Part 30

We have said “they were.” Alas for those Dutch bottles, and for our folly, improvident wretches as we are, in setting them about for our own pleasure, instead of shutting them up in a cabinet! Of what were once eleven perfect irreplaceable treasures ‹the twelfth had a large chip off its neck from the beginning›, there are only five left! Tittums, the splendid savage “smoke Persian,” swept the biggest and best off a chimney-piece with taps of a deliberately evil paw.... And the rest have gone the way of vases!

“Very sorry, Miss” ‹it’s generally to the Signorina they come: she takes the edge off the Padrona’s fury›. “I don’t know how it happened, I’m sure. It came to pieces——”

‹Oh, let us stay our pen! Every owner of precious bric-à-brac knows the awful sound of those words, and the futility of resentment.›

The Master of the Villino had a teapot. Of yellow Cantagalli pottery it was, with quaint adornments like caterpillars all over it; it had a snake handle and a long curving spout. He loved it. He never wanted to have his tea out of any other vessel. One morning a stranger sat in its place. He rang the bell severely. One of the nomad footmen, who appear, and camp, and go away, answered it.

“My teapot.”

‹Yes, it was broken.›

“It came to pieces in your hand, I suppose?” said the master sarcastically.

The injured expression of the misjudged became painted on John’s face:

“No, sir,” he said with much dignity, “it shut itself in the door!”

* * * * *

Loki has had a bath, out of due season, because his own artist has come down from London to limn his imperial splendours for his own book. We tried to make him understand that it is only smug nouveaux riches who imagine they can patronize art; that, on the contrary, it is Art which condescends to us. He put on his most Chinese face and became a crocodile on the spot. On such occasions his Grandpa calls him a “Crocowog.” ‹This page is only for the pet dog-lover: superior people, please pass on!› He is very nice to kiss after his bath, a process attended on his side by subterranean growls of protest and an alarming curling of the lip. But—dear little gentle creature as he is at heart—it is not in him to bite even the most persistent tormentor.

When his Grandfather amuses himself by what he calls “Squeezing the growls out” every morning, Loki tries vainly to keep up a show of displeasure, but always ends on his back with a windmill waving of pretty prayerful paws.

Loki has his own very marked ideas on the subject of jokes; at least he has one—in fact, an only joke! It took his Grandfather some time to apprehend it; but constant repetition of the incident ‹after the consecrated fashion of the British farce› is beginning to make him see the point of it. The joke is this: at the top, or the bottom, of the garden, as the case may be, coming in from, or going out for, a walk, Loki stands stock still, generally unperceived till you are midway. No coaxing, whistling, or screaming will budge him. He will stand there a quarter of an hour, it may be. And the point of the joke is that you must get behind him and stamp your feet, and say “Naughty Dog!” Then Loki careers up or down in paroxysms of merriment. This may not appeal to some people’s special bump of hilarity; and as it is useless to try to explain a jest, we will leave those to enjoy the spinach story.

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XXXII

England is so seldom visited by hot weather such as we now have, that, especially in our little place with its foreign stamp within and without, one keeps thinking of other lands. There was the one hot summer we went visiting in country houses in Italy—two country houses, to be precise, and both of them were “castelli.”

* * * * *

The first ‹which we preferred vastly› was on a high plateau in the middle of the Piedmontese plain, not far from Turin. From that entrancing spot the view lay over wide undulating stretches of maize fields and vineyards; and the eye could not turn North, West, East or South without resting on a distant panorama of Alps or Apennines.

That was a hot summer with a vengeance! We were met in the dusk of the evening—the soft warm dusk of such days in Italy, when the caress of the air is like the touch of velvet—by a gay little equipage drawn by three mountain horses abreast, each with a collar of bells and a red hussar plume erect on its forehead. It was the most merry vehicle we have ever driven in. How those horses went! How they tossed their heads and how their bells jangled!

A beautiful old French style castello it was, by no means spoilt in our eyes by having been left with rough brick. Now we hear that its ambitious owners have faced it with stone and are themselves charmed with the result. No doubt its original picturesqueness had its disadvantages, for innumerable birds built under the eaves amid those rough bricks. At the approach of any vehicle the air was full of flying wings. The flutter and the sound of them! We thought the place all delightful and characteristic; wonderfully more attractive than the pompous banality of the now renewed mansion, photographs of which we have since had mendaciously to admire.

Inside it was cool and charming; full of old French furniture and irreplaceable family relics. Some of these have recently been sold, to defray, no doubt, part of the cost of the new exterior.

The sedan chair of Madame la Maréchale in pre-Revolution days remains in my memory as a regret; it was a wonder of old Vernis-Martin. We hope they have kept the great flags that used to hang in the hall. The reigning châtelaine did not really care for any of these old things. Her heart was set on the joys of a Roman appartement, and its concomitant social gaieties.

There was a spacious white hall with impossible paintings of a boar hunt on its walls, opening upon an endless series of reception rooms. And through these lofty chambers three little children were running about in little white linen tunics, and nothing on underneath, because of the heat of the weather. Their hair was cut in mediæval fashion, straight across the forehead and straight again across the shoulders. There was also a most adorable baby of eleven months carried about by a soft-eyed Balia. Out of the mountains she had come, this creature, to cherish another’s child! And a series of misfortunes had fallen upon her little home since her departure: the death of her own nursling followed by the death of the cow! “Cara moglie,” her husband wrote on each occasion, “do not grieve. It is the will of God!”

There were no doubt other very simple reasons for these catastrophes: the pitiable poverty of the family which had made it necessary for the poor woman to sell her mother-rights, and possibly the tainted milk of the sick cow which had poisoned the little mountaineer. But call it fate, or the intolerable economic system of modern Italy, it came round in the end to the same thing. “Do not grieve, cara moglie. It is the will of God!”

She had done her best to help her own, and this was her comfort in her sorrow. It was not such a bad comfort; and the most advanced thinker cannot prove after all that it was not the will of God.

It was difficult, too, for the foster-mother to weep long when Baby Maddalena danced on the stone of the terrace with little bare brown feet. She had the bluest eyes and the brownest face that ever we beheld, and laughed and gurgled as she danced, with very high action, upheld by the ends of her sash by the adoring Balia, whose own face and neck above her string of gold beads were the colour of a ripe apricot.

It would be difficult to have devised a fortnight of greater interest, amusement, and quaintness than that of this Piedmontese visit. It was a thoroughly foreign household. The handsome white-bearded athletic father of the Chatelaine, tied to his chair by an attack of gout, had his apartments downstairs. And on an upper floor the mother of the Marchese had her own complete establishment, including a wonderful library, all tawny gold. There was a baroque Chapel; and one of our most vivid recollections was our pulling the children down by their sashes as they swung themselves over the tops of the benches, doubled up like golden fleeces till their curly heads and their little shoes touched.

One thing never to be omitted was to watch Monte Rosa at sunset. The night before our departure there was a thunderstorm far, far away in those Alps where Monte Rosa rises in beauty. At every flash, peak beyond peak shone out in distances hitherto wrapped away even from the imagination.