The Ghost Feeler Read Free

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.
    â€˜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 gatekeeper’s child. He went on, without removing his eye:
    â€˜For two hundred years nothing has been changed in the apartments of the Duchess.’
    â€˜And no one lives her now?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜And that’s Vicenza?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜And does the Duke come there?’
    â€˜Never. In winter he goes to Rome.’
    â€˜And the palace and the villa are always closed?’
    â€˜As you see – always.’
    â€˜How long has this been?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 our dull age has lost the art. Down the alleys maimed statues stretched their arms like rows of whining beggars; fauneared terms grinned in the thickets, and above the laurustinus walls rose the mock ruin of a temple, falling into real ruin in the bright disintegrating air. The glare was blinding.
    â€˜Let us go in,’ I said.
    The old man pushed open a heavy door, behind which the cold lurked like a knife.
    â€˜The Duchess’s apartments,’ he said.
    Overhead and around us the same evanescent frescoes, under foot the same scagliola volutes, unrolled themselves interminably. Ebony cabinets, with inlay of precious marbles in cunning perspective, alternated down the room with the tarnished efflorescence of gilt consoles supporting Chinese monsters; and from the chimney-panel a gentleman in the Spanish habit haughtily ignored us.
    â€˜Duke Ercole II,’ the old man explained, ‘by the Genoese Priest.’
    It was a narrow-browed face, sallow as a wax effigy, highnosed and cautious-lidded, as though modelled by priestly hands; the lips weak and vain rather than cruel; a quibbling mouth that would have snapped at verbal errors like a lizard catching flies, but had never learned the shape of a round yes or no. One of the Duke’s hands rested on the head of a dwarf, a simian creature with pearl ear-rings and fantastic dress; the other turned the pages of a folio propped on a skull.
    â€˜Beyond is the Duchess’s bedroom,’ the old man reminded me.
    Here the shutters admitted but two narrow shafts of light, gold bars deepening the subaqueous gloom. On a daïs the bedstead, grim, nuptial, official, lifted its baldachin; a yellow Christ agonized between the curtains, and across the room a lady smiled at us from the chimney-breast.
    The old man unbarred a shutter and the light touched her face. Such a face it was, with a flicker of laughter over it like the wind on a June meadow, and a