"Ain't I a prisoner?" said I. "I thought I had murdered somebody, and was sentenced for life to this chamber."
"How can you be so silly!" said she. "You know perfectly well how these foreigners make a fuss about everything, and exaggerate every trifle into a mock importance. Now, we are not in Ireland—"
"No," said I, "would to Heaven we were!"
"Well, perhaps I might echo the prayer without doing any great violence to my sincerity; but as we are not there, nor can we change the venue—is n't that the phrase?—to our own country, what if we just were to make the best of it, and suffer this matter to take its course here?"
"As how, Cary?"
"Simply by dressing yourself, and driving into Como. Your case will be heard on any morning you present yourself; and I am so convinced that the whole affair will be settled in five minutes that I am quite impatient it should be over."
I will not repeat all her arguments, some good and some bad, but every one of them dictated by that kind and affectionate spirit which, however her judgment incline, never deserts her. The end of it was, I got up, shaved, and dressed, and within an hour was skimming over the calm clear water towards the little city of Como.
Cary was with me,—she would come,—she said she knew she did me good; and it was true: but the scene itself—those grand, great mountains; those leafy glens, opening to the glassy lake, waveless and still; that glorious reach of blue sky, spanning from peak to peak of those Alpine ridges—all soothed and calmed me; and in the midst of such gigantic elements, I could not help feeling shame that such a reptile as I should mar the influence of this picture on my heart by petty passions and little fractious discontents an worthy of a sick schoolboy.
"Is n't it enough for you, K. I.," says I, "ay, and more than you deserve, just to live, and breathe, and have your being in such a bright and glorious world? If you were a poet, with what images would not these swooping mists, these fleeting shadows, people your imagination? What voices would you hear in the wind sighing through the olive groves, and dying in many a soft cadence along the grottoed shore? If a painter, what effects of sunlight and shadow are there to study? what tints of color, that, without nature to guarantee, you would never dare to venture on? But being neither, having neither gift nor talent, being simply one of those 4 fruit consumers,' who bring back nothing to the common stock of mankind, and who can no more make my fellow-man wiser or better than I make myself taller or younger, is it not a matter of deep thankfulness that, in all my common-place of mind and thought, I too—even K. I. that I am—have an intense feeling of enjoyment in the contemplation of this scene? I could n't describe it like Shelley, nor paint it like Stan field, but I 'll back myself for a five-pound note to feel it with either of them." And there, let me tell you, Tom, is the real superiority of Nature over all her counterfeits. You need no study, no cultivation, no connoisseurship to appreciate her: her glorious works come home to the heart of the peasant, as, mist-begirt, he waits for sunrise on some highland waste, as well as to the Prince, who gazes on the swelling landscape of his own dominions. I could n't tell a Claude from a Canaletti,—I 'm not sure that I don't like H. B. better than Albert Durer,—but I 'd not surrender the heartfelt delight, the calm, intense, deep-souled gratitude I experience from the contemplation of a lovely landscape, to possess the Stafford gallery.
I was, then, in a far more peaceful and practicable frame of mind as we entered Como than when I quitted the villa.