|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 57
The uneventful days--only outwardly uneventful--slipped by in
floods of sunshine, and the servants, watching the four ladies, came to
the conclusion there was very little life in them.
To the servants San Salvatore seemed asleep. No one came to tea,
nor did the ladies go anywhere to tea. Other tenants in other springs
had been far more active. There had been stir and enterprise; the boat
had been used; excursions had been made; Beppo's fly was ordered;
people from Mezzago came over and spent the day; the house rang with
voices; even sometimes champagne had been drunk. Life was varied, life
was interesting. But this? What was this? The servants were not even
scolded. They were left completely to themselves. They yawned.
Perplexing, too, was the entire absence of gentlemen. How could
gentlemen keep away from so much beauty? For, added up, and even after
the subtraction of the old one, the three younger ladies produced a
formidable total of that which gentlemen usually sought.
Also the evident desire of each lady to spend long hours
separated from the other ladies puzzled the servants. The result was a
deathly stillness in the house, except at meal-times. It might have
been as empty as it had been all the winter, for any sounds of life
there were. The old lady sat in her room, alone; the dark-eyed lady
wandered off alone, loitering, so Domenico told them, who sometimes
came across her in the course of his duties, incomprehensibly among the
rocks; the very beautiful fair lady lay in her low chair in the top
garden, alone; the less, but still beautiful fair lady want up the
hills and stayed up them for hours, alone; and every day the sun blazed
slowly round the house, and disappeared at evening into the sea, and
nothing at all had happened.
The servants yawned.
Yes the four visitors, while their bodies sat--that was Mrs.
Fisher's--or lay--that was Lady Caroline's--or loitered--that was Mrs.
Arbuthnot's--or went in solitude up into the hills--that was Mrs.
Wilkins's--were anything but torpid really. Their minds were unusually
busy. Even at night their minds were busy, and the dreams they had
were clear, thin, quick things, entirely different from the heavy
dreams of home. There was that in the atmosphere of San Salvatore
which produced active-mindedness in all except the natives. They, as
before, whatever the beauty around them, whatever the prodigal seasons
did, remained immune from thoughts other than those they were
accustomed to. All their lives they had seen, year by year, the
amazing recurrent spectacle of April in the gardens, and custom had
made it invisible to them. They were as blind to it, as unconscious of
it, as Domenico's dog asleep in the sun.
The visitors could not be blind to it--it was too arresting after
London in a particularly wet and gloomy March. Suddenly to be
transported to that place where the air was so still that it held its
breath, where the light was so golden that the most ordinary things
were transfigured--to be transported into that delicate warmth, that
caressing fragrance, and to have the old grey castle as the setting,
and, in the distance, the serene clear hills of Perugini's backgrounds,
was an astonishing contrast. Even Lady Caroline, used all her life to
beauty, who had been everywhere and seen everything, felt the surprise
of it. It was, that year, a particularly wonderful spring, and of all
the months at San Salvatore April, if the weather was fine, was best.
May scorched and withered; March was restless, and could be hard and
cold in its brightness; but April came along softly like a blessing,
and if it were a fine April it was so beautiful that it was impossible
not to feel different, not to feel stirred and touched.
Mrs. Wilkins, we have seen, responded to it instantly. She, so
to speak, at once flung off all her garments and dived straight into
glory, unhesitatingly, with a cry of rapture.
Mrs. Arbuthnot was stirred and touched, but differently. She had
odd sensations--presently to be described.
Mrs. Fisher, being old, was of a closer, more impermeable
texture, and offered more resistance; but she too had odd sensations,
also in their place to be described.
Lady Caroline, already amply acquainted with beautiful houses and
climates, to whom they could not come quite with the same surprise, yet
was very nearly as quick to react as Mrs. Wilkins. The place had an
almost instantaneous influence on her as well, and of one part of this
influence she was aware: it had made her, beginning on the very first
evening, want to think, and acted on her curiously like a conscience.
What this conscience seemed to press upon her notice with an insistence
that startled her--Lady Caroline hesitated to accept the work, but it
would keep on coming into her head--was that she was tawdry.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|