectations, but nothing could have been less festive than the atmosphere in which we donned those costumes. They were rich, accurate, and complete. The wigs of flowing hair were perfectly deceptive. The fur-trimmed surcoats and the long hose were in fabrics suggestive of lost weaving arts. Each dagger, buckle, hat-gem, and finger-ring, was a true antique. Even when the two ladies appeared, in sumptuous Renaissance dresses, their coiffures as closely in accordance with that period as their expanded silhouettes, no smile crossed any face.

"Are we all--" began Antonio. His voice failed him. m.u.f.fled in thick cloaks, we faced the bl.u.s.tery night again.

Behind the farm-house stood horses, saddled and bridled in an obsolete manner. Our small cavalcade wound up a hillside path, which, in the darkness, the beasts felt out for themselves. One became aware of cypress-trees on either hillside, immensely tall, to judge by the thickness of their trunks. More and more numerous became these trees, as was evident from the lamentation of their countless branches. In its groan, the forest voiced to the utmost that melancholy which the imaginative mind a.s.sociates with cypresses in Italy, where they seemed always to raise their funereal grace around the sites of vanished splendors.

We were ascending one of the hills that lie scattered above Florence toward the mountains, and that were formerly all covered with these solemn trees.

But the wind grew even stronger as we neared the summit. Above us loomed a gray bulk. The Castle of Manzecca reluctantly unveiled itself, bleak, towering, impressive in its decay--a ruin that was still a fortress, and that time had not injured so much as had its mortal besiegers; the last of whom had died centuries ago. A gate swung open. Our horses clattered into a courtyard which abruptly blazed with torches.

In that dazzle all the omens of our journey were fulfilled. We found ourselves, as it appeared, not only in a place embodying another age, but in that other age itself.

The streaming torches revealed shock-headed servitors of the Renaissance, their black tunics stamped in vermilion, front and back, with a device of the Manzecca. By the steps glittered the spear-points of a clump of men-at-arms whose swarthy and rugged faces remained impa.s.sive under flattened helmets. But as we dismounted a grey-hound came leaping from the castle, and in the doorway hovered an old maid-servant. To her Antonio ran straightway, his cape whipping out behind him.

"Speak, Nuta! Is she well?" he demanded.

We followed him into the castle.

It was a s.p.a.cious hall, paved with stone, its limits shadowy, its core illuminated brilliantly with candles. From the rafters dangled some banners, tattered and queerly designed. Below these, in the midst of the hall--in a mellow refulgence that she herself seemed to give forth--there awaited us a woman glorified by youth and happiness, who pressed her hand to her heart.

She wore a gown of violet-colored silk, the sleeves puffed at the shoulders, the bodice tight across the breast and swelling at the waist, the skirt voluminous. On either side of her bosom, sheer linen, puckered by golden rosettes, mounted to form behind her neck a little ruff. Over her golden hair, every strand of which had been drawn back strictly from her brow, a white veil was clasped, behind her ears, by a band of pearls and amethysts cut in cabuchon.

Still, she was remarkable less for her costume than for the singularity of her charms.

To what was this singularity due? To the intense emotions that she seemed to be harboring? Or to the arrangement of her lovely features, to-day unique, which made one think of backgrounds composed of brocade and armor, the freshly painted canvases of t.i.tian and the dazzling newness of statues by Michael Angelo? As she approached that singularity of hers became still more disquieting, as though the fragrance that enveloped her were not a woman's chosen perfume, but the very aroma of the magnificent past.

Antonio regarded her with his soul in his eyes, then greedily kissed her hands. When the others had saluted her, each of them as much moved as though she were an image in a shrine, Antonio said in a hoa.r.s.e voice to me:

"I present you to Madonna Fiammetta di Foscone, my affianced bride.

Madonna, this gentleman comes from a distant country to pay you homage."

"He is welcome," she answered, in a voice that accorded with her peculiar beauty.

And my bewilderment deepened as I realized that they were speaking not modern Italian, but what I gathered to be the Italian of the sixteenth century.

I found myself with Antonio in a tower-room, whither he had brought me on the ladies' retirement to prepare themselves for supper.

The wind, howling round the tower, pressed against the narrow windows covered with oiled linen. The cypress forest, which on all sides descended from our peak into the valleys, gave forth a continuous moan.

Every instant the candle-light threatened to go out. The very tower seemed to be trembling, like Antonio, in awe of the secret about to be revealed. For a while my poor friend could say nothing. Seated in his rich disguise on a bench worn smooth by men whose tombs were crumbling, he leaned forward beneath the burden of his thoughts, and the long locks of his wig hung down as if to veil the disorder of his features.

Finally he began:

"In the year fifteen hundred my family still called this place their home. There were only two of them left, two brothers, the older bearing the t.i.tle Lord of Manzecca. The younger brother was that Antonio di Manzecca whose portrait you saw on the wall of my apartment in the city.

It is to him, as you observed, that I bear so close a resemblance.

"In a hill-castle not far away lived another family, the Foscone.

"The Lord of Foscone, a widower, had only one child left, a daughter seventeen years old. Her name was Fiammetta. Even in Florence it was said that to the north, amid the wilderness of cypress-trees, there dwelt a maiden whose beauty surrounded her with golden rays like a nimbus."