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."




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