actually with the Contessa. The house was so quiet.
But a great blaze illuminated the distant stairwell. And cocking his ear for voices, he heard them. And then he turned and made his way to the inevitable back stairs.
The night was just as warm as it had been earlier, and as he stepped out into the grass, he saw countless stars overhead, uneven, some so clear they were faintly yellow or even pink, others merely tiny points of white light. And the fleeting clouds made him rock for a moment on the balls of his feet with his head back, for the whole heavens or the whole earth seemed to move.
Light streamed out from the parlor windows and when he finally went up to the glass, he saw Maestro Cavalla was still there. Guido was talking to Signore Ruggerio, and Signore Ruggerio appeared to be describing something with his finger on a bare table, while the Contessa looked on.
He turned his back, and in spite of the most intense excitement, he knew he must not go in.
He walked fast through the garden, finding his way into the patches of rose trees, and slowing his pace he made his way to that outbuilding which was completely dark. The moon shone bright for an instant, and just before the clouds passed over it again, he saw the doors were still open and he moved quietly towards them with just the crunch of the grass under his foot. Was it wrong to go in when all lay open so fearlessly? He told himself that he would merely stand in the door.
And placing his hand timidly on the frame, he saw the pictures before him, drained of color, the faces luminous and indistinct. Slowly Saint Michael materialized, and then the whiteness of that canvas on which only part of the work had been done. His foot sounded very loud to him on the slate flooring, and then he settled slowly onto the bench before the picture and made out a gathering of figures, white, and intertwined under what seemed a black mass of trees.
It was maddening not to be able to see it, and yet he felt an intruder. He did not want to touch her brushes, her little pots of paint so tightly covered, nor even the cloth that lay folded to one side. But these objects fascinated him. He remembered her when she was still bent forward. And he heard her voice again, its lovely treble and its slight opacity, and he realized that there had been a slight accent to her words.
After a moment’s playing with conscience, he took one of the matches from her little table nearby and lighted the candle on his right.
The flame sputtered, grew larger, and slowly an even illumination filled the room. The great work against the wall quickly colored in, and the picture before him showed nymphs in a garden, lithesome and golden-haired, their gauzy dresses barely covering them as they danced with garlands of flowers in their tiny hands.
It was nothing as chaste and dour as her murals in the Contessa’s chapel; it was more lively and immensely more skilled. And why not, he mused? In three years, what had he learned of singing? Wasn’t it natural that she should have made her own progress, unknown to him, with the brush? Yet he could see now an attitude to the painted faces before him which indisputably connected them to the chapel Virgin he’d admired so many times. He found himself staring at the naked limbs of these nymphs, however, with a slight humming fascination that made him feel suddenly ashamed.
The paint was fresh; if he touched it, he would harm it, but he did not want to touch it. He merely wanted to look and to think that she had painted this.
Guido’s little story of the funeral in Sicily came back to him. So she was the little English cousin, the little widow who had been so frightened by those horrid catacombs they had to take her out. Now he could hear it in her voice in his memory, that touch of an accent, and it gave her even greater fascination, though when he thought of her alone now without her husband, he wondered if it might even be worse for her than the marriage must have been.
A sadness came over him, a sadness slow but without measure. And he realized that all the times he’d ever seen her, in any place no matter how