I
“Above all,” the letter ended, “don’t leave Siena without seeing Doctor
Lombard’s Leonardo. Lombard is a queer old Englishman, a mystic or a
madman (if the two are not synonymous), and a devout student of the
Italian Renaissance. He has lived for years in Italy, exploring its
remotest corners, and has lately picked up an undoubted Leonardo, which
came to light in a farmhouse near Bergamo. It is believed to be one of
the missing pictures mentioned by Vasari, and is at any rate, according
to the most competent authorities, a genuine and almost untouched
example of the best period.
“Lombard is a queer stick, and jealous of showing his treasures; but we
struck up a friendship when I was working on the Sodomas in Siena three
years ago, and if you will give him the enclosed line you may get a peep
at the Leonardo. Probably not more than a peep, though, for I hear he
refuses to have it reproduced. I want badly to use it in my monograph on
the Windsor drawings, so please see what you can do for me, and if you
can’t persuade him to let you take a photograph or make a sketch, at
least jot down a detailed description of the picture and get from him
all the facts you can. I hear that the French and Italian governments
have offered him a large advance on his purchase, but that he refuses
to sell at any price, though he certainly can’t afford such luxuries; in
fact, I don’t see where he got enough money to buy the picture. He lives
in the Via Papa Giulio.”
Wyant sat at the table d’hote of his hotel, re-reading his friend’s
letter over a late luncheon. He had been five days in Siena without
having found time to call on Doctor Lombard; not from any indifference
to the opportunity presented, but because it was his first visit to
the strange red city and he was still under the spell of its more
conspicuous wonders--the brick palaces flinging out their wrought-iron
torch-holders with a gesture of arrogant suzerainty; the great
council-chamber emblazoned with civic allegories; the pageant of Pope
Julius on the Library walls; the Sodomas smiling balefully through the
dusk of mouldering chapels--and it was only when his first hunger was
appeased that he remembered that one course in the banquet was still
untasted.
He put the letter in his pocket and turned to leave the room, with a
nod to its only other occupant, an olive-skinned young man with lustrous
eyes and a low collar, who sat on the other side of the table, perusing
the FANFULLA DI DOMENICA. This gentleman, his daily vis-a-vis, returned
the nod with a Latin eloquence of gesture, and Wyant passed on to
the ante-chamber, where he paused to light a cigarette. He was just
restoring the case to his pocket when he heard a hurried step behind
him, and the lustrous-eyed young man advanced through the glass doors of
the dining-room.
“Pardon me, sir,” he said in measured English, and with an intonation of
exquisite politeness; “you have let this letter fall.”
Wyant, recognizing his friend’s note of introduction to Doctor Lombard,
took it with a word of thanks, and was about to turn away when he
perceived that the eyes of his fellow diner remained fixed on him with a
gaze of melancholy interrogation.
“Again pardon me,” the young man at length ventured, “but are you by
chance the friend of the illustrious Doctor Lombard?”
“No,” returned Wyant, with the instinctive Anglo-Saxon distrust of
foreign advances. Then, fearing to appear rude, he said with a guarded
politeness: “Perhaps, by the way, you can tell me the number of his
house. I see it is not given here.”
The young man brightened perceptibly. “The number of the house is
thirteen; but any one can indicate it to you--it is well known in Siena.
It is called,” he continued after a moment, “the House of the Dead
Hand.”
Wyant stared. “What a queer name!” he said.
“The name comes from an antique hand of marble which for many hundred
years has been above the door.”
Wyant was turning away with a gesture of thanks, when the other added:
“If you would have the kindness to ring twice.”
“To ring twice?”
“At the doctor’s.” The young man smiled. “It is the custom.”
It was a dazzling March afternoon, with a shower of sun from the
mid-blue, and a marshalling of slaty clouds behind the umber-colored
hills. For nearly an hour Wyant loitered on the Lizza, watching the
shadows race across the naked landscape and the thunder blacken in the
west; then he decided to set out for the House of the Dead Hand. The
map in his guidebook showed him that the Via Papa Giulio was one of the
streets which radiate from the Piazza, and thither he bent his course,
pausing at every other step to fill his eye with some fresh image of
weather-beaten beauty. The clouds had rolled upward, obscuring the
sunshine and hanging like a funereal baldachin above the projecting
cornices of Doctor Lombard’s street, and Wyant walked for some distance
in the shade of the beetling palace fronts before his eye fell on
a doorway surmounted by a sallow marble hand. He stood for a moment
staring up at the strange emblem. The hand was a woman’s--a dead
drooping hand, which hung there convulsed and helpless, as though it had
been thrust forth in denunciation of some evil mystery within the house,
and had sunk struggling into death.
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 Æsculapius mouldering in a niche on the landing. Facing the
Æsculapius 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.
“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 mænads. 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,
over-worked 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 Æneas 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 wonder. 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.
Wyant was silent. He had the puzzled sense that his wishes were being
divined and gratified for reasons with which he was in no way connected.
“Well, well,” the doctor muttered, “I don’t say no--I don’t say no. I
know what Clyde wants--I don’t refuse to help him.” He turned to Wyant.
“You may come again--you may make notes,” he added with a sudden effort.
“Jot down what occurs to you. I’m willing to concede that.”
Wyant again caught the girl’s eye, but its emphatic message perplexed
him.
“You’re very good,” he said tentatively, “but the fact is the picture is
so mysterious--so full of complicated detail--that I’m afraid no notes I
could make would serve Clyde’s purpose as well as--as a photograph, say.
If you would allow me--”
Miss Lombard’s brow darkened, and her father raised his head furiously.
“A photograph? A photograph, did you say? Good God, man, not ten people
have been allowed to set foot in that room! A PHOTOGRAPH?”
Wyant saw his mistake, but saw also that he had gone too far to retreat.
“I know, sir, from what Clyde has told me, that you object to having
any reproduction of the picture published; but he hoped you might let
me take a photograph for his personal use--not to be reproduced in his
book, but simply to give him something to work by. I should take the
photograph myself, and the negative would of course be yours. If you
wished it, only one impression would be struck off, and that one Clyde
could return to you when he had done with it.”
Doctor Lombard interrupted him with a snarl. “When he had done with it?
Just so: I thank thee for that word! When it had been re-photographed,
drawn, traced, autotyped, passed about from hand to hand, defiled by
every ignorant eye in England, vulgarized by the blundering praise of
every art-scribbler in Europe! Bah! I’d as soon give you the picture
itself: why don’t you ask for that?”
“Well, sir,” said Wyant calmly, “if you will trust me with it, I’ll
engage to take it safely to England and back, and to let no eye but
Clyde’s see it while it is out of your keeping.”
The doctor received this remarkable proposal in silence; then he burst
into a laugh.
“Upon my soul!” he said with sardonic good humor.
It was Miss Lombard’s turn to look perplexedly at Wyant. His last words
and her father’s unexpected reply had evidently carried her beyond her
depth.
“Well, sir, am I to take the picture?” Wyant smilingly pursued.
“No, young man; nor a photograph of it. Nor a sketch, either; mind
that,--nothing that can be reproduced. Sybilla,” he cried with sudden
passion, “swear to me that the picture shall never be reproduced! No
photograph, no sketch--now or afterward. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, father,” said the girl quietly.
“The vandals,” he muttered, “the desecrators of beauty; if I thought it
would ever get into their hands I’d burn it first, by God!” He turned
to Wyant, speaking more quietly. “I said you might come back--I never
retract what I say. But you must give me your word that no one but Clyde
shall see the notes you make.”
Wyant was growing warm.
“If you won’t trust me with a photograph I wonder you trust me not to
show my notes!” he exclaimed.
The doctor looked at him with a malicious smile.
“Humph!” he said; “would they be of much use to anybody?”
Wyant saw that he was losing ground and controlled his impatience.
“To Clyde, I hope, at any rate,” he answered, holding out his hand. The
doctor shook it without a trace of resentment, and Wyant added: “When
shall I come, sir?”
“To-morrow--to-morrow morning,” cried Miss Lombard, speaking suddenly.
She looked fixedly at her father, and he shrugged his shoulders.
“The picture is hers,” he said to Wyant.
In the ante-chamber the young man was met by the woman who had admitted
him. She handed him his hat and stick, and turned to unbar the door. As
the bolt slipped back he felt a touch on his arm.
“You have a letter?” she said in a low tone.
“A letter?” He stared. “What letter?”
She shrugged her shoulders, and drew back to let him pass.