A celebrated, if rather medievally minded, preacher, whom we once heard lashing the vices of the day, cried sarcastically: “You’ll meet the very best society in hell.”
Holy man, we doubt if he would have made the same remark to-day! The resort in question must have become so overwhelmingly German.
July 8.—The Signora had been a whole year at the Villino—perhaps the longest time in all her life in one place—but circumstances had summoned her family to London for a few days, and she could not contemplate their being exposed to Zeppelins without her.
The little London house which was our home so long, and—to use nursery parlance—the nose of which has been so completely put out of joint by the Villino, seemed glad to see us again.
How curious is the atmosphere of place! These walls that enfold us, that have seen our swift joys and our great sorrows, our merry hours and our sad ones, become fond of us, as we of them. We are convinced that there is a spirit in inanimate things, something that gives back, that keeps. Do not old places ponder? Are they not set with memories? Do they not know their own? Do they not withhold themselves and suffer from the stranger? Who has not seen the millionaire striving to make himself at home in the great house that will have none of him? Who has not felt what an accident he is, how little he belongs, how little he or his race will ever belong to the stones he has bought, and which he will never own?
And even a little London house in a street may become individual to oneself; and you may feel as the Signora did, that it has missed you, that through long absence you have been unkind; that if you finally separate yourself from it, it will always want you, and you it. And, after all—it is with houses, as with people—the link is not necessarily that of the blood relationship or long acquaintance. You need not have inherited your affinity. You are in sympathy, or you are not. The Villino claimed us upon our first meeting, but we impressed ourselves upon the town dwelling. It is still home to us; not the home, a home.
We sat in the high-ceilinged drawing-room, with its rather delicate Georgian air, and found old familiar emotions waiting for us. And we thought of all the kind and dear friends we had seen between these walls; of our gay little parties and the music-makers who had made music to us; hours that seemed to belong to another life. Here the great Pole, whose magic hands have refused themselves to the notes ever since his people have been in anguish, made the night wonderful with his incomparable art. We do not think the small London house can ever forget the echoes of that music. It was always a feast for it when he, with whose friendship we feel ourselves so deeply honoured, came to its board. Loki—he was in his puppyhood then—decorated with the Polish colours, would dance towards him on his hind-legs. The genius would come in like sunshine, happy himself in the immense pleasure his presence gave. Certainly this rare being seemed to give forth light.
“When he leaves the room,” said a friend of his to us, “it is as if the light went out.”
If one had the gift of beholding auras, what a halo of fire would one not have seen about that wonderful head? We once said this to him.