Part 31

“Why does the sky do like that?” asked the second boy, vigorously blinking his great eyes. With straight black hair and an odd, serious little countenance, square-jawed and long upper-lipped like a Medici out of Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes, he was the most mediæval-looking of all the children. We loved that four-year-old.... He has grown up, we hear, “impossible” and a burden to his family. We cannot help feeling it must be the family’s fault. The elder boy, much handsomer though he was, did not then promise so well. A terribly nervous child; the cry “Ho paura,” was always on his lips. It hurt his grandfather’s pride that any son of his race should show such degenerate timidity.

One typical scene we were witness of. The little fellow, in great awe of the peremptory, loud-voiced old sportsman, approached him to say good-night; and, hanging his head after the manner of the frightened child, stammered the requisite “Bonsoir, Bonpapa,” almost inaudibly.

Instantly wrath broke out over him. ‹Bonpapa’s temper had not improved with the gout.› “That was not the manner in which to say good-night.”—“A man was to look up: to speak straight.” “What does one say?” he ended, shouting.

“Pardon!” cried the poor, terrified imp, with a wail.

This child, over whom were so many head-shakings, doubts and laments, has grown up so brave and fine a boy that it would have rejoiced the heart of the old Vicomte to see him now. His was a stormy heart that wanted much of life, and therefore, of course, knew much bitterness. It is stilled now, alas! this many a year.

* * * * *

From this comparatively modern mansion in the Piedmont we went to an old, old castle in the plains of Lombardy. The chronicles have it that Barbarossa besieged it. It was approached through a considerable village—one of great antiquity, and still retaining the lines of the Roman castrum, with all its streets parallel or at right-angles. At the top of the main of these the great machicolated entrance of the Castello, with its faded frescoes across the arch, was very impressive in mediæval strength. The church shouldered one corner of the immense pile of outer wall; and each side of the moat, between the towers, inside and out, peasant houses had crept.

The Castello itself, of extreme antiquity, as has been said, formed two sides of a square, round, and flagged courtyard. The garden ran sheer up the hill, within the tower-flanked walls of the outer bailey. There were vineyards inside; and outside, where the ground fell away, the whole land was likewise covered with vines. They ran up and down long ridges, like petrified waves, as far as the eye could see. And in the far, far distance, almost lost in the horizon, were the Alps.

What a view that was from the loopholes of those half-ruined towers—especially at sunset, when there gathered a rosy mist over that curious, wild-tossing expanse!

Could we go back now to that unique spot, what a vast amount of æsthetic pleasure should we not draw from it? But it must be admitted that we were gross-minded enough at the time to allow material discomfort to overcome all other impressions.

To lodge in a genuine old Lombard Castle, with stone floors and stairs hewn in the immense thickness of the stone; to look out upon one side into the moat, and to see the peasant houses clinging to the massive foundations far below like barnacles to a rock; to look out on the other side upon the odd rise of sunburnt garden up to the vineyard and the towers; to imagine oneself back into the very heart of the Middle Ages may be very inspiring, in theory. But mediæval sensibilities were undoubtedly more blunted than ours. The smell of that moat running with the refuse of the crowded Italian village!... For additional pungency, all the water in the place came from sulphur springs! The reek of it was in one’s nostrils all day from merely washing in it.

The household was composed of peasant women out of the village. The wife of the barber, the mother of the shoemaker, and others, clattered about the stone passages in their mules—a style of foot-gear which leaves the foot free from the instep. It was perhaps as well that the heels were high, for their idea of housemaiding ‹a method which appertains in most Italian households to this day› was first to walk about with a pail and to slop water out of it over the flags of the floor; then to sweep the resulting wet mess into a puddle where the stone was worn most hollow or under the carpet!

Some attempts at a housemaid’s sink had been excavated in the stone at the head of the stairs outside our set of rooms; but there was generally a small cataract of soapy water dripping down the steps, for the simple practice of the donna that attended on our apartment was to stand on the landing outside our doors and to shy the contents of her bucket upwards.

* * * * *

The delightful friend with whom we stayed, though not born of the country, had fallen quite resignedly into its ways. And, indeed, the castle was chiefly ruled by the Princesse Mère, a châtelaine of the old school, who used to arise in the grey dawn and pull the iron chain of the great bell that hung outside her windows, to call the vassals to their daily work.

“Come, come!” she was frequently heard addressing some dependent or other whose movements were more indolent than she approved of. “Are you here for your comfort or for mine?”

* * * * *

The table was served, copiously, with singular Italian dishes. There was a favourite soup with stewed quails in it: the whole animal, bones and beak and all! It is an unspeakable dish to have set before you on a hot day. Patties filled with cocks’ combs might follow. Even the Risotto was intermingled with such strange mincings of liver and cutlet trimmings that one hesitated before venturing. The Fritura, needless to say, was in full force. A lucky dip, that! You may come across yesterday’s cauliflower, a bit of forgotten sweetbread, a slice of sausage, a frizzled artichoke, and half the quail you couldn’t eat the night before—all in one spoonful!

Besides the fierce matutinal summons of the domestic bell, one’s sleep was constantly disturbed by a jangle of chimes from the church: a perfect frenzy of joy-bells it was, so prolonged and insistent that sleep was beaten out of one’s brain as with hammers.

* * * * *

“What,” we asked our younger hostess, the third day of this infliction, “what are these carillons, morning after morning?”

“Oh, that?—That is for the Angels’ Mass,” she answered us indifferently.

“The Angels’ Mass?”

“Yes. A child dead in the village.”

“But every morning?”

“There have been several deaths lately. It is the fever from the rice fields.”

Pleasant hearing for a woman with an only little daughter just recovering from a rather serious illness! Every smell that greeted her nostrils afterwards—and they were of a diversified and poignant description—seemed laden with the germs of death. But the young Principessa had absorbed a good deal of the indolent indifference of her adopted country towards hygiene.

“You, with your English notions!” was all the comfort her visitor got, offered in tones of good-humour not unmixed with contempt. Or else: “What you smell, my dear, is only carbolic; and that is very healthy.”