House of Doria

“ On the banks of the River Nervia the Doria had their mighty castle and ruled the land of Dolceaqua. A fighting people. There was a Doria who slew the Prince of Monaco. But great families—they are like nations—their history is a sand hill in the hour-glass of time. They arise and crumble by the process of their own development. ”

“ The greatest, the most magnificent private dwelling in the world is the Doria Pamfili palace, as the Doria themselves were the most famous, and became the most powerful of those many nobles who, in the course of centuries, settled in the capital and became Romans, not only in name but in fact—Doria, Borghese, Rospigliosi, Pallavicini and others of less enduring fame or reputation, who came in the train or alliance of a Pope, and remained in virtue of accumulated riches and acquired honour. ”

“ His life is dreadful. But you, Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth – I can't believe anything against you. And yet I see you very seldom, and you never come down to the studio now, and when I am away from you, and I hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, I don't know what to say. Why is it, Dorian, that a man like the Duke of Berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it? Why is it that so many gentlemen in London will neither go to your house or invite you to theirs? ”

“ An ancient bridge like a rainbow still spans Nervia, and the houses climb up the hills among the vines and olives, while frowning down upon all things is the mighty ruin of the Doria's castle—a great ghost from the past. In the midst of all the human business and bustle, removed by a century from the concerns of men, it stands, hollow and empty, with life surging round about, like the sea on the precipices below us. ”

“ No, indeed, my place is in a palace!”
Very different is the anemone of Villa Doria, far away across the city, on the Janiculum. It too nestles beneath the stone-pines, in the fine short grass, but it is a patrician bloom, each flower perfect, with broad polished petals of pure ivory or vivid scarlet or monsignore purple, diverging from a heart as black as jet. It is chary of growth and keeps close to the ground, and you must tread delicately or you will crush some yet unopened buds. ”

“ Although Doria was ambitious and harsh, he was a good patriot and successfully opposed the emperor Charles’s repeated attempts to have a citadel built in Genoa and garrisoned by Spaniards; neither blandishments nor threats could win him over to the scheme. Nor did age lessen his energy, for in 1550, when eighty-four years old, he again put to sea to punish the raids of his old enemies the Barbary pirates, but with no great success. War between France and the Empire having broken out once more, the French seized Corsica, then administered by the Genoese Bank of St George ”

“ The nobles were by law excluded from this highest office, and even from the command of a galley; [13] and not a few illustrious families passed into the ranks of the people by their own election. It is well known that before the reforms of Doria, the so-called nobles were held in less honour than distinguished men of the people, because their rank excluded them from the Dogate and many other offices. The Doria and Spinola came to power in a revolutionary period, and in violation of law. ”

“ Their minds move far more swiftly than ours. They are more hungry to get everything possible out of life. Doria is a child in many ways; but a delightful, poetical child. I think England rather chills him; yet he vows there are no rich women in Italy. He longs for Italy all the same. I expect he will go home again presently. He will leave Uncle Ben in the spring—so he confides to me; but do not whisper it, for my uncle thinks highly of him and would hate to lose him. He can do everything and anticipates our wishes and whims in the most magical way. ”

“ People do ride, however, in both villas, which deserve honourable mention in this regard. Villa Doria, with its noble site, its splendid views, its great groups of stone-pines, so clustered and yet so individual, its lawns and flowers and fountains, its altogether princely disposition, is a place where one may pace, well mounted, of a brilliant day, with an agreeable sense of its being rather a more elegant pastime to balance in one's stirrups than to trudge on even the smoothest gravel. ”

“ One afternoon, a month later, Dorian Gray was reclining in a luxurious arm-chair, in the little library of Lord Henry's house in Mayfair. It was, in its way, a very charming room, with its high-panelled wainscoting of olive-stained oak, its cream-coloured frieze and ceiling of raised plaster-work, and its brickdust felt carpet strewn with silk long-fringed Persian rugs. On a tiny satinwood table stood a statuette by Clodion, and beside it lay a copy of "Les Cent Nouvelles," bound for Margaret of Valois by Clovis Eve, and powdered with the gilt daisies that Queen had selected for her device. ”

“ Giuseppe Doria sings to me and I go out in the launch now and then. I always travel to and fro that way when I have to visit Dartmouth for Uncle Ben and for the household provisions. And I am to have chickens to rear in the spring."
"The Italian—"
"He is a gentleman, Mr. Brendon—a great gentleman, you might say. I do not understand him very well. But I am safe with him. He would do nothing base or small. He confided in me when first I came. He then had a dream to find a rich wife, who would love him and enable him to restore the castle of the Doria in Italy and build up the family again. ”

“ Harvest was on again, and the dry-farm called for much of his attention. Dorian prospered, and he had no time to devote to the girls, so he thought, and so he said, when occasion demanded expression.
One evening while driving through the city and seeing the lights of the moving picture theatre, he was reminded of his promise to Carlia. His conscience pricked him just a little, so the very next evening he drove up to Farmer Duke's. Seeing no one choring about, he went into the house and inquired after Carlia. Mrs. Duke told him that Carlia had gone to the city that afternoon. ”

“ Then it occurred to Dorian that Carlia, being a country bred girl and accustomed to work about farm houses, might apply to some of the adjacent farms down in the valley below the town for work. The whole country lay under deep snow, but the roads were well broken. Dorian walked out to a number of the farms and made enquiries. At the third house he was met by a pleasant faced, elderly woman who listened attentively to what he said, and then invited him in. ”

“ The Strada Nuova is formed of a double line of magnificent palaces, among which the Doria Palace is conspicuous. The architecture is in general fine; and when not good is at least pleasing; the fronts of the houses are in general gaily painted and stuccoed. The best apartments are usually at the top; and the roofs often laid out in terraces, or paved with marble and adorned with flowers and shrubs. ”

“ As Boccanegra was the father of our popular liberty so Doria was its executioner. He wrested the government from the hands of the people, and committed it to those of the nobles. He momentarily silenced, but did not destroy, the rage of parties. By depressing the populace, he cut the nerves of the Republic; he gave us independence in name, but he destroyed the franchises of the citizens. A great historian has justly said, that the liberties given us by Andrea Doria are ridiculous; the future will accept that as the final decision of history. ”

“ We think the truth to be that when Doria saw the unanimity of the people in opposing the erection of a citadel, he wisely resolved to support his fellow-citizens, and the people are entitled to the chief praise for the failure of that scheme. They were not yet corrupted by the servility of the nobility, and might have renewed the examples of their ancient valour and prevented the foreign power from striking root in the Republic. They lost no opportunity of manifesting their profound dislike of Spain, as Doge Lercaro himself testifies. ”

“ He returned to Genoa for good in 1555, and being very old and infirm he gave over the command of the galleys to his great-nephew Giovanni Andrea Doria, who conducted an expedition against Tripoli, but proved even more unsuccessful than his uncle had been at Algiers, barely escaping with his life. Andrea Doria died on the 25th of November 1560, leaving his estates to Giovanni Andrea. The family of Doria-Pamphilii-Landi (q.v.) is descended from him and bears his title of prince of Melfi. Doria was a man of indomitable energy and a great admiral. ”

“ In Valmontone, where the huge Doria palace is, we met a ghastly funeral, an old woman carried by the Frati della Misericordia on an open bier, her withered head nodding to and fro with the motion, and priests—as Lea said—"gibbering before her." Here, from the broad deserted terrace in front of the palace, we looked over the mountains, with mists drifting across them in the wind; all was the essence of picturesqueness, raggedness, ignorance, and filth. ”

“ He busied himself with chores and his books, and he did not relax in his ward duties. Once in a while he saw Carlia at the meeting house, but she absented herself more and more from public gatherings, giving as an excuse to all who inquired, that her work bound her more closely than ever at home.
Dorian and his mother frequently talked about Uncle Zed and the hopes the departed one had of the young man. "Do you really think, mother, that he meant I should devote my life to the harmonizing of science and religion?" he asked. ”

“ Yes, one continual round of work at the farm house is apt either to crush to dullness or to arouse to rebellion. Carlia was of the kind not easily crushed.... But what could they now do? What could he do? For, it came to him with great force that he himself was not altogether free from blame in this matter. He could have done more, vastly more for Carlia Duke.
"Well, Brother Duke," said Dorian. "Is there anything that I can do?" ”

“ Doria and inasmuch as Doria is as yet very much an unknown quantity to you and me, you must understand that I don't allow appearances to blind my eyes or control my actions. Now if a woman hints, or indicates, that she is unhappily married, then nothing is more natural than that a man like yourself, who entertains the tenderest feelings to the woman, should believe what he sees and regard her melancholy as genuine. It looks all right; but suppose, for their own ends, that Jenny Doria and her spouse want to create this impression? ”

“ He guessed to what Doria possibly referred and felt concern but no surprise. The other continued.
"Ambition may succumb before beauty. Ancestral castles may crumble before the tide of love, as a child's sand building before the sea. Too true!"
Doria sighed and looked at Brendon closely. The Italian stood in a tight-fitting jersey of brown wool, a very picturesque figure against his dark background. The other had nothing to say and prepared to descend. He guessed what had happened and was concerned rather with Jenny Pendean than the romantic personality before him. ”

“ Doria is aroused by a hunting-party who have risen so early that they seem to have forgotten to take off their nightcaps, to which the Italian hood, as worn by the Haymarket hunters, bears an obstinate resemblance. The Prince discovers his wife has fled, and orders his chasseurs to divert their attention from the game they had purposed to ride to cover for, and to hunt up the missing Nina.
“In the deep recesses of a wood” Spinola and Doria meet, the latter having, by some instinct, found out his pseudo-friend’s treachery; of course they fight: Doria falls ”

“ As the door closed, Dorian put the key in his pocket and looked round the room. His eye fell on a large, purple satin coverlet heavily embroidered with gold, a splendid piece of late seventeenth-century Venetian work that his grandfather had found in a convent near Bologna. Yes, that would serve to wrap the dreadful thing in. It had perhaps served often as a pall for the dead. Now it was to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself—something that would breed horrors and yet would never die. ”

“ Doria was like firing paper-pellets against a stone wall. To her indeed the young married hero spoke almost indecorously, and that which his delicacy withheld him from speaking to Clare. He could provoke nothing more responsive from the practical animal than "Pooh-pooh! Tush, tush! and Fiddlededee!"
"Really," Mrs. Doria said to her intimates, "that boy's education acts like a disease on him. He cannot regard anything sensibly. He is for ever in some mad excess of his fancy, and what he will come to at last heaven only knows! I sincerely pray that Austin will be able to bear it." ”

“ Meeting is out, and the folks are coming home."
They walked slowly back to the house. Mr. and Mrs. Duke soon arrived and told of the splendid meeting they had had.
"Uncle Zed spoke," said Mr. Duke, "and he did well, as usual. He's a regular Orson Pratt."
"The people do not know it," added Dorian; "perhaps their children or their children's children will."
"Well, what have you two been doing?" enquired the father of Carlia.
"We've just been taking a walk," answered Dorian. "Will it be alright if Carlia and I go to the new moving picture theatre in town some Saturday?" ”

“ Dorian looked at him and smiled. "What a way for a fashionable painter to travel! A Gladstone bag and an ulster! Come in, or the fog will get into the house. And mind you don't talk about anything serious. Nothing is serious nowadays. At least nothing should be."
Hallward shook his head, as he entered, and followed Dorian into the library. ”