If Cattaro was more picturesque and strange-looking than the Bramleighs had expected, it was also far more poverty-stricken and desolate. The little town, escarped out of a lofty mountain, with the sea in front, consisted of little more than one straggling street, which followed every bend and indentation of the shore. It is true, wherever a little plateau offered on the mountain, a house was built; and to these small winding paths led up, through rocks bristling with the cactus, or shaded by oleanders large as olive-trees. Beautiful little bits of old Venetian architecture, in balconies or porticos, peeped out here and there through the dark foliage of oranges and figs; and richly ornamented gates, whose arabesques yet glistened with tarnished gilding, were festooned with many a flowery creeper, and that small banksia-rose, so tasteful in its luxuriance. From the sea it would be impossible to imagine anything more beautiful or more romantic. As you landed, however, the illusion faded, and dirt, misery, and want stared at you at every step. Decay and ruin were on all sides. Palaces, whose marble mouldings and architraves were in the richest style of Byzantine art, were propped up by rude beams of timber that obstructed the footway, while from their windows and balconies hung rags and tattered draperies, the signs of a poverty within great as the ruin without. The streets were lined with a famished, half-clothed population, sitting idly or sleeping. A few here and there affected to be vendors of fruit and vegetables; but the mass were simply loungers reduced to the miserable condition of an apathy which saw nothing better to be done with life than dream it away. While Bramleigh and L'Estrange were full of horror at the wretchedness of the place, their sisters were almost wild with delight at its barbaric beauty, its grand savagery, and its brilliantly picturesque character. The little inn, which probably for years had dispensed no other hospitalities than those of the cafÉ, that extended from the darkly columned portico to half across the piazza, certainly contributed slightly to allay the grumblings of the travellers. The poorly furnished rooms were ill kept and dirty, the servants lazy, and the fare itself the very humblest imaginable.

Nothing short of the unfailing good temper and good spirits of Julia and Nelly could have rallied the men out of their sulky discontent; that spirit to make the best of everything, to catch at every passing gleam of sunlight on the landscape, and even in moments of discouragement to rally at the first chance of what may cheer and gladden,—this is womanly, essentially womanly. It belongs not to the man's nature; and even if he should have it, he has it in a less discriminative shape and in a coarser fashion.

While Augustus and L'Estrange then sat sulkily smoking their cigars on the sea-wall, contemptuously turning their backs on the mountain variegated with every hue of foliage, and broken in every picturesque form, the girls had found out a beautiful old villa, almost buried in orange-trees in a small cleft of the mountain, through which a small cascade descended and fed a fountain that played in the hall; the perfect stillness, only broken by the splash of the falling water, and the sense of delicious freshness imparted by the crystal circles eddying across the marble fount, so delighted them that they were in ecstasies when they found that the place was to be let, and might be their own for a sum less than a very modest “entresol” would cost in a cognate city.

“Just imagine, Gusty, he will let it to us for three hundred florins a year; and for eighteen hundred we may buy it out and out, forever.” This was Nelly's salutation as she came back, full of all she had seen, and glowing with enthusiasm over the splendid luxuriance of the vegetation and the beauty of the view.

“It is really princely inside, although in terrible dilapidation and ruin. There are over two of the fireplaces the Doge's arms, which shows that a Venetian magnate once lived there.”

“What do you say, George?” cried Bramleigh. “Don't you think you 'd rather invest some hundred florins in a boat to escape from this dreary hole than purchase a prison to live in?”

“You must come and see the 'Fontanella'—so they call it—before you decide,” said Julia. “Meanwhile here is a rough sketch I made from the garden side.”

“Come, that looks very pretty, indeed,” cried George. “Do you mean to say it is like that?”

“That's downright beautiful!” said Bramleigh. “Surely these are not marble,—these columns!”

“It is all marble,—the terrace, the balconies, the stairs, the door-frames; and as to the floors, they are laid down in variegated slabs, with a marvellous instinct as to color and effect. I declare I think it handsomer than Castello,” cried Nelly.

“Have n't I often said,” exclaimed Bramleigh, “there was nothing like being ruined to impart a fresh zest to existence? You seem to start anew in the race, and unweighted, too.”

“As George and I have always been in the condition you speak of,” said Julia, “this charm of novelty is lost to us.”

“Let us put it to the vote,” said Nelly, eagerly. “Shall we buy it?”

“First of all, let us see it,” interposed Bramleigh. “Today I have to make my visit to the authorities. I have to present myself before the great officials, and announce that I have come to be the representative of the last joint of the British lion's tail; but that he, being a great beast of wonderful strength and terrific courage, to touch a hair of him is temerity itself.”

“And they will believe you?” asked Julia.

“Of course, they will. It would be very hard that we should not survive in the memories of people who live in lonely spots, and read no newspapers.”

“Such a place for vegetation I never saw,” cried Nelly. “There are no glass windows in the hall, but through the ornamental ironwork the oranges and limes pierce through and hang in great clusters; the whole covered with the crimson acanthus and the blue japonica, till the very brilliancy of color actually dazzles you.”

“We 'll write a great book up there, George,—'Cattaro under the Doges:' or shall it be a romance?” said Bramleigh.

“I 'm for a diary,” said Julia, “where each of us shall contribute his share of life among the wild-olives.”

“Ju's right,” cried Nelly; “and as I have no gift of authorship, I'll be the public.”

“No, you shall be the editor, dearest,” said Julia. “He is always like the Speaker in the House,—the person who does the least, and endures the most.”

“All this does not lead us to any decision,” said L'Estrange. “Shall I go up there all alone, and report to you this evening what I see and what I think of the place?”

This proposal was at once acceded to; and now they went their several ways, not to meet again till a late dinner.

“How nobly and manfully your brother bears up!” said Julia, as she walked back to the inn with Nelly.

“And there is no display in it,” said Nelly, warmly. “Now that he is beyond the reach of condolence and compassion, he fears nothing. And you will see that when the blow falls, as he says it must, he will not wince nor shrink.”

“If I had been a man I should like to have been of that mould.”

“And it is exactly what you would have been, dear Julia. Gusty said, only yesterday, that you had more courage than us all.”

When L'Estrange returned, he came accompanied by an old man in very tattered clothes, and the worst possible hat, whose linen was far from spotless, as were his hands innocent of soap. He was, however, the owner of the villa, and a Count of the great family of Kreptowicz. If his appearance was not much in his favor, his manners were those of a well-bred person, and his language that of education. He was eager to part with this villa, as he desired to go and live with a married daughter at Ragusa; and he protested that, at the price he asked, it was not a sale, but a present; that to any other than Englishmen he never would part with a property that had been six hundred years in the family, and which contained the bones of his distinguished ancestors, of which, incidentally, he threw in small historic details; and, last of all, he avowed that he desired to confide the small chapel where these precious remains were deposited to the care of men of station and character. This chapel was only used once a year, when a mass for the dead was celebrated, so that the Count insisted no inconvenience could be incurred by the tenant. Indeed, he half hinted that, if that one annual celebration were objected to, his ancestors might be prayed for elsewhere, or even rest satisfied with the long course of devotion to their interests which had been maintained up to the present time. As for the chapel itself, he described it as a gem that even Venice could not rival. There were frescos of marvellous beauty, and some carvings in wood and ivory that were priceless. Some years back he had employed a great artist to restore some of the paintings, and supply the place of others that were beyond restoration; and now it was in a state of perfect condition, as he would be proud to show them.

“You are aware that we are heretics, monsieur?” said Julia.

“We are all sons of Adam, mademoiselle,” said he, with a polite bow; and it was clear that he could postpone spiritual questions to such time as temporal matters might be fully completed.

As the chapel was fully twenty minutes' walk from the villa, and much higher on the mountain side, had it even been frequented by the country people it could not have been any cause of inconvenience to the occupants of the villa; and this matter being settled, and some small conditions as to surrender being agreed to, Bramleigh engaged to take it for three years, with a power to purchase if he desired it.

Long after the contract was signed and completed, the old Count continued, in a half-complaining tone, to dwell on the great sacrifice he had made, what sums of money were to be made of the lemons and oranges, how the figs were celebrated even at Ragusa, and Fontanella melons had actually brought ten kreutzers—three-halfpence—apiece in the market at Zara.

“Who is it,” cried Julia, as the old man took his leave, “who said that the old mercantile spirit never died out in the great Venetian families, and that the descendants of the doges, with all their pride of blood and race, were dealers and traders whenever an occasion of gain presented itself?”

“Our old friend there has not belied the theory,” said Bramleigh; “but I am right glad that we have secured La Fontanella.”