Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Our Moods and the Seas—Memories in Landscapes—The Healing of the Sea—A Vision in the Bay of Naples—Marion Crawford’s Yacht Expected—The Family Together at Leghorn—Lady Paget—A Bathing Scene—Hugh Fraser—“Spannocchi” for Dinner—The Avenging Boatman—Livorno, an Anomaly—Sunset on the Mare Ligure—Bay of Spezia, a Splurge of Colour and Light—A Hail Storm in Venice—The Joy of a Gondola—Moods of Venice—A Giorgione Beauty—The Nurseries of Venice—Her Shops—Saints and Heresies of the Thirteenth Century.

Let us come back to happier themes! Many and enchanting books have been written about Italian cities and Italian country, but none about our Italian seas. People who look at the map may think this a limited subject; there is the Mediterranean and there is the Adriatic, what more can be said? Amici miei, to a sea-lover there are as many seas as ports; the dear salt water and the sunrise and the sunset know it, and have a separate caress for each. They make—or fit into—the thousand moods of mind that colour a pilgrim’s life, and the pictures of them in my gallery of remembrance are clearer than any of my landscapes and more helpful—because they never hurt. The landscapes, all except the loveliest ones where the spirit poised for one longing instant—like a bird on the topmast of a ship and, like the bird, was given no more than time to take breath and wing away again—are mostly inhabited. Here your friend quarrelled with you; there your true love kissed you and betrayed; further on your child was sick and every aspect of the most beautiful scenery in the world brings back only the poignant watches when a flush of colour in the little face sent you crazy with joy and something wrong again with the little pulse froze your heart with fear. On land we cannot get away from ourselves and others; earth is greedily dominant, monstrously exacting. But the sea repudiates all individual ties. You must be empty of yourself or it will not speak to you at all. Its laws are not our laws, and the first thing it does, if you are docile to its magic, is to wash out your personality, and, oh, how glad some of us are—or would be—if we only could utterly forget that irritant, insistent factor of existence!

In our long wanderings most paths, as we look back on them, show the little red stains where we cut our feet; we have left shreds of our soul’s garments on many a thorn by the way; but for me, and I fancy for some of you others, the breath and the sound and the touch of the sea has been nothing but coolness and healing, a sunbath for life’s chillinesses, a fountain of strength in its languors. I think I should know now the right point to make for, according to the distemper that might be assailing me; and, though twenty years ago I sought and loved the onslaught of the Atlantic and the Valhalla of the March tides in the Channel, to-day I would fare no further than my home seas, those that lap and sing on the Italian shores.

I was sailing up into, the Bay of Naples once, just as the morning had conquered the last star; the sky was a faint milky blue, and the mountains were cowled outlines, very dark and still. Not a breath stirred the sea, not a sound came from the land. Suddenly from the shadows that were neither land nor sea, I saw coming towards me a tall glorious form, floating on the water, pointing to the sky, clothed in long straight robes of white, making for open sea with the steady rush of a seabird on rested pinions. It took all the growing daylight to itself—it was the daylight, for a few breathless seconds—a vision of the Immaculate Conception, it seemed to me; then the music of ripple on prow whispered across the water, the sun leapt up behind Sant’ Angelo; I rubbed my eyes and, lo, a slender vessel with snowy sails, tall and narrow, from some strange port, such sails as our seamen never unfurled. She brought the wind as she had taken the daylight, and a moment later she swept past in her immaculate pride and was gone.

I always rather resented the advent of battleships and royal yachts and gaudy truck of that kind in our Southern waters, but the private yachts inspired us with a pleasant, mysterious interest that was not unwelcome. Once, when we were watching anxiously for my brother, during his venturesome sail from New York to Naples, the children were cruising round the Bay not far from Naples. A large beautiful yacht was seen to come in and cast anchor off Santa Lucia, and at once the greatest excitement prevailed on the Crawford felucca. Was that the Alda? Oh, surely it must be! At once the Margherita headed for the port, and the nearer she came to the new arrival the surer was everybody that the Alda—which none of them had seen, as Marion had just bought her—had reached port at last. How well she had stood the voyage! No sign of the heavy weather mentioned in the wire from Gibraltar! No sign of the Padrone either, but, of course, he would have had to go on shore to report himself and get his harbour papers from the Consul. What was this? Dark-faced sailors in fezes? How like Marion to pick up a Lascar crew in New York! Let us row round her and hail somebody—good Heavens! The first shout brought a dozen lovely Turkish ladies to the cabin windows, smiling, interested, only too ready to ask the pretty boatful on board. The children stared, open-mouthed! Then a burst of uncontrollable laughter shook the Margherita from stem to stern. Papa had certainly not brought a harem from New York! “A casa,” came the order to the grinning sailors, and the Margherita turned tail and ran for home.

There is a busy unromantic seaport called Livorno, a long way up the coast from Naples, a Tuscan town of white streets and shadeless squares, all alive with commerce, and, until I came to years of reason, represented to me by the huge flapping straw hats, fine as silk and pale gold in colour, which we children regarded as signals of summer when, on the first hot day, the ribbons that held them were tied under our chins, and we were admonished, on pain of sunstrokes and spankings, not to take them off. I had among my possessions a toy Swiss cottage all made of the same pretty straw, and I imagined that “Leghorn” was a straw city with bunches of red poppies and blue ribbons on the house-tops for ornament. It was rather a blow to discover, on being taken there when I was seven years old, to find that the only traces of my toy city were the thin golden strings which most of the women were plaiting with lightning quickness as they walked in the streets or sat in the doorways. After that, as I grew older, Leghorn meant just the sea in some of its most enchanting aspects, for it was very rarely that we missed our few weeks of bathing there in September, if we had spent the summer in the North. It was the beginning of the autumn homecoming; we took an apartment on the long bright boulevard that faces the sea, the cook and one or two of the servants came up from Rome to look after us, and, always, we had a royally good time. The last, I think, was the best of all, happening after a memorable summer in the Bagni de Lucca, which I have described elsewhere. My sister had just become engaged, and her fiancÉ, Erich von Rabe, of course followed us to Leghorn. Hugh Fraser was there, occupied mostly, it seemed to me, in saving the Paget children from getting drowned, since they would attempt to follow their indomitable young mother in her long swims out in the deep. Lady Paget did everything beautifully; she was built like a goddess and could not do anything else, whether she rode or danced or glided about in great old rooms or flowery gardens; but she never seemed more of a goddess than when she stood for an instant in her clinging draperies with her arms above her head and then leapt, like a curved arrow, out and down into the sun-kissed waves. One held one’s breath while they engulfed her—and then, yards beyond, up came that proud small head, and away she would go, with long easy strokes, a being at one with the sun and the sea—a joy to behold.

All that was in the morning, when the spaces under the big tents on the outrunning piers of the “stabilimenti” were crowded to the very edge with cheery, chattering groups, the ladies embroidering as fast as they talked, the children romping, the young men making love, and the old people, who would not face the cold joy of a plunge, smiling benignly on it all. The piers were low, and a sudden gust of wind would fling the salt water up without warning; then there were shrieks mingled with laughter, flurrying of skirts and scraping of chairs and snatching up babies, and all the fun of settling down again, only to renew the game at the next shower. This gathering only took place in the morning. As soon as the sun was right overhead, the ladies packed their fancy work into their reticules, wiped the remains of “ciambelle” from the children’s mouths, straightened their hats—all with an incessant fire of chatter like that of a tree full of roosting sparrows suddenly disturbed—and away everybody trailed along the blazing white boulevard for home, mid-day dinner, and the rapturous quiet of the siesta afterwards.

I believe I was a little jealous, even then, of the kind of official ownership which the Ambassador and his family seemed to claim in the man who, though neither of us dreamed it yet, was very soon to be my husband. Anyway, I permitted myself an occasional mood of pleasant melancholy towards evening when my own dear people, like all the others who had any deference at all for public opinion, were driving round and round the public gardens, listening to the band. Two of our party had agreed to slap public opinion quite brutally in the face; these were my erratic sister and her equally erratic fiancÉ. They hired a little sailing boat, and day after day, towards four o’clock, went off by themselves, unchaperoned save by the boatman, for long expeditions, whence they returned, gloriously happy and hungry, just in time for a very late dinner. Once and once only they lured me out—why, I could not imagine at the moment, as I was a bad sailor in those days and did not in the least want to go, but I soon found out their wicked motive. I had taken it upon myself to order the meals while we were at Leghorn, as my mother thought it would be good practice for me. Now there was one dish which we all, except Annie and Erich, particularly disliked, a fry of very bony, very rank-smelling crayfish, called “spannocchi.” After one trial I had steadily refused to have it brought to the table. But those two young monsters liked “spannocchi,” and they laid their plot quite cleverly and everything turned out just as they intended. We beat out to sea, the weather was squally, and in a short time I was lying, a seasick heap, in the bottom of the boat, begging with tears to be taken home. This was what they had been waiting for. “Not unless you promise us spannocchi for dinner to-morrow!” they exclaimed in a breath, grinning down at me in my misery. They looked as big and wicked as the pictures of the demon lover in our old ballad book, when he is sailing the faithless wife to hell!

Of course I promised—and was a most unpopular person with the rest of the family at dinner-time the next night. But their boatman avenged me in the end. The day before we returned to Rome they took leave of him with a little present, and he, who had all along imagined them to be a young married couple, because they came unaccompanied, testified his gratitude and good-will in true Italian fashion, by crying enthusiastically: “Heaven bless you, my good Signori, and may it be a fine boy!”

Annie put her head down and ran for home, and Erich was not allowed to come to dinner that night.

Livorno is an anomaly, an Italian city with no history, no ancient monuments, no works of art. In fact, it always seemed to me less Italian than any spot I knew in the whole country, but in the days when we used to frequent it I took that, as one took everything else in that cheerful age, for granted, and it was only long afterwards that I gave myself the trouble to hunt up the causes of the phenomenon. Then I learnt that down to the days of the Medici it was a small fishing village with a few hundred inhabitants, bearing, for some unknown reason, the name of another tiny place further north, Livorno Vercellese. The Medici first noted its possibilities, and set to work to make it the real port of Florence, till then largely dependent for such a commodity on Pisa, a little further up the coast. Pisa, the ancient rival of Genoa and Venice, still sick with memories of her past greatness and, since 1405, the bought-and-paid-for fief of Florence, was always seething with disaffection and conspiracy. Its last desperate effort at retrieving its independence was made in 1494, and the Florentines were put to the trouble of besieging it and taking it by force. It was some sixty or seventy years later (I think during the reign of Francesco, the father of Marie de Medici) that Livorno recommended itself to the ruler of the Republic as a fine spot for a port that would have no disturbing memories of independence to interfere with its usefulness. In order to insure this they did not colonise it with Italians at all, but craftily invited the more commercially-minded among the malcontents of all Europe to come and open up trading houses there. The invitation was eagerly accepted: persecuted Catholics from England and Germany, Moors from Spain, Jews in great numbers from all parts came, settled, and flourished, the Jews of course outnumbering all the rest, so that the Leghorn population is largely Jewish to this day. But there are also several old English merchant houses that, while still affecting to regard England as “home,” are deeply rooted in the bright little city on the Ligurian Sea, and very kind and hospitable were their representatives to us. I remember certain commodities—great chests of tea, rolls of English flannel, and fine table linen—my mother always sent for to one of these Leghorn merchants, and I fancy it is due to the little English-speaking community that the town is generally known by that barbarous travesty of its Italian name. In our times it has, of course, all the unsightly riches of a great modern military and commercial centre—foundries, docks, ship-yards, fortifications, naval arsenals, and all the rest of it—but its real attractions lie in the marvellous freshness of its air and its unbroken sea-line, changing in tint at every hour of the day and taking on certain splendours that I never remember seeing elsewhere. Livorno always seems cool, for when the sun is shining his hottest the breeze never fails, and the billows roll in and break in laughter and thunder on the rocks and toss their spray almost to the windows of your room, where the light comes up in a glow of green and gold through the Venetians and the wind plays games with the clean white curtains all day long.

But it is at evening that the Mare Ligure takes you and holds you with a spell of its own. At sunset the wind generally dies down, and then the sun sinks slowly over a softly-moving but untroubled sea. The sky clears of its dancing clouds and becomes—not sky, somehow, but a fathomless infinity of breathing rose and topaz, transparent and liquid like jewelled wine. And every ripple and dimple of the water soaks up the transcendent flush, swaying rhythmically, and smoothing out into vast pools of melting mother-of-pearl, in which that living wet crimson seems to lie like a transparent veil over deeper tints that float beneath. When the sun is gone, the red deepens to the velvet of a dark June rose, and the western sky is flame, not light; but hurrying night has chilled the east behind you, and now every ripple is violet blue on its hither side, the golden glow recedes further and further towards the west, is sucked away in the trail of the sun at last, and then nothing is left of the day but a forsaken sweep of primrose and the wraith of a new-born star.

For sheer splurge of colour and light one must go further north and be out in the Bay of Spezia some September noon, when the harbour is full of white battleships all beaconed with signals like strung flowers, and the bands are playing madly and salutes are crashing through the music for some royal holiday. The white town and the green hills behind it seem to thrill visibly in unison, and the sea is cobalt that would make your eyes ache but for the fringe of feathery white ripples that the breeze combs up all over its surface, and the sky is transparent turquoise, and night seems a thousand years away. Further on yet Genoa the Superb has a sea as blue, sky as stainless, but she dominates in her white and emerald loveliness so that her setting is almost effaced. One forgets to notice the steps of the throne where Sovereign Beauty queens it so royally.

Then cross the plain to Venice, the witch who holds East and West in her soft hands and plays with their riches as a millionaire’s child might slip a rain of gold pieces from one palm to another, in idleness, recking nothing of their value. Sea and sky, priceless palace and empty island—it is all hers—she can never exhaust her past, and our century, jejune and vulgar as it is, only seems to touch her to a scornful smile. But Venice can tremble still. Once in many years there sweeps down on her one of Nature’s handfuls of retribution—a storm that makes her quake to her artificial incredible foundations. I saw one such. It was in May, Venice’s most perfect month. We had been out to the Lido that morning, bathing in water smooth as cream; there was not a cloud in the sky. We had barely got home when inky darkness descended, and out of it burst a gale that lashed the Grand Canal to fury, and a machine-gun fire of hail was flung against the windows, to result, an instant later, in a crash of broken glass and tumbling bricks that was truly appalling. Through the tumult came shrieks and cries. Every window in the Ducal Palace was smashed, and most of the others in the town; when it was over—the whole thing did not last more than twenty minutes—I went out on our balcony and picked up, from the thick layer lying there, hailstones as big as pigeons’ eggs. The next day we went out again to the Lido, and where a long green pergola of vines had shaded the way to the bathing establishment now stood a bare tracery of dry branches. Not a single leaf was left.

But generally the Adriatic waits on Venice with subservient calm, and one can float over those vast yet not unpictured lagoons in still assurance that one’s reveries will not be disturbed. I doubt whether such lengths of languorous idling be good for young strong people, but as a rest-cure for tired ones there can be nothing more complete. The shape and build of the gondola (what a perfect name for the gliding sinuous thing!) was evolved by an artist in comfort; the enormous leather cushions let you sink into their thickness as far as you please without ever touching the limit of their pleasant elasticity. Whether cowled in to keep off the sun’s rays in the day or uncovered to give you all the coolness of the evening, the gondola seat relieves you of all responsibility for your body; it holds you as an experienced nurse holds a tired child; and in its silent swan-like rush through the water you get just the sense of motion necessary to keep your nerves employed yet soothed. With the right companion, what talks are possible, as you glide out in the last flush of evening towards the more distant lagoons and wait for the moon to come up out of Istria, across the sea! Your gondolier, silent as Charon, is behind you and you forget his existence. And all the rest is behind, too, but very far behind: daily life with its horrid strident claims and calculations that won’t even leave honeymooning couples alone! Time has ceased, and the world is standing still to let you look at life in its beauty and kiss its face in its peace. When at last you say, without turning your head, “A casa, Sandruccio!” your black swan quivers an instant from low stern to dark arched prow, swings round in the smallest space any boat did ever turn in, and you float back to the regular rhythm of Sandruccio’s twenty-foot oar, till a necklace of lights lies low on the land and the faintest of songs—a very mist of music—is wafted over the water. “Alla Pizzetta?” enquires Sandruccio, speaking for the first time and in a voice expressing much amused indulgence for dreaming lovers. A few minutes later he is imperiously ordering fellow-gondoliers out of his way to the steps, is holding the side of the swan the eighth of an inch off the grind of the stone, and you and your other self dance on shore to become light-hearted young people, keeping time surreptitiously to the gay waltz of the band and laughing at everything and nothing because all the festive crowd around you is doing the same thing.

Witch and tyrant as she is—and perhaps for that very reason, since tyrants must know how to yield as well as how to rule—Venice will meet you in almost all your moods, and create new ones for you if you have none of your own.

I used to get dazzled with all the splendour of palaces and Churches; these last are so full of the glorification of great men—the monuments and ornamentation are so obtrusive that there seems scarcely any room for prayer. San Marco itself, dream of beauty as it is, inspires less devotion than many a humble country Church without a single work of art to recommend it. Without the ineffable Presence in the Tabernacle I should have felt more piously disposed at the foot of the lonely shrine out in the Lagoon, where the Blessed Madonna’s picture smiles down from its tall tarred post on the flowers that one or other of her children brings there every day. The water laps gently at her feet, the sky arches blue overhead, and one can dream very good and happy dreams as one gazes up at her. But in San Marco, just as in the Doges’ Palace, one is teased by two things—the necessity of thought and appreciation, and that horrid sense one has in so many places in Italy, of all the prying irreverence that expert—sceptic—heretics of the Ruskin tribe have brought to bear on it—as if the cleverest ant that ever crawled and builded underground could measure the courses of the stars!

To forget, and rest from, other people’s thoughts, I used to walk a good deal through those narrow, noiseless streets where never hoof or wheel comes to break the stillness, where old houses lean close to share old secrets, and the shadows lie clear and cool through most of the daylight hours. When the sun does strike down he turns the grey to gold, seems to gather up all the perfume of the small hidden gardens and fling it to you with a laugh on a spray of jessamine that has tossed itself over some ancient wall, or a tangle of red carnations spilling down through the scrollwork of a balcony projecting the wide curve of its iron bars far overhead, above the street. Through a half-open portone, dull green, like the narrow canals in the shade, you catch a glimpse of a courtyard deep sunk between high walls that are dimpled and lichened to indescribable richness of colour, and gleaming here and there with some lovely fragment of bas-relief. Cupid with one wing gone and half a bow—a row of bursting pomegranates trailing off into nothing—a few letters of some once pompous inscription—who knows, who cares? They served out their own uses centuries ago and were stuck in here to corner a window frame, to key an arch, to replace a brick, but the sun and the rain and the salt sweetness of Adriatic airs have fused and mellowed them to the gold-white tint of fresh curds, smoothed their marbled surface to the velvet uniformity of magnolia petals. There is a fountain in the courtyard, of course, a rough half shell of stone set into the wall, where a slow jet trickles all day long and is just now spilling over the brim of the red copper “conca” that some woman has set a-tilt below it—and forgotten, perhaps, to run upstairs and pull in the wire that dangles overhead between two windows, flapping with garments of many colours like a string of signals at sea. For there are windows that look into the courtyard, row above row—and there she is, looking out of one, a red-haired, brown-eyed young creature with broad shoulders and sunburnt throat, a strapping baby trying to wriggle out of its swaddling bands in her arms. In a minute she comes down, and clatters over the broad damp stones in her wooden clogs with yellow velvet toe-caps—and the sight of them sets me dreaming of the Venetian ladies three hundred years ago, picking their way to Mass through the narrow twisting “calle” on clogs, too, but such clogs! A narrow stein, twelve or fourteen inches high, resting on a base not more than two inches wide, and spreading at the top into a pretty little slipper, lined with velvet, and the whole thing was covered with crimson velvet and gold lace held in place by dozens of gold-headed nails! How any grown woman ever balanced herself on these stilts is a mystery to me still. My father at one time collected ancient footgear, and then forgot all about it; so it came to pass that in a corner of our old nursery at the Villa Negroni there lay the strangest heap of toys that any modern child ever had to play with—several pairs of these exquisitely ornamented “sabots” tumbled in with pink and scarlet silk slippers of the Watteau period—and later. One pair, I remember, with heels like knitting pins, so high that only the very point of the foot touched the ground at all. But, oh, how the little feet that wore them must have suffered! They had certainly walked in such shoes from childhood, for the foot had sunk down and lost shape until, pathetically small as the little slipper was, it was as lumpy and shapeless as a clenched fist and almost as broad as it was long.

By the time I remembered her again, after my mental excursion, my Giorgione beauty had twisted a towel into a turban, placed it on her red hair, and, lifting the “conca” on to her head with a turn of the hand and without spilling a drop, had disappeared up the dark stairway, all in less time than it takes to tell. Then, after stealing one fat, pink oleander blossom from the tree in the corner, I went on my way, sniffing its nutty sweetness, to lose myself in the silent labyrinth of those little-trodden alleys and then be suddenly brought to a standstill by a deep narrow canal, unbridged, green, silent, serving as the water door to the rooms of dark old houses that frowned at each other across it. At every few yards stone steps led down, the water lapping confidentially over the lowest ones. From far away comes the long warning cry, “O, PremÍ”—that has puzzled generations of etymologists unable to give even a guess at its derivation. But everybody knows its meaning—you hear it a hundred times a day at every angle of the canals, telling those whom it concerns that a gondola is coming round the corner. The next moment it has swung into sight, the long, sinuous black thing cutting through the water so smoothly and imperiously, pulling up suddenly without jerk or sound beside the steps to let its fare slip on shore or its gondolier deliver a message—in the soft lisping dialect that sounds like insects’ wings in a summer noon—to some one waiting for it on a balcony above.

It is the little things that are so real and charming in Venice, I think; the glimpses of life among the unchanging, persistent, common people, who live as they have always lived in the discreet still atmosphere of the back streets and the forgotten waterways.

Sometimes grown-up Venice is a little overpowering; one feels called upon to note every turn and building, for fear of missing some exquisite bit of architecture, some play of light and shade that must be remembered. Then one is glad to get away to one or another of the islands that lie around her, the nurseries where she played, and dreamed of the future, a thousand years ago. The dearest of them all to me is Torcello. We rowed out there one morning in August, when the sea was very calm and the sun a little veiled by clouds sweeping slowly up from the south. As we approached the island it seemed as if its few buildings were flush with the water; so low does it lie that the grasses and wild roses on the shore were dipping in the wash of the ripples. Some peasants had been cutting the grass, the scent of new-mown hay filled the air, and two great boats pushed out from some inlet and passed between us and the land, laden ten feet high with a cargo of fragrant green gold. As they met the breeze, up went the tawny sails and they skimmed away over the blue water like bees heavy with pollen. Then there was the cool rush of the turning prow, our gondola ran in softly to the strand, some one held up an arm, and I sprang on shore—to find myself in another age and another clime. I had to wait a few minutes to realise what it all meant, for the “ambiente” was new to my senses. A stretch of turf and wild roses—that explained itself—youth and roses never need introduction—but the still white Church, so long and low, with its slender columns like altar candles, its grave Byzantine lines—that made me pause. It seemed as if some Saint had turned from his prayers to ask me what I came for, and I could only reply: “You must tell me—there is nothing here that I have a name for, but there is something that was mine—give it back to me!”

When I walk through a familiar room in the dark, a peculiar warning like a ghostly touch is laid on my forehead as I come near any object on a level with it, and that same feeling came to me there at Torcello, I remember. It seemed as if it all were known to me, as if every flower and blade of grass called out, “We were here with you before!”—as if the small forsaken basilica had meant the heart of home in some lapsed period that life, as I knew it, could in no way account for. Its loveliness was so removed, so ascetic that one held one’s breath for fear of disturbing its peace; the marble seats, the central throne, seemed all peopled by grave shades of presbyters, surrounding their Bishop, their long straight vestments marked with the gold cross from shoulder to shoulder and from neck to feet; I could almost fancy I heard their deep chant, first from this side of the mounting tribune and then from that, echoing in the cold spaces overhead and dying away down the nave among the columns. I believed the old story then, that Torcello had been the first resting-place of the hunted exiles fleeing seaward from the Huns; it was not that; I doubt whether the basilica was really built in the Seventh Century as the guidebooks say; Rialto had its Church long before Torcello; but Rialto has been the artery of Venice’s throbbing vitality too long for any associations to cling to it now, while Torcello has stood aside, a recluse that has never wavered in its loyalty to the Past, and the Past is enshrined there for all time. I was surprised to find that it and I were friends. There are only two of all the dead and gone centuries of Europe that seem really my own besides the one I was born in—and they do not belong to the chaotic times of Barbarian invasion and Byzantine supremacy. But the nameless sweetness of the airs that play so gently over the forsaken island said something that day that could never be forgotten, and the impression was so strong and so perfect that I have never wished to tamper with it by a second visit.

Strangely enough Torcello dismissed us with contumely, for as we left it in the late afternoon we encountered a fearful storm and came, I think, very near to being swamped. The thunder simply hurled itself from every quarter at once, the sea rose in inky billows of terrifying dimensions, and between them and the rain we were drenched to the skin, and very thankful when Sandruccio, who behaved splendidly, finally landed us on the slippery steps of our hotel.

For a day or two after that we stayed within call, so to speak, and had no fancy for putting out to the Lagoons. There were mornings when it was pleasant to be utterly and frankly frivolous and do nothing but wander under the arcades of the Piazzetta and in and out of the bewilderingly pretty shops. Such a spread of colour and glitter they were, and so tempting was it to pick up some of the alluring trifles for the new home we were going to make in Peking! The Murano glass at Salviati’s I still think the most beautiful product of our own or any other time. Every tint of sea and sky and jewel gleamed in the ethereal beakers and vases; I remember a tall goblet of transparent topaz, shot with gold, that twisted and curled on its tendril stem like a newly opened convolvulus, spreading at last into a cup too ethereal for earthly lips to touch, so full of light that the most sparkling wine would have darkened it; and all round, for handles, were blown wreaths of milky iridescent foam, so faint that it seemed as if they must run down its sides and wet your fingers with salt spray. It was like getting into the Sea-King’s palace under the sea to spend an hour at Salviati’s; every lovely freak and fancy of sun and water, from the brooding sapphire of secret caves to the last bubble of spray on a curling wave, it was all there, caught and crystallised for mortals to love and handle.

Those were the days of beads—one wore as many chains as one liked, the more the better—and for years I went round with a little Venetian rosary of blue and gold flecked with fairy roses round my neck. The mother-of-pearl overcame me altogether—long garlands of the tiny shells strung in fanciful patterns—each perfect in itself and shot with rainbows through its moonlight sheen—but the dignity of a married woman forbade the wearing of such things now. For years they lay about on my dressing-table reflected in the depths of a Venetian mirror which also accompanied me everywhere, a big oval set in a frame of translucent flowers and leaves, neither white nor silver nor pearl, but just the colour of the foam when the sun shines through it.

We went out to Murano once and saw all the processes of glass-blowing, and they made a little vase for me while I was there; but the secrets of those marvellous colours were not explained, and I came away with one cherished illusion intact—I am still sure that the glass-blowers have a tributary tribe of nymphs and fairies who gather their tints for them out at sea, in nets woven of sunbeams and moonrays!

During that honeymoon summer, Venice indoors, with all its matchless art treasures, appealed to me less than Venice out of doors. At the time of my first stay there I was only sixteen, but mature enough to appreciate what I was seeing, and my dear old stepfather was a splendid guide and allowed us to miss nothing. He was a strange combination, dear man—an expert at explaining beauty of colour and technique and stonily impervious to impression or atmosphere. All that remained to him of his Calvinistic New England education was a giant conscience, to which other people’s inclinations had to bow wherever he took the lead, as he did, imperiously, in matters of sightseeing. Often I would have begged off some expedition, feeling surfeited already with beauty and history, and longing to be healthily frivolous for a few hours, as youth needs to be sometimes. But it was of no use—go with him I must, and very glad I was of it afterwards, for, returning in later years to the places where he had piloted me about, I could make at once for the things I wanted to see again, without troubling my head about the others. One of these, alas! was gone when Hugh and I, just married, came to Venice. The St. Peter Martyr of Titian had perished in a fire. I had lingered before it long, as a girl, for there was something more than mere beauty in the painting; one felt there was truth, relatively as absolute as that for which the Saint gave his life—a picture not only of himself but of what he died for, loyalty to the unalterable essence of things as they are.

It is as hard to describe a beloved picture as a beloved face, but this one had been seldom copied or reproduced, and it is gone, now, so I will try. In a dark glade of the woods through which flamed red bars of sunset, two ruffians were attacking the Saint and his companion; Peter knelt between them in the foreground, looking up to Heaven, ere the last blow fell, with a wonderful expression of mingled pain and joy. The sweep of the drapery, the slight sinking to one side, showed that his strength was gone already, but through the physical anguish on his face there shone such radiance that one knew Heaven was already opened to his eyes—it was not trust, it was certainty. The assassins, great bulky brutes, towered over him, but their figures were shadowed and dark and formless as evil itself; all the light, all the reality, were centred on the bending head, the dying eyes, the praying hands, the mystic cross that barred the priestly garment. I think there were palms and angels hovering overhead; but in a very old drawing, half life-size, of this picture—to all appearance contemporary with the painting—that I found among my dear father’s possessions they were absent. In the background lay the body of the martyr’s slain companion, martyred, too, but all the glory and the promise seemed to be for Peter—none for him. As I have said, I was only sixteen then, and knew less about Peter the Martyr than I did about Confucius or Genghis Khan, and for many years I wondered why the other martyr had remained nameless and unsainted. It shows the incompleteness of my education when I confess that it was only a year or two ago that I pieced his story together for myself. Let some one correct me if I am wrong, but I think the neglected companion was Conrad, the confessor of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, a man of high learning and much piety, but to whom, on account of his harsh treatment of the “dear Saint,” the Church refused the honours of canonisation. But we know that Conrad was murdered for the Faith, and may be equally sure that it was owing to St. Elizabeth’s prayers that Heaven allowed him to expiate his fault by a heroic death.

The Thirteenth Century, so rich in Saints, was appallingly prolific in heresies, too, and of these the ManichÆan, ancient as the Devil himself, was just then the most aggressive. It had gained much ground in the north of Italy, and when Peter was born in Verona his whole family had been led away by it. But the true faith was still taught in the schools, and by the time the boy was seven years old he had learnt the Apostles’ Creed, and neither blows nor caresses at home could shake him in his loyalty to it. Later he was sent to Bologna to pursue the studies considered necessary for a gentleman in those days, but Providence had other designs and uses for him. He was yet in his teens when the call came; he answered it at once, renounced the world, and took the Habit of the Preachers, the sons and followers of St. Dominic. The Breviary says, “With great splendour did his virtues shine in Religion,” especially in his gifts of preaching, which brought the strayed lambs back to the Fold by thousands at a time. He had always prayed for the crowning grace of martyrdom, and when it approached he told those who loved him that his end was close at hand. The ManichÆans feared him as much as they hated him, for he was as stern with the recalcitrant as he was tender to the contrite. He was returning, in the exercise of his ministry, from Como to Milan, when they murdered him. With his last breath he repeated the Apostles’ Creed. The antiphon for his feast repeats the words used by Innocent IV in the Bull of his canonisation, which took place the year after his death, an immense number of authentic miracles having already testified to the honour and glory God had bestowed upon him in Paradise. “As purest flame leaps up from the depths of smoke, as the rose blooms on the thorny branch, so Peter, Teacher and Martyr, is born of faithless parents.” “Soldier in the Preachers’ camp, he stands now in the ranks of the warriors triumphant.” “His soul was all-angelic, his tongue fruitful, his life apostolic, and his death precious.” “The unconquered athlete battles strong in death, professing aloud the Faith for which he bleeds. It is thus that the martyr triumphs as he does for the Faith.”

To all but us benighted Catholics “the Faith,” in these latter days, is a mere sun-myth, and the blackest heresy a disease that has lost all its terrors—as harmless as chickenpox or a cold in the head. Let us who know better at least have the grace to acknowledge our debt to the great ones who fought for our heritage and kept it clean with their blood!