Why Sophia Jervis went to Sant' Ambrogio she herself could not have told; to all outward seeming she merely drifted there, influenced by the many little urgencies of travel—the name seen casually in a guide-book and all unnoticed stamping itself on her brain; a chance mention of the place caught from some fellow-traveller, aided by the fact that the time-table had happened to open at the words "Sant' Ambrogio"—these were the trifles by which the power stronger than herself guided Sophia, with such cunning manipulation, such a fine lack of insistence even on the trifles, that she was unaware of any power at work. Also she was in that numbed condition which mercifully follows any great straining of emotion; even pain lay quiescent, though rather in a swoon than a sleep—a mere blankness from which it would struggle up more insistent than before.
When Sophia alighted from the train at the nearest station for Sant' Ambrogio, and found the carriage she had ordered awaiting her, she was not in the mood to take joy in anything she saw; and yet, as the wiry little Tuscan horse trotted swiftly along she found herself, though not actually responding, at least offering no blank wall of resistance to the country around. To say country, as though a landscape consisted of mere earth and vegetation, is to make an incomplete statement; the quality of the light, the harmony or discordance where man's work meets Nature; and, above all, the intangible atmosphere, rarer and more vital than the actual enveloping air, that is the soul of a country—all these are of more potency than the position of a clump of trees or the existence of a particular crop. And nowhere is this atmosphere more elusive but more compelling than in Tuscany at spring time. Sophia was too deadened to respond, but she felt the echo of the thing, as it were, in much the same way that a stone-deaf person feels vibrations run through the floor and up his chair to his spine when certain chords are played on an organ.
It is a drive of about five miles from the railway station to Sant' Ambrogio, and the road winds across the plain, sometimes rising and falling, always leading towards the rim of interfolding hills. In the vineyards the vines, naked at first glance, were just beginning to flower, and the rows of pollarded planes from which they were festooned showed a glory of young leaf. The maize was a couple of feet in height, and where the sun shone through the blades of it they looked like thin green flames. The heat was intense, and the air seemed stifled with the subtle smell of the dust that lay thickly over the road and powdered the grassy edges. The whole plain of Tuscany, apparently empty of human life, and consequently filled with a sense of utter peace, seemed a vast green platter brimming with a divine ether and held up towards the heavens by the steady hands of genii. Only Sophia's carriage showed like a black insect winging a course fast enough to itself but slow to the gaze of any being who, looking down on this dish held for the gods, could see the whole expanse of it at once.
Everywhere was a sense of light—light steeping the sky, drenching the earth, and vibrating in the spaces between; light that gave a gracious blur to edges, that refracted from each subtle difference of plane and angle; light that permeated the very shadows so that they seemed semi-transparent. One with this sense of light, as body is one with soul, was the sense of colour—tender greens, at once pure and delicate; blues that paled to the merest breath or merged in a soft purple. The wideness of the view gave full value to the exquisitely fine curves which composed it—the curves of outline where hills and long sweeping slopes came against the sky, and the curves of surfaces, which inter-folded and led into each other like the waters of a vast lake where Time has stayed his foot and the spellbound water holds for ever the slopes and gradations blown into being by an arrested wind.
Something—an emotion impersonal in itself yet arousing the personality in her—began to stir at Sophia's heart; then, as the carriage rounded a curve in the road and she received the shock of Sant' Ambrogio against the distant arch of the sky, sudden tears burned in her eyelids. Leaning back as well as she could against the uncompromising cushions, she gazed from between lids half-closed so as to narrow her vision on the one thing.
Sant' Ambrogio is a little city of towers, some twenty of them, varying in height, all clustered together within the circling walls and pricking the sky like a group of tall-stemmed flowers in a garden. The town seems to have grown rather than been built on the crest of the only great hill for miles, but the ripples of the plain all converge towards it, leading the eye naturally up to this little crown of Tuscany. When they considered a tower a reminder of God, the ancients were not without a deeper spiritual foundation than they knew of; there is nothing of more direct psychological significance than line, and the many upward-springing lines of Sant' Ambrogio made it seem a thing so lightly poised as almost to be hanging from the heavens. A sense of something winged, which, though just resting on the earth, yet had plumes ready pricked for flight, impressed itself on Sophia's brain as she gazed.
"This might have been beautiful for me if only I could still feel," was her swift thought, and she closed her eyes to let the gleam of light thus evoked sink into her mind. As she lay with her consciousness turned inwards, the deadened fibres of her began to stir; pain moved in its swoon, and, waking, took the keenest form of all—remembrance. Quite suddenly there flashed before her mental vision the loggia at the top of the old palace in Florence where she and Richard had said good-bye. She, who was to see the cords of passion grow slack, had there seen them stretched at their tensest, and the memory of it clutched at her heart with that pity for him which had kept her calm for his comfort. Now, mingled with it, was her own pain, which, at the time, her thought for him had overwhelmed. She saw again his face as she had seen it then—his thin, hawk-like profile dark and sharply-cut against the evening sky. With the memory of the pain that had gone through her at that moment, the power to feel stirred again, and it was that moment which struck at her anew. Her hands fastened suddenly on the hot sides of the carriage.
"Oh, oh!" she said in the low voice that overwhelming sorrow can wring from the tongue, a soliloquy terrible in its unself-consciousness: "oh, oh! I can't bear it; I can't bear it!"
As the horse slowed down at the beginning of the hill, the first poignancy of Sophia's reawakened feeling passed off, and she lay back, her hands laying palm upwards in her lap. With entry into the town came coolness; the ancient architects of the South knew better than to favour the broad streets planned by their descendants, and the narrow ways threaded so cunningly between the tall cliffs of houses were cool as shadowed streams. The greyness of the paved street fell like a suggestion of peace on Sophia after the searching sunlight of the plain, and the acuteness of her mental trouble subsided in response to the sense of physical ease; she had regained her grip of herself when the carriage drew up at the door of the Albergo Santo Spirito.
The Albergo is a whitewashed building set round a courtyard; clean, unfretted by detail, full of dim, sweet spaces and gay domestic sounds. Sophia, aware of its charm, yet realized, on looking back afterwards, that she had also been aware that the inn was for her but the ante-chamber to some other place or state, as yet unrevealed. At the time she was only conscious that a sense of waiting held the calm air, though, if she had thought to ask herself the question, she would have said that life held nothing for which it could be worth her while to wait.