England is so seldom visited by hot weather such as we now have, that,
especially in our little place with its foreign stamp within and
without, one keeps thinking of other lands. There was the one hot summer
we went visiting in country houses in Italy—two country houses, to be
precise, and both of them were “_castelli_.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A CASTELLO IN PIEDMONT]
The first ‹which we preferred vastly› was on a high plateau in the
middle of the Piedmontese plain, not far from Turin. From that
entrancing spot the view lay over wide undulating stretches of maize
fields and vineyards; and the eye could not turn North, West, East or
South without resting on a distant panorama of Alps or Apennines.
That was a hot summer with a vengeance! We were met in the dusk of the
evening—the soft warm dusk of such days in Italy, when the caress of the
air is like the touch of velvet—by a gay little equipage drawn by three
mountain horses abreast, each with a collar of bells and a red hussar
plume erect on its forehead. It was the most merry vehicle we have ever
driven in. How those horses went! How they tossed their heads and how
their bells jangled!
A beautiful old French style castello it was, by no means spoilt in our
eyes by having been left with rough brick. Now we hear that its
ambitious owners have faced it with stone and are themselves charmed
with the result. No doubt its original picturesqueness had its
disadvantages, for innumerable birds built under the eaves amid those
rough bricks. At the approach of any vehicle the air was full of flying
wings. The flutter and the sound of them! We thought the place all
delightful and characteristic; wonderfully more attractive than the
pompous banality of the now renewed mansion, photographs of which we
have since had mendaciously to admire.
Inside it was cool and charming; full of old French furniture and
irreplaceable family relics. Some of these have recently been sold, to
defray, no doubt, part of the cost of the new exterior.
The sedan chair of _Madame la Maréchale_ in pre-Revolution days remains
in my memory as a regret; it was a wonder of old Vernis-Martin. We hope
they have kept the great flags that used to hang in the hall. The
reigning châtelaine did not really care for any of these old things. Her
heart was set on the joys of a Roman _appartement_, and its concomitant
social gaieties.
[Sidenote: GRANDCHILDREN]
There was a spacious white hall with impossible paintings of a boar hunt
on its walls, opening upon an endless series of reception rooms. And
through these lofty chambers three little children were running about in
little white linen tunics, and nothing on underneath, because of the
heat of the weather. Their hair was cut in mediæval fashion, straight
across the forehead and straight again across the shoulders. There was
also a most adorable baby of eleven months carried about by a soft-eyed
_Balia_. Out of the mountains she had come, this creature, to cherish
another’s child! And a series of misfortunes had fallen upon her little
home since her departure: the death of her own nursling followed by the
death of the cow! “_Cara moglie_,” her husband wrote on each occasion,
“do not grieve. It is the will of God!”
There were no doubt other very simple reasons for these catastrophes:
the pitiable poverty of the family which had made it necessary for the
poor woman to sell her mother-rights, and possibly the tainted milk of
the sick cow which had poisoned the little mountaineer. But call it
fate, or the intolerable economic system of modern Italy, it came round
in the end to the same thing. “Do not grieve, _cara moglie_. It is the
will of God!”
She had done her best to help her own, and this was her comfort in her
sorrow. It was not such a bad comfort; and the most advanced thinker
cannot prove after all that it was not the will of God.
It was difficult, too, for the foster-mother to weep long when Baby
Maddalena danced on the stone of the terrace with little bare brown
feet. She had the bluest eyes and the brownest face that ever we beheld,
and laughed and gurgled as she danced, with very high action, upheld by
the ends of her sash by the adoring _Balia_, whose own face and neck
above her string of gold beads were the colour of a ripe apricot.
It would be difficult to have devised a fortnight of greater interest,
amusement, and quaintness than that of this Piedmontese visit. It was a
thoroughly foreign household. The handsome white-bearded athletic father
of the Chatelaine, tied to his chair by an attack of gout, had his
apartments downstairs. And on an upper floor the mother of the Marchese
had her own complete establishment, including a wonderful library, all
tawny gold. There was a baroque Chapel; and one of our most vivid
recollections was our pulling the children down by their sashes as they
swung themselves over the tops of the benches, doubled up like golden
fleeces till their curly heads and their little shoes touched.
One thing never to be omitted was to watch Monte Rosa at sunset. The
night before our departure there was a thunderstorm far, far away in
those Alps where Monte Rosa rises in beauty. At every flash, peak beyond
peak shone out in distances hitherto wrapped away even from the
imagination.
“Why does the sky do like that?” asked the second boy, vigorously
blinking his great eyes. With straight black hair and an odd, serious
little countenance, square-jawed and long upper-lipped like a Medici out
of Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes, he was the most mediæval-looking of all
the children. We loved that four-year-old.... He has grown up, we hear,
“impossible” and a burden to his family. We cannot help feeling it must
be the family’s fault. The elder boy, much handsomer though he was, did
not then promise so well. A terribly nervous child; the cry “_Ho
paura_,” was always on his lips. It hurt his grandfather’s pride that
any son of his race should show such degenerate timidity.
One typical scene we were witness of. The little fellow, in great awe of
the peremptory, loud-voiced old sportsman, approached him to say
good-night; and, hanging his head after the manner of the frightened
child, stammered the requisite “_Bonsoir, Bonpapa_,” almost inaudibly.
Instantly wrath broke out over him. ‹Bonpapa’s temper had not improved
with the gout.› “That was not the manner in which to say good-night.”—“A
man was to look up: to speak straight.” “What does one say?” he ended,
shouting.
“_Pardon!_” cried the poor, terrified imp, with a wail.
This child, over whom were so many head-shakings, doubts and laments,
has grown up so brave and fine a boy that it would have rejoiced the
heart of the old Vicomte to see him now. His was a stormy heart that
wanted much of life, and therefore, of course, knew much bitterness. It
is stilled now, alas! this many a year.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A CASTELLO IN LOMBARDY]
From this comparatively modern mansion in the Piedmont we went to an
old, old castle in the plains of Lombardy. The chronicles have it that
Barbarossa besieged it. It was approached through a considerable
village—one of great antiquity, and still retaining the lines of the
Roman _castrum_, with all its streets parallel or at right-angles. At
the top of the main of these the great machicolated entrance of the
Castello, with its faded frescoes across the arch, was very impressive
in mediæval strength. The church shouldered one corner of the immense
pile of outer wall; and each side of the moat, between the towers,
inside and out, peasant houses had crept.
The Castello itself, of extreme antiquity, as has been said, formed two
sides of a square, round, and flagged courtyard. The garden ran sheer up
the hill, within the tower-flanked walls of the outer bailey. There were
vineyards inside; and outside, where the ground fell away, the whole
land was likewise covered with vines. They ran up and down long ridges,
like petrified waves, as far as the eye could see. And in the far, far
distance, almost lost in the horizon, were the Alps.
What a view that was from the loopholes of those half-ruined
towers—especially at sunset, when there gathered a rosy mist over that
curious, wild-tossing expanse!
Could we go back now to that unique spot, what a vast amount of æsthetic
pleasure should we not draw from it? But it must be admitted that we
were gross-minded enough at the time to allow material discomfort to
overcome all other impressions.
[Illustration: castle tower]
To lodge in a genuine old Lombard Castle, with stone floors and stairs
hewn in the immense thickness of the stone; to look out upon one side
into the moat, and to see the peasant houses clinging to the massive
foundations far below like barnacles to a rock; to look out on the other
side upon the odd rise of sunburnt garden up to the vineyard and the
towers; to imagine oneself back into the very heart of the Middle Ages
may be very inspiring, in theory. But mediæval sensibilities were
undoubtedly more blunted than ours. The smell of that moat running with
the refuse of the crowded Italian village!... For additional pungency,
all the water in the place came from sulphur springs! The reek of it was
in one’s nostrils all day from merely washing in it.
The household was composed of peasant women out of the village. The wife
of the barber, the mother of the shoemaker, and others, clattered about
the stone passages in their _mules_—a style of foot-gear which leaves
the foot free from the instep. It was perhaps as well that the heels
were high, for their idea of housemaiding ‹a method which appertains in
most Italian households to this day› was first to walk about with a pail
and to slop water out of it over the flags of the floor; then to sweep
the resulting wet mess into a puddle where the stone was worn most
hollow or under the carpet!
Some attempts at a housemaid’s sink had been excavated in the stone at
the head of the stairs outside our set of rooms; but there was generally
a small cataract of soapy water dripping down the steps, for the simple
practice of the _donna_ that attended on our apartment was to stand on
the landing outside our doors and to shy the contents of her bucket
upwards.
* * * * *
The delightful friend with whom we stayed, though not born of the
country, had fallen quite resignedly into its ways. And, indeed, the
castle was chiefly ruled by the _Princesse Mère_, a châtelaine of the
old school, who used to arise in the grey dawn and pull the iron chain
of the great bell that hung outside her windows, to call the vassals to
their daily work.
“Come, come!” she was frequently heard addressing some dependent or
other whose movements were more indolent than she approved of. “Are you
here for your comfort or for mine?”
* * * * *
The table was served, copiously, with singular Italian dishes. There was
a favourite soup with stewed quails in it: the whole animal, bones and
beak and all! It is an unspeakable dish to have set before you on a hot
day. Patties filled with cocks’ combs might follow. Even the _Risotto_
was intermingled with such strange mincings of liver and cutlet
trimmings that one hesitated before venturing. The _Fritura_, needless
to say, was in full force. A lucky dip, that! You may come across
yesterday’s cauliflower, a bit of forgotten sweetbread, a slice of
sausage, a frizzled artichoke, and half the quail you couldn’t eat the
night before—all in one spoonful!
Besides the fierce matutinal summons of the domestic bell, one’s sleep
was constantly disturbed by a jangle of chimes from the church: a
perfect frenzy of joy-bells it was, so prolonged and insistent that
sleep was beaten out of one’s brain as with hammers.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: THE ANGELS’ MASS]
“What,” we asked our younger hostess, the third day of this infliction,
“what are these carillons, morning after morning?”
“Oh, that?—That is for the Angels’ Mass,” she answered us indifferently.
“The Angels’ Mass?”
“Yes. A child dead in the village.”
“But every morning?”
“There have been several deaths lately. It is the fever from the rice
fields.”
Pleasant hearing for a woman with an only little daughter just
recovering from a rather serious illness! Every smell that greeted her
nostrils afterwards—and they were of a diversified and poignant
description—seemed laden with the germs of death. But the young
_Principessa_ had absorbed a good deal of the indolent indifference of
her adopted country towards hygiene.
“You, with your English notions!” was all the comfort her visitor got,
offered in tones of good-humour not unmixed with contempt. Or else:
“What you smell, my dear, is only carbolic; and that is very healthy.”
A few dabs of disinfectant had indeed been distributed about the moat,
on much the same principle, and with the same effect, as the red pepper
which is served with wild duck, just to heighten the flavour of the
dish.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: ENTOMOLOGICAL MYSTERIES]
Perhaps the most lasting impression of that Lombardy sojourn was the
morning discovery in a glass of drinking-water which had been placed
beside the bed the previous night, of the most extraordinary creature
any of us had ever seen. It was like a very large shrimp, perfectly
transparent, with such gigantic antennæ and legs that they protruded
over the top of the tumbler!
No one else in the castle had ever beheld anything like it either, it
appeared; except one old woman, who described it vaguely as “_una bestia
del acqua_.” But as it most certainly had not been in the tumbler when
the water was put into it, its origin remains for ever a mystery.
A few nights later the little girl of the party of travellers found one
of these zoological mysteries in a quite empty tumbler! We might have
thought it a practical joke played on the _forestieri_, only that no one
could have come into the room without the knowledge of its occupants.
This, and the sudden departure of the “chef” who had been responsible
for the little quails in the soup, did upset the equanimity of the
pretty hostess.
“To think,” she cried, “that I should invite my best friend here, to
starve or poison her!... And that unknown beasts should get into her
drinking-water! I—I have been here every summer for eleven years and I
have never seen a beast like that!”
She thought we had dreamt the first monster. The second was carried in
to her, with its horrible transparent legs bristling over the tumbler.
She surveyed it hopelessly.
“_Il ne manquait plus que cela!_”
* * * * *
Yet one looks back on it all with a kind of tenderness. It was all so
picturesque! What a dwelling might have been made of that antique castle
by anyone who had the money and the art to spend it!
But, alas!... In the great stone bedchambers where we lodged there were
blinds with Swiss scenes depicted in the most vivid colours: a mountain
maiden and a Mont Blanc, and a torrent upon each.... Incongruity could
go no farther—except perhaps in the billiard-room, which had been done
up by the _Principe_ and was always shown off with great pomp. It was a
splendid vaulted apartment, dating from the Barbarossa period; there
were four deep niches hewn out of the stone: well, in two of these were
placed large Chinese Mandarins, with heads that nodded if anyone could
reach high enough to set them going; and, in the other two were plaster
statues of the worst garden description: Flora with a basket, Ceres with
a lumpy sheaf!
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[Illustration: AUTUMN]
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[Illustration: landscape with man and pets]