Tacita went eagerly to look out.
“We must not show ourselves,” Elena said. “You can look through the gauze.”
The first glance, vaulting over a mass of tree-tops and a great half-moon of verdure, saw a plain that extended to a low ripple of pale-blue mountains on the horizon. A few stunted groves were visible on this wide expanse, and a few abrupt hills which seemed to be protruding ledges, the crevices of which had been gradually filled by the dust-bearing winds.
Tacita recollected Ion’s description of this scene, which had appeared to him so beautiful that San Salvador, compared with it, had seemed a prison.
“Poor boy!” she thought. “He will find nowhere else such freedom as that which he is so eager to leave.”
The near view compensated by its richness for the sterility of the distant. It was a vast fenceless garden radiating two miles, or more, in every direction from the front of the castle, and every foot of it was cultivated to the utmost. There were blocks of yellowing wheat, there was every green of garden, orchard, and vineyard; and through them all the ever-present olive-trees which gave the place its name. They were planted wherever a tree could go. Around the foot of the castle they were clustered so thickly that they hid even from its windows the green turf and gray steps of its semicircular terraces. The large houses of whitewashed stone with flat roofs were scattered about irregularly. By some of them stood groups of palm-trees; or a single tree waved its foliage above the terrace.
The visitors had their dinner in a quaint boudoir, cone-shaped, and frescoed to look like a forest aisle from the pavement to the apex of its ceiling. One could recognize the artist of the Basilica in those interwoven branches, those leaping squirrels, and the bird’s-nests with a gaping mouth or downy head visible over the rim.
“I will give you a more fitting service when you come here by way of the Pines,” Dylar said. “But on these stolen visits from below we live with closed doors and a single servant.”
“He eats,” thought Tacita. “Therefore he is human.” And she felt no need of puzzling over a major proposition, nor, indeed, of anything but what the painted cone contained.
“It should be a communicable thought which provokes that amused smile,” Dylar said when he caught her expression.