Hermione's cottage, the eyrie to which she was bringing Maurice Delarey,
was only a cottage, although to Lucrezia it seemed almost a palace. It
was whitewashed, with a sloping roof of tiles, and windows with green
Venetian shutters. Although it now belonged to a contadino, it had
originally been built by a priest, who had possessed vineyards on the
mountain-side, and who wished to have a home to which he could escape
from the town where he lived when the burning heats of the summer set in.
Above his vineyards, some hundreds of yards from the summit of the
mountain, and close to a grove of oaks and olive-trees, which grew among
a turmoil of mighty boulders, he had terraced out the slope and set his
country home. At the edge of the rough path which led to the cottage from
the ravine below was a ruined Norman arch. This served as a portal of
entrance. Between it and the cottage was a well surrounded by crumbling
walls, with stone seats built into them. Passing that, one came at once
to the terrace of earth, fronted by a low wall with narrow seats covered
with white tiles, and divided by broken columns that edged the ravine and
commanded the great view on which Lucrezia had been gazing. On the wall
of this terrace were stone vases, in which scarlet geraniums were
growing. Red roses twined around the columns, and, beneath, the steep
side of the ravine was clothed with a tangle of vegetation, olive and
peach, pear and apple trees. Behind the cottage rose the bare
mountain-side, covered with loose stones and rocks, among which in every
available interstice the diligent peasants had sown corn and barley. Here
and there upon the mountains distant cottages were visible, but on Monte
Amato Hermione's was the last, the most intrepid. None other ventured to
cling to the warm earth so high above the sea and in a place so
solitary. That was why Hermione loved it, because it was near the sky
and very far away.
Now, after an earnest, ruminating glance at the cottage, Lucrezia walked
across the terrace and reverently entered it by a door which opened onto
a flight of three steps leading down to the terrace. Already she knew the
interior by heart, but she had not lost her awe of it, her sense almost
of being in a church when she stood among the furniture, the hangings,
and the pictures which she had helped to arrange under Gaspare's orders.
The room she now stood in was the parlor of the cottage, serving as
dining-room, drawing-room, boudoir, and den. Although it must be put to
so many purposes, it was only a small, square chamber, and very simply
furnished. The walls, like all the walls of the cottage inside and out,
were whitewashed. On the floor was a carpet that had been woven in
Kairouan, the sacred African town where Artois was now staying and making
notes for his new book. It was thick and rough, and many-colored almost
as Joseph's coat; brilliant but not garish, for the African has a strange
art of making colors friends instead of enemies, of blending them into
harmonies that are gay yet touched with peace. On the walls hung a few
reproductions of fine pictures: an old woman of Rembrandt, in whose
wrinkled face and glittering dark eyes the past pleasures and past
sorrows of life seemed tenderly, pensively united, mellowed by the years
into a soft bloom, a quiet beauty; an allegory of Watts, fierce with
inspiration like fire mounting up to an opening heaven; a landscape of
Frederick Walker's, the romance of harvest in an autumn land;
Burne-Jones's "The Mill," and a copy in oils of a knight of Gustave
Moreau's, riding in armor over the summit of a hill into an unseen
country of errantry, some fairy-land forlorn. There was, too, an old
Venetian mirror in a curiously twisted golden frame.