Lamia rose from her seat, placed herself close beside him, and taking his hand, replied:
‘Dear Poet, even in my youngest moments, compared with you I am in my dotage.’ And I would at that moment have been any age you will, to be treated thus tenderly.
We made many expeditions of which I have not told you, just as we visited, again and again, churches, palaces, and dismantled monasteries I have not named. But Lamia particularly wished to see a Convent,—a Convent, that is to say, in the Italian signification, of monks, not disestablished, but allowed still to survive, with a certain number of its inmates, as a national monument. She had heard me speak of the attractive hospitality I had enjoyed in them in days gone by; and we selected for our monastic excursion a Convent in the Apennines not too remote from Florence, and the drive to which would take us through Gavinana, a spot none of us had ever visited. Does the word Gavinana suggest anything to you? Probably not; yet it was there that the liberties of Florence received their final extinction. Indeed I fancy that, of the thousands of people who nowadays visit the Tuscan Capital, many are unaware that, in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, it underwent a Siege whose incidents strongly resemble many that occurred during the siege of another Capital nearly thirty years ago. Only Florence is much more beautiful than Paris, and less suggestive of the horrors of war. Yet the Siege of Florence lasted ten months, or more than twice as long as that of Paris; its inhabitants underwent far greater hardships, and displayed much greater heroism. We might have been a little sceptical on those points had Florentine historians been our only authority for them. But the copious and impartial Reports of the Venetian Ambassadors who were in the Fair City at the time render doubt impossible, and establish the courage, pertinacity, and patience of the besieged against Emperor and Pope. All the villas within a certain radius of Florence were rased to the ground, lest they should furnish help and corn to the besiegers; and all its silver plate, both sacred and profane, was melted down to replenish the coffers of the Republic. It is the noblest, perhaps it is the one perfectly noble, incident in the story of Florence; and I sometimes have thought, and the Poet agrees with me, that Francesco Ferruccio, whose statue is among that series of famous Florentines outside the Uffizi, is its most heroic and effective figure. He would in all probability have saved Florence, had the timidity of some of his fellow-countrymen, and the treachery of others, allowed him; for he proposed to create a diversion by marching on Rome, and menacing it with another sack such as had recently taken place under the Constable Bourbon. His project was overruled, and he died fighting in the piazza at Gavinana; his only consolation, in his last moments, being that the Leader of the Imperial Army, the Prince of Orange, was also slain. ‘The ill-omened spot,’ says the historian of the Commonwealth of Florence, ‘lies within sight of the traveller as he passes, about a mile to the right of it, on his way from Pistoia to Modena. And not a peasant of those mountains, though ignorant as his yoke of dove-coloured oxen of all the history of his country from that day to this, not a goat-herd tending his flock by the roadside, not a grimy muleteer bringing down his string of charcoal-laden beasts from the forests of the Upper Apennine, will be unable to point out to the stranger the field on which, nearly four hundred years ago, Tuscan liberty was fought for and lost.’
Drinking our coffee, for which we paid an incredibly small sum, under the plane trees of the square where Ferruccio and Florence fell, we again discoursed on the arbitrary hazards of Time that made the City justly called Fair, and to which one is often disposed to apply what Ovid represents Helen as saying to her Grecian paramour:—
‘Apta magis Veneri quam sunt tua corpora Marti:
Bella gerant alii; tu, Paris, semper ama,’
a place of arms, a city woeful and intrepid, the champion of freedom against Sceptre and Tiara.
‘Surely,’ said Lamia, ‘Dante would have forgiven Florence could he have lived to see that day. The times were grim, and the deeds austere enough even for one “who had seen Hell.” Would you not rather,‘ she continued, turning to the Poet, ‘have it said of you that you had seen Heaven?’
‘Remember,’ said Veronica, ‘Dante saw both.’
The twilight was deepening into dusk before we reached the Convent whither we were bound, for our driver had taken a wrong turning during the last few miles of our journey; and Lamia was quick to note, as characteristic of Italy, that, when inquiry put us on the right one, the directions given were, not as in England, according to signposts, but to little tabernacles or shrines at the parting of the ways: now of the Annunciation, now of Saint Agatha or Saint Barbara, now of Saint Francis of Assisi receiving the Stigmata. I am afraid her curiosity was more piqued than satisfied when we reached our bourne; for, though we were most piously welcomed, Veronica and she were not allowed to violate that portion of the Convent which is defended from female gaze by the word Clausura; and she not unnaturally, though quite inaccurately, imagined that she was not shown what was most worth seeing. The Poet and I were allotted sleeping-cells within the Monastery, but our companions, of course, had to pass the night in the Foresteria, or strangers’ quarter, outside, in charge of a lay-brother, and it was there we all had our truly ascetic supper. But the guests of Sallust never enjoyed one more; for our host, the Prior, was an ideal monk, majestic yet saintly of aspect, with long flowing beard, silky and snowy, measured manners, and paternally caressing voice. The Rules of his Order forbid any instrumental accompaniment either at Mass or the other Sacred Offices of the twenty-four hours; but he had always loved music for its own sake, and he had made for himself a primitive sort of spinette, on which he said he would play to us, for our further entertainment, when the lay-brother who was waiting on us had retired, and all the Confraternity were in their first deep sleep. The performance, like the instrument, was touching in its simplicity; and Veronica, wishing to make him some return, said that Lamia, too, was fond of music, and would, she was quite sure, sing to him if he cared to hear her. Even in the Foresteria, I fear, there was a touch of the profane in the suggestion; but he evidently could not resist the temptation thus presented to him, and begged Lamia to sing, but with not too loud and penetrating a voice. She at once broke into the wild and melancholy chant the Italian recruits used to sing in the days of Napoleon, when they were dragged from their homes to face the snows of Russia:—