For the adornment of the log-built home Sicily had yielded to his wise searching various relics of antiquity, Greek, Norman, Saracen, and Spanish, and in the ensuing days in which Jane and Peripatetica were permitted to tread the same path with the Northman and his beautiful wife, these treasures came out of pockets to be fitted with dates and history, and even, in the delightful instance of one small ghostly grotesque, to change owners.
While the two seekers of Persephone were gathering and savouring this refreshing tang of the cold salt of the northern seas, this large vista of the gay, poised strength of a mighty race—their train was looping and coiling through summer hills to the seat of summer—cherry and apple, peach and pear trees tossed wreaths of rose and white from amid the grey of olives and the green of citron, for this was the land of Mignon’s homesick dream—“das Land, wo die Citronen blüh’n.”
Miles and miles and miles of orange and lemon groves ran beside their path; climbing the hills and creeping down to the edge of the tideless sea. Trees that were nurtured like babies; each orchard gathered about old grey or rose-washed tanks holding the precious water which is the life-blood of all this golden culture during the rainless summer. Tanks moist and dripping and fringed with ferns, mirroring the overhanging yellow fruit, or the pink geraniums that peeped over the shoulders of the broad-bladed cacti to blush happily at their own reflections in the water.
An exquisite form of orcharding, this, as delicate and perfect as a hot-house, with every inch of the soil utilized for the vegetables set about the trees’ roots, and the trees themselves growing in unbelievable numbers to the acre. For not one superfluous leaf or branch was there—just the requisite number to carry and nourish the greatest possible quantity of fruit. In consequence of which the whole land was as if touched by some vegetable Midas and turned all to gold. Millions and millions of the yellow globes hung still unpicked, though already the trees were swelling the buds which within ten days were to break forth into a far-flung bridal wreath, and intoxicate all the land with honeyed perfumes.
And, mark you, how nations are influenced by their trees! In the bad old days of constant war and turmoil the isolated family was never secure, and the people clung to the towns, but modern careful culture of the orange has forced orchardists to live close by their charges, and the population is being slowly pushed back into rural life, with the result of better health, better morals, and a great decrease of homicides. One has really no convenient time for sticking knives into one’s friends when one is showing lemon-trees how to earn $400 an acre and orange-trees half as much....
“It is the most beautiful town in the whole world,” said Peripatetica in that tiresomely dogmatic way she has of expressing the most obvious fact.
They had wandered out of their hotel, and through a pair of stately iron gates crowned with armorial beasts. Beyond the gates lay a garden. But a garden! Acres of garden, laced by sweeping avenues, shadowed by cypress and stone pines, by ilex and laurel. From the avenues dipped paths which wound through boscoes, looped under bridges veiled with curtains of wisteria and yellow banksias, climbed again to pass through pleached walks; paths that tied themselves about shadowy pools where swans floated in the gloom of palm groves, or debouched across emerald lawns where clumps of forget-me-nots and cinerarias made splashes of bold colour in the grass.
“They do these things so well in Europe,” remarked Peripatetica approvingly, as a splendid functionary, in a long blue coat and carrying a silver-headed staff, lifted his cockaded hat to them as they entered the gates. “Now where at home would one find one of our park guardians with such a manner, and looking so like a nobleman’s servant? This,” she went on, in an instructive tone, being newly arisen from a guide-book, “is the Giardino Inglese; one of the public parks, and it has exactly the air of loved and carefully tended private possession.”
They lounged over the parapets of the carved bridges, with their elbows set among roses, to look down into the little ravines where small runnels flowed among the soft pink-purple clouds of Judas-trees. They were tempted into allées bordered their whole length with the white fountains of blossoming spireas, or hedged on both sides by pink hermosas. They strolled past clumps of feathery bamboos to gaze along the shadowy vistas of four broad avenues meeting at a bright circle where a sculptured fountain tossed its waters in the sun. They lingered in paths where tea-roses were garlanded from tree to tree, or by walls curtained by Maréchale Niels. They inspected the nurseries and admired the greenhouse. They came with delight upon a double ring of giant cypresses lifting dark spires into the dazzling blue of the sky, and sat to rest happily upon a great curved marble seat whose back had lettered upon it a reminder to the “Shadowed Soul” that wisdom comes only in shade and peace.
“E La Sagezza Vieni Solo