“The visitor thought it time to go, and I agreed with her. These English! These English!
“It has rained every day since we left Italy. In France we caught a peep of the sun now and then; here, never. If ever again I stand under our skies I shall rejoice. Before I thought of being useful it seemed that those skies could never be bright, and I dreaded going back. But now, oh, how eager I am to be there! Ever your affectionate daughter, who counts the hours until she shall see you,
“Hera.”
CHAPTER IX
A SEED OF GRATITUDE
In the evening they departed from Charing Cross, and without interruption their journey to France was accomplished. When a day had come and gone the Alpine solitudes were behind them, and they beheld once more the Arcadian valleys of Vaudois. Soon after that they moved in the sunlight over stretches of Lombardian plain. Now the azure above them resembled the sky color of pictures in old missals. How beautiful it was to Hera’s eyes! She felt the irresistible charm of the prospect, even as the barbarians did in ancient days. She wondered if it was any different then. Through all time those plains seemed to have been under the husbandman’s rule, ever fruitful, ever smiling in their bright verdure.
Tarsis lowered a window and the breath of springtime fanned their faces. It brought a delicious freshness from the little man-made streamlets that, catching the heavens’ mood, wove a blue network over the land, and sparkled in the sun-play like great strings of precious stones. In their purpose of irrigation they crossed the white highroads and the by-paths, coursed in sluices under the railway, and cut the fields how and where they pleased, too well bent upon practical service to care for symmetry of form. They drew near one another, they rambled far apart, but in the end always meeting in the wide canal that bore elsewhere their enriching flood; and so forever running, yet never wasted. A few weeks, and this pampered soil would render its marvellous account; the meadows would yield their many harvests; the rice stalks would be crowded with ears; the clover would be like a blossoming thicket, the cornfields like canebrakes; but the men and women who toiled to produce this abundance would live on in their poverty. The clod-breakers were there again to-day—as they had been with the returning springtime for ages, about their work—boys digging trenches, ploughmen at their shafts, women and girls planting seed.
Hera noticed that the villages along the way had not the neat and cheerful look of the French and Swiss hamlets. Seen from afar, crowning a hilltop, their tiled roofs brightly red in the sun-glare, and the yellow walls gleaming like burnished gold, the pictorial expression of them was full of beauty; but when the train halted in the heart of one, and its wretchedness lay bare, her spirit was saddened by the grim reality.
“I mean to do something to help the poor of Milan,” she said to Tarsis, one of the gloomy pictures haunting her memory.
“You have chosen a wide field of good endeavour,” he returned, in a slight tone of banter.
“And I wonder why the field is so wide,” she pursued. “Milan is called our City Prosperous.”