“Fancy! But Cupid? What is Love doing in the midst of those dreadful ruins? Roses would be enough for him.”
“I asked the good man that question, too.”
“And what did he tell you?”
“‘He delights in ruins,’ he assured me, with a mysterious smile, a Mona Lisa smile that merchants can put on at will, I’ve noticed.”
“Yes, it’s funny,” she concluded. “The Italians put marble groups in city clothes in their cemeteries, making them look like dressmakers’ parlors, and they select the emblems of death to decorate their gardens....”
Slowly they climbed the Sacred Mountain, which rose about a hundred yards above the town. When they reached the summit they found evening there, and a new secret sweetness in the great woods of firs, larches, chestnuts and parasol pines, in the midst of which, here and there under the declining sun, were scattered the twenty sanctuaries of St. Francis. These little chapels, built between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, are all of different styles of architecture, round or square, with or without peristyles, Gothic or Romanesque, Byzantine effects prevailing. Each of them encloses, instead of an altar, some scene from the saint’s life, done in life-size terracotta images, a motionless Oberammergau. A naïve and candid art had presided over the installation of this pilgrim’s goal. The stigmata of the saint are the ends of the wires that raise his hands to the gold rays in the ceiling that denote God’s presence there.
Since they had come to Orta Edith and Maurice had never let many days go by without visiting the Sacred Mountain. You could reach it from the Belvedere Hotel in a few steps. Among all the chapels they had elected the fifteenth, which, according to tradition, had been designed by Michelangelo, as their special favourite. It was circular in form, with a cupola, and had a peristyle supported by slender little granite columns. It reminded them of the Calvary of Lemenc, where their flight had been decided on. Along its gallery, which rose a few steps from the ground, the graceful vaulted arches framed successively the various perspectives of the woods: sometimes a view of other chapels among the foliage, sometimes the outlines of a well-curb, and sometimes, between the branches, a panel of sky, a corner of the lake, or the island of St. Jiulio, with its campanile at its front, looking like some big ironclad run aground in the tiny water.
They made their way instinctively toward their special chapel, and climbed its steps. The pine trunks near them stood out against the reddening background of the sky, and here and there one of the other sanctuaries gleamed among the trees like a friendly dwelling.
She held her roses in one hand and rested the other on the shoulder of her lover.
“It was a beautiful evening, like this,” she sighed.