Page:Weird Tales volume 31 number 03.djvu/85

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N THE art gallery of a North German city hangs a lurid oil painting which represents two Italians way-laying and attacking a third. I will tell you the history of the painting.

In the nineties of the last century, a young German painter was living in the outskirts of Rome, in an isolated little house surrounded by a vineyard. One fine, bright moonlight night, after sitting over the wine till a late hour with two or three friends down in the city, he came home about midnight. He had to walk some distance beyond the end of the street-car line, through a narrow road that ran between high walls. He never came through that lane late at night without a feeling of apprehension. He was a poor man, he never wore jewelry, his modest brown cape and dilapidated broad-brimmed hat were very much like the clothing of many of his modest neighbors, visibly not the appurtenances of a man of means, and he had had no love affairs in Rome; so that it did not seem as if any sort of ambush was likely. He thought a good deal about his fiancée back in Germany, and he almost always carried a letter from her in his left inside vest pocket, just over his heart. As he walked home he was in the habit of whistling to keep his courage up, of talking aloud to himself, bursting out every now and then with "That's certainly a fact!" or "Yes, I think that's what I'll do!" And he was likely to call out at intervals to his little dog, a Spitz who never strayed far from his master's heels. He always carried a revolver on his person, although in all the years since he had acquired it, he had never once had occasion to fire it off.

But when he came near his garden gate, he never failed to find himself shivering with apprehension till his slightly trembling fingers had the gate unlocked. He could almost visualize a big fellow gliding around the corner and stepping out threateningly in front of him. He always had his key in his hand before he had reached the gate, and he always pushed the key into the lock with nervous haste; on dark nights he would hold his lighted cigar toward the lock with the other hand. Then he would lock the gate behind him in a great hurry, unlock his house door just as nervously, light the candle which stood waiting for him to the left of the door on the uneven tile floor, try the door which led into the ground-floor rooms, all of them unoccupied except the kitchen and utilized as lumber-rooms to store his artist's supplies, and climb the creaking stairs to the upper floor where were located his spacious studio and his little bedroom. The bedroom was scarcely more than an alcove, and it always stood wide open into the studio, so that as he lay in bed he could see the great wide window and the starry heavens outside.

His trip home on this particular evening had not been without disquieting incidents. Nothing very definite had

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