In the summer of 1759 Lady Kilrush carried out a long-cherished design of revisiting Italy. When last in that country her father's critical state of health had been a drag upon her movements. She would go there now a free agent, with ample leisure to explore the region in which she was most keenly interested, those romantic hills above the Lake of Como, where her mother's birthplace was to be found.
She took Sophy, her French maid, Rodolphine, and her first footman, who was an Italian, and travelled by Ostend and the Hague and the Rhine to Basle, then by Lucerne and Fluellen, to the rugged steeps of the St. Gothard, loitering on the road, and seeing all the churches and picture-galleries that were worth looking at, her travelling carriage half full of books, and her maid and footman following in a post-chaise with the luggage, which was a lighter load of trunks and imperials than a woman of ton might have been supposed to require, her ladyship's travelling toilette being of a severe simplicity.
When George II. was king there was a luxury of travelling, which made amends for the want of the train de luxe and the wagon-lit. It was the luxury of slowness; the delicious leisure of long days in the midst of exquisite scenery—by lake, and river, and mountain pass—that had time to grow into the mind and memory of the traveller; journeys in which there were long oases of rest; perfumed summer nights in quiet places, where the church bell was the only sound; mornings in obscure galleries where one picture in a catalogue of a hundred was a gem to be remembered ever after; glimpses of humble lives, saunterings in market-places, adventures, perils perhaps, an alarm of brigands, ears listening for a sudden shot ringing sharp among snow-clad hills—all the terrors, joys, chances, surprises of a difficult road; and at one's inn a warmth of welcome and a deferential service that in some wise atoned for bad cooking and ill-furnished rooms.
To Antonia that Italian journey offered a delicious repose from the fever of London pleasures. After George Stobart's departure for America there had been a jarring note in the harmony of life—a note that had to be drowned somehow; and hence had come that craving for excitement, that hastening from one trivial pleasure to another, which had made her so conspicuous a figure in the London of last winter.
In the solemn silence of everlasting hills, in a solitude that to Sophy seemed a thing of horror, Antonia thought of her last season; the crowded rooms, reeking with odours of pulvilio and melting wax, the painted faces, the atmosphere of heat and hair-powder, the diamonds; the haggard looks and burning eyes, round the tables where play ran high; the hatred and malice; the jests that wounded like daggers; the smiles that murdered reputations.
"Shall I ever go back to it all, and think a London season life's supreme felicity?" she wondered, standing in front of the Capuchins' Hospice, among the granite peaks of the St. Gothard, in the chill mountain air, while the mules were being saddled for the descent into Italy. They had ridden yesterday morning through the Urnerloch—that wonderful passage of two hundred feet through the solid rock, which had been made early in the century—by the green meadows of Andermatt, and across the Ursern valley; they had wound slowly upward through a wild and barren region to the friendly hospice where there was always welcome and shelter.
Lady Kilrush had left her English travelling carriage at Lucerne, and the journey from Airolo to Como would be made in an Italian post-chaise. Her footman was a native of Bellinzona, and was able to arrange all the details of their route.
At Como she hired one of the country boats, new from the builders, and engaged four stalwart Italian boatmen, who were to be in her service while she made a leisurely tour of the lake, stopping wherever the scene pleased her fancy, and putting up with the most primitive accommodation, provided the inn were clean, and the prospect beautiful.
That year of 1759, remarkable for the success of British arms in Europe, Hindostan, and America, the "great year," as Horace Walpole calls it, was also a year of golden weather, a summer of sunshine and cloudless skies, and Antonia revelled in the warmth and light of that lovely scene. It seemed as if every drop of blood in her veins rejoiced in the glory of her mother's birthplace. Here, in what spot she knew not, but somewhere along these sunlit hills that sloped gently to the lake, her mother's early years had been spent. She would have given much to find the spot; and in her long rambles with Sophy, or alone, she rarely passed a church without entering it, and if she could find the village priest rarely left him till he had searched the register of marriages for her father's name. But no such name appeared in those humble records; and she thought that her father might have carried his fugitive bride to Milan, or even into Switzerland, before the marriage ceremony was possible; the girl being under age, and the bridegroom a heretic. She looked with interest at every villa that sheltered a noble family, and questioned the peasants, and the people of the inn, about all the important inhabitants of their neighbourhood, hoping to hear in such or such a patrician family of a runaway marriage with a wandering Englishman. But the old people to whom she chiefly addressed herself had no memory of such an event.
It was the beginning of September, and the scene and atmosphere had lost nothing of their charm by familiarity, so having made the tour of the lake villages, and being somewhat tired of rough fare, ill-furnished rooms, and most of all of Sophy's repinings for the comforts of St. James's Square, Lady Kilrush hired a villa near the quaint little town of Bellagio, a villa perched almost at the point of the wooded promontory, with a garden that sloped to the water's edge. The villa belonged to one of Antonia's fashionable friends—a certain Lady Despard, a banker's widow, who gave herself more airs than an empress, and preferred Rome or Florence to London, because of the superior consequence her wealth gave her in cities where the measure of her rank was not too precisely known. This lady—after trying to imitate Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and live among a peasant population—had wearied of her villa and the little town at her gates, the church bells, the voices of the fishermen, the feasts and processions, and lack of modish company; and her house was to be let furnished with all its amenities.