It was only when we perceived farther down the wall to the left an
archway opening into a white farm court, and an old peasant woman
looking out of it, that we came back to the ordinary affairs of life.
Which, for ourselves, consisted in getting to Bassano. And we found it,
after following out of our rocky gorge a river that no one would have
suspected of being the lazy Venetian Brenta, one of the most seductive
little towns in the universe. Its ivied walls, its capricious streets,
its overshadowing eaves, its pictured façades, its covered bridge,
its noisy green river, so ravished two wanderers fresh from the
pseudo-classicism of Munich that they instantly resolved to spend there
the remainder of their lives.
Certain obstacles, however, opposed this project. The hotels, otherwise
perfect establishments of their kind, afforded no outlook save upon the
blackest alleys. And these on market mornings were nothing less than
bedlam. Moreover a heavenly apartment we had descried from afar, at
the top of a house overhanging the Brenta, with a corner loggia that
reminded us of the one we had seen in the Val Sugana--an apartment
after which no other apartment in the world could make us happy--was
occupied by an unnatural parent of many children who refused to
entertain our polite proposal that she vacate in our favour, even when
we proved to her that we would save her offspring’s lives in taking the
lease off her hands.
So when our Dæmon led us, sad and destitute of matches, not only to
the Caffè al Mondo but to the table next Principe Montughi, we fell as
ripe plums into his mouth. But my phrase is far from happy if it lead
the reader to imagine that he is about to be treated to a portrait of
the dark and designing Italian of romance. In the first place, Principe
Montughi might very well have been described as fair. In all his
subsequent dealings with us he certainly was. In the second place, the
suggestion that we should occupy a part of his villa had its origin,
I remember, in the audacity of my wife. For the rest, I am ready to
allow that he was one of the most imposing persons I ever met. The mere
sight of his silk hat was a lesson in worldly wisdom, while the air
with which he offered me--no: with which he proffered me--the match
of destiny made me realise that I must be born again, and a Latin, to
carry life off with such a hand. What was more striking about him,
though, at least to my Anglo-Saxon eye, was the way he filled his
immaculate morning-coat, as if no clothes could ever be big enough for
his arms and shoulders. And his head, which was set close to them,
looked better suited to batter in gates than to carry silk hats. But
its size and squareness and general competence contrasted oddly, again,
with the eyes. These were of so pale a blue that from a distance they
had the emptiness of a statue’s gaze. I wondered whether it were the
contiguity of them, or the extreme narrowness of the forehead above
them, or the surprised flare of their nearly intermingled eyebrows,
that gave them the look of trouble so magnificently contradicted by
everything else about the Prince.
Therefore when I say that we fell as ripe plums into his mouth, I
merely choose a less graceful, though perhaps less pompous, way of
saying that fate had prepared us for him and him for us. And I shall
waste no time in pretending that his villa was not the one we had
seen up the river. That would make too light of an element of the
fatal in our chance relation of which I, for one, became increasingly
conscious. Yet after the way we had gone on about the place, he could
scarcely do less than invite us to drive out the next day and see it.
If we secretly trembled lest our first impression were destined to
suffer the common lot of first impressions, we proved that we had been
right after all. We began to know it as soon as we clattered under the
archway of the _podere_, passed out of the picturesque white court into
an olive yard, skirted an old garden that had gone all to birds and
bushes, and looked down from the terrace into the delicious morning
freshness of the cypress avenue. But what really clinched us was the
loggia. This was nothing less than a great marble room, opening out of
the upper hall of the villa. There were windows on either hand of the
door, and in each side wall a niche where statues once had been. As for
the front, it was a triptych framed between the low marble parapet and
the pillars supporting the roof, wherein were set, with all the art of
an Italian May morning, the tangled green of the garden, and the valley
shut in between its rocky walls, and the Brenta shining past vineyards
and stone pines and scattered farms into a sea of misty sunlight that
was the Lombard Plain.
Such a loggia--such a place to work in, to play in, to eat in, to
sleep in, to live in--never was on sea or land. Once we set foot in
it we forgot Bassano and the unnatural parent and every other human
tie; and the _Principe_ was lost. I don’t believe he could have got
rid of us if he had wanted to. Though, for that matter, I have always
wondered why he didn’t. Which is not saying that we did not discover
reasons enough for his keeping us. But as it was he smiled indulgently
at our enthusiasm over his barrack, as he called it, apologised for its
dilapidated condition, and said that if we would give him time he would
make a few necessary improvements. Such, for instance, as scraping the
moss from the avenue of cypresses. This proposal we rejected in horror,
crying out that we should never dream of using that entrance and that
we would infinitely prefer him to scrape the tiles off the floors. We
did agree, however, that he should supply service and an occasional
carriage, in addition to our meals. With which understanding we took a
reluctant leave, warning the _Principe_ to expect us not later than the
evening of the second day.
And thus it was that from a carriage hired in the whim of a honeymoon
we alighted in an episode the most memorable of our lives.