"
"Yes," said Castelrovinato with his melancholy smile, "the test of
success is to have had one's money's worth; but experience, which is
dried pleasure, is at best a dusty diet, as we know. Yonder, in a fold
of those hills," he added, pointing to the cluster of Euganean mountains
just faintly pencilled above the plain, "lies the little fief from which
I take my name. Acre by acre, tree by tree, it has gone to pay for my
experiments, not in agriculture but in pleasure; and whenever I look
over at it from Venice and reflect on what each rood of ground or trunk
of tree has purchased, I wonder to see my life as bare as ever for all
that I have spent on it."
The young Marquess shrugged his shoulders. "And would your life," he
exclaimed, "have been a whit less bare had you passed it in your
ancestral keep among those windy hills, in the company of swineherds and
charcoal-burners, with a milk-maid for your mistress and the village
priest for your partner at picquet?"
"Perhaps not," the other agreed. "There is a tale of a man who spent his
life in wishing he had lived differently; and when he died he was
surrounded by a throng of spectral shapes, each one exactly like the
other, who, on his asking what they were, replied: 'We are all the
different lives you might have lived.'"
"If you are going to tell ghost-stories," cried Coeur-Volant, "I will
call for a bottle of Canary!"
"And I," rejoined the Count good-humouredly, "will try to coax the
ladies forth with a song;" and picking up his lute, which always lay
within reach, he began to sing in the Venetian dialect:--
There's a villa on the Brenta
Where the statues, white as snow,
All along the water-terrace
Perch like sea-gulls in a row.
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