A perfect silence reigned. They heard nothing but their own steps on the grassy pavement. The town of Monte Compatri, seen through the trees on the other height, looked more like a gray rock than a city. Not a sign of life was visible from it. The glimpses they caught of the
Campagna had seemed fragments of a vast green solitude where grass had long overgrown the traces of men. No smallest cloud gave life or motion to the steady blue overhead; no song of bird wove a silver link between familiar scenes and that solemn retreat. The soul, stripped of its veiling cares and interests, was like Moses on the mountain, face to face with God. History, mythology, poetry—they were not! The buzzing of these golden bees that made the brow of Tusculum their hive was inaudible and forgotten. On this height was a station-house of eternity, and the electric current of the other world flowed through its blue and silent air.
“It seems to me one should prepare one’s mind before going there,” Bianca said, looking back from the foot of the mountain, after they had descended. They had scarcely spoken a word going down.
The impression made on them was, indeed, so strong that they scarcely observed anything about them for several hours; and it was only when they were going down to Frascati again in the afternoon that they roused themselves from their silence.
“We shall have time to go into Villa Aldobrandini a little while,” the Signora said, looking at her watch. “The train does not start for more than an hour. We can send the man on to the station with our bags, and walk down ourselves. Of course all these villas have very nearly the same view, but this is the finest of all.”
They had time for a short visit only, but their guide made the most of it. Going round one of the circling avenues, dark with ancient ilex-trees, she turned into a cross-road that led directly to the upper centre of the villa, where the cascades
began. First, from under a tomb-like door in the side of a mound, flowed a swift ribbon of water between stone borders. It slanted with the hill, and flashed along silent in the sunshine, eager to leap through the mouth of the great mask below, to scatter its spray over carven stone and a hundred flowers.
They followed the cascades down to the lower front, with its niches, statues, chapel, and chambers, and the noble casino facing it.
“Every story of the house, as you go up,” the Signora said, “brings you on a level with a new cascade, and from the topmost room you look into the heart of the upper thicket, where you might imagine yourself unseen. Indeed, splendid as these scenes are, there is, to me, a constant sense of discomfort in that frequent appearance of solitude where solitude is not. There seems to be no nook, however apparently remote, which is not perfectly overlooked from some almost invisible watch-tower. It may be necessary, but the suggestion is of suspicion and espionage.”
They left the villa by the front avenue and lawn, walking through grass and flowers ankle deep, and gathering handfuls of dear, familiar pennyroyal that they found growing all about.