were neatly clipped lemon trees, and the faint glow of marble benches on the carpet of grass, and right before him a dimly discernible stone path.
He commenced to walk. And as the lights grew brighter behind him, he drifted out a gate into the large rose garden which he knew lay to the left. There were the most marvelous blooms here, the Contessa herself tending them, and he wanted that sweetness all around him for as long as he could have it. It was the first of May, everything was still pressing on him, giving him thoughts, and he wanted to be alone.
But as he entered the rose garden proper, he saw, far beyond it, a strong light coming out of a small outbuilding not very far from the back of the house. A pair of doors stood open, and as he drew nearer, taking his time, his hand gently touching here and there a particularly large cabbage of a blossom, he saw through those doors a splendid array of colors and faces, and what seemed a blue sky.
He stopped. It was a curious illusion. The doors were portals to some sort of overcrowded and tumultuous world.
He moved a little forward and made out that he was looking into a room full of paintings! On the wall was mounted an immense picture, but there were others before it on easels, and he stood for quite some time looking at these works. In the distance they seemed finished and alive: clusters of biblical faces and forms surely as perfected as those that covered all the palaces and churches in which he’d ever been. There was Saint Michael the Archangel driving the damned into hell, his cape swirling beneath his lifted wings, his face subtly illuminated by the fire below. And beside him was a picture of a saint unknown to Tonio, a woman with a crucifix clasped to her breasts. The colors pulsed in the light. And all of these pictures seemed darker, more solemn, than those he’d known at Venice when he was a child.
He could hear little sounds from the room.
The stillness of the garden, its concealing darkness, gave him that delicious feeling of being invisible, and he drew even closer now, picking up the fragrance of the paint and the turpentine and the oil.
But as he reached the threshold nearest him, he realized the artist was at work inside. It couldn’t be she, he thought. These paintings had an authority, perhaps even a virility, that was lacking in those light and airy murals on the chapel walls. Yet as he saw the bent figure, clothed in black, before the canvas, he realized it was a woman who was painting, a woman holding the brush, and down her back there fell a wealth of glowing yellow hair.
It was she.
And I am alone with her, he thought suddenly. He stood very still.
But the sight of her sleeves rolled back from her bare arms, the shabbiness of her black chemise with its smears of paint, caused him an immediate panic. She looked lovely to him in this disarray. He stood gazing at her softened profile, the deep rose color of her lips, the dark blue of her eye.
Just when he knew he should leave here at once, she turned with a rustle of taffeta under her outer garments and looked him full in the eye.
“Signore Treschi,” she said and her voice penetrated him, causing him a little contraction in the chest. It was a sweet treble, soft at the edges, and caught off guard by it, he had to tell himself to answer her.
“Signorina.” He mumbled the word, and made her a little bow.
She was smiling; in fact, she seemed infected with an immediate gaiety, which gave her blue eyes a lovely glint. And as she rose from the chair, her dark chemise, tied at the neck, opened, so that he saw an expanse of pink flesh above the bodice of her black dress. Her small cheeks were plumped with her smile, and all of her seemed round and real to him suddenly as if he’d seen her only on the stage in the past. Now she was here.
Her hair had those eternal wisps about it, but there were no stiff curls; it was merely parted in the middle and hung down everywhere, and he wondered how it would feel to the touch. The severity might have been cruel to another face, but her pretty features did not really seem to