Wyant, recognizing his friend’s note of introduction to Doctor Lombard, took it with a word of thanks, and was about to turn away when he perceived that the eyes of his fellow diner remained fixed on him with a gaze of melancholy interrogation.
“Again pardon me,” the young man at length ventured, “but are you by chance the friend of the illustrious Doctor Lombard?”
“No,” returned Wyant, with the instinctive Anglo-Saxon distrust of foreign advances. Then, fearing to appear rude, he said with a guarded politeness: “Perhaps, by the way, you can tell me the number of his house. I see it is not given here.”
The young man brightened perceptibly. “The number of the house is thirteen; but any one can indicate it to you—it is well known in Siena. It is called,” he continued after a moment, “the House of the Dead Hand.”
Wyant stared. “What a queer name!” he said.
“The name comes from an antique hand of marble which for many hundred years has been above the door.”
Wyant was turning away with a gesture of thanks, when the other added: “If you would have the kindness to ring twice.”
“To ring twice?”
“At the doctor’s.” The young man smiled. “It is the custom.”
It was a dazzling March afternoon, with a shower of sun from the mid-blue, and a marshalling of slaty clouds behind the umber-colored hills. For nearly an hour Wyant loitered on the Lizza, watching the shadows race across the naked landscape and the thunder blacken in the west; then he decided to set out for the House of the Dead Hand. The map in his guidebook showed him that the Via Papa Giulio was one of the streets which radiate from the Piazza, and thither he bent his course, pausing at every other step to fill his eye with some fresh image of weather-beaten beauty. The clouds had rolled upward, obscuring the sunshine and hanging like a funereal baldachin above the projecting cornices of Doctor Lombard’s street, and Wyant walked for some distance in the shade of the beetling palace fronts before his eye fell on a doorway surmounted by a sallow marble hand. He stood for a moment staring up at the strange emblem. The hand was a woman’s—a dead drooping hand, which hung there convulsed and helpless, as though it had been thrust forth in denunciation of some evil mystery within the house, and had sunk struggling into death.
A girl who was drawing water from the well in the court said that the English doctor lived on the first floor, and Wyant, passing through a glazed door, mounted the damp degrees of a vaulted stairway with a plaster AEsculapius mouldering in a niche on the landing. Facing the AEsculapius was another door, and as Wyant put his hand on the bell-rope he remembered his unknown friend’s injunction, and rang twice.
His ring was answered by a peasant woman with a low forehead and small close-set eyes, who, after a prolonged scrutiny of himself, his card, and his letter of introduction, left him standing in a high, cold ante-chamber floored with brick. He heard her wooden pattens click down an interminable corridor, and after some delay she returned and told him to follow her.
They passed through a long saloon, bare as the ante-chamber, but loftily vaulted, and frescoed with a seventeenth-century Triumph of Scipio or Alexander—martial figures following Wyant with the filmed melancholy gaze of shades in limbo. At the end of this apartment he was admitted to a smaller room, with the same atmosphere of mortal cold, but showing more obvious signs of occupancy. The walls were covered with tapestry which had faded to the gray-brown tints of decaying vegetation, so that the young man felt as though he were entering a sunless autumn wood. Against these hangings stood a few tall cabinets on heavy gilt feet, and at a table in the window three persons were seated: an elderly lady who was warming her hands over a brazier, a girl bent above a strip of needle-work, and an old man.
As the latter advanced toward Wyant, the young man was conscious of staring with unseemly intentness at his small round-backed figure, dressed with shabby disorder and surmounted by a wonderful head, lean, vulpine, eagle-beaked as that of some art-loving despot of the Renaissance: a head combining the venerable hair and large prominent eyes of the humanist with the greedy profile of the adventurer. Wyant, in musing on the Italian portrait-medals of the fifteenth century, had often fancied that only in that period of fierce individualism could types so paradoxical have been produced; yet the subtle craftsmen who committed them to the bronze had never drawn a face more strangely stamped with contradictory passions than that of Doctor Lombard.
“I am glad to see you,” he said to Wyant, extending a hand which seemed a mere framework held together by knotted veins. “We lead a quiet life here and receive few visitors, but any friend of Professor Clyde’s is welcome.” Then, with a gesture which included the two women, he added dryly: “My wife and daughter often talk of Professor Clyde.”
“Oh yes—he used to make me such nice toast; they don’t understand toast in Italy,” said Mrs. Lombard in a high plaintive voice.
It would have been difficult, from Doctor Lombard’s manner and appearance to guess his nationality; but his wife was so inconsciently and ineradicably English that even the silhouette of her cap seemed a protest against Continental laxities. She was a stout fair woman, with pale cheeks netted with red lines. A brooch with a miniature portrait sustained a bogwood watch-chain upon her bosom, and at her elbow lay a heap of knitting and an old copy of The Queen.
The young girl, who had remained standing, was a slim replica of her mother, with an apple-cheeked face and opaque blue eyes. Her small head was prodigally laden with braids of dull fair hair, and she might have had a kind of transient prettiness but for the sullen droop of her round mouth. It was hard to say whether her expression implied ill-temper or apathy; but Wyant was struck by the contrast between the fierce vitality of the doctor’s age and the inanimateness of his daughter’s youth.
Seating himself in the chair which his host advanced, the young man tried to open the conversation by addressing to Mrs. Lombard some random remark on the beauties of Siena. The lady murmured a resigned assent, and Doctor Lombard interposed with a smile: “My dear sir, my wife considers Siena a most salubrious spot, and is favorably impressed by the cheapness of the marketing; but she deplores the total absence of muffins and cannel coal, and cannot resign herself to the Italian method of dusting furniture.”
“But they don’t, you know—they don’t dust it!” Mrs. Lombard protested, without showing any resentment of her husband’s manner.
“Precisely—they don’t dust it. Since we have lived in Siena we have not once seen the cobwebs removed from the battlements of the Mangia. Can you conceive of such housekeeping? My wife has never yet dared to write it home to her aunts at Bonchurch.”
Mrs. Lombard accepted in silence this remarkable statement of her views, and her husband, with a malicious smile at Wyant’s embarrassment, planted himself suddenly before the young man.
“And now,” said he, “do you want to see my Leonardo?”
“DO I?” cried Wyant, on his feet in a flash.
The doctor chuckled. “Ah,” he said, with a kind of crooning deliberation, “that’s the way they all behave—that’s what they all come for.” He turned to his daughter with another variation of mockery in his smile. “Don’t fancy it’s for your beaux yeux, my dear; or for the mature charms of Mrs. Lombard,” he added, glaring suddenly at his wife, who had taken up her knitting and was softly murmuring over the number of her stitches.
Neither lady appeared to notice his pleasantries, and he continued, addressing himself to Wyant: “They all come—they all come; but many are called and few are chosen.” His voice sank to solemnity. “While I live,” he said, “no unworthy eye shall desecrate that picture. But I will not do my friend Clyde the injustice to suppose that he would send an unworthy representative. He tells me he wishes a description of the picture for his book; and you shall describe it to him—if you can.”