The Call of the Blood - Page 32/317

Hermione's cottage, the eyrie to which she was bringing Maurice Delarey,

was only a cottage, although to Lucrezia it seemed almost a palace. It

was whitewashed, with a sloping roof of tiles, and windows with green

Venetian shutters. Although it now belonged to a contadino, it had

originally been built by a priest, who had possessed vineyards on the

mountain-side, and who wished to have a home to which he could escape

from the town where he lived when the burning heats of the summer set in.

Above his vineyards, some hundreds of yards from the summit of the

mountain, and close to a grove of oaks and olive-trees, which grew among

a turmoil of mighty boulders, he had terraced out the slope and set his

country home. At the edge of the rough path which led to the cottage from

the ravine below was a ruined Norman arch. This served as a portal of

entrance. Between it and the cottage was a well surrounded by crumbling

walls, with stone seats built into them. Passing that, one came at once

to the terrace of earth, fronted by a low wall with narrow seats covered

with white tiles, and divided by broken columns that edged the ravine and

commanded the great view on which Lucrezia had been gazing. On the wall

of this terrace were stone vases, in which scarlet geraniums were

growing. Red roses twined around the columns, and, beneath, the steep

side of the ravine was clothed with a tangle of vegetation, olive and

peach, pear and apple trees. Behind the cottage rose the bare

mountain-side, covered with loose stones and rocks, among which in every

available interstice the diligent peasants had sown corn and barley. Here

and there upon the mountains distant cottages were visible, but on Monte

Amato Hermione's was the last, the most intrepid. None other ventured to

cling to the warm earth so high above the sea and in a place so

solitary. That was why Hermione loved it, because it was near the sky

and very far away.

Now, after an earnest, ruminating glance at the cottage, Lucrezia walked

across the terrace and reverently entered it by a door which opened onto

a flight of three steps leading down to the terrace. Already she knew the

interior by heart, but she had not lost her awe of it, her sense almost

of being in a church when she stood among the furniture, the hangings,

and the pictures which she had helped to arrange under Gaspare's orders.

The room she now stood in was the parlor of the cottage, serving as

dining-room, drawing-room, boudoir, and den. Although it must be put to

so many purposes, it was only a small, square chamber, and very simply

furnished. The walls, like all the walls of the cottage inside and out,

were whitewashed. On the floor was a carpet that had been woven in

Kairouan, the sacred African town where Artois was now staying and making

notes for his new book. It was thick and rough, and many-colored almost

as Joseph's coat; brilliant but not garish, for the African has a strange

art of making colors friends instead of enemies, of blending them into

harmonies that are gay yet touched with peace. On the walls hung a few

reproductions of fine pictures: an old woman of Rembrandt, in whose

wrinkled face and glittering dark eyes the past pleasures and past

sorrows of life seemed tenderly, pensively united, mellowed by the years

into a soft bloom, a quiet beauty; an allegory of Watts, fierce with

inspiration like fire mounting up to an opening heaven; a landscape of

Frederick Walker's, the romance of harvest in an autumn land;

Burne-Jones's "The Mill," and a copy in oils of a knight of Gustave

Moreau's, riding in armor over the summit of a hill into an unseen

country of errantry, some fairy-land forlorn. There was, too, an old

Venetian mirror in a curiously twisted golden frame.