Lucy smiled—unwillingly. They were mounting a charming road high above the lake. Stretching between them and the lake were steep olive gardens and vineyards; above them light half-fledged woods climbed to the sky. In the vineyards the fresh red-brown earth shone amid the endless regiments of vines, just breaking into leaf; daisies glittered under the olives; and below, on a mid-way crag, a great wild-cherry, sun-touched, flung its boughs and blossoms, a dazzling pearly glory, over the dark blue hollow of the lake.
And on the farther side, the high, scooped-out wall of the crater rose rich and dark above the temple-site. How white—white—it must have shone!—thought Lucy. Her imagination had been caught by the priest's story. She saw Nemi for the first time as one who had seen it before. Timidly she looked at the man walking beside the carriage. Strange! She no longer disliked him as she had done, no longer felt it impossible that he should have written the earlier book which had been so dear to her. Was it that she had seen him chastened and depressed of late—had realised the comparative harmlessness of his vanity, the kindness and docility he could show to a friend? Ah no!—if he had been kind for one friend, he had been difficult and ungrateful for another. The thinness of Eleanor's cheek, the hollowness of her blue eye accused him. But even here the girl's inner mind had begun to doubt and demur. After all did she know much—or anything—of their real relation?
Certainly this afternoon he was a delightful companion. That phrase which Vanbrugh Neal had applied to him in Lucy's hearing, which had seemed to her so absurd, began after all to fit. He was bon enfant both to Eleanor and to her on this golden afternoon. He remembered Eleanor's love for broom and brought her bunches of it from the steep banks; he made affectionate mock of Neal's old-maidish ways; he threw himself with ejaculations, joyous, paradoxical, violent, on the unfolding beauty of the lake and the spring; and throughout he made them feel his presence as something warmly strong and human, for all his provoking defects, and that element of the uncommunicated and unexplained which was always to be felt in him. Eleanor began to look happier and younger than she had looked for days. And Lucy wondered why the long ascent to Nemi was so delightful; why the scirocco seemed to have gone from the air, leaving so purpureal and divine a light on mountain and lake and distance.
* * * * *
When they arrived at Nemi, Manisty as usual showed that he knew nothing of the practical arrangements of the day, which were always made for him by other people.
'What am I to do with these?' he said, throwing his hands in despair towards the tea-baskets in the carriage.—'We can't drive beyond this—And how are we to meet the others?—when do they come?—why aren't they here?'
He turned with peremptory impatience to Eleanor. She laid a calming hand upon his arm, pointing to the crowd of peasant folk from the little town that had already gathered round the carriage.
'Get two of those boys to carry the baskets. We are to meet the others at the temple. They come by the path from Genzano.'
Manisty's brow cleared at once like a child's. He went into the crowd, chattering his easy Italian, and laid hands on two boys, one of whom was straight and lithe and handsome as a young Bacchus, and bore the noble name of Aristodemo. Then, followed by a horde of begging children which had to be shaken off by degrees, they began the descent of the steep cliff on which Nemi stands. The path zigzagged downwards, and as they followed it, they came upon files of peasant women ascending, all bearing on their kerchiefed heads great flat baskets of those small wood-strawberries, or fragole, which are the chief crop of Nemi and its fields.
The handsome women, the splendid red of the fruit and the scent which it shed along the path, the rich May light upon the fertile earth and its spray of leaf and blossom, the sense of growth and ferment and pushing life everywhere—these things made Lucy's spirits dance within her. She hung back with the two boys, shyly practising her Italian upon them, while Eleanor and Manisty walked ahead.