He looked at the delicate adornment of the
walls, the curtains of Lyons damask, the crystal girandoles, the toys in
porcelain of Saxony and Sevres, in bronze and ivory and Chinese lacquer,
crowding the tables and cabinets of inlaid wood. Overhead floated a rosy
allegory by Luca Giordano; underfoot lay a carpet of the royal
manufactory of France; and through the open windows he heard the plash
of the garden fountains and saw the alignment of the long green alleys
set with the statues of Roman patriots.
"Then," said he--and the words sounded strangely in his own ears--"then
they may take it from us some day--and all this with it, to the very toy
you are playing with."
She rose, and from her fullest height dropped a brilliant smile on him;
then her eyes turned to the portrait of the great fighting Duke set in
the monumental stucchi of the chimney-piece.
"If you take after your ancestors you will know how to defend it," she
said.
4.3.
The new Duke sat in his closet. The walls had been stripped of their
pious relics and lined with books, and above the fireplace hung the
Venus of Giorgione, liberated at last from her long imprisonment. The
windows stood open, admitting the soft September air. Twilight had
fallen on the gardens, and through it a young moon floated above the
cypresses.
On just such an evening three years earlier he had ridden down the slope
of the Monte Baldo with Fulvia Vivaldi at his side. How often, since, he
had relived the incidents of that night! With singular precision they
succeeded each other in his thoughts.
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