The strange sorrow that had befallen Hilda did not fail to impress
its mysterious seal upon her face, and to make itself perceptible to
sensitive observers in her manner and carriage. A young Italian artist,
who frequented the same galleries which Hilda haunted, grew deeply
interested in her expression. One day, while she stood before Leonardo
da Vinci's picture of Joanna of Aragon, but evidently without seeing
it,--for, though it had attracted her eyes, a fancied resemblance to
Miriam had immediately drawn away her thoughts,--this artist drew a
hasty sketch which he afterwards elaborated into a finished portrait. It
represented Hilda as gazing with sad and earnest horror at a bloodspot
which she seemed just then to have discovered on her white robe. The
picture attracted considerable notice. Copies of an engraving from
it may still be found in the print shops along the Corso. By many
connoisseurs, the idea of the face was supposed to have been suggested
by the portrait of Beatrice Cenci; and, in fact, there was a look
somewhat similar to poor Beatrice's forlorn gaze out of the dreary
isolation and remoteness, in which a terrible doom had involved a tender
soul. But the modern artist strenuously upheld the originality of his
own picture, as well as the stainless purity its subject, and chose
to call it--and was laughed at for his pains--"Innocence, dying of a
Blood-stain!"
"Your picture, Signore Panini, does you credit," remarked the picture
dealer, who had bought it of the young man for fifteen scudi, and
afterwards sold it for ten times the sum; "but it would be worth a
better price if you had given it a more intelligible title. Looking at
the face and expression of this fair signorina, we seem to comprehend
readily enough, that she is undergoing one or another of those troubles
of the heart to which young ladies are but too liable. But what is this
blood-stain? And what has innocence to do with it? Has she stabbed her
perfidious lover with a bodkin?"
"She! she commit a crime!" cried the young artist. "Can you look at the
innocent anguish in her face, and ask that question? No; but, as I
read the mystery, a man has been slain in her presence, and the blood,
spurting accidentally on her white robe, has made a stain which eats
into her life."
"Then, in the name of her patron saint," exclaimed the picture dealer,
"why don't she get the robe made white again at the expense of a few
baiocchi to her washerwoman? No, no, my dear Panini. The picture being
now my property, I shall call it 'The Signorina's Vengeance.' She
has stabbed her lover overnight, and is repenting it betimes the next
morning. So interpreted, the picture becomes an intelligible and very
natural representation of a not uncommon fact."