II
It was only when we perceived farther down the wall to the left an archway opening into a white farm court, and an old peasant woman looking out of it, that we came back to the ordinary affairs of life. Which, for ourselves, consisted in getting to Bassano. And we found it, after following out of our rocky gorge a river that no one would have suspected of being the lazy Venetian Brenta, one of the most seductive little towns in the universe. Its ivied walls, its capricious streets, its overshadowing eaves, its pictured façades, its covered bridge, its noisy green river, so ravished two wanderers fresh from the pseudo-classicism of Munich that they instantly resolved to spend there the remainder of their lives.
Certain obstacles, however, opposed this project. The hotels, otherwise perfect establishments of their kind, afforded no outlook save upon the blackest alleys. And these on market mornings were nothing less than bedlam. Moreover a heavenly apartment we had descried from afar, at the top of a house overhanging the Brenta, with a corner loggia that reminded us of the one we had seen in the Val Sugana—an apartment after which no other apartment in the world could make us happy—was occupied by an unnatural parent of many children who refused to entertain our polite proposal that she vacate in our favour, even when we proved to her that we would save her offspring’s lives in taking the lease off her hands.
So when our Dæmon led us, sad and destitute of matches, not only to the Caffè al Mondo but to the table next Principe Montughi, we fell as ripe plums into his mouth. But my phrase is far from happy if it lead the reader to imagine that he is about to be treated to a portrait of the dark and designing Italian of romance. In the first place, Principe Montughi might very well have been described as fair. In all his subsequent dealings with us he certainly was. In the second place, the suggestion that we should occupy a part of his villa had its origin, I remember, in the audacity of my wife. For the rest, I am ready to allow that he was one of the most imposing persons I ever met. The mere sight of his silk hat was a lesson in worldly wisdom, while the air with which he offered me—no: with which he proffered me—the match of destiny made me realise that I must be born again, and a Latin, to carry life off with such a hand. What was more striking about him, though, at least to my Anglo-Saxon eye, was the way he filled his immaculate morning-coat, as if no clothes could ever be big enough for his arms and shoulders. And his head, which was set close to them, looked better suited to batter in gates than to carry silk hats. But its size and squareness and general competence contrasted oddly, again, with the eyes. These were of so pale a blue that from a distance they had the emptiness of a statue’s gaze. I wondered whether it were the contiguity of them, or the extreme narrowness of the forehead above them, or the surprised flare of their nearly intermingled eyebrows, that gave them the look of trouble so magnificently contradicted by everything else about the Prince.
Therefore when I say that we fell as ripe plums into his mouth, I merely choose a less graceful, though perhaps less pompous, way of saying that fate had prepared us for him and him for us. And I shall waste no time in pretending that his villa was not the one we had seen up the river. That would make too light of an element of the fatal in our chance relation of which I, for one, became increasingly conscious. Yet after the way we had gone on about the place, he could scarcely do less than invite us to drive out the next day and see it.
If we secretly trembled lest our first impression were destined to suffer the common lot of first impressions, we proved that we had been right after all. We began to know it as soon as we clattered under the archway of the podere, passed out of the picturesque white court into an olive yard, skirted an old garden that had gone all to birds and bushes, and looked down from the terrace into the delicious morning freshness of the cypress avenue. But what really clinched us was the loggia. This was nothing less than a great marble room, opening out of the upper hall of the villa. There were windows on either hand of the door, and in each side wall a niche where statues once had been. As for the front, it was a triptych framed between the low marble parapet and the pillars supporting the roof, wherein were set, with all the art of an Italian May morning, the tangled green of the garden, and the valley shut in between its rocky walls, and the Brenta shining past vineyards and stone pines and scattered farms into a sea of misty sunlight that was the Lombard Plain.
Such a loggia—such a place to work in, to play in, to eat in, to sleep in, to live in—never was on sea or land. Once we set foot in it we forgot Bassano and the unnatural parent and every other human tie; and the Principe was lost. I don’t believe he could have got rid of us if he had wanted to. Though, for that matter, I have always wondered why he didn’t. Which is not saying that we did not discover reasons enough for his keeping us. But as it was he smiled indulgently at our enthusiasm over his barrack, as he called it, apologised for its dilapidated condition, and said that if we would give him time he would make a few necessary improvements. Such, for instance, as scraping the moss from the avenue of cypresses. This proposal we rejected in horror, crying out that we should never dream of using that entrance and that we would infinitely prefer him to scrape the tiles off the floors. We did agree, however, that he should supply service and an occasional carriage, in addition to our meals. With which understanding we took a reluctant leave, warning the Principe to expect us not later than the evening of the second day.
And thus it was that from a carriage hired in the whim of a honeymoon we alighted in an episode the most memorable of our lives.