The Marble Faun Volume 2 - Page 12/157

From the old butler, whom he found to be a very gracious and affable

personage, Kenyon soon learned many curious particulars about the family

history and hereditary peculiarities of the Counts of Monte Beni. There

was a pedigree, the later portion of which--that is to say, for a little

more than a thousand years--a genealogist would have found delight in

tracing out, link by link, and authenticating by records and documentary

evidences. It would have been as difficult, however, to follow up the

stream of Donatello's ancestry to its dim source, as travellers have

found it to reach the mysterious fountains of the Nile. And, far beyond

the region of definite and demonstrable fact, a romancer might have

strayed into a region of old poetry, where the rich soil, so long

uncultivated and untrodden, had lapsed into nearly its primeval state

of wilderness. Among those antique paths, now overgrown with tangled and

riotous vegetation, the wanderer must needs follow his own guidance, and

arrive nowhither at last.

The race of Monte Beni, beyond a doubt, was one of the oldest in Italy,

where families appear to survive at least, if not to flourish, on their

half-decayed roots, oftener than in England or France. It came down in

a broad track from the Middle Ages; but, at epochs anterior to those,

it was distinctly visible in the gloom of the period before chivalry put

forth its flower; and further still, we are almost afraid to say, it was

seen, though with a fainter and wavering course, in the early morn of

Christendom, when the Roman Empire had hardly begun to show symptoms of

decline. At that venerable distance, the heralds gave up the lineage in

despair.

But where written record left the genealogy of Monte Beni, tradition

took it up, and carried it without dread or shame beyond the Imperial

ages into the times of the Roman republic; beyond those, again, into the

epoch of kingly rule. Nor even so remotely among the mossy centuries did

it pause, but strayed onward into that gray antiquity of which there

is no token left, save its cavernous tombs, and a few bronzes, and some

quaintly wrought ornaments of gold, and gems with mystic figures and

inscriptions. There, or thereabouts, the line was supposed to have had

its origin in the sylvan life of Etruria, while Italy was yet guiltless

of Rome.

Of course, as we regret to say, the earlier and very much the larger

portion of this respectable descent--and the same is true of many

briefer pedigrees--must be looked upon as altogether mythical. Still,

it threw a romantic interest around the unquestionable antiquity of the

Monte Beni family, and over that tract of their own vines and fig-trees

beneath the shade of which they had unquestionably dwelt for immemorial

ages. And there they had laid the foundations of their tower, so long

ago that one half of its height was said to be sunken under the surface

and to hide subterranean chambers which once were cheerful with the

olden sunshine.