Vassilii handed me the two halves of the malachite ornament, which he had taken from a small, well-worn bag of chamois leather. I saw how costly the locket must have been when new, for the diamonds set around the edge were large and of the first water. When, after examining the broken portions, I handed them back to him, he sighed, and carefully replaced them in his pocket. Then rising, he wished me “Good-night” in a strained, harsh voice, and sought his room.
Next day we continued our journey to Onega.
CHAPTER XII.
FALSE ZERO.
A bright July evening, a white dusty Italian road, and a fugitive from justice mounted upon a stout pony, with an outfit consisting of a well-filled canvas valise and a revolver.
The police were searching for me, and in consequence I had a few weeks before escaped from England, and set out upon a wandering journey eastward across Europe. I was in Emilia, lonely, tired, and dispirited, having left Piacenza at early morning and ridden on throughout the scorching day. It had, however, grown cooler, for which I was thankful. The wind had risen, blowing softly from mountain and from sea across the plains, through the pines of Pavia, and across the oak forests at the base of the Apennines.
Now and then a puff of blue wood-smoke rose through the branches from charcoal-burners’ cabins; now and then some great magnolia flower shivered its rosy needles upon me as I passed beneath the trees; far away below the Ave Maria was chiming from the church towers in the plain; above, low rain clouds, fretted and edged with amber, floated near the sun; over all the day was of that wondrous hue which is like the soft violet blue of the iris, and is clear yet mystical, as children’s eyes when they wake from dreams of angels.
As I road slowly up the long mountain road, I was overtaken by a horseman, who, light-hearted and happy, was singing to himself staves of contadini choruses. He rode up beside me with a genial, “Buona sera, signore.”
He was a fine-looking man of about thirty, with a dark, pointed beard and waxed moustaches. We rode on together up the hill, and fell into conversation. He inquired where I was from, and my destination, to which I replied that I was travelling for pleasure. He told me that he was a vine-grower living in Marengo, and that he was returning from a business visit to Cremona. When we stopped for water at a roadside spring, he asked me to carry a small pair of saddlebags, as his horse was tired out. I complied cheerfully, and we pushed on up the steep road. Arrived at the top, he took a cross-road, remarking that he believed we should reach the albergo of Padrone Vincenti before the moon rose.
I found him a pleasant, entertaining Italian, and being, no doubt, conceited, imagined that he found me the same. It was dusk when we rode up to a ruined villa, high upon the mountain-side—vast, crumbling, desolate. It was one of those old villas, of which there are hundreds in Italy, standing on their pale olive slopes. Those who are strange to them see only the peeling plaster, the discoloured stone, the desolate courts, the grass-grown flags, the broken statues, the straying, unkempt vines, the look of utter loneliness and decay. But those who know them well, love them and learn otherwise; learn the infinite charm of the silent halls, of the endless echoing corridors, of the wide, frescoed, wind-swept, and sun-bathed chambers, and of the shadowy logge where the roseglow of the oleander burns in the dimness of the arches, and the lizards bask in the sunlight.