The boys were coming in from their afternoon walk down the mountain-side, and all glowing with just-subsiding fun. Each one, passing the prior, caught at his hand to kiss it; but as he would not permit himself to receive such an homage, they resorted to the amusing substitute of kissing their own hands after they had touched his.
“What beautiful recollections of their school-days those boys will carry with them through their lives!” Mr. Vane remarked, as they went out over the colonnade to the Loggia del Paradiso. “In no way, it seems to me, except by being educated here, unless one spend one’s life here, could one become perfectly familiar with the riches, visible and invisible, of the place; and such a familiarity would be of itself an education, especially for the impressible minds of the young.”
The front of the Paradiso fills the gap in the middle of one side of the monastery—that part opposite the church—and is on a level with the church, or the second story of the monastery. It is probably the same width as the church. Leaning on the parapet there, one looks off on a view which may well give the place its name—the beautiful plain and the beautiful circling mountains, with the still, blue splendor of the southern sky gazing down upon them as if enamored of their beauty. There was no need of imagination in such a place. Simple, literal eyes were enough to flood the soul with beauty.
Familiar as he was with the scene, the prior was sympathetic enough to say but little; and even Isabel, whose impressions, being more superficial, ran a good deal into words, hushed herself out of respect for the others.
“Until we reach Rome again,” the Signora remarked to her friends as they went down the stairs to the great court, “I should like to be excused from all social intercourse, except the mere being with you bodily. I don’t want to speak or be spoken to, except to learn of this place. We have no right to talk; we are ghosts. We have come here in a dream or a vision. Father Boniface talks, of course, because he is a part of the place.”
They laughed and agreed.
“But I hope,” the prior said, “that you are not too ghostly to taste the water they are just drawing up now. See how it sparkles!”
Two columns support a cross-piece over this beautiful well, and from the centre drops an iron chain with a copper bucket at each end. When one goes down the other comes up, dripping full of airy water.
They all drank silently—each, probably, to some friend, absent or present. Bianca blushed as she drank, and her pretty mouth seemed to kiss the water. Then, standing on the upper step of the well, they leaned over the stone curb and looked down to where, far below, the surface of the water shone like a huge black diamond set in a gray border.
Tired out with travel and with pleasure, the ladies were not sorry when the prior proposed that they should go down to the house where they were to sleep.