‘An irrepressible longing. It was first aroused in me, I think, by reading, in tender years, Arnold’s History of Rome, whereby I believed as firmly in the Palatine she-wolf, the leap into the Curtian Gulf, the Rape of the Sabine Women, and the nocturnal interviews of Numa and Egeria, as in any of the immediate facts of one’s schoolboy existence; nor did the iconoclastic criticism, with which one perforce made acquaintance later on, in any degree shake that cherished credulity. What romantic prose originated, was consummated by yet more wizard verse. To no mediæval scholar was Virgil more of a magician than to me, and not even Dante would say of him with more truth—
Tu se’ lo mio maestro e il mio autore.
I kept repeating, long before I could translate them into action, the words addressed by Æneas to his immortal Mother, when she appeared to him in the guise of a huntress in the Carthaginian forest, Italiam quaero patriam; for already it seemed to be a second fatherland. And when, at length, the moment arrived that the longing could be indulged, the only words I could find to express my joy were—
Tendimus in Latium, sedes ubi fata quietas
Ostendunt.
‘Stop, stop,’ said Lamia, ‘I wish I understood Latin, but you know I don’t.‘
‘Then,’ he replied, ‘do as I did before I first went to Italy, being then much of the age that you are now. I bought the best Italian grammar I could find, and worked at it as a schoolboy is made to work at the elementary rules of a dead language. I studied the dictionary in like manner; so that, when I went to the new land, I might not long feel quite a stranger there.’
‘The very thing I have been doing, until my brain seems a repository for the various inflections of the subjunctive mood; and, as Veronica corrects my pronunciation, I hope, by the time we reach Latium, to be more or less understanded of the people. But please do not let us concern ourselves with either my shortcomings or my accomplishments; but rather tell me, while I make you some coffee in this windless atmosphere, how you first went to Italy, and when.‘ ‘It is a long story and will occupy some little time.’
‘And so will the making of coffee, if it is to be made properly,’ said Veronica, who had now returned to us, and to whose superior powers Lamia only too willingly surrendered that delicate task.
‘One likes to think,’ he began, ‘that Heaven interests itself in one’s training; and so I used self-flatteringly to conceive that a special care arranged the conditions under which one first beheld the shore of Liguria. I had taken boat at Marseilles direct for Leghorn; and, in ordinary circumstances, we should have passed some thirty-six hours on the open sea, far from sight or surmise of land. It was, therefore, through no intelligent design of one’s own, but through the sheer bounty of the gods, that the engine broke down a few hours after we had left Marseilles, but not so completely but that we could continue our journey. The result was that we had to hug the shore nearly the whole way. It was the September equinox, and the moon was full; so night and day we gazed on that bewitching coast; bay after bay, town after town, village after village, mountain-range after mountain-range, unfolding themselves to my untravelled gaze. In the course of our present journey, we shall pass ever and again through gloomy arcades and narrow ways whose unseemly aspect will probably shock Veronica and perhaps please none of us. But distance, the enchanter, presented them to me then as consisting mainly of granite palaces and marble belfries; and in every fold of every hill nestled villages that seemed built of porphyry, and wherefrom soared, intermediaries between earth and heaven, many-storied campanili, whose chimes, as they pealed for Angelus or Ave Maria, we could sometimes faintly hear. There was no cloud in the sky, scarce a ripple on the water, nothing but sunlight or moonlight in the air. Sleep would have been a desecration of so ethereal a scene; and I well remember watching the rounded moon wax paler and paler as the morning sun reddened up over the wave, and then sink, as in despair of rivalry, behind the hills.‘ ‘O, I say, it’s boiling!’ said Lamia.
I hope everybody knows that, in making coffee, that is exactly what it should not be allowed to do; and I fear Lamia had a malicious pleasure in finding Veronica for once at fault. I cannot but suppose that Veronica had heard the foregoing story many times before, but she catches fire so readily from any one’s enthusiasm for Italy, that she had almost allowed the coffee to do the same. But she so deftly rescued it from hurt, that, unheeding of Lamia’s exclamation, he went on: