Short Fiction

attraction. I took my stand upon a stool which stood beneath them against the wall, and raising the covering of the first, I beheld a faithful and very beautifully painted portrait of my entertainer, arrayed precisely as I had seen him. The painting looked old, and yet it represented him not as any younger than he now was. While musing upon this discrepancy, my eye accidentally fell upon some numerals dimly traced in one corner of the canvass. Heavens! the date they recorded was that of more than a century before; yet the portrait was undoubtedly his. It was a perfect likeness⁠—character, expression, everything⁠—it was a facsimile of the original. My convictions, too, were yet further established by observing traces upon the back of the right hand, which rested upon a crutch-handle stick, a deep scar, which had caught my attention in the original, as his hand lay within my arm in our today’s walk. Again I examined the date, I had read it aright⁠—the year it recorded had been passed nearly a century and a half before, and the mellow tone of the picture itself tallied well with its silent but startling claim to antiquity. With a strange feeling of interest and of horror I suffered the sable drapery to fall again over the picture; and raising the covering of the next, I beheld the portrait of a young lady, richly dressed, and of such surpassing loveliness and grace as my eyes had never seen before. Entranced⁠—lost in wonder and rapture, I gazed upon this beautiful vision; a creature so perfect, of such unutterable, such infinite loveliness had never even dimly visited me in my most ethereal fancies. Like one lost in a sad and beautiful dream, I stood wrapt and moveless, my heart wrung with vain yearnings, for still the thought stole over me that all this most terrible beauty before whose image I stood in this intense worship of every faculty, had long ago passed to dust and darkness. Thus gazing and dreaming on, the tears flowed silently down my cheeks. Strange fascination!

“ ‘You make yourself at home, signor, I’m glad to see,’ said the old man, who, unperceived by me was standing by my shoulder.

“I started, and dropped the velvet curtain, and was for some time so confounded as not to be able to articulate a single word. There stood the old man, his figure disposed in precisely the attitude represented in the portrait, his tall crutch-handled stick in his right hand, and his left buried to the wrist in the bosom of his doublet; there he stood in all points⁠—face, attitude, and garb, the breathing incarnation of the picture on which I had just been looking.

“ ‘You examined, then, these portraits?’ inquired the old man.

“ ‘Two of them, signor,’ I replied with some embarrassment.

“ ‘This one,’ continued he, raising the pall which covered the first, ‘is accounted extremely like me: it is the portrait of one of my house, a brave man, who fell one hundred and forty years since in the service of the state of Venice. I am reckoned like him, strangers at least account me so.’

“He fixed his eyes upon me, I thought with that uncertain, curious gaze with which those who feel themselves the objects of suspicion, encounter a glance of scrutiny. I averted my eyes, and he, suffering the velvet cloth to drop into its place, turned upon his heel and walked twice or thrice rapidly through the hall; he stopped beside me, and laying his hand kindly upon my shoulder, he said⁠—

“ ‘Come, come, you must not grow melancholy, my young friend; you were looking, when I surprised you, at a portrait of singular beauty, that of a young woman. You shall probably have an opportunity before long of comparing the counterfeit with the original. Will not that bring a smile to your cheek? time was when such a promise would have led me blindfold anywhere; but I am partial, perhaps, she is my daughter.’

“If the old man looked for compliments upon the beauty of his child, I believe he must have been satisfied, if my words bore any proportion to my feelings. Man never spoke language of more passionate admiration than did I, he smiled and cried ‘Bravo,’ as I finished; then observing that it was growing dark, he placed his arm within mine, and led me from the hall.

“We passed through several apartments, lofty, damp, and dark, impressed with the character of desertion and decay, but everywhere carrying the evidences of former splendour.

“We entered a chamber hung with dusky tapestry. The end at which we stood on entering was occupied by a table and some antique chairs, and upon the floor, corresponding with the angles of the table, but at the distance of some six feet, were placed four massive golden candlesticks containing huge wax tapers, which shot into the air to the height of twelve feet, and burned with a flame larger than that of a torch, but white and clear as the light of the sun. The strange effect of these arrangements was much enhanced by another still more extraordinary peculiarity which marked this chamber as unlike any which I had ever seen before. The end of the room at which we stood, as I have already said, was occupied by the table and other furniture which I have mentioned, but the opposite extremity of the chamber I could not see. It was effectually shrouded from my sight by a light semitransparent vapour, which rolled and eddied in cloudy volumes within some twenty or thirty feet of the table⁠—beyond this distance it did not come⁠—some invisible influence held it back, and there it hung, forming a strange, heaving barrier, a mysterious impenetrable veil between human vision and sights, perhaps, unsuited to its ken. These odd peculiarities of the room in which I found myself were not without their effect upon my imagination and spirits⁠—a sense of unknown danger overshadowed me. I recounted in my own mind the circumstances of my