Somewhat later in the day, they went out for a stroll through the
town together. To Herminia's great relief, Alan never even noticed
she had been crying. Man-like, he was absorbed in his own delight.
She would have felt herself a traitor if Alan had discovered it.
"Which way shall we go?" she asked listlessly, with a glance to
right and left, as they passed beneath the sombre Tuscan gate of
their palazzo.
And Alan answered, smiling, "Why, what does it matter? Which way
you like. Every way is a picture."
And so it was, Herminia herself was fain to admit, in a pure
painter's sense that didn't at all attract her. Lines grouped
themselves against the sky in infinite diversity. Whichever way
they turned quaint old walls met their eyes, and tumble-down
churches, and mouldering towers, and mediaeval palazzi with carved
doorways or rich loggias. But whichever way they turned dusty
roads too confronted them, illimitable stretches of gloomy suburb,
unwholesome airs, sickening sights and sounds and perfumes. Narrow
streets swept, darkling, under pointed archways, that framed
distant vistas of spire or campanile, silhouetted against the solid
blue sky of Italy. The crystal hardness of that sapphire firmament
repelled Herminia. They passed beneath the triumphal arch of
Augustus with its Etruscan mason-work, its Roman decorations, and
round the antique walls, aglow with tufted gillyflowers, to the
bare Piazza d'Armi. A cattle fair was going on there; and Alan
pointed with pleasure to the curious fact that the oxen were all
cream-colored,--the famous white steers of Clitumnus. Herminia
knew her Virgil as well as Alan himself, and murmured half aloud
the sonorous hexameter, "Romanos ad templa deum duxere triumphos."
But somehow, the knowledge that these were indeed the milk-white
bullocks of Clitumnus failed amid so much dust to arouse her
enthusiasm. She would have been better pleased just then with a
yellow English primrose.
They clambered down the terraced ravines sometimes, a day or two
later, to arid banks by a dry torrent's bed where Italian primroses
really grew, interspersed with tall grape-hyacinths, and scented
violets, and glossy cleft leaves of winter aconite. But even the
primroses were not the same thing to Herminia as those she used to
gather on the dewy slopes of the Redlands; they were so dry and
dust-grimed, and the path by the torrent's side was so distasteful
and unsavory. Bare white boughs of twisted fig-trees depressed
her. Besides, these hills were steep, and Herminia felt the
climbing. Nothing in city or suburbs attracted her soul. Etruscan
Volumnii, each lolling in white travertine on the sculptured lid of
his own sarcophagus urn, and all duly ranged in the twilight of
their tomb at their spectral banquet, stirred her heart but feebly.
St. Francis, Santa Chiara, fell flat on her English fancy. But as
for Alan, he revelled all day long in his native element. He
sketched every morning, among the huddled, strangled lanes;
sketched churches and monasteries, and portals of palazzi; sketched
mountains clear-cut in that pellucid air; till Herminia wondered
how he could sit so long in the broiling sun or keen wind on those
bare hillsides, or on broken brick parapets in those noisome
byways. But your born sketcher is oblivious of all on earth save
his chosen art; and Alan was essentially a painter in fibre,
diverted by pure circumstance into a Chancery practice.