“Oh, che bellezza!” cried the small boy. “Mamma, mamma, look! Isn’t she beautiful? Isn’t she lovely? Divinamente! Oh ... mamma!”
He closed his black eyes, lovelorn, dazzled by the little white girl of five. The parents laughed, the priests laughed, everybody laughed. But the boy was not at all confused:
“Era una bellezza!” he repeated once more, casting a glance of conviction all around him.
It was very hot in the train. Outside, the mountains gleamed white on the horizon and glittered like a fire with opal reflections. Close to the railway stood a row of eucalyptus-trees, sickle-leaved, brewing a heavy perfume. On the dry, sun-scorched plain, the wild cattle grazed, lifting their black curly heads with indifference to the train. In the stifling, stewing heat, the passengers’ drowsy heads nodded up and down, while a smell of sweat, tobacco-smoke and orange-peel mingled with the scent of the eucalyptuses outside. The train swung round a curve, rattling like a toy-train of tin coaches almost tumbling over one another. And a level stretch of unruffled lazulite—metallic, crystalline, sky-blue—came into view, spreading into an oval goblet between slopes of mountain-land, like a very deep-set vase in which a sacred fluid was kept very blue and pure and motionless by a wall of rocky hills, which rose higher and higher until, as the train swung and rattled round the clear goblet, at one lofty point a castle stood, coloured like the rocks, broad, massive and monastic, with the cloisters running down the slope. It rose in noble and sombre melancholy; and from the train one could hardly distinguish what was rock and what was building-stone, as though it were all one barbaric growth, as though the castle had grown naturally out of the rock and, in growing, had assumed something of the shape of a human dwelling of the earliest times. And, as though the oval with its divine blue water had been a sacred reservoir, the mountains hedged in the Lake of San Stefano and the castle rose as its gloomy guardian.
The train wound along a curve by the water-side, swung round a bend, then round another and stopped: San Stefano. It was a small, quiet town, lying sleepily in the sun, without life or traffic, and visited only in the winter by day-trippers, who came from Rome to see the cathedral and the castle and tasted the wine of the country at the osteria.
When Cornélie alighted, she at once saw the prince.
“How sweet of you to come and look us up in our eyrie!” he cried, in rapture, eagerly pressing her two hands.
He led her through the station to his little basket-carriage, with two little horses and a tiny groom. A porter would bring her luggage to the castle.
“It’s delightful of you to come!” he repeated. “You have never been to San Stefano before? You know the cathedral is famous. We shall go right through the town: the road to the castle runs behind it.”
He was smiling with pleasure. He started the horses with a click of his tongue, with a repeated shake of the reins, like a child. They flew along the road, between the low, sleepy little houses, across the square, where in the glowing sunlight the glorious cathedral rose, Lombardo-Romanesque in style, begun in the eleventh and added to in every succeeding century, with the campanile on the left and the battisterio on the right: marvels of architecture in red, black and white marble, one vast sculpture of angels, saints and prophets and all as it were covered with a thick dust of ages, which had long since tempered the colours of the marble to rose, grey and yellow and which hovered between the groups as the one and only thing that had been left over of all those centuries, as though they had sunk into dust in every crevice.