Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/329

 spurious miracle. It appeared to attempt a compromise.

He had discovered that a Primitive Methodist had been buried in consecrated ground by mistake but only he knew this for a certainty and he saw no reason to disturb the eternal rest of a poor eccentric old maid. Besides, such a thing did not seem to him to be a matter of any great importance. He bowed before the mystery and, feeling somewhat ashamed of himself for his impertinence, packed away in crates in the cellar of the Villa Leonardo, the vast accumulation of notes, copyings and false starts which represented Miracles and Other Natural Phenomena. This cellar he found, as he had supposed, to be of Etruscan construction.

But the next day he began with singular energy a new work. This time it was not a scientific undertaking but a historical romance teeming with local color. It was called Riccardo and Giuliana and the setting was Brinoë in the time of the Renaissance. The hero, Riccardo, was a man, fifty-three years old, who had spent his life in the service of the Dukes of Brinoë. The heroine, Giuliana, was a young girl of thirty-five who had been kept a prisoner since childhood in a lonely villa in the valley behind Monte Salvatore by an aunt who concealed a taste for sadism beneath a reputation for great piety. Among the subsidiary characters were Michangelo, Leonardo, Machiavellia, Lucrezia Tuornabuoni, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, Botticelli, Fra Lippo Lippi (who supplied the comic relief) and a few others. In the