Shortly after six o’clock in
the evening we left the Villa de Angelis. The
day had been as usual cloudlessly serene; but a gentle
sea-breeze, of which I have spoken, rose in the afternoon
and brought with it a refreshing coolness. We
had arranged a sort of couch in the landau with many
cushions for my brother, and he mounted into the carriage
with more ease than I had expected. I sat beside
him, with Raffaelle facing me on the opposite seat.
We drove down the hill of Posilipo through the ilex-trees
and tamarisk-bushes that then skirted the sea, and
so into the town. John spoke little except to
remark that the carriage was an easy one. As
we were passing through one of the principal streets
he bent over to me and said, “You must not be
alarmed if I show you to-day a strange sight.
Some women might perhaps be frightened at what We are
going to see; but my poor sister has known already
so much of trouble that a light thing like this will
not affect her.” In spite of his encomiums
upon my supposed courage, I felt alarmed and agitated
by his words. There was a vagueness in them which
frightened me, and bred that indefinite apprehension
which is often infinitely more terrifying than the
actual object which inspires it. To my inquiries
he would give no further response than to say that
he had whilst at Posilipo made some investigations
in Naples leading to a strange discovery, which he
was anxious to communicate to me. After traversing
a considerable distance, we had penetrated apparently
into the heart of the town. The streets grew
narrower and more densely thronged; the houses were
more dirty and tumbledown, and the appearance of the
people themselves suggested that we had reached some
of the lower quarters of the city. Here we passed
through a further network of small streets of the name
of which I took no note, and found ourselves at last
in a very dark and narrow lane called the Via del
Giardino. Although my brother had, so far
as I had observed, given no orders to the coachman,
the latter seemed to have no difficulty in finding
his Way, driving rapidly in the Neapolitan fashion,
and proceeding direct as to a place with which he was
already familiar.
In the Via del Giardino
the houses were of great height, and overhung the
street so as nearly to touch one another. It seemed
that this quarter had been formerly inhabited, if
not by the aristocracy, at least by a class very much
superior to that which now lived there; and many of
the houses were large and dignified, though long since
parcelled out into smaller tenements. It was
before such a house that we at last brought up.
Here must have been at one time a house or palace of
some person of distinction, having a long and fine
façade adorned with delicate pilasters, and much florid
ornamentation of the Renaissance period. The
ground-floor was divided into a series of small shops,
and its upper storeys were evidently peopled by sordid
families of the lowest class. Before one of these
little shops, now closed and having its windows carefully
blocked with boards, our carriage stopped. Raffaelle
alighted, and taking a key from his pocket unlocked
the door, and assisted John to leave the carriage.
I followed, and directly we had crossed the threshold,
the boy locked the door behind us, and I heard the
carriage drive away.
We found ourselves in a narrow and
dark passage, and as soon as my eyes grew accustomed
to the gloom I perceived there was at the end of it
a low staircase leading to some upper room, and on
the right a door which opened into the closed shop.
My brother moved slowly along the passage, and began
to ascend the stairs. He leant with one hand on
Raffaelle’s arm, taking hold of the balusters
with the other. But I could see that to mount
the stairs cost him considerable effort, and he paused
frequently to cough and get his breath again.
So we reached a landing at the top, and found ourselves
in a small chamber or magazine directly over the shop.
It was quite empty except for a few broken chairs,
and appeared to be a small loft formed by dividing
what had once been a high room into two storeys, of
which the shop formed the lower. A long window,
which had no doubt once formed one of several in the
walls of this large room, was now divided across its
width by the flooring, and with its upper part served
to light the loft, while its lower panes opened into
the shop. The ceiling was, in consequence of these
alterations, comparatively low, but though much mutilated,
retained evident traces of having been at one time
richly decorated, with the raised mouldings and pendants
common in the sixteenth century. At one end of
the loft was a species of coved and elaborately carved
dado, of which the former use was not obvious; but
the large original room had without doubt been divided
in length as Well as in height, as the lath-and-plaster
walls at either end of the loft had evidently been
no part of the ancient structure.
My brother sat down in one of the
old chairs, and seemed to be collecting his strength
before speaking. My anxiety was momentarily increasing,
and it was a great relief when he began, talking in
a low voice as one that had much to say and wished
to husband his strength.
“I do not know whether you will
recollect my having told you of something Mr. Gaskell
once said about the music of Graziani’s ‘Areopagita’
suite. It had always, he used to say, a curious
effect upon his imagination, and the melody of the
Gagliarda especially called up to his thoughts
in some strange way a picture of a certain hall where
people were dancing. He even went so far as to
describe the general appearance of the room itself,
and of the persons who were dancing there.”
“Yes,” I answered, “I
remember your telling me of this;” and indeed
my memory had in times past so often rehearsed Mr.
Gaskell’s description that, although I had not
recently thought of it, its chief features immediately
returned to my mind.
“He described it,” my
brother continued, “as a long hall with an arcade
of arches running down one side, of the fantastic Gothic
of the Renaissance. At the end was a gallery
or balcony for the musicians, which on its front carried
a coat of arms.”
I remembered this perfectly and told
John so, adding that the shield bore a cherub’s
head fanning three lilies on a golden field.
“It is strange,” John
went on, “that the description of a scene which
our friend thought a mere effort of his own imagination
has impressed itself so deeply on both our minds.
But the picture which he drew was more than a fancy,
for we are at this minute in the very hall of his
dream.”
I could not gather what my brother
meant, and thought his reason was failing him; but
he continued, “This miserable floor on which
we stand has of course been afterwards built in; but
you see above you the old ceiling, and here at the
end was the musicians’ gallery with the shield
upon its front.”
He pointed to the carved and whitewashed
dado which had hitherto so puzzled me. I stepped
up to it, and although the lath-and-plaster partition
wall was now built around it, it was clear that its
curved outline might very easily, as John said, have
formed part of the front of a coved gallery.
I looked closet at the relief-work which had adorned
it. Though the edges were all rubbed off, and
the mouldings in some cases entirely removed, I could
trace without difficulty a shield in the midst; and
a more narrow inspection revealed underneath the whitewash,
which had partly peeled away, enough remnants of colour
to show that it had certainly been once painted gold
and borne a cherub’s head with three lilies.
“That is the shield of the old
Neapolitan house of Doma-Cavalli,” my brother
continued; “they bore a cherub’s head fanning
three lilies on a shield or. It was in the balcony
behind this shield, long since blocked up as you see,
that the musicians sat on that ball night of which
Gaskell dreamt. From it they looked down on the
hall below where dancing was going forward, and I
will now take you downstairs that you may see if the
description tallies.”
So saying, he raised himself, and
descending the stairs with much less difficulty than
he had shown in mounting them, flung open the door
which I had seen in the passage and ushered us into
the shop on the ground-floor. The evening light
had now faded so much that we could scarcely see even
in the passage, and the shop having its windows barricaded
with shutters, was in complete darkness. Raffaelle,
however, struck a match and lit three half-burnt candles
in a tarnished sconce upon the wall.
The shop had evidently been lately
in the occupation of a wine-seller, and there were
still several empty wooden wine-butts, and some broken
flasks on shelves. In one corner I noticed that
the earth which formed the floor had been turned up
with spades. There was a small heap of mould,
and a large flat stone was thus exposed below the surface.
This stone had an iron ring attached to it, and seemed
to cover the aperture of a well, or perhaps a vault.
At the back of the shop, and furthest from the street,
were two lofty arches separated by a column in the
middle, from which the outside casing had been stripped.
To these arches John pointed and said,
“That is a part of the arcade which once ran
down the whole length of the hall. Only these
two arches are now left, and the fine marbles which
doubtless coated the outside of this dividing pillar
have been stripped off. On a summer’s night
about one hundred years ago dancing was going on in
this hall. There were a dozen couples dancing
a wild step such as is never seen now. The tune
that the musicians were playing in the gallery above
was taken from the ‘Areopagita’ suite
of Graziani. Gaskell has often told me that when
he played it the music brought with it to his mind
a sense of some impending catastrophe, which culminated
at the end of the first movement of the Gagliarda.
It was just at that moment, Sophy, that an Englishman
who was dancing here was stabbed in the back and foully
murdered.”
I had scarcely heard all that John
had said, and had certainly not been able to take
in its import; but without waiting to hear if I should
say anything, he moved across to the uncovered stone
with the ring in it. Exerting a strength which
I should have believed entirely impossible in his
weak condition, he applied to the stone a lever which
lay ready at hand. Raffaelle at the same time
seized the ring, and so they were able between them
to move the covering to one side sufficiently to allow
access to a small staircase which thus appeared to
view. The stair was a winding one, and once led
no doubt to some vaults below the ground-floor.
Raffaelle descended first, taking in his hand the sconce
of three candles, which he held above his head so as
to fling a light down the steps. John went next,
and then I followed, trying to support my brother
if possible with my hand. The stairs were very
dry, and on the walls there was none of the damp or
mould which fancy usually associates with a subterraneous
vault. I do not know what it was I expected to
see, but I had an uneasy feeling that I was on the
brink of some evil and distressing discovery.
After we had descended about twenty steps we could
see the entry to some vault or underground room, and
it was just at the foot of the stairs that I saw something
lying, as the light from the candles fell on it from
above. At first I thought it was a heap of dust
or refuse, but on looking closer it seemed rather a
bundle of rags. As my eyes penetrated the gloom,
I saw there was about it some tattered cloth of a
faded green tint, and almost at the same minute I
seemed to trace under the clothes the lines or dimensions
of a human figure. For a moment I imagined it
was some poor man lying face downwards and bent up
against the wall. The idea of a man or of a dead
body being there shocked me violently, and I cried
to my brother, “Tell me, what is it?”
At that instant the light from. Raffaelle’s
candles fell in a somewhat different direction.
It lighted up the white bowl of a human skull, and
I saw that what I had taken for a man’s form
was instead that of a clothed skeleton. I turned
faint and sick for an instant, and should have fallen
had it not been for John, who put his arm about me
and sustained me with an unexpected strength.
“God help us!” I exclaimed,
“let us go. I cannot bear this; there are
foul vapours here; let us get back to the outer air.”
He took me by the arm, and pointing
at the huddled heap, said, “Do you know whose
bones those are? That is Adrian Temple. After
it was all over, they flung his body down the steps,
dressed in the clothes he wore.”
At that name, uttered in so ill-omened
a place, I felt a fresh access of terror. It
seemed as though the soul of that wicked man must be
still hovering over his unburied remains, and boding
evil to us all. A chill crept over me, the light,
the walls, my brother, and Raffaelle all swam round,
and I sank swooning on the stairs.
When I returned fully to my senses
we were in the landau again making our way back to
the Villa de Angelis.