“Parting is such sweet sorrow,” sighed Juliet.
But the girl of fourteen saw in the act an excuse for endless
impassioned kisses. The world-worn poet Haraucourt better understood the
disastrous effect of saying good-bye.
“_Partir_” he cries, “_c'est mourir un feu!_”
“To leave, to part, is to die a little.” Unless, indeed, death be a more
desirable state than life,--as who in this world can possibly affirm,
or deny,--except our Holy Mother Church?--It were safer then, never to
leave, never to part. This is perhaps the true course of wisdom, to live
in the same spot, content with the same people. They, after all, are
sure to be exceedingly like the people one will find elsewhere; and, ten
to one, prove to be verily rather nicer, as experience is apt to show.
Yet Juliet and Haraucourt are agreed upon one point; parting, whether to
the accompaniment of kisses or of death, a little,--parting is a sorrow.
The parting of their ways, to the three occupants of Villa Santa
Cecilia, was poignant. To each, after his kind the next twenty-four
hours were inexpressibly distressing. Ponty got through them
stoically and worked off some of his feelings in an unconscionable and
conscienceless number of cigarettes. Lucilla wept and prayed. Ruth said
very little and directed her packing in a suffocation of heartache.
As the train passed out from the station at Florence, bearing her with
Pontycroft towards Genoa, Ruth's tears gushed like fountains of water.
Nor did she in the least try to conceal her distress from Ponty who sat
quietly regarding the landscape from the other side of the compartment.
It had been arranged that he should return for Lucilla, thus giving to
that lady a welcome day's grace, when Ruth had been safely handed over
to the Bolingbrokes, friends of Lucilla, a young Secretary from the
British Embassy in Rome and his bride, on their way out, to Washington.
Their names Ponty had, with relief, discovered among the list, at
Humbert's of the ship's passengers.
The varied, finished, complex Tuscan landscape passed all leisurely
before their eyes; the olive groves, the orange-pink willows; the white
streams romping under grey arches; the villages, the mediaeval cytties,
scattered by the way, the rose-coloured or white monasteries and villas
on the sun-decked hillsides. From the little old churches and campaniles
of the plain, from the convents perched far above them, innumerable
silvery peals of chimes came floating, in tune, out of tune, it mattered
not. As a matter of fact, they were shockingly out of tune; the quality
of the Tuscan air is, however, so extraordinary an embellisher of sound
as well as of scene, that all sounds become harmonious, even as every
scene arranges itself into a primitive picture, thanks to this most
beautifying of mediums.
“How can I leave it, how _can_ I leave it?” Ruth was saying to herself.
“You know, I think I'm a goose,” she let fall at last, smiling at
Pontycroft through her tears.
“My sweet child,” said Pontycroft, “we must aye live and learn! And
you're so young that living and learning may still be supposed to hold
elements of interest. There's a lot ahead of you that's new and strange,
so dry your pretty eyes, and _Sursum Corda_.”
“My soul misgives me that the new and strange will contain nothing
approaching to this,” Ruth said, nodding her head towards the
window. “And I don't think I shall like doing without it,” she added
plaintively.
“God's country,” said Pontycroft, “won't look like this, to be sure, nor
give you a single blessed one of these fine emotions, these raptures.
But after all, it's the first wrench that costs, says the prophet, and
since we're not here entirely, he assures us, to amuse ourselves, a
visit to God's country may prove a salutary if bitter pill to a young
lady surfeited with the sweets of Europe.”
“Dio mio,” Ruth cried, “since when has Pontycroft turned moralist?”
“From the hour he was made to realise the fatal effects of reckless
paradox,” Ponty answered, with mock solemnity.
They fell to chaffing one another as naturally as possible and the time
flew.
“_Genoa la Suferba, Genoa la Suferba!_ How perfectly, how radiantly the
word describes her fits her,” murmured Ruth when, after a succession of
tunnels, in the early afternoon, the sumptuous town burst upon them.
The dazzling town, her flashing panoply of palaces, villas, gardens,
churches, mounting up, and up--her hill, leaning firmly against the
background of blue skies, blue as the Virgin Mary's robe.
“The imagination, the purpose, in those lines of architecture, those
formal gardens!” cried Ruth. “How daring, uncompromising, beauty is in
this land of Italy. And see, the Mediterranean, all sparkle and laughter
there at her feet!” She leaned forward; then fell back against the
cushions, savouring with heart as well as eyes the brilliant vision.
The train hammered heavily into the station.
“Ge--no--a! Ge--no--a!” The nasal cry reverberated through the
glass-covered dome. There was noisy confusion of opening carriage doors,
of passengers descending, calling, embracing, greeting; of porters
running hither and yon; of trucks of luggage blocking the way amid a
commotion of officialdom.
Ruth stood quietly in the uproar, and gazed upon it, and at Ponty's lank
figure, while he dealt with the business of the occasion. Her heart was
beating tumultuously. She felt a violent impulse to run away and hide
herself.
“The beginning of the end,” she cried. “It is the beginning of the end.
Why have I done this?”
A moment later she had shaken hands with the Bolingbrokes; she was
saying good-bye to Pontycroft from the window of the carriage which was
to take her, with her new acquaintances, to the ship.
Ruth's sympathetic Italian maid, waiting and watching in the background,
in a hack laden with luggage, murmured to herself: “_Pover
a, Poverella!_”