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Assunta muttered to herself as she lighted her way with her candle down the long hall. "Molto intelligente, la Signorina! Only here three days, and already understands all." "You don't need speech here," said Daphne, pulling aside the curtains of her tapestried bed a little later. "The Italians can infer all you mean from a single smile."
"Is it possible " She moved into the house and lifted her voice. Then Brendon heard Assunta answer and in a moment there followed a horrified exclamation from the younger woman. But Brendon had descended the steps to meet the approaching boat. His mind was still in a whirl of mingled emotions. Above him, as he steadied the boat, stood Jenny and she spoke swiftly. "He is not in the house!
Marzio did not stop to hear more, but pushed past Assunta with his burden under his arm, and entered the passage. The door at the end was open, and he saw his wife standing in the bright light in the sitting-room, anxiously looking towards him as though she had heard his coming. "For God's sake, Gigia," he said, addressing her by her old pet name, "tell me quickly what has happened!"
He sees Assunta, who does not recognize him, and says that he has come from Virgilio Poggi, who is at death's door at Bellagio. "There was no weightier temptation possible than that. Redmayne forgets every other consideration and in five minutes has started for Bellagio. The boat is quickly in mid-lake under the darkness and there Albert meets his death and burial.
Assunta, on the other hand, would talk volubly of my death and tell me with assured earnestness: "It was to be expected, eccellenza he was too good for us, and the saints took him. Of course our Lady wanted him she always picks out the best among us.
Poor stupid Assunta there gives in her adhesion in a jargon she does n't understand, and you and I, proper, passionless tourists, come lounging in to rest from a walk. And yet the Catholic church was once the proudest institution in the world, and had quite its own way with men's souls.
Assunta dared not delay the message. Indeed, knowing all that this must mean to her master, she delivered it instantly, and five minutes after hearing the dreadful news, Albert Redmayne, in great agony of mind, had embarked, to be rowed toward the promontory where his friend dwelt. Assunta declared that her master had been gone for an hour, if not longer.
"Are you in pain, my dear?" I softly asked. "No!" she answered in a tiny voice, so faint and far away that we held our breath to listen to it; "I am quite well now. Assunta must dress me in my white frock again now papa is here. I knew he would come back!" And she turned her eyes upon me with a look of bright intelligence.
As it was, she was too gentle, too humble, in her estimate of her own worth and power of attraction to be angry with him: and yet she was sufficiently interested in the matter to listen not unwillingly to all the gossip that the Signora Assunta poured into her ear about Ludovico, tending to show that he was unworthy of pretending to her hand.
Titian's "Virgin Received into Heaven," soaring midway between the archangel who descends to crown her and the apostles who yearn to follow her, is far less a Madonna Assunta than the apotheosis of humanity conceived as a radiant mother. Throughout the picture there is nothing ascetic, nothing mystic, nothing devotional. Nor did the art of the Renaissance stop here.
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