The stubby pipe sucked and sputtered, and McCann knocked the ashes into the road. They had driven already nearly an hour, and he was growing impatient; "how much farther had they to go?" He asked the coachman, who only replied, "Just a fractional bit further, suh," which was indefinite. They left the highway and struck into a hilly road where the hedgerows grew thick on either side, with rough pastures beyond, on the one hand, and on the other thick and ancient pine forests, where the low sunlight struck under the sighing branches and rested on mossy boulders and level patches of golden ferns. Now and then a grey farmhouse appeared in its orchard, and once they passed a dingy white meeting-house, with pointed wooden spikes on the four corners of its belfry, its green blinds faded a sickly yellow. Just beyond they met the country milk-team with its cantering horses and clattering cans, the driver nodding on his seat, with a watchful collie beside him. Then the pastures on the right ended, and they plunged into deep forests, black, almost lightless, where the road wound like the bed of a dry torrent in a vast green cañon. The carriage climbed steeply up the rocky road, with no sound around but the rattle of pebbles under the feet of the horses, and the melancholy calling of the wood thrushes. On the crown of the hill heavy wrought-iron gates closed their passage, gates that swung back slowly as the footman whistled twice. They passed through, turned sharply to the left, and in a flash were out of the forest.
Malcolm McCann had not a very keen sense of beauty, but even to him the vision that lay before him startled him into sudden enthusiasm. They were riding along the comb of a ridge of high hills thick with ink-black pine forests to the left, while to the right they swept down in gracious undulations into a basin-shaped valley, the level floor of which was, it may be, something over a thousand acres in extent, shaped like an elongated ellipse, with lofty hills rising on all sides.
The sun dropped down and lay on the edge of the world; from the farther side of the valley it poured a suave, golden glory of molten light down over the purple, serrated hills, that lay in the valley like amber wine. Smooth fields of ripening grain and velvet meadow-land chequered the valley irregularly, slim elms and dark, heavy oaks rising among them. In the midst, curling like level smoke, wound a narrow river with black poplars and golden chestnut-trees leaning above. In all the valley was no sign of a dwelling save far away at the distant end, where from the midst of thick foliage rose dark roofs and towers and chimneys, as of some château on the Loire.
McCann caught his breath. "Is that the place?" he said quickly.
"Suh, that is Vita Nuova," answered the footman.
[II.]
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