From the old butler, whom he found to be a very gracious and affable
personage, Kenyon soon learned many curious particulars about the family
history and hereditary peculiarities of the Counts of Monte Beni. There
was a pedigree, the later portion of which--that is to say, for a little
more than a thousand years--a genealogist would have found delight in
tracing out, link by link, and authenticating by records and documentary
evidences. It would have been as difficult, however, to follow up the
stream of Donatello's ancestry to its dim source, as travellers have
found it to reach the mysterious fountains of the Nile. And, far beyond
the region of definite and demonstrable fact, a romancer might have
strayed into a region of old poetry, where the rich soil, so long
uncultivated and untrodden, had lapsed into nearly its primeval state
of wilderness. Among those antique paths, now overgrown with tangled and
riotous vegetation, the wanderer must needs follow his own guidance, and
arrive nowhither at last.
The race of Monte Beni, beyond a doubt, was one of the oldest in Italy,
where families appear to survive at least, if not to flourish, on their
half-decayed roots, oftener than in England or France. It came down in
a broad track from the Middle Ages; but, at epochs anterior to those,
it was distinctly visible in the gloom of the period before chivalry put
forth its flower; and further still, we are almost afraid to say, it was
seen, though with a fainter and wavering course, in the early morn of
Christendom, when the Roman Empire had hardly begun to show symptoms of
decline. At that venerable distance, the heralds gave up the lineage in
despair.
But where written record left the genealogy of Monte Beni, tradition
took it up, and carried it without dread or shame beyond the Imperial
ages into the times of the Roman republic; beyond those, again, into the
epoch of kingly rule. Nor even so remotely among the mossy centuries did
it pause, but strayed onward into that gray antiquity of which there
is no token left, save its cavernous tombs, and a few bronzes, and some
quaintly wrought ornaments of gold, and gems with mystic figures and
inscriptions. There, or thereabouts, the line was supposed to have had
its origin in the sylvan life of Etruria, while Italy was yet guiltless
of Rome.
Of course, as we regret to say, the earlier and very much the larger
portion of this respectable descent--and the same is true of many
briefer pedigrees--must be looked upon as altogether mythical. Still,
it threw a romantic interest around the unquestionable antiquity of the
Monte Beni family, and over that tract of their own vines and fig-trees
beneath the shade of which they had unquestionably dwelt for immemorial
ages. And there they had laid the foundations of their tower, so long
ago that one half of its height was said to be sunken under the surface
and to hide subterranean chambers which once were cheerful with the
olden sunshine.