darkness! And into the crumbling surface of the wall, rude hands had built fragments of the goddesses and the Caesars that had once reigned there, barbarously mingled with warm white morsels from the great cornice of the portico, acanthus blocks from the long buried capitals, or dolphins orphaned of Aphrodite.
The wreck was beautiful, like all wrecks in Italy where Nature has had her way. For it was masked in the gloom of the overhanging trees; or hidden behind dropping veils of ivy; or lit up by straggling patches of broom and cytisus that thrust themselves through the gaps in the Roman brickwork and shone golden in the dark. At the foot of the wall, along its whole length, ran a low marble conduit that held still the sweetest liveliest water. Lilies of the valley grew beside it, breathing scent into the shadowed air; while on the outer or garden side of the path, the grass was purple with long-stalked violets, or pink with the sharp heads of the cyclamen. And a little further, from the same grass, there shot up in a happy neglect, tall camellia-trees ragged and laden, strewing the ground red and white beneath them. And above the camellias again, the famous stone-pines of the villa climbed into the high air, overlooking the plain and the sea, peering at Rome and Soracte.
So old it was!—and yet so fresh with spring! In the mornings at least the spring was uppermost. It silenced the plaint of outraged beauty which the place seemed to be always making, under a flutter of growth and song. Water and flowers and nightingales, the shadow, the sunlight, and the heat, were all alike strong and living,—Italy untamed. It was only in the evenings that Lucy shunned the path. For then, from the soil below and the wall above, there crept out the old imprisoned forces of sadness, or of poison, and her heart flagged or her spirits sank as she sat or walked there. Marinata has no malaria; but on old soils, and as night approaches, there is always something in the shade of Italy that fights with human life. The poor ghosts rise from the earth—jealous of those that are still walking the warm ways of the world.
But in the evenings, when the Fountain Walk drove her forth, the central hot zone of the garden was divine, with its roses and lilacs, its birds, its exquisite grass alive with shining lizards, jewelled with every flower, breathing every scent; and at its edge the old terrace with its balustrade, set above the Campagna, commanding the plain and the sea, the sky and the sunsets.
Evening after evening Lucy might have been found perched on the stone coping of the balustrade, sometimes trying, through the warm silent hours, by the help of this book or that, to call up again the old Roman life; sometimes dreaming of what there might still be—what the archaeologists indeed said must be—buried beneath her feet; of the marble limbs and faces pressed into the earth, and all the other ruined things, small and great, mean or lovely, that lay deep in a common grave below the rustling olives, and the still leafless vineyards; and sometimes the mere passive companion of the breeze and the sun, conscious only of the chirping of the crickets, or the loudness of the nightingales, or the flight of a hoopoe, like some strange bright bird of fairy-tale, flashing from one deep garden-shadow to another.
Yet the garden was not always given up to her and the birds. Peasant folk coming from Albano or the olive-grounds between it and the villa would take a short cut through the garden to Marinata; dark-faced gardeners, in blue linen suits, would doff their peaked hats to the strange lady; or a score or two of young black-frocked priestlings from a neighbouring seminary would suddenly throng its paths, playing mild girlish games, with infinite clamour and chatter, running races as far and fast as their black petticoats would allow, twisting their long overcoats and red sashes meanwhile round a battered old noseless bust that stood for Domitian at the
The wreck was beautiful, like all wrecks in Italy where Nature has had her way. For it was masked in the gloom of the overhanging trees; or hidden behind dropping veils of ivy; or lit up by straggling patches of broom and cytisus that thrust themselves through the gaps in the Roman brickwork and shone golden in the dark. At the foot of the wall, along its whole length, ran a low marble conduit that held still the sweetest liveliest water. Lilies of the valley grew beside it, breathing scent into the shadowed air; while on the outer or garden side of the path, the grass was purple with long-stalked violets, or pink with the sharp heads of the cyclamen. And a little further, from the same grass, there shot up in a happy neglect, tall camellia-trees ragged and laden, strewing the ground red and white beneath them. And above the camellias again, the famous stone-pines of the villa climbed into the high air, overlooking the plain and the sea, peering at Rome and Soracte.
So old it was!—and yet so fresh with spring! In the mornings at least the spring was uppermost. It silenced the plaint of outraged beauty which the place seemed to be always making, under a flutter of growth and song. Water and flowers and nightingales, the shadow, the sunlight, and the heat, were all alike strong and living,—Italy untamed. It was only in the evenings that Lucy shunned the path. For then, from the soil below and the wall above, there crept out the old imprisoned forces of sadness, or of poison, and her heart flagged or her spirits sank as she sat or walked there. Marinata has no malaria; but on old soils, and as night approaches, there is always something in the shade of Italy that fights with human life. The poor ghosts rise from the earth—jealous of those that are still walking the warm ways of the world.
But in the evenings, when the Fountain Walk drove her forth, the central hot zone of the garden was divine, with its roses and lilacs, its birds, its exquisite grass alive with shining lizards, jewelled with every flower, breathing every scent; and at its edge the old terrace with its balustrade, set above the Campagna, commanding the plain and the sea, the sky and the sunsets.
Evening after evening Lucy might have been found perched on the stone coping of the balustrade, sometimes trying, through the warm silent hours, by the help of this book or that, to call up again the old Roman life; sometimes dreaming of what there might still be—what the archaeologists indeed said must be—buried beneath her feet; of the marble limbs and faces pressed into the earth, and all the other ruined things, small and great, mean or lovely, that lay deep in a common grave below the rustling olives, and the still leafless vineyards; and sometimes the mere passive companion of the breeze and the sun, conscious only of the chirping of the crickets, or the loudness of the nightingales, or the flight of a hoopoe, like some strange bright bird of fairy-tale, flashing from one deep garden-shadow to another.
Yet the garden was not always given up to her and the birds. Peasant folk coming from Albano or the olive-grounds between it and the villa would take a short cut through the garden to Marinata; dark-faced gardeners, in blue linen suits, would doff their peaked hats to the strange lady; or a score or two of young black-frocked priestlings from a neighbouring seminary would suddenly throng its paths, playing mild girlish games, with infinite clamour and chatter, running races as far and fast as their black petticoats would allow, twisting their long overcoats and red sashes meanwhile round a battered old noseless bust that stood for Domitian at the
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