‘I fear,’ observed Veronica, ‘there is much truth in what you say. Only yesterday I remonstrated with the driver of the carriage I had hired to bring me back to the Villa, because his horse seemed in a shockingly poor condition. His answer was, “Campa come me,—he fares as I do. When I have plenty, he has plenty. When I have little, there is little for him also. When there are more forestieri, he will have more oats.”‘
‘Let us have a carriage apiece every afternoon,’ said Lamia, ‘and do what we all shall hate, drive round and round the Cascine from five to seven. Only, in that case, I must have that new gown.’
‘A firefly! A firefly!’
It was Veronica, invariably the most observant of us, whose voice called to us to welcome the fairy visitor, whose arrival is as delightful and momentous an event in Italy as the wing of the first swallow, the call of the first cuckoo, or the note of the first nightingale, in England. We were all on the alert in a moment, calling in return:
‘Where? Where?’
It was a single, solitary firefly, for one may say of fireflies as of primroses:
First you come by ones and ones,
Lastly in battalions,
and it moved and twinkled in the deepening twilight, among the olive-trees, a miniature and terrestrial planet, having no fixed orbit. I need scarcely say that this was some days before Pasqua delle Rose, though Whitsuntide happened to be an early one; and, the following night, we saw three, and, the night after, seven. Then, for May can be capricious in Tuscany as elsewhere, the weather was not propitious for them. But, by the time the moon was nearly at full, they were plenteous as stars in the Milky Way; and while they flitted and glistened among the darkening leaves, the nightingales rejoiced and enlivened each other with the song that an ancient story and inherited association have transformed for us into a strain of imaginary sadness. Life offers no more enchanting combination of sensations than fall to one’s lot on a warm Italian night in May, when moonlight, fireflies, and nightingales weave their concerted charm; and, night after night, we repaired to the same antique marble seat, where we liked to think Lorenzo and his associates had often sat, in front of the same dark silent cypresses, and drank in the same sweet, grave, harmonious delights. Perhaps you think us a company of selfish Hedonists, wholly given up to pleasurable sensations, poor weak copies of our Pagan Renaissance predecessors on the self-same spot? Whether that be true or not of some of us, I will not undertake to say. But certainly it is not true of Veronica, nor yet, I think, of Lamia. Indeed, speaking generally, I think one ought to entertain one’s friends with a record of one’s happiness rather than with a recital of one’s woes; but it does not follow, does it, that there is no pathetic minor in one’s life because one is not always sounding it? Indeed, amid all the enchantments of that Italian season when Spring and Summer are indistinguishable, we had been conscious of the shadow of pain which is cast by the surely approaching extinction of a young life in one’s own immediate precincts; and the shadow was all the darker because the season was so bright. Ilaria, the youngest and comeliest of the daughters of our contadini, whose acquaintance you perhaps remember our first making, had, we were assured, till within a twelvemonth ago, more than justified her pretty name by the joyousness of her ways. But there was a canker in the bud, which thus was destined never to open fully to the meridian of life; and, shortly after our arrival, her figure was no longer seen among the olives, or her voice heard among the vines. Veronica was much troubled by the utter lack of creature comforts in the spacious casa colonica, or farmhouse, where Ilaria was patiently awaiting the end, though in reality their absence was only part of that rudimentary simplicity of existence which is universal among a people untainted by Northern ideas of luxury. She and Lamia were unremitting in their visits, their nursing, and their solicitude. But these proved unavailing; and Pasqua delle Rose had to spare some of its luxuriant blooms for the grave of poor Ilaria. In the simple rustic household where she had left a vacant place, we liked to think that, in the daytime at least, the continual demands of Nature, in her busiest and most growing season, on the energy and co-operation of Man, diverted their thoughts somewhat from the missing figure; but, when we met and wished them good-day in the podere, tying the vines, training the pomi-d’oro, or cutting the sweet green fodder, that smile of which I once spoke as invariably accompanying their salutations for awhile vanished from their faces, and at nightfall we knew they were brought into undistracted consciousness of their bereavement. We grieved for them, and felt, moreover, a separate grief of our own; and neither the luminous May moon, nor the fairy-flitting fireflies, nor the silvery fluting of the nightingale, could wean us from the gravity of our thoughts. Even the purest and most generous sympathy borrows something of its tenderness, I suppose, from the knowledge that we are one and all subject to the dispensation of grief, and that those who console to-day may themselves need to be consoled to-morrow; and this is peculiarly so with the advent of the shadow of death, from which not even the strongest nor the most sanguine can hope to escape. Thus, without saying it, we were all, I suspect, musing on our common mortality, and thinking how the continuance of the deepest and dearest of our joys depends on the favour and forbearance of Heaven.