DOI chapter:
Chapter II
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.62095#0045
16 Eighteenth-Century Colour-Prints
Giorgione is ever under the lattice, the air is ever full of the sound of his lute and his rich
voice singing. Get thee hence. There are castles where no memories dwell for thee, cities
where thou wilt lose thy pain and thy bitter hatreds. Go ! my son. Thy wife will abide
here in peace, and I will lead her thoughts to repentance and her heart to grace.”
“ Her thoughts are of Giorgione; there is no repentance in her,” answered the poor
boy, his thin face working, his restless hands plucking at his beads.
For never yet had torture wrung from Jiulia confession or sorrow. The good man
spoke, Ugo tried to follow him ; but always that pale wife of his, with cold eyes and ripe
lips, maddened him afresh ; and in a hell of his own passions, made desperate by his own
deficiencies, he wreaked on her sad vengeance for his own misery.
Then there came one black day when Jiulia was alone with her women. There
were moans from the high turret room wherein she lay, and strange sounds, and the echo
of hurrying steps, and presently a new cry quick and shrill—a cry at which the women
smiled, and Ugo who knew not how to smile, or had forgotten the art, turned white and
trembled.
If Jiulia’s love had been less strong, if perchance she had not seen the crystal gates
so near, when he bent over her and asked roughly, cc Is this child mine ? ” with
anguish and choking in his voice, she might have spared him that slow smile, that glance
so comprehensive with which she swept his figure.
“ Yours ? Per Dio ! My beautiful babe ! ” and saying, died.
The wild passion the words and look wrung from him was beyond his control ; the
gurgling, new-born cry of the baby lying across her breast maddened him : it was less than
to kill a chicken . . . his fingers had stifled the cry before his brain had time to
recognise the inevitability of the deed. Her eyes never met his again ; she was gazing across
him to the glimmering square of the casement, where her lover had climbed so fatally.
Perhaps she saw him from there still. Ugo’s last vengeance left her smiling. When her
attendants rushed to her rescue, he was hanging over her with tearing sobs and shaking
hands, kissing her pallor, the creeping cold of the dead face . . . telling her for the first
time, when she was beyond hearing, something of what she had made of him.
Not all the influence nor all the power of those famous Condottieri of Panico were
enough to save Ugo from all the consequences of his crime. Something he was spared
thereby, and that sparing helped to write history differently. A less powerfully protected
criminal would have been left with sightless eyes and head severed from his body, dangling
in chains outside the gray towers and battlements of Asola. Or he would have been
taken to Venice to be tried, dragged through the streets, his hands bound together by a
cord, a rope fastened round his neck and tied in such a manner that if he struggled he
would be strangled. Had the latter fate been his, he would not have struggled. Once he
realised that Jiulia was indeed dead, he accepted his fate with an indifference that looked
callous to any one who failed to read the anguish in those thin cheeks and sunken eyes.
He would have accepted his fate : cords or imprisonment, or death itself, were nothing to
him. The blood of the only thing he had ever loved seemed on his loathsome hands; all
perception of colour was drowned out of the wretched eyes by tears of agony and
acquiescence. But neither fate was for him. He was not only permitted to escape; he
was forced to escape. Lands or money he would have none of, nor help of any kind.
Giorgione is ever under the lattice, the air is ever full of the sound of his lute and his rich
voice singing. Get thee hence. There are castles where no memories dwell for thee, cities
where thou wilt lose thy pain and thy bitter hatreds. Go ! my son. Thy wife will abide
here in peace, and I will lead her thoughts to repentance and her heart to grace.”
“ Her thoughts are of Giorgione; there is no repentance in her,” answered the poor
boy, his thin face working, his restless hands plucking at his beads.
For never yet had torture wrung from Jiulia confession or sorrow. The good man
spoke, Ugo tried to follow him ; but always that pale wife of his, with cold eyes and ripe
lips, maddened him afresh ; and in a hell of his own passions, made desperate by his own
deficiencies, he wreaked on her sad vengeance for his own misery.
Then there came one black day when Jiulia was alone with her women. There
were moans from the high turret room wherein she lay, and strange sounds, and the echo
of hurrying steps, and presently a new cry quick and shrill—a cry at which the women
smiled, and Ugo who knew not how to smile, or had forgotten the art, turned white and
trembled.
If Jiulia’s love had been less strong, if perchance she had not seen the crystal gates
so near, when he bent over her and asked roughly, cc Is this child mine ? ” with
anguish and choking in his voice, she might have spared him that slow smile, that glance
so comprehensive with which she swept his figure.
“ Yours ? Per Dio ! My beautiful babe ! ” and saying, died.
The wild passion the words and look wrung from him was beyond his control ; the
gurgling, new-born cry of the baby lying across her breast maddened him : it was less than
to kill a chicken . . . his fingers had stifled the cry before his brain had time to
recognise the inevitability of the deed. Her eyes never met his again ; she was gazing across
him to the glimmering square of the casement, where her lover had climbed so fatally.
Perhaps she saw him from there still. Ugo’s last vengeance left her smiling. When her
attendants rushed to her rescue, he was hanging over her with tearing sobs and shaking
hands, kissing her pallor, the creeping cold of the dead face . . . telling her for the first
time, when she was beyond hearing, something of what she had made of him.
Not all the influence nor all the power of those famous Condottieri of Panico were
enough to save Ugo from all the consequences of his crime. Something he was spared
thereby, and that sparing helped to write history differently. A less powerfully protected
criminal would have been left with sightless eyes and head severed from his body, dangling
in chains outside the gray towers and battlements of Asola. Or he would have been
taken to Venice to be tried, dragged through the streets, his hands bound together by a
cord, a rope fastened round his neck and tied in such a manner that if he struggled he
would be strangled. Had the latter fate been his, he would not have struggled. Once he
realised that Jiulia was indeed dead, he accepted his fate with an indifference that looked
callous to any one who failed to read the anguish in those thin cheeks and sunken eyes.
He would have accepted his fate : cords or imprisonment, or death itself, were nothing to
him. The blood of the only thing he had ever loved seemed on his loathsome hands; all
perception of colour was drowned out of the wretched eyes by tears of agony and
acquiescence. But neither fate was for him. He was not only permitted to escape; he
was forced to escape. Lands or money he would have none of, nor help of any kind.