| 353 | 354 | 355 | 356 | 357 |
| 1 | 90 | 180 | 269 | 359 |
|
THE OVAL PORTRAIT
THE chateau into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance,
rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a
night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingled gloom and
grandeur which have so long frowned among the Appennines, not less in
fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe. To all appearance it had been
temporarily and very lately abandoned. We established ourselves in one
of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments. It lay in a
remote turret of the building. Its decorations were rich, yet tattered
and antique. Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with
manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an unusually
great number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden
arabesque. In these paintings, which depended from the walls not only
in their main surfaces, but in very many nooks which the bizarre
architecture of the chateau rendered necessary--in these paintings my
incipient delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest; so
that I bade Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room--since it was
already night--to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which stood by
the head of my bed--and to throw open far and wide the fringed curtains
of black velvet which enveloped the bed itself. I wished all this done
that I might resign myself, if not to sleep, at least alternately to the
contemplation of these pictures, and the perusal of a small volume which
had been found upon the pillow, and which purported to criticise and
355
Page
Quick Jump
|