Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/68



was one of the most beautiful creatures ever moulded by the great Master's hand, and one on whom He might deign to look with the same paternal complacency as Pygmalion looked on his Galathea.

Adelgunda was also as the apple of their eye to her father and mother; but not the less did they bring her up with the utmost strictness and severity, in the awful loftiness of their aristocratic principles, which made no allowance for a single error, a single imperfection, a single weakness even, among any who belonged to them. Every one was to be super-excellent, and supremely high-bred like their ancestors; for their ancestors had only virtues, their failings being entombed with their bodies. The slightest infringement of the stately decorum, the formal propriety—and, to the honour of their ancestors we must add—the rectitude, the loyal and chivalric conduct of these worthies, called forth as unmerciful punishment as a heinous fault. And Adelgunda, from her earliest infancy, learned to form grand ideas about her noble, ancient, and opulent family; it was impressed on her mind that she would be very degenerate indeed if she did not resemble all those long departed and now mouldering dames and damsels, whose portraits hung in long rows in the great picture-gallery, as a large old-fashioned apartment was called, which, in spite of accidental fires, of repairs and renovations in the old baronial castle, had preserved unaltered its antique appearance since the middle of the sixteenth century.

In her infancy, Adelgunda had often been taken into this venerable saloon, and, counting with her five small fingers, she could repeat the names of all these haughty-looking, long-bearded cavaliers, equipped in heavy armour, or those stiff richly-dressed nobles, most of them decorated with jewelled orders, or other tokens of a high worldly position; and these grand-looking ladies, encased in whalebone and stiff corsets, with towering powdered heads, and magnificent jewellery, evincing the wealth of the family. These ladies and gentlemen hung, as has been said, in straight rows on each side of the long, narrow, dark, oak-panelled hall; and they were all half-length portraits in oval or almost square frames, the gilding of which had long since faded into a sort of a brownish-yellow cinnamon tint. But at the end of the hall, between two deep Gothic windows, with small old-fashioned panes of glass, there hung alone in state the great ancestress, or founder of the family—a tall, dark, stern-looking woman, whose countenance was grave, austere, and almost menacing, though the features, when narrowly examined, were regular and beautiful.

In contrast to the half-length portraits around, this picture was almost colossal in size; and the noble lady it represented, who in Roman Catholic times had ended her days as the abbess of a convent, stood there so stately and so stiff in the close black garb, with the unbecoming white linen band across her forehead, and with one hand, in which she held a crucifix, resting