‘From the dark edges of the sensual ground,’
as the bird-mother coaxes her young to try its wings in little flights from twig to twig before it soars into the heavens. No, it is not forbidden to the fancy to play around the mysterious life that makes the bud swell into the flower and the seed grow into the lofty tree, so long as we see all in God, and see in God the Trinity, and, in the aspiring flame of created adoring spirits, behold Maria Santissima as the white point that touches the foot of the throne.”
The Signora had been speaking slowly and dreamily, pausing now and then; but at the last, growing earnest, had, as it were, waked herself, and become aware that she was talking aloud and was listened to.
Smiling, and blushing too a little, “Scusino!” she said. “I cannot help it. I preach as the sparks fly upward.”
“I speak for a seat in your meeting-house for the rest of my life,” Mr. Vane replied promptly.
“Apropos of meeting-houses,” she said, “what do you think of
those for spires?” pointing to four gigantic cypresses in the villa they were passing.
This villa was a strange, deserted-looking place just above the Campagna. Nothing in it flourished but the four cypresses, which rose to a magnificent height, their huge cones sloping at the top to a feather so slender that it was always tipped to one side. Stern, dark, and drawn close together, they looked down on the place as if they had cursed it and were waiting to see the consummation of its ruin. All their shadows were full of a multitudinous grit of cicali voices that sounded like the sharp grating together of teeth. At their feet stood the house, half-alive, half-dead, hidden from the street by the walls it was not high enough to overlook. It was like the upper part of a house that the earth had half swallowed. At each side of the door stood a statue dressed in some antique fashion, hat on head and sword on thigh. They might have been two men who were petrified there long before. At each side of the gate, inside, a stone dog, petrified too, in the act of starting up with open jaws, crumbled in a blind rage, as if a paralyzed life yet dwelt under the lichen-covered fragments, and struggled to pour forth its arrested anger.
A little farther on was another decaying villa, where green moss and grasses grew all over the steps, half hid the paving-stones of the court, and choked the fountain dry. The house, once a gay and noble mansion, had now got its shutters decently closed over the sightless windows, and resigned itself to desolation. The long, dim avenues had a damp, unhealthy breath, and not a flower was to be seen.
They went in and seated themselves