The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

by M. E. Braddon

Antonia engaged the villa for a month, at a liberal rent, and established herself, with Giuseppe, the Italian footman, as her major-domo, and a modest household of his selection; not a household of much polish or experience, but of willing hands, smiling faces, eyes that sparkled and danced with the golden light of Italy. Antonia was at home and happy among these people, who served her as it were upon their knees, and whose voices had a note that was like a caress.

"I can understand how my mother loved her garden of roses, her chestnut woods, and long terraces where the vines make a roof of shade, and how she must have pined in a dull English village—a Lincolnshire village, dismal flats without a tree, straight roads, and church steeples, with the lead-coloured sea making a level line in the distance, that seems like the end of the world. Alas, to her eyes, accustomed to this golden land, these mountains climbing up to heaven, how heart-breaking it must all have been!"

Summer in Italy, summer on the Lake of Como. Never till now had Antonia known what summer means—that perfect glory of sunlight, that magical atmosphere, half golden light and half azure haze, in which earthly things put on the glory of a dream. Never before had she enjoyed the restfulness of a land where the atmosphere and the light are enough for happiness, a sensuous happiness, perhaps, but leaving the spirit wings free for flight. After the stress and tumult of a London winter, the strife of paltry ambitions, the malevolence that called itself wit, the aching sense of loneliness in a crowd, what bliss to loll at ease in the spacious country boat, under the arched awning, while the oars dipped, and the water rippled, and life went by like a sleep! She had almost left off remembering the days of the week, the passage of time. She only knew that the moon was waning. That great golden disk which had bathed the hills in light and tempted her to loiter on the lake till midnight, was no more. There was only a ragged crescent that rose in the dead of night and filled her with melancholy. She stood at her open window, in the dark hour before dawn, drinking the cool sweet air, and full of sorrowful thoughts.

Where was George Stobart under that dwindling moon? In what grim and frowning wilderness, amidst what desolate waste of mountains, in what wild scene of savage warfare, hemmed round by painted foes, deafened by war cries more hideous than the howling of the wolves in the midnight woods, done to death by the ingenious cruelties of human fiends, or dying of famine and neglected wounds, crawling on bleeding feet till the wearied body dropped across the narrow track that the tramp of soldiers had worn through the wilderness, dying forsaken and alone, perhaps, in the pitilessness of a panic flight.

Her heart ached as she thought of him. Alas, why had he been false to his own convictions, to his own faith? She knew that he had once been sincere, had once been strong in a hope that she could not share. When first she knew him he had been a good man. She looked back, and recalled the domestic picture—the rustic lawn basking in the June sunshine, the warm air perfumed with pinks and southernwood, and the husband seated in his garden reading to his wife. She had looked down at him from the proud height of her philosophy, had scorned his unquestioning belief in things unseen; but she had respected him for his renunciation of all the luxuries and pleasures the common herd love.

Of the progress of the American campaign since the victory at Cape Breton she knew very little. The posts between Italy and England were of a hopeless irregularity, and the newspapers which she had ordered to be sent her were more than half of them lost or stopped on the way, while an occasional gossiping letter from a fashionable friend told her more of the new clothes at the Birthday than the triumphs or reverses of British arms. The London papers were at this time more concerned about Prince Ferdinand's victory over the French at Minden, and Lord George Sackville's strange backwardness in following up the Prince's success, than about the fortunes of Amherst or Forbes, and the wild warfare of the West.

It was perhaps from the desire to be better informed that Antonia was glad to see Lord Dunkeld, who surprised her by alighting from a boat at the landing stage of her villa, in the first week of her residence. He found her sitting in her garden, dreaming over a book. He had arrived at Varenna on the previous evening, he told her, and meant to stop some time at the inn, which commanded a fine view of the two lakes, and had better accommodation than was usual in out-of-the-way places.

"May one ask what brings your lordship to Italy, when most of the fine gentlemen I know are shooting partridges in Norfolk?" Antonia asked, when they were seated on a marble bench in front of the lake.

There was a fountain on the lawn near them, and oleanders white and red, masses of blossom and delicate lance-shaped leaves, made a screen against wind and sun, and there were red roses trailing all along the marble balustrade above the lake, and poppies pink, and red, and white, and pale pink cyclamen, filled a circular bed at the base of a statue of Flora, and all the garden seemed alive with colour and light. A double flight of steps, broad and shallow, went down to the water, and Dunkeld's boat was moored there, with his two boatmen lounging under the awning, idle and contented. It is a stiff pull from Varenna to the point, when the wind is blowing from Lecco.

"Will your ladyship scorn me if I confess that I love better to sit in an Italian garden than to tramp over a Norfolk stubble? There is a delicate freshness in the scent of a turnip field at early morning; but I prefer roses, and the company of one woman in the world."