Escaping at last from the sulphur fumes, the strange glares and the Hades visions, they found themselves standing under a clear star-strewn sky with a gentle air blowing in their faces. In an open carriage they were whirled off, they knew not where, into the night, stars bright overhead and lights like fallen stars on a high hill to the right, the soft wind of the darkness breathing of spring and green growing things.
Suddenly there was the welcoming door of the Hotel des Temples, and then little white bedrooms and quick oblivion.
There is a pounding on Jane’s door.
“Hurry, you sluggard!” says Peripatetica’s voice. “Come out and see what a delicious place this is!” and she enters radiant. “There’s no mistake about spring this time; everything is riotous with it—and it’s real country. Not mere theatrical scenery like Taormina, nor mere bones and stones like Syracuse, but real dear Arcadian country, with trees, actually trees! and there are great golden temples rising out of the trees, with the sea and the hills behind, and nothing but sweet peaceful meadows and orchards all around us—I want to stay here forever.”
When Jane too stood upon the hotel terrace drinking in all the fairness of the outlook which Peripatetica silently but proudly displayed, in the proprietorship of earlier rising, she was quite ready to echo the wish. Billowy orchards of almonds in tenderest leafage, hoary groves of olives, the silver and white of wind-stirred bean-fields in blossom, vivid emerald of young wheat, crimson meadows of lupine rolling down to a peacock sea glittering to a wide horizon.
Soft mountains, not too high; old stone pines black against the azure sky; brown walls of convents, and bell towers emerging from the dark green of oranges and pines; and rising out of all this Arcadian sweetness of meadow and grove the tawny columns of the Temples.
“Oh, let’s get to them at once!” cried Jane, and guideless and impatient they went, as the bird flies, straight across the intervening country, towards those beckoning golden pillars. Plunging down the hillside in front, garden-orchard, ploughed field, dusty highroad—all were merely a road between them and those temples of Lost Gods still rising unsubmerged above the tree tops. Little boys digging in the fields shyly offered them fossil shells and the bits of pottery their shovels had turned up, old women at garden gates called invitations to come in and pick oranges or inspect the ruins of “Casa Greco’s,” but they held straight on through olive groves seemingly old as the temples themselves, through velvety young wheat and flowery meadows. The distance was greater than had appeared from above. Sometimes the gleam of columns through the green beckoned illusively to impossible short cuts, as when a tempting grass path seemed to run straight to the feet of the nearest temple and instead led into a farmyard inhabited by fiercely barking dogs. A noise that called out the farm people to explain as politely as if these were the first strangers who had ever made the intrusive mistake, that an impassable wall made it impossible to reach the Temples through their property, and to detail a wee, starry-eyed bronze faun in tattered blue rags to put them upon the correct but roundabout road.
In the glowing sun of the spring morning—the old world renewing itself in blooming freshness all about—songs of birds and petals of fruit-blossoms in the air, against the shimmering blue of sky and sea and the new green of the earth’s breast, was upreared the saffron mass of Concordia—shrine of a Peace twenty centuries old.
It looked its name, did Concord, standing with all its amber columns worn but perfect, in unbroken accord, still upholding architrave and tympanum.