How was such a puny will as his to contend against the great forces
of greed and prejudice? All the influences arrayed against
him--tradition, superstition, the lust of power, the arrogance of
race--seemed concentrated in the atmosphere of that silent room, with
its guarded threshold, its pious relics, and lying on the desk in the
embrasure of the window, the manuscript litany which the late Duke had
not lived to complete.

Oppressed by his surroundings, Odo rose and entered the bed-chamber. A
lamp burned before the image of the Madonna at the head of the bed, and
two lighted flambeaux flanked the picture of the Last Judgment on the
opposite wall. Odo remembered the look of terror which the Duke had
fixed on the picture during their first strange conversation. A
praying-stool stood beneath it, and it was said that here, rather than
before the Virgin's image, the melancholy prince performed his private
devotions. The horrors of the scene were depicted with a childish
minuteness of detail, as though the painter had sought to produce an
impression of moral anguish by the accumulation of physical sufferings;
and just such puerile images of the wrath to come may have haunted the
mysterious recesses of the Duke's imagination. Crescenti had told Odo
how the dying man's thoughts had seemed to centre upon this dreadful
subject, and how again and again, amid his ravings, he had cried out
that the picture must be burned, as though the sight of it was become
intolerable to him.

Odo's own mind, across which the events and emotions of the day still
threw the fantastic shadows of an expiring illumination, was wrought to
the highest state of impressionability. He saw in a flash all that the
picture must have symbolised to his cousin's fancy; and in his desire to
reconstruct that dying vision of fleshly retribution, he stepped close
to the diptych, resting a knee on the stool beneath it. As he did so,
the picture suddenly opened, disclosing the inner panel. Odo caught up
one of the flambeaux, and in its light, as on a sunlit wave, there
stepped forth to him the lost Venus of Giorgione.

He knew the picture in an instant. There was no mistaking the glow of
the limbs, the midsummer languor of the smile, the magical atmosphere in
which the gold of sunlight, of autumn leaves, of amber grapes, seemed
fused by some lost alchemy of the brush. As he gazed, the scene changed,
and he saw himself in a darkened room with cabalistic hangings. He