In "Monte Beni" this oratory is minutely pictured, where "beneath the
crucifix . . . lay a human skull . . . carved in gray alabaster, most
skillfully done . . . with accurate imitation of the teeth, the
sutures, the empty eye-caverns." Everywhere the intense
picturesqueness gave material, at Montauto, for my father's romance.
Stella, whom he invited into the story without changing her name, was
a sympathetic object in my now somewhat alarmed and lonely days. I
call her an "object," because I could not understand a word she said,
and she soon gave up opening her lips when we were together. She
looked kind, in spite of her rocky hardness of Italian feature, and
she fed me on dried melon-seeds when I was at the lowest tide of
depression. Sometimes she was to be found at the well, close to the
entrance-arch. There the faithful servant let down a bucket by its
heavy chain with a doomsday clank. The sunlight revealed the smallness
and brilliancy and number of her black braids and the infinite
multitude of her wrinkles, as well as the yellowness of her dangling
gold earrings and the texture of her parchment-like arms, which were
the color of glossy brown leaves. Sometimes she would awaken me from
soporific melancholy by allowing herself to be found upon her knees in
her bedroom, a bare and colorless abode, her great black crucifix
hanging in majestic solitude upon the wall above her handsome old
head. I thought her temporarily insane to pray so much, and at all to
an audience; but I recognized the gentleness of the attacks, and I
somehow loved her for them.
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