Crucial Instances

Crucial Instances

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Crucial Instances, by Edith Wharton
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Title: Crucial Instances
Author: Edith Wharton
Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7516] [This file was first
posted on May 13, 2003]
Edition: 10

Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO Latin-1
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, CRUCIAL
INSTANCES ***

Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, William Flis, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team

CRUCIAL INSTANCES
BY
EDITH WHARTON

TABLE OF CONTENTS
I The Duchess at Prayer II The Angel at the Grave III The Recovery IV
_"Copy": A Dialogue_
V The Rembrandt VI The Moving Finger VII The Confessional

THE DUCHESS AT PRAYER
Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian
house, that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a
priest behind which buzz the secrets of the confessional? Other houses
declare the activities they shelter; they are the clear expressive cuticle
of a life flowing close to the surface; but the old palace in its narrow
street, the villa on its cypress-hooded hill, are as impenetrable as death.
The tall windows are like blind eyes, the great door is a shut mouth.
Inside there may be sunshine, the scent of myrtles, and a pulse of life

through all the arteries of the huge frame; or a mortal solitude, where
bats lodge in the disjointed stones and the keys rust in unused doors....
II
From the loggia, with its vanishing frescoes, I looked down an avenue
barred by a ladder of cypress-shadows to the ducal escutcheon and
mutilated vases of the gate. Flat noon lay on the gardens, on fountains,
porticoes and grottoes. Below the terrace, where a chrome-colored
lichen had sheeted the balustrade as with fine laminae of gold,
vineyards stooped to the rich valley clasped in hills. The lower slopes
were strewn with white villages like stars spangling a summer dusk;
and beyond these, fold on fold of blue mountain, clear as gauze against
the sky. The August air was lifeless, but it seemed light and vivifying
after the atmosphere of the shrouded rooms through which I had been
led. Their chill was on me and I hugged the sunshine.
"The Duchess's apartments are beyond," said the old man.
He was the oldest man I had ever seen; so sucked back into the past that
he seemed more like a memory than a living being. The one trait
linking him with the actual was the fixity with which his small saurian
eye held the pocket that, as I entered, had yielded a lira to the
gate-keeper's child. He went on, without removing his eye:
"For two hundred years nothing has been changed in the apartments of
the Duchess."
"And no one lives here now?"
"No one, sir. The Duke, goes to Como for the summer season."
I had moved to the other end of the loggia. Below me, through hanging
groves, white roofs and domes flashed like a smile.
"And that's Vicenza?"
"Proprio!" The old man extended fingers as lean as the hands fading

from the walls behind us. "You see the palace roof over there, just to
the left of the Basilica? The one with the row of statues like birds
taking flight? That's the Duke's town palace, built by Palladio."
"And does the Duke come there?"
"Never. In winter he goes to Rome."
"And the palace and the villa are always closed?"
"As you see--always."
"How long has this been?"
"Since I can remember."
I looked into his eyes: they were like tarnished metal mirrors reflecting
nothing. "That must be a long time," I said involuntarily.
"A long time," he assented.
I looked down on the gardens. An opulence of dahlias overran the
box-borders, between cypresses that cut the sunshine like basalt shafts.
Bees hung above the lavender; lizards sunned themselves on the
benches and slipped through the cracks of the dry basins. Everywhere
were vanishing traces of that fantastic horticulture of which