Volume Ii Part 18 (1/2)
Tuesday Evening.
The telegraph has just brought word that she _will_ come. James is gone down to the office to get a copy of the despatch.
James is come back to say that she is at Novi. If she arrive here to-night, there will be an illumination of the town! Is not this too bad, Molly? Doesn't your blood run cold at the thought of it all?
They 're shouting like mad under my window now, and Lord George thinks she must be come already. James has come in with his hat in tatters and his coat in rags. The excitement is dreadful. The people suspect that the Government are betraying them to Russia, and are going to destroy a palace that belongs to a tallow merchant.
All is right, Molly. She is come! and they are serenading her now under the windows of the ”Croce di Matta!”
Wednesday Night.
If my trembling hand can subscribe legibly a few lines, it is perhaps the last you will ever receive from your attached Jemima. I was never intended to go through such trials as these; and they 're now rending a heart that was only made for tenderness and affection.
We were there, Molly! After such a scene of crus.h.i.+ng and squeezing as never was equalled, we got inside the circus, and with the loss of my new turban and one of my ”plats,” we reached our box, within two of the stage, and nearly opposite the King. For an hour or so, it was only fainting was going on all around us, with the heat and the violent struggle to get in. n.o.body minded the stage at all, where they were doing the same kind of thing we used to see long ago. Ten men in pinkish buff, vaulting over an old white horse, and the clown tumbling over the last of them with a screech; the little infant of three years, with a strap round its waist, standing and tottering on the horse's back; the man with the bra.s.s b.a.l.l.s and the basin, and the other one that stood on the bottles,--all pa.s.sed off tiresome enough, till a grand flourish of trumpets announced Signor Annibale, the great Modern Hercules. In he rode, Molly, full gallop, all dressed in a light, flesh-colored, web, and looking so like naked that I screeched out when I saw him. His hair was divided on his forehead, and cut short all round the head; and, indeed, I must confess he was a fine-looking man. After a turn or two, brandis.h.i.+ng a big club, he galloped in again, but quickly reappeared with a woman lying over one of his arms, and her hair streaming down half-way to the ground. This was Sofia; and you may guess the enthusiasm of the audience at her coming! There she lay, like in a trance, as he dashed along at full speed, the very tip of one foot only touching the saddle, and her other leg dangling down like dead. It was shocking to hear the way they talked of her symmetry and her shape,--not but they saw enough to judge of it, Molly!--till at last the giant stopped to breathe a little just under our box. K. I. and the young men, of course, leaned over to have a good look at her with their gla.s.ses, when suddenly James screamed, ”By the ------ --I won't say what--it is herself!” Mary Anne and I both rose together. The sight left my eyes, Molly, for she looked up at me, and who was it--but the Countess that James was going to marry! There she was, lying languidly on the giant, smiling up at us as cool as may be. I gave a screech, Molly, that made the house ring, and went off in Mary Anne's arms.
If this is n't disgrace enough to bring me to the grave, Nature must have given stronger feelings than she knows to your ever afflicted and heart-broken
Jemima Dodd.
LETTER XXIII. MISS CAROLINE DODD TO MISS c.o.x, AT MISS MINCING'S ACADEMY, BLACK ROCK, IRELAND
Sestri, Gulf of Genoa.
My dear Miss c.o.x,--I had long looked forward to our visit to Genoa in order to write to you. I had fancied a thousand things of the ”Superb City” which would have been matters of interest, and hoped that many others might have presented themselves to actual observation. But with that same fatality by which the future forever evades us, we have come and gone again, and really seen nothing.
Instead of a week or fortnight pa.s.sed in loitering about these mysterious, narrow streets, each one of which is a picture, poking into crypts, and groping along the aisles of those dim churches, and then issuing forth into the blaze of suns.h.i.+ne to see the blue sea heaving in mighty ma.s.ses on the rocky sh.o.r.e, we came here to see some vulgar spectacle of a circus or a tournament. By ill-luck, too, even this pleasure has proved abortive; a very mortifying, I might say humiliating, discovery awaited us, and we have, for shame's sake, taken our refuge in flight from one of the most interesting cities in the whole peninsula.
I am ashamed to confess to you how ill I have borne the disappointment.
The pa.s.sing glimpses I caught here and there of steep old alleys, barely wide enough for three to go abreast; the little squares, containing some quaint monument or some fantastic fountain; the ma.s.sive iron gateways, showing through the bars the groves of orange-trees within; the wide portals, opening on great stairs of snow-white marble,--all set me a-dreaming of that proud Genoa, with its merchant-princes, who combined all the haughty characteristics of a feudal state with the das.h.i.+ng spirit of a life of enterprise.
The population, too, seemed as varied in type as the buildings around them. The bronzed, deep-browed Ligurian--the ”Faquino”--by right of birth, stood side by side with the scarcely less athletic Dalmatian. The Arab from Tiflis, the Suliote, the Armenian, the dull-eyed Moslem, and the treacherous-looking Moor were all grouped about the Mole, with a host of those less picturesque figures that represent Northern Europe.
There, was heard every language and every dialect. There, too, seen the lineaments of every nation, and the traits of every pa.s.sion that distinguish a people. Just as on the deep blue water that broke beside them were s.h.i.+ps of every build, from the proud three-decker to the swift ”lateen,” and from the tall, taper spare of the graceful clipper to the heavily rounded, low-masted galliot of the Netherlands.
I own to you that however the actual life of commerce may include commonplace events and commonplace people, there is something about the sea and those that live on the great waters that always has struck me as eminently poetical.
The scene, the adventurous existence, the strange faraway lands they have visited, the Spice Islands of the South, the cold sh.o.r.es of the Arctic Seas, the wondrous people with whom they have mingled, the dangers they have confronted,--all invest the sailor with a deep interest to me, and I regard him ever as one who has himself been an actor in the great drama of which I have only read the outline.
I was, indeed, very sorry to leave Genoa, and to leave it, too, unseen.
An event, however, too painful to allude to, compelled us to start at once; and we came on here to the little village from whence I write. A lovely spot it is,--sheltered from the open sea by a tall promontory, wooded with waving pines, whose feathery foliage is reflected in the calm sea beneath. A gentle curve of the strand leads to Chiavari, another town about six miles off; and behind us, landward, rise the great Apennines, several thousand feet in height,--grand, barren, volcanic-looking ma.s.ses of wildest outline, and tinted with the colors of every mineral ore. On the very highest pinnacles of these are villages perched, and the tall tower of a church is seen to rise against the blue sky, at an elevation, one would fancy, untrodden by man.
There is a beautiful distinctness in Italian landscape,--every detail is ”picked out” sharply. The outline of every rock and cliff, of every tree, of every shrub, is clean and well defined. Light and shadow fall boldly, and even abruptly, on the eye; but--shall I own it?--I long for the mysterious distances, the cloud-shadows, the vague atmospheric tints of our Northern lands. I want those pa.s.sing effects that seem to give a vitality to the picture, and make up something like a story of the scene. It is in these the mind revels as in a dreamland of its own. It is from these we conjure up so many mingled thoughts of the past, the present, and the coming time,--investing the real with the imaginary, and blending the ideal with the actual world.
How naturally do all these thoughts lead us to that of Home! Happily for us, there is that in the religion of our hearts towards home that takes no account of the greater beauty of other lands. The loyalty we owe our own hearth defies seduction. Admire, glory in how you will the grandest scene the sun ever set upon, there is still a holy spot in your heart of hearts for some little humble locality,--a lonely glen,--a Highland tarn,--a rocky path beside some winding river, rich in its childish memories, redolent of the bright hours of sunny infancy,--and this you would not give for the most gorgeous landscapes that ever basked beneath Italian sky.
Do not fancy that I repine at being here because I turn with fond affection to the scene of my earliest days. I delight in Italy; I glory in its splendor of sky and land and water. I never weary of its beauteous vegetation, and my ear drinks in with equal pleasure the soft accents of its language; but I always feel that these things are to be treasured for memory to be enjoyed hereafter, just as the emigrant labors for the gold he is to spend in his own country. In this wise, it may be, when wandering along some mountain ”boreen” at home, sauntering of a summer's eve through some waving meadow, that Italy in all its brightness will rise before me, and I will exalt in my heart to have seen the towers of the Eternal City, and watched the waves that sleep in ”still Sorrento.”
We leave this to-morrow for Spezia, there to pa.s.s a few days; our object being to loiter slowly along till papa can finally decide whether to go back or forward: for so is it, my dearest friend, all our long-planned tour and its pleasures have resolved themselves into a hundred complications of finance and fas.h.i.+onable acquaintances.