When the rest of the household were in deep sleep, Randal stood long at
his open window, looking over the dreary, comfortless scene--the moon
gleaming from skies half-autumnal, hall-wintry, upon squalid decay,
through the ragged fissures of the firs; and when he lay down to rest,
his sleep was feverish, and troubled by turbulent dreams.
However, he was up early, and with an unwonted color in his cheeks,
which his sister ascribed to the country air. After breakfast, he took
his way towards Hazeldean, mounted upon a tolerable horse, which he
hired of a neighboring farmer who occasionally hunted. Before noon, the
garden and terrace of the Casino came in sight. He reined in his horse,
and by the little fountain at which Leonard had been wont to eat his
radishes and con his book, he saw Riccabocca seated under the shade of
the red umbrella. And by the Italian's side stood a form that a Greek of
old might have deemed the Naïad of the Fount; for in its youthful beauty
there was something so full of poetry--something at once so sweet and so
stately--that it spoke to the imagination while it charmed the sense.
Randal dismounted, tied his horse to the gate, and, walking down a
trelised alley, came suddenly to the spot. His dark shadow fell over the
clear mirror of the fountain just as Riccabocca had said, "All here is
so secure from evil!--the waves of the fountain are never troubled like
those of the river!" and Violante had answered in her soft native
tongue, and lifting her dark, spiritual eyes--"But the fountain would be
but a lifeless pool, oh my father, if the spray did not mount towards
the skies!"