CHAPTER X
When they swung round the great bend of the Rhone, and Vienne came in sight, Tommy uttered a cry of exultation.
“Oh Clementina, let us stay here for a week!”
When they stood an hour afterwards on the great suspension bridge that connects Vienne with the little town of Sainte-Colombe, and drank in the afternoon beauty of the place, Tommy amended his proposition.
“Oh Clementina,” said he, “let us stay here for ever!”
Clementina sighed, and watched the broad blue river sweeping in its majestic curve between the wooded mountains from whose foliage peeped a myriad human habitations, the ancient Château-Fort de la Bâtie standing a brave and mutilated sentinel on its dominating hill, the nestling town with its Byzantine towers and tiled roofs, the Gothic west front of the Cathedral framed by the pylons of the bridge, the green boulevarded embankment and the fort of Sainte-Colombe in its broader and more smiling valley guarded, it too, by its grim square tower, the laughing peace of the infinite web of afternoon shadow and afternoon sunlight. Away up the stream a barge moved slowly down under a sail of burnished gold. A few moments afterwards coming under the lee of the mountains, the sail turned into what Tommy, who had pointed it out, called a dream-coloured brown. From which it may be deduced that Tommy was growing poetical.
In former times Clementina would have rebuked so nonsensical a fancy. But now, with a nod, she acquiesced. Nay more, she openly agreed.
“We who live in a sunless room in the midst of paint-pots, know nothing of the beauty of the world.”
“That’s true,” said Tommy.
“We hope, when we’re tired, that there is such a place as the Land of Dreams, but we imagine it’s somewhere east of the sun, and west of the moon. We don’t realise that all we’ve got to do to get there is to walk out of our front door.”