Crucial Instances

The sky had turned to a steel gray, against which the villa stood out sallow and inscrutable.  A wind strayed through the gardens, loosening here and there a yellow leaf from the sycamores; and the hills across the valley were purple as thunder-clouds.

* * * * *

“And the statue—?” I asked.

“Ah, the statue.  Well, sir, this is what my grandmother told me, here on this very bench where we’re sitting.  The poor child, who worshipped the Duchess as a girl of her years will worship a beautiful kind mistress, spent a night of horror, you may fancy, shut out from her lady’s room, hearing the cries that came from it, and seeing, as she crouched in her corner, the women rush to and fro with wild looks, the Duke’s lean face in the door, and the chaplain skulking in the antechamber with his eyes on his breviary.  No one minded her that night or the next morning; and toward dusk, when it became known the Duchess was no more, the poor girl felt the pious wish to say a prayer for her dead mistress.  She crept to the chapel and stole in unobserved.  The place was empty and dim, but as she advanced she heard a low moaning, and coming in front of the statue she saw that its face, the day before so sweet and smiling, had the look on it that you know—­and the moaning seemed to come from its lips.  My grandmother turned cold, but something, she said afterward, kept her from calling or shrieking out, and she turned and ran from the place.  In the passage she fell in a swoon; and when she came to her senses, in her own chamber, she heard that the Duke had locked the chapel door and forbidden any to set foot there….  The place was never opened again till the Duke died, some ten years later; and then it was that the other servants, going in with the new heir, saw for the first time the horror that my grandmother had kept in her bosom….”

“And the crypt?” I asked.  “Has it never been opened?”

“Heaven forbid, sir!” cried the old man, crossing himself.  “Was it not the Duchess’s express wish that the relics should not be disturbed?”