“I HAVE YOU STILL, THE SUN COMES OUT AGAIN.”
The new year was just a week old, and Isola and Allegra were standing
on a terraced hillside in a country where January has noontides as
brilliant and balmy as an English June. They had travelled up that
almost perpendicular hill in a roomy landau drawn by a pair of strong
horses, and now, near the summit of the hill, on the last of those
many terraces that zig-zag up the face of the cliff, they had alighted
from the carriage, and were standing side by side upon the broad white
road, at an angle where the cliff dipped suddenly, clothed with the
wild growth of stunted olive and bushy pine, down and down to the abyss
where the blue sea looked like a sapphire at the bottom of a pit. They
stood and gazed, and gazed again, almost bewildered by the infinite
beauty and variety of that dazzling prospect.
Below them, in the shelter of the land-locked bay, Ospedaletti’s
pavilioned Casino shone whitely out of a garden of palm and cactus,
with terrace and balustrade vanishing down by the sea. To the right,
the steep promontory of Bordighera jutted far out into the blue; and
over the rugged crest of the hill Mentone’s long white front lay in a
gentle curve, almost level with the sea--a strip of vivid white between
the blue of the water and the gloom of that great barren mountain wall
which marks the beginning of modern Italy. And beyond, again, showed
the twin towers of Monaco; and further still, in the dim blue distance,
rose the battlemented line of the Esterelles, dividing the fairyland
of the Riviera from the workaday realities of shipbuilding Toulon and
commercial Marseilles.
On this side of those pine-clad mountains there were only pleasure and
fancy, wealth, fashion, the languid invalid, and the feverish gambler;
on the other side there were toilers and speculators, the bourse and
the port, the world of stern fact.
To the left, deep down within the hills, lay the little harbour of San
Remo, with its rugged stone pier and its shabby old houses, and the
old, old town climbing up the steep ascent to that isolated point where
the white dome of the Sanctuary shone out against the milky azure of
the noontide sky; and further and further away stretched the long line
of the olive-clothed hills, to the purple distance, where the seamen’s
church of Madonna della Guardia stands boldly out between sky and sea,
as if it were a half-way house on the road to heaven.
“How lovely it all is!” cried Allegra. “But don’t you feel that one
careless step upon that flowery edge yonder would send us whirling down
the cliffs to awful, inevitable death? When that man passed us just now
with his loaded cart, I felt sick with fear--the wheels seemed to graze
the brink of the abyss as the horse crept slowly along--poor stolid
brute!--unconscious of his danger. It is a dreadful drive, Isola, this
zig-zag road to Colla--slant above slant, backwards and forwards, up
the face of this prodigious cliff. I had to shut my eyes at every turn
of the road, when the world below seemed to swim in a chaos of light
and colour--so beautiful, so terrible! Do you see the height of those
cliffs, terrace above terrace, hill above hill? Why, that level road at
the very bottom is the top of a taller cliff than those I used to think
so appalling at Broadstairs and Ramsgate!”
“I don’t think it would make much difference to a man who fell over
the edge whether he fell here or in the Isle of Thanet,” said Martin
Disney, as he stood, with his arm drawn through his wife’s, sweeping
the prospect with his field glass.
“Oh, but it would! One would be only a sudden shock and a plunge into
the sea, or swift annihilation on the rocks below; but from this awful
height--think of the horror of it! To go whirling down, plucked at here
by an olive branch, or there by a jagged rock, yet always whirling
downward, rebounding from edge to edge, faster, and faster, and faster,
till one were dashed into a shapeless mass on that white road yonder!”
“And to think of people living up there in the clouds, and going to
sleep every night with the knowledge of this mighty wall and that
dreadful abyss in their minds!” she concluded, pointing upward to where
the little white town of Colla straggled along the edge of the hill.
They were going up to see the pictures and books in the little museum
by the church. It was their first excursion, since their arrival in
Italy, for Martin Disney had been anxious that his wife should be
thoroughly rested after her long journey, before she was called upon
to make the slightest exertion. She was looking better and stronger
already, they were both agreed; and she was looking happier, a fact
which gave her husband infinite satisfaction. They had come by the
St. Gothard, had rested a night at Dover and a night at Basle, and
had stopped at Lucerne for three days, and again a couple of days at
Milan, and again at Genoa, exploring the city, and the Campo Santo in
a leisurely way; Allegra exalted out of herself almost by the delight
of those wonderful collections in the palaces of the Via Balbi--the
Veroneses, the Titians, the Guidos--Isola languidly admiring, languidly
wondering at everything, but only deeply moved when they came to the
strange city of the dead, the scenic representation of sickness,
calamity, grief and dissolution, in every variety of realistic
representation or of classic emblem. Sculptured scenes of domestic
sorrow, dying fathers, kneeling children, weeping widows--whole
families convulsed in the throes of that last inevitable parting;
the death of youth and beauty; the fallen rose-wreath; the funeral
urn; the lowered torch; hyacinth and butterfly; Psyche and Apollo;
the fatal river and the fatal boat; grimness and beauty--the actual
and the allegorical curiously mixed in the sculptured images that
line the cold white colonnades, where the footsteps of holiday-makers
echo with a sepulchral sound under the vaulted roof. Here Isola was
intensely interested, and insisted on going up the marble steps, flight
after flight, and to the very summit of the hill of graves, with its
wide-reaching prospect of mountain, and fort, and city, and sea.
“Think how hard it must be to lie here and know nothing of all that
loveliness,” she said, her eyes widening with wonder as they gazed
across the varied perspective of vale and mountain, out to the faint
blue sea. “How hard, how hard! Do they feel it and know it, Allegra?
Can this I--which feels so keenly, which only sleeps in order to enter
a new world of dreams--busier and more crowded and more eventful than
the real world--can this consciousness go out all at once like the
flame of a candle--and nothing, nothing, nothing be left?”
“They are not here,” said Allegra, with gentle seriousness. “It is only
the husk that lies here--the flower-seed has been carried off in God’s
great wind of death--and the flower is blossoming somewhere else.”
“One allegory is as good as another,” said Isola. “We can but console
ourselves with symbols. I don’t like this crowded city of the dead,
Allegra. For God’s sake, don’t let Martin have me buried here, if I
should die at San Remo!”
“Dearest, why will you harbour such ghastly thoughts?”
“Oh, it was only a passing fancy. I thought it just possible that if I
were to die while we are in Italy, Martin might think to honour me by
having me laid in this splendid cemetery. He seemed so struck by the
grandeur and beauty of the monuments, just now, when we were in those
colonnades down yonder.”
Colonel Disney had lingered a little way off to look at Mazzini’s
monument. He came up to them now, and hurried them back to the gate,
where their carriage was waiting. And so ended their last afternoon in
Genoa; and the most vivid picture of the city and its surroundings that
Isola carried away with her was the picture of those marble tombs upon
the hill, and those tall and gloomy cypresses which are the trees of
death.
* * * * *
Yes, she was better, gayer, and more active--more like the girl-wife
whom Martin Disney had carried home to Cornwall, prouder than Tristram
when he sailed away with Irish Isolt.
The Italian sunshine had revived his fading flower, Disney told
himself, ready to love all things in a land that had brought the smiles
back to his wife’s pale lips, and a delicate bloom to her wan cheeks.
Yes, she was happier than she had been of late in Cornwall. He saw and
rejoiced in the change.
They stayed at a hotel for more than a week, while they deliberated
upon the choice of a villa. They found one at last, which seemed to
realize their ideas of perfection. It was not a grand or stately
dwelling. No marble bell-tower or architectural loggia attracted the
eye of the passing pedestrian. It was roomy, and bright, and clean, and
airy, built rather in the Swiss than the Italian style, and it stood
upon the slope of the hill on the west side of the town, with nothing
but olive-woods between its terraced garden and the road that skirted
the sea. It was a reminiscence of the Alps, built by a retired merchant
of Zurich, and its owner had called it Lauter Brunnen. The house was
at most two years old; but life’s vicissitudes had left it empty for
a year and a half, and the rent asked of Colonel Disney was much less
than he had been prepared to pay.
The installation was full of delight for Isola and her sister-in-law.
The house afforded innumerable surprises, unexpected nooks and corners
of all kinds. There were lovely views from every window--east, west,
north, or south--and there was a garden full of roses, a garden made
upon so steep a slope that it was a succession of terraces, with but
little intervening level ground, and below the lowest terrace the
valley stretched down to the sea, a tangle of gnarled old olive trees,
wan and silvery, with a ruined gateway just seen among the foliage at
the bottom of a dim grey glade.
To the right, straggling along the edge of the wooded hill, appeared
the white houses and churches, cupola, pinnacle, and dome of Colla, so
scattered as to seem two towns rather than one, and with picturesque
suggestions of architectural splendour that were hardly borne out by
the reality, when one climbed those rugged mule-paths, and crossed the
romantic gorge above the waterfall, and then upward and upward to the
narrow alleys and crumbling archways, and the spacious old church with
its lofty doorway standing high above the stony street.
* * * * *
Only a few paces from Colonel Disney’s villa there was a stately house
that had gone to ruin. The roof was off in some places; there were
neither floors nor windows left; and the walls were open to the wind
and rain--frescoed walls, upon which might be traced figures of saint
and martyr, angel and madonna. There was a spacious garden, with an
avenue of cypresses--a garden where the flowers had been growing wild
for years, and where Isola and Allegra wandered and explored as they
pleased. It was higher on the hillside than their own villa, and from
the eastward edge of this garden they looked--across a yawning gulf
in which lay all the lower town of San Remo--to the Sanctuary and the
Leper Hospital, conspicuous on the crest of the opposite hill.
The need for Citadel and Sanctuary had passed with the fiercer age in
which they were built. Neither Saracen nor pirate menaced San Remo
nowadays; but the old white walls made a picturesque note in the
landscape, and the very name of Sanctuary had a romantic sound.
The first week in the new house was like a week in fairyland. The
weather was peerless--a climate that makes people forget there is such
a season as winter in the world--and the two girls wandered about in
the olive woods and climbed the mule-paths all through the fresh balmy
hours or in the hottest noontides sat in the deserted garden or in
a sheltered corner near an old stone well--one of those wells which
suggest the meeting of Isaac and Rebecca--and Allegra painted while
Isola read to her, in the low sweet voice which lent new and individual
music to the sweetest verse of her favourites, Byron, Keats, and
Shelley.
In these sequestered spots, where only a peasant woman laden with a
basket of olives, or a padre, going from Colla to San Remo, ever passed
within sight of them, they read the Eve of St. Agnes and the Pot of
Basil--the Prisoner of Chillon, Manfred, and all those familiar lyrics
and favourite passages of Shelley which Isola held in her heart of
hearts. The wonder-dream of Alastor--the passionate lament of Adonaïs,
could not seem purer or more spiritual than the life of these young
women in those calm days through which January slipped into February,
unawares, like a link in a golden chain--a chain of sunshine and
flowers.
In February came the Carnival; and pretty little rustic San Remo decked
itself with bunting and greenery, and made believe to hold a Battle
of Flowers, which had a certain village simplicity as compared with
the serried ranks of carriages, the fashion, and beauty, and wealth
of floral displays, along the Promenade des Anglais or the Croisette.
With the Carnival came the mistral, which generally seems to be waiting
round the corner ready to leap out upon the flower-throwers, to blight
their bouquets, and blow dust into the eyes of beauty, and make the
feeble health-seekers cower in the corners of their rose-decked
carriages. This Lenten season was no exception to other seasons; and
the calendar--which had been as it were in abeyance since New Year’s
Day--came into force again--and stern and sterile Winter said, “Here
am I. Did you think I had forgotten you?” The invalids were roughly
awakened from their dream of Paradise, to discover that February even
in San Remo meant February, and could not always be mistaken for May or
June.
Isola felt the change, though she was hardly conscious of it on the
day of the floral battle, when she was sitting in a roomy landau,
covered with the dark shining foliage and pale yellow fruit from some
of those lemon trees in the orchard where she and Allegra had spent
their morning hours. Allegra had planned the decorations, and had gone
down to the coach-house to assist in the work, delighted to chatter
with the coachman in doubtful Italian, groping her way in a language in
which her whole stock-in-trade consisted of a few quotations from Dante
or Petrarch--and all the wise saws of Dr. Riccabocca.
“I would have none of that horrid pepper tree which pervades the
place with its floppy foliage, and dull red fruit,” she told Isola,
descanting on the result of her exertions. “I was rather taken with the
pepper trees at first, but I am satiated with their languid grace. They
are like the weeping ash or the weeping willow. There is no real beauty
in them. I would rather have one of those cypresses towering up among
the grey-green olives in the valley below Colla than all the pepper
trees in the public gardens. I have used no flowers but narcissus;
no colour but the pale gold of the lemons and the dark green of the
leaves; except one bit of audacity which you will see presently.”
This was at noon, after two hours’ work in the coach-house. An hour
later the carriage was at the door.
Allegra’s audacity was an Algerian curtain, a rainbow of vivid colour,
with which she had draped the back of the landau, hiding all the
ugliness of rusty leather. The carriage, or it might have been the two
girlish faces in it, one so pale and gentle, the other so brilliant
and changeful in its lights and shadows, made the point of attraction
in the little procession. Everybody spoke of the two girls in the
lemon landau, with the nice-looking, middle-aged man. Were they his
daughters, people wondered, or his nieces; and at what hotel were they
staying? It was a disappointment to discover that they were living in
that villa to the west of the town, out of the way of everything and
everybody, and that they were seldom to be seen in public, except at
the new church, where they were regular worshippers.
“The man is Colonel Disney, and the tall, striking-looking girl is his
wife,” said one person better informed than the rest, but making a
wrong selection all the same.