"Villa Serbelloni, Bellaggio."
CHAPTER XXVII
BELLAGGIO
The narrowness of the imagination of the old masters is generally depicted in their canvases. Heaven to them was a serious business of pearly gates, harps, halos, and aërial flights on ambient pale clouds. Or, was it the imagination of the Church, dominating the imagination of the artist? To paint halos, or to starve? was doubtless the Hamletonian question of the Renaissance. Now Hillard's idea of Heaven—and in all of us it is a singular conception—was Bellaggio in perpetual springtime; Bellaggio, with its cypress, copper-beech, olive, magnolia, bamboo, pines, its gardens, its vineyards, its orchards of mulberry trees, its restful reaches, for there is always a quality of rest in the ability to see far off; Bellaggio, with the emerald Lecco on one side and the blue-green Como on the other, the white villages nestling along the shores, and the great shadowful Italian Alps.
The Villa Serbelloni stands on the wooded promontory, and all day long the warm sunshine floods its walls and terraces and glances from the polished leaves of the tropical plants. The villa remains to-day nearly as it was when Napoleon's forces were in Milan and stabling their horses in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazia, under the fading Last Supper, by Da Vinci. It is a hotel now, the annex of one of the great hostelries down below in the town. A tortuous path leads up to the villa; and to climb it is to perform the initial step or lesson to proper mountain-climbing. Here and there, in the blue distances, one finds a patch of snow, an exhilarating foretaste of the high Alps north of Domo d' Ossola and south of the icy Rhone.
The six-o'clock boat from Como puffed up noisily and smokily to the quay, churning her side-paddles. The clouds of sunset lay like crimson gashes on the western mountain peaks. Hillard stepped ashore impatiently. What a long day it had been! How white the Villa Serbelloni seemed up there on the little hill-top. He gave his luggage to the porter from the Grand and followed him on foot to the hotel, which was only a dozen steps from the landing. No, he would not dine at the hotel, all but empty at this time of year. He was dining at the Villa Serbelloni above. He dressed quickly, but with the lover's care and the lover's doubt. Less than an hour after leaving the boat he stepped forth from the gardens and took the path up to the villa. The bloom on the wings of the passing swallow, the clouds on the face of the smooth waters, the incense from the flowers now rising upon the vanished sun, the tinted crests encircling, and the soft wind which murmured drowsily among the overhanging branches, all these made the time and place as perfect as a lover's mind could fancy.
Sonia, Sonia; his step took the rhythm of it as he climbed. Sonia, Sonia; the very silence seemed to voice it. And she was waiting for him up there. How would she greet him, knowing that nothing would have brought him to her side but the hope of love? With buoyant step he turned by the porter's lodge and strode down the broad roadway to the villa, a deepening green arch above him.
Handsome he was not; he was more. With his thin, high-bred face, his fine eyes, his slender, graceful figure, he presented that type of gentleman to whom all women pay unconscious homage, whether low-born or high, and in whom the little child places its trust and confidence.
He arrived shortly. As he entered the glass-inclosed corridor the concierge rose from his chair and bowed. Hillard inclined his head and went on. There was no one in the dining-room. In the restaurant there was no one but a lonely Russian countess, who had spent part of the year at the villa for more than a decade. He doffed his hat as he passed through the room and gained the picturesque terrace. Afar he saw a table spread under the great oak. A woman sat by it. She was gazing down the winding terraces toward the Lecco. It was still daylight, and he would have known that head of hair among the ten thousand houris of heaven. Softly, softly! he murmured to his heart, now become insurgent.