“Then we shall visit you to-morrow.” Don Riccardo decided, with an enthusiasm which Aunt Beatrice did not share.
CHAPTER III
A DREAM REALISED
The following afternoon Mario, on horseback, appeared at the villa and said he had stopped to accompany the Barbiondi in their ride to the Social Dairy. It was a proffer Donna Beatrice could not regard with favour. From the first the trip across the river had seemed to her a project of questionable taste; but now that it was to include the company of a man in whom Hera had betrayed a “scandalous interest,” it stood in her mind as a distinctly improper proceeding. Drawing her brother aside, she said as much to him while they waited for the horses to be brought from the stables.
But Don Riccardo failed to view the affair in that light. He was glad to see Forza, and glad of the opportunity the three-mile ride afforded for a chat with the son of his old comrade. His expectation in regard to the chat, however, was not realised, for what Aunt Beatrice pronounced a shocking display of indiscretion on the part of her niece occurred before they had reached the Bridge of Speranza. When the cavalcade, after a brisk trot, had dropped into a walk, Hera and Mario fell behind and rode side by side. And in the rest of the journey Donna Beatrice could not see that they made any appreciable effort to lessen the distance separating them from the others.
The day was a true one of the freakish month. In the morning hours the clouds had played their many games, now gambolling on the blue in fleecy flocks, now rolling sublimely in great white billows or tumbling in darker shapes that shed big drops of rain. But the present hour was one of purest sky, and all the land was gloried in sunshine. Mysterious heralds of the springtime spoke to the spirit and senses of the younger riders. The river was in gentler mood; the grey brush of the poplars no longer strained in the wind, maple twigs were dimpling with buds, and the green mantle of the hills seemed to grow brighter with every glance. Their cheeks were smoothed by the new breath that comes stealing over the land in April days. They talked of the things about them. Hera rejoiced in the life of the outer air. She knew the wild growths and the architecture of the birds, and he, if saddened easily by the ugliness men impart to life, was ever awake to the beauties of the world. They saw here and there a last year’s nest in the leafing branches.
“There was the home of an ortolan,” she would say, or, “There a blackbird lived, there a thrush.”
“And soon, when passing Villa Barbiondi,” he added once, “a friend may say, ‘There Donna Hera lived.’”
“Yes,” she said; “I shall part from the dear old nest, as the birds part from theirs.”
Where the road branched upward to the dairy Don Riccardo and his sister were waiting. Together the four made the ascent of the zigzag way, passing under oaks that had clung to their brown leaves through all the assaults of winter and moving beneath the mournful green of the needle-pines. They walked about the scrupulously clean, well-ordered houses and yards of the Social Dairy, where moral enlightenment and manual energy worked in concert. It was one of the several hundred places, Mario told them, that the new, industrial plan had brought into being. He explained the genius of co-operation, and how in this instance it brightened the lives of thousands of poor farmers. Hera remarked the air of well-being that pervaded the place—the neat apparel of the men and women, the interest they showed in their work, and the absence from their eyes of the driven look she had observed in a factory of Milan.
“How bright and fresh and—happy they are!” she said to Mario.