Chapter III: Part 3

Some two hundred yards and more each of them spreads around; you may see the little brown bobbins, that mark the circumference, float and jerk up and down on the water as Gian-Battista spreads his end of net, rowing across the marked space meanwhile; then the two boats lie sentinels at either end, to guard their sacred surface from other craft, and to watch for the haul. So when the time has come, and the watching has been long enough, calling to one another across the space with deep, loud voices that are tempered to softness as they travel over the water, Paolo and Battista begin slowly to row towards the net’s centre with the net’s ends fastened to their separate boats, and, when they meet in the middle, the net’s mouth will have closed upon the captured fish.

There are not many this time. When Battista has got into his uncle’s boat, and when together, with cheery cry and many a passing ejaculation, they have hauled in the great net, it is but a _cattiva pesca_ that is the result of their evening’s labour. And the sun has gone down now behind the purple clouds and beneath the waves; the sea’s blue is dark, almost to blackness, as the night breeze creeps up; Sestri’s coast can no longer be seen—scarce even the great promontory that hides La Spezia from sight in the daytime. Yet further out to sea they lay down the net again, and little lanterns have had to be lighted in either boat, other lights and lanterns have been long put out that glimmered faintly from the village ashore, before Paolo and Battista row back again towards the rock-bound bay beneath the cliff. But a dying memory of sunset from the west can still light the boats homewards though the summer night be far advanced, and, against the background of this dim and distant brightness, Paolo’s tall figure stands taller than before as he waits, with forward foot and well-poised body, upon the boat’s prow, till the shingle shall grind beneath her keel, and it be time to leap out into shallow water and pull her high upon the yellow beach. Maddalena’s shrill voice is hushed, the children are all a-bed and the hearth swept up; but, if the fire be spent, the fisher’s meal has not been forgotten by the fisher’s wife; cold _polenta_, brown bread and chestnuts stand ready by the settle, though the portly fishwife lies asleep whose work it will be to bear the haul of tunny-fish to early market.

The morning dawns, pure and bright. Beneath the _pergolas_ of Bogliasco cottages the sun is warm already, though night-dews lie wet still on flowers and herbage. The blue water below laps but gently against the gnarled rocks where it can dash at will so wildly, for the sea is calm to-day under a tender sky. ‘It will be hot,’ fisher-wives say, ‘but what will you have when June days are so near?’ Scarce a ripple stirs the water surface, whose blue is as only the Mediterranean’s blue can be when the sky is full of colour as now, and the sun is strong to perfect and enhance. Paolo has been abroad betimes, and Maddalena is already on her way to the fish-market with last evening’s produce; but we, who have not cared to rise so early, will follow Maso this time, who, having neither wife nor children, begins only to fish when the sun is aloft.

Maso has not so handsome a fame as he who stood last night against the sunset. In fact, he is an ugly man, for, besides a face that is brown and weather-beaten, and pitted with the small-pox (as his nickname in the village dialect would tell you), he has a short, wiry figure, that for all its ease of movement cannot compare with the tall, spare grace of his neighbour. Maso had wonderful luck with the _bianchette_, that are a kind of whitebait, through the past month of April, and he had a good net of anchovies some three days ago; but anchovies are not the surest sport, and this morning he will lay for the sardines, as Paolo has done. Maso has a little brother—a brisk, lithe little ragamuffin of ten years, one of those who rarely have time for aught but mischief, as his keen eyes would tell you; him he sends up on the hill for watch. And while the two men—for the fishing is all done in couples, and Maso has a comrade like the rest—while the men spread their nets just beyond the rocks in the creek’s clear water below, Giannino’s bare feet have climbed the hill where the stones were sharpest for his long toes to cling to, and is squatting on the hot earth amid the thyme and the flowers and beneath the grey-toned olives, between the frail network of whose boughs those blue waves shine with fairest glory.

But Giannino notes none of the things of Nature; he is watching the sardine shoals come on. Maso and the other have parted company in their separate boats now; each is posted at an opposite side, with a net’s end fastened to his skiff. And presently Giannino, from behind the olive trees, sees a goodly company of little slim and silvery fish making towards that very pool of clearest blue-green water, where the cruel snare lies spread in the rock’s great shade. A silent signal is enough to the fishers, who are watching for it, and the boats row slowly centre-wards, till the net’s mouth has closed upon the dainty prisoners. Silver and gold gleam in the sun’s own silver light, for the little fish struggle pitifully amid those horrible meshes. It has been a _buona pesca_ this time, and the brown and dingy coils are soon in the boat, the spoil secured safely within the well. It is Nicoletta who goes to market with the sardines; but not into town, only to Bogliasco, where men and women buy the fish from the fishers, to take into Genoa. Nicoletta is a spare and tanned little maiden, with brown feet and ankles that have never known shoes or stockings; she is sister to Maso and Giannino, but it is the latter she resembles in her wild, wiry strength, for she, too, is something of a pickle!

The sun climbs the sky till its rays are so hot that even Riviera men and women are fain to fly from it for an hour or so, while they eat the _merenda_, and sleep their own calm sleep beneath the shadows of rock or fig-tree. The olives shine silver-white in the fair beams that ripen their fruit; aloes and palms flourish, broad pines are darkly green and perfumed; in bays and upon burning rocks the colour-laden water ebbs quietly. But at last the sun sets again, and in the evening’s cool, fishers sink the lobster baskets in rock-bound pools of the coast, where the water is nigh to blackness in its depth beside the cliffs. Night is near, and the sea’s colour fades awhile with the last of the sunlight.

Santa Margherita.

Santa Margherita is one of the many little towns which have gradually grown up along the eastern Riviera, gathering themselves together around the country palace of some _signore_, which, first, had been built alone upon the shore, or springing up where, for convenience sake, a little fishing hamlet had been set in creek or bay, until now the whole of the coast line from Genoa to La Spezia is studded thickly with the white walls and glistening roofs of human habitations. The little place has had a station since the railroad has come this way—a station of its own, and not one shared with another village, as some of its neighbours, and one, too, at which all the trains must stop which run during the day to Sestri. There was a great palace built up here many years ago. I forget to what family it belongs, but it is a stately pile, whose marble steps creep down to the water’s edge, and on whose battered face the dim colours of ancient frescoes still show quaintly through the dirt which has encrusted them. The _signori_ used to come here for the sea-bathing, and perhaps it was in this wise that the town of Santa Margherita came to be built. Nevertheless it is in a fair position upon the coast, and it was probably a prosperous little fishing village long before it could boast its stone pavements and its piazza of now-a-days. The coast swerves in gently so as to form a smooth and ample bay just where the town stands, and jutting out on either side into the blue waves stand two promontories guarding the gulf. To the right is Porto Fino, and, within the bay round the point, a little village bears the name. It is so called from the many dolphins which, near to that shore, sport in bevies beneath the clear water quickly to disperse at the approach of a boat. ‘Fino,’ for shortness and convenience sake, apparently can mean _delfino_.

Hills, graceful and undulating, clothed with many trees and watered by many a cool stream, are set against the sky for background, and Santa Margherita lies within their lap, sending the gayest houses to adorn her front upon the coast. Buildings of any note belonging to the place are but few—only the Campanile, which stands up tall against the hill, and has some pretty colouring in the mosaic of its belfry, and one or two decrepit old mansions belonging to the gentry of the neighbourhood. The great palace of which we have already spoken stands upon a low hill without the town; orange groves gather round and about it, and woods where dark and spreading pines are set against the tenderer foliage of chestnuts and arbutus: its white loggias and colonnades face the sea, hung richly with creepers and vines. In the town there are many poorer houses—most of them modern—tall and thinly built, with ill-designed proportions, and gaudily coloured paintings nowise resembling the frescoes of olden times. Along the façade of the town houses stand closely wedged together whose windows are thickly studded up and down, and hung with the white linen from which meaner habitations in Italy are rarely unadorned. This is the most populous part of Santa Margherita, and between these houses and the waters of the bay there is only the paved street from whence steps lead to the higher part of the town, the railway station and the fair country beyond. Here roads branch out on all sides; one leads from behind the town, over the hill to more towns and villages inland, another is hemmed by tall rows of ilexes, and others again, less important, creep up the clefts of the valley until they are lost in the woods, and only peep out again on the barren crests of mountains, where pine trees alone stand as fringes against the sky.

Santa Margherita is but one of a hundred nooks along the Cornice from Nice to La Spezia; the villages all breathe the same balmy sea air and bask in the same sunshine, and wear the same garb of luxuriant vegetation, of quaint picturesqueness, side by side with gaudy vulgarity; and yet each has its own life, each is home, as no other place can be to its citizens. Santa Margherita, like the rest, has its full sum of incongruity. Squalid habitations that yet have something of the grace of Italy, with their green shutters, large windows, and marble mosaic floors, stand, in dirt and poverty, side by side with stately palaces of olden time or with the pretentious structures of modern architecture. And in the inhabitants is the same apparent discord. Men and women who for years have been used to exact the homage of their inferiors, live side by side with the lowest and the poorest of the people, and, even more, with a perfect grace and courtesy; ladies to whom fashion is a necessity, and excitement has become a second nature, take a naïve pleasure in the pursuits and interests of poor fisherwives, of _contadine_ cooking the porridge, or lace-weavers at their pillow.

And nature is there to keep all this strange medley in countenance. Down upon the beach, where the fishers stow their craft when the day’s work is over at sea, and where the little dark-eyed children, ragged and dirty, play in and out the nets upon the shingle, the wind blows hot from off the great moving plain of the Mediterranean and the sun shines heavily for many an hour upon the houses and groves and gardens that are on the water’s level. Leave the town a space, and take one of those roads which lead upward among the mountain valleys, and in a little half-hour the face of nature seems subtly to have changed, and her voice tells a different tale, while yet murmuring of the sea which is near. The summer breeze is scarcely cooler or the sun’s rays less powerful where they break between the large-leaved foliage of the chestnuts, yet a sense of freshness creeps silently around, vigour is in the flowers that grow, in the trees, in the water that flows and ripples. Ferns are tall and waving upon the banks of little rills and beside cascades, or frail and feathery growing between the crevices of loose stone walls. Maiden-hair is there in profusion, and hart’s-tongue and holly fern, besides many others. The ways are rough and stony, sometimes losing themselves in what seems to be but a mere water-course, sometimes steeply climbing the hills in tortuous coils; but even these rough footpaths look upon fair valleys, and the pale sky is spread out above them, till they reach the mountain’s summit and wind round again upon its crown back towards the whispering sea. And now you will enter upon the region of stone pines, and this is the promontory of Porto Fino. The goodly trees rise up from out soft earth, and their straight stems, with the curiously carved bark, stand tall and erect, many feet on high, ere the branches begin gracefully to strike out on the several sides. Then the boughs grow more forked and multiply again, and still there are no leaves yet to be seen, only when you look up from below you see that there is a great shade spread above you, and that all those thickly matted branches are clothed and adorned with the dark and sweet-scented foliage. Then you sit down, perhaps, in the dreamy cool and the twilight of this forest—where the trees do not need to be thickly set that they may throw their shadows densely—and you breathe the heavy-perfumed air from the pines, while you hear from afar the murmur of the sea. These pine trees can grow on the narrowest ledges of soil that have found a place up the face of the cliffs, and can yet stretch their branches far out over the waves, so that the most barren edge of land by them is made beautiful and softened. And all the time, perhaps, that you have been walking you have scarce caught more than a far-off vision of the magic water. As you made a turn in the road or climbed some little knoll on your way there came a sudden picture before you of a brilliant colour, neither blue nor green nor purple, such as you ever saw it before, framed in the stately branches of the dark pines. And the sky is pale, and yet the sky, too, seems pregnant with colour, and fathomless, and so the sea and the sky meet in one. Then you dive down into a little dale again and into a lonely glen, and the sea is away and the memory of it, only still mysteriously its influence seems to be around. The village of Porto Fino lies to your left, but far below upon the sea-shore. You must descend. The pines still fringe the ridge of land, where it overhangs the water, but now the vegetation will change. Little tufts and sprigs of divers shrubs cling to the rock—myrtle—and gracefully twining sarsaparilla; but green things are not abundant here, where strange boulders of rock strike down into the sea, or lift up their great forms from its depths a little way from the shore; and when the cape is rounded, and the woods begin again, they are no longer pine plantations but sweeping chestnut groves that drape the hill-side. There is a little shrine that has been built upon the farthest point of the Porto Fino promontory. On windy days the ‘Madonetta’ has bidden fair to be cast from her home and hurled into the treacherous Mediterranean, for the gales rise up suddenly on this coast, and I have seen the smiling waters wax dark and livid in one short hour, dashing their waves in mighty billows upon the rocks, and tossing their white foam far aloft. Then the dolphins gather themselves in companies below the surface, and the ships are fain to take refuge in one of the bays which nature has provided along the coast. Of these Porto Fino is by far the best and largest for many miles ahead. The harbour can hold even large ships, and is a constant halting-place for the smaller craft which ply their trade along the coast. Then the little fishing-smacks are forced to be moored upon the beach, for the swell of the sea is heavy even in this sheltered bay.

So the footpath will have brought you down, curling round the cliff’s front till you come where the chestnut woods are growing luxuriantly above the shores of the little harbour. Porto Fino’s church is to the right of the village, and above it. It is on the neck of the peninsula, just where the land is narrowest, so that standing beside it some windy day you can feel, on the one hand, from the turbid billows beneath, the foam that dashes up against the rocks, and on the other you can see the gentle heaving of the calmer waters in the little bay at your left. You must needs pass the church as you make your way down to the village. The way is steep, but it is paved, though the round stones are somewhat hard and slippery. Porto Fino is a small place. There is a piazza upon the shore whence the little pier juts out into the water, and around which the houses are built in a square. They are poor dwellings most of them, though one or two pink and yellow houses, with balconies, suppose themselves to be charming summer residences for strangers. The village is a fishing village, and therefore is pretty well huddled together upon the shore; but there are a few cosier looking cottages in the woods behind, where the lace-makers live; and the odds and ends of the place have crept up into the valley or upon the slopes. There are pleasure boats at Porto Fino, besides the fishing-smacks: though when I say pleasure boats I have not in mind those dainty little craft which are wont so to be called in fashionable watering-places, for these are rough and dingy, and built, I doubt not, against all rules of modern invention. Nevertheless, they are safe and comfortable, and swift enough when pulled by two stalwart fishers. They will beset you as you come out upon the piazza, these swarthy boatmen, and clamour loudly for your favour. Then the boat will row you over the dark green waters of the little bay out into the wide sea without, where the water is bluer and less transparent; and when you have rounded the promontory and skirted other little bays you will be back at Santa Margherita.

The Lace Weaver.

On the hill with crest that is fringed with stone pines, above Santa Margherita’s town and harbour, Lucrezia’s grey cottage stands, with thatched roof, among the trees. Olives are around her dwelling, for it stands on the nether slopes, where the fir’s fragrance from above scarce reaches; their fine branches and crooked stems rest traced upon the sky, and into their grey tones fig-trees bring brighter green for contrast, though brightest of all are the vines that twine beneath. The blue-grey smoke curls above the green-grey trees, to show where the lace-weaver lives; a rough spring flows freshly out of the earth beside her cottage, with wooden trough to guide its stream into the brick basin, and thence into the beans and potatoes of her garden; a rude balcony flanks the house, a walnut tree shadows it over, a _pergola_ dims the light at the kitchen window; and the gourd-plants trail beneath it on the ground, with ample golden flowers; carnations, side by side with kitchen herbs, grow in a box upon the window-sill.

Lucrezia sits outside on the little terrace; the pear tree is white with blossom, just opposite, and at the foot of many a sloping, stone-hemmed garden, where green wheat waves and gladioli bloom between, the sunny sea spreads far away and breaks white upon the rocks; but her face is not raised to look, for before her is the lace-pillow, and, while her fingers ply busily, her head is bowed, and she softly rocks a cradle with her foot. Lucrezia is a young mother. Last year, when the fruit was at the best and the fishing had been good, she was married to Pietro of Santa Margherita, and the little swaddled infant that sleeps at her feet is the first-born, who came with the summer’s return this May-time. He has no features to boast of yet, and his legs and arms are tightly bound with swathing bands, but Lucrezia thinks him truly fair nevertheless, nor minds the piteous wail with which he will shortly break in upon her deftest bit of labour. She is a comely woman, but beautiful rather with the recollection of other beauty—the beauty of past generations—than perfect in her own person. She is dark and tall and straight, with square, broad shoulders and ample bosom; her hair is almost black, her eyes are grey, her skin is bronzed and slightly freckled, her mouth is wide, and the teeth within it white and even; the hands that weave and twist amid a labyrinth of threads are coarse and large, though seemly shaped; the foot upon the cradle’s edge is no dainty foot, for it has grown hard upon the hard stones, and tanned with the sun, and soiled with the world’s work of every day. Neither _contadine_ nor fisherwives waste their scant pence on shoes and stockings.

While her fingers ply busily, her head is bowed, and she
softly rocks a cradle with her foot.]

Lucrezia plaits her white threads swiftly—so swiftly that you might almost see the pattern growing beneath her fingers, though it is no simple design that she weaves thus from memory, but an elaborate arrangement of groundwork and spray and border, that go to make the width most used for flounces. The wooden bobbins clap together merrily when Lucrezia thus nimbly twists and crosses threads over the pink pillow’s surface. She is crooning a lullaby to the bandaged _bamboccio_ the while, and nearly mars the use of it by the loud peals of laughter that Maria’s conversation provokes, who sits idling on the cottage door-step.

‘Marry? I wouldn’t marry for worlds, and have to work as you’re working now,’ declares decisively that one who is yet a spinster. ‘What man is worth it? For me, I like to amuse myself—in the way one should, of course! _Santa Vergine!_ you’re always at it! If you’re not at the lace-pillow, you’re with the fish to market or down in the villa round the _tomate_ and the herbage! And then that marmot of yours! It’s one thing to dandle him a bit for you when you’re up to Santa Margherita on an errand, but to have a thing like that of one’s own——! Not for me!’ ‘Go to!’ laughs Lucrezia. ‘And that young man of Camogli that I know of?’ ‘And that young man—and that young man! What young man, and what’s he to do with me?’ simpers the maid. ‘All very fine,’ replies the married woman, with a giggle so loud that Ernesto gives an ominous whine, and would probably move his limbs were they not so well secured, ‘that will _he_ know better than I for a surety!’ And she rocks the cradle faster, and begins to croon afresh, till the pins on the pillow want shifting forwards, and Maria so far recovers her gravity as to continue, ‘You are always up to your jokes, you! But tell me a little—wilt teach me the lace-making if I have the patience to learn? It’s the only way for us poor girls to earn a pair of ear-rings, I suppose.’ ‘Dear heart, you would never have patience,’ says Lucrezia. ‘A fisher-girl like you! Why, your hands are rough from the oar, and you’d never sit still a little half-hour. It’s bad enough for me, who have been used to it since I was twelve years old!’

A portion of the pattern gets finished off at this point, and Lucrezia casts a handful of threads aside—the threads that have twined one kind of weft for sprays—and takes up a new set to fill in the ground with. She has had a good day’s work, has been at the pillow at least five or six hours, and has completed nearly _mezzo palmo_ of flounce, which is about five inches. If she were not the nimblest worker in all Santa Margherita’s vicinity, she could never make as much lace as this in the whole twelve hours, and yet the Genoa shops will scarcely pay her more than a franc for the piece she has done, weaving since daybreak, till now that it is time to cook the _cena_. Indeed, if hers were not the best and smoothest made lace to be had along that shore, Lucrezia would not even earn as much. It is not without some reason that to Maria’s remark about its being the best means of gain for a woman, she answers, but curtly, ‘You believe it? Listen to me rather; that you, who have hard hands and slow wits, and the patience only of a spirit in purgatory, you would not make half a franc with your day at the pillow! Even the glove-sewing would suit you better, though ’tis but a poor trade! Take to yourself that young man of Camogli, and go in peace! He has a house above his head, and you are fit for nothing so well as to sell his fish for him at Santa Margherita, and harvest his wheat and his olives.’

Lucrezia rises to stretch her arms, for the shadows are creeping longer and a filmier light dims the sun’s dazzle on the bay. It will be time to pare the potatoes and wash the rice for _minestra_, though, on second thoughts, she has a mind to cook some _polenta_—that is quicker done, and just as acceptable for a second meal. Maria’s gossip must end for this time. She, too, has a _cena_ to make ready at home for the men, and Lucrezia has enough to do now, for, just when the pot wants putting on—that bundle in the cradle begins to wail, of course! ‘It’s always so,’ laments she plaintively, but the mother’s heart cannot find it within to be cross, though she must rake the fire with one hand while holding the infant to her breast with the other.

The first-born’s woes are stilled, supper simmers over the burning logs, in the light of whose flames Lucrezia’s copper vessels shine brightly on the smoke-tarnished walls; without, the sunlight has faded, and grey clouds cross the west. ‘We shall have a storm to-night,’ muses she on the terrace, looking seawards with her back to the road, and to the chestnut-woods behind her olive trees. Truly, the blue waves are sadder-coloured than before and begin to wear white feathers on their bosoms. A wind moves in the grey branches overhead, and rustles more noisily amid the broader-leaved chestnuts behind; on the hill’s crest it is sighing beneath the stone pines. ‘Pietro will surely not go to the fishing this night,’ says she, half aloud; and she turns to fetch the copper cauldron to fill at the spring.

Some one is coming through the chestnut wood that lies away from the sea—a lady. Is it one of the ladies from the _palazzo_ on Santa Margherita’s beach? Yes—good Virgin—it is indeed, and the same one who bought lace of her last week! What a good fortune, for a private customer buys at double the price offered at Genoa shops. ‘Your servant,’ says she modestly, but without a curtsey—that is not the way with our _contadine_; yet her manner is none the less respectful. ‘A fair evening to you, my good girl,’ replies the town dame in the high singsong that is special to Genoese dialect, and different from the Venetian twitter or the deep Milanese chest notes. She is not alone—a tall man attends her, dressed after a supposed English mode, as for the country; he is chestnut-haired, and would call himself _biondo_, or fair, spite of his skin’s colour; that is why he affects the English style, and he too says a gracious ‘_Felice sera_’ to our Lucrezia, because she is a comely woman. She meanwhile, standing beside the fountain with her hand resting on the copper bowl to steady it, gazes with appreciating eyes on the lady’s elegant attire, who says presently to the swain beside her, ‘It will rain, I think—it behoves to go quickly home;’ then to the _contadina_ whose vessel has filled the while at the trickling spring, ‘Have you any more lace of that sort that I bought last time?’ ‘Come up the steps beneath the _pergola_, dear lady, and I will show you what I have,’ replies Lucrezia, frankly, but with no curtness as the words might imply. And she heaves the water-vessel to her head, which must first be replaced in the kitchen, whence she then brings two nicely dusted rush chairs for the _signori_. _La marchesa_ sits down, asks a question about the prospects of grape and olive harvest, speaks a word to the now wakeful _bambino_, and handles black and white lace while the fair-haired gallant leans against the stone parapet and smokes and gives valuable opinions on stitch and pattern and quality.

Lucrezia has a handsome store of completed lace—of course, some of it is promised to the shop, but what matter? No one can quicker invent a suitable lie for the shopwoman, should the _marchesa_ take a fancy to any special piece. There are lengths of all widths, in flounce, and edge, and insertion-lace; there are scarves and shawls, and parasol covers, and every kind of female adornment that is in fashion, whether suited to this special kind of _guipure_ trimming or no. Lucrezia’s lace is the finest made in the neighbourhood, but even hers is no fine and precious kind. True, in olden times the Riviera girls used to make a straight-edged and thin-threaded lace that was worthier the name, but, for this long time past, florid designs and Maltese stitches have come into vogue, and now we have nothing but _guipure_ made along the shores. _La marchesa_ buys her five metres of heavy-weighted black silk flouncing, in which kind the loose-woven patterns show to best advantage, and when she has bargained a while over it, and laughed and talked friendly with Lucrezia, it is discovered suddenly by all three that the rising blast has lashed our blue sea’s waters into swelling and breaking billows, and that the storm is overhead. Dark clouds hasten across the sunset, and the rain begins to drop. ‘_Misericordia!_’ says the lady. For the square pink palace looks a long way off. She is fain to take the shelter of the lace-weaver’s shady kitchen, that is now gracefully offered, and to blacken her dainty slippers on the square brick hearth and listen to the first-born’s wail till the rain have ceased to water the garden, and the wind to turn up the olive leaves’ white linings, till the worst of the storm be over, in fact, though waves still dash white spray on black and cloven rocks in the bay, and the sunlight be blotted out for good this day. But Pietro has good news on his return to the cottage; the fishing has been good this broken weather, and Lucrezia has good news, too—she has sold five _metri_ at an honest price to the _marchesa_ of the great palace.

Il Manente.

The Husbandman.

At Camogli, where the stone-pines adorn the cliff’s edge, and burthen even the fresh sea-breeze with their strange and heavy sweetness—at Camogli, that is built beside the waves, and that has the quaint harbour where fishers dwell, there are many new houses for gentlefolk to live in, and one or two old ones for old families to whom they belong; and these well-worn palaces stand on their own lands, beside their own fig-trees, and beneath pines of their own planting. Such things are at Camogli, and even at Recco, though Recco is a little town with church and streets, not so picturesque by half as the thriving fishing village—such city memories are at both these places because they lie beside the sea, and because from homes and lodgings in their midst people can easily spend the half of their summer days in the water.

But at Ruta there are not many fine houses for city folk, and not even many old palaces, for Ruta is up on the hill with the land-breezes behind it, that come through clefts and valleys, and the sea-scent in front of it that must travel across vineyards and up corn-covered terraces to get there. Yet there is a broad, smooth, carriage-road from Recco to the village on the hill—that same old road along which many a traveller of many a nation has come in the days when the railroad was yet unmade, of which many another has heard tell because of its beauty; for Ruta stands on the way that used to be the highway from Genoa to La Spezia. And besides this wide and dusty one, there is another path by which you may reach the village that I mean—a path that strikes off from Camogli’s gayest front, to wind steeply up the hill when once it has left Camogli’s church behind; a rough foot-path, whose sides are hemmed with low stone walls, and upon which other loose stones roll perilously. It is the way that the _manenti_ take when they come in the sunrise hours to Camogli with their market goods, and carry fish up again that has been bought on the shore with their morning’s earnings, for Ruta lies crowning the valley that is called in Genoa and on the Riviera the valley of fruit; and, though nobles of old did not build their palaces so far from the sea, any more than town-folk of to-day, all of them are glad enough of the fruit that grows better where the shade is, and where dry sea-breezes are not so prone to wither.

Giovanni’s villa lies on the western side of the hill, and looks to the sunrise. He is an old man, his hair is whitening fast and his hands are wrinkled and horny, his face is seamed; though so tall and strong a frame scarce will have need to stoop yet a while. But for all he has been on the ground, pruning the vines and the fruit-trees, and tilling the soil these many years, Giovanni has rarely yet had occasion to grumble much at his land’s produce, though neighbours do tell him oftentimes the place lies with an unprofitable aspect. The terraced fields and little plantations where he grows the maize and peas and fine asparagus in season, lie one above another in patches, on the steep, with the rising ground behind to shield them from untoward winds, and the sun full to their front; and beyond, where the hill curves round to westward, his cherry trees and pear and plum trees grow, with peach and almond trees between for a good sprinkling, and aloes faintly grey and stiff on the rocky wall above; silver-lined olive-leaves wave from knotted boughs where wheat grows, with gladiolas blooming in its midst; fig trees spread widely, and vines twine around wildly wherever there is room amongst all the cultivation: truly, Giovanni has no need to complain.

The old _manente_ lives lonely; he has few friends so close as the crops and the fruit-gathering that he labours so fondly for. The tender-leaved lettuce and early asparagus are more to him than neighbours, and the ripening of the red tomatoes is of keener interest than anything that happens in the village, for the weather-worn man has none at home to care for him: his wife is dead, and, of his children, the sons are about the world, fishing at sea, and selling _pasta_ in Genoa; the daughters are well married in distant towns and villages. It is better so; and to heave the pickaxe in the upturned field, to train the vines while thinking on Marrina’s last-born babe or on Pietro’s success a-board the merchant vessel, is dearer to the husbandman’s heart than the sound even of loved voices around his hearth.

The day is a July day; the wheat is waving yellow and near to the harvesting; the melons have ripened well, and it is a good year for all the fruit; the peaches have even been so many that _manenti_ have given them away in baskets-full. Fine and tender spring crops have had their day, and it is over. This is the full time when nature is the most lavish—not a time of sharpest interest, perhaps, but the husbandman joys in his reward. It will be a good vintage, and the green autumn figs crowd thick on their trees’ branches; they are swelling fast, and will streak their soft green skins ere long with pink, as they come to full maturity. People say there will be a falling-off in the chestnut-harvest on the other hand, but that matters less to this _manente_ of whom I write, because his riches are greater in olive-woods.

Giovanni has been to Camogli this early morning already, and he is an old man, but he means to go to Rappallo in the forenoon yet. ‘Fair Madonna, and it is the old ones must work whether they will or no,’ says he to neighbours who greet him on the steep and stony way, with some comment on his toil; ‘the young have all gone to the devil, and to the city trades; what would the soil do if it weren’t for us, whose bones are oiled to the labour?’ But though he fret and fume a bit now and then, if truth were told, Giovanni would ill brook even a day’s idleness! What if the path be bad, and the burthen on an old man’s shoulder makes the sweat to steal down his brow? Do not the fig-leaves cast broad shadows where one sits awhile on the flints by the roadside to rest, and is it not consolation enough to note how the fruit waxes full, and how the olives are rich in berries? Besides even at three hours after dawn, when Giovanni was climbing the hill again from market, dews were still moist and breezes fresh off the sea from behind; it is of a hot sultry night, or with a fierce midday sun overhead, that one fears the mount a bit, and wearies of the secret stillness amid trees, or of the silver dazzle on that blue sheet, of Mediterranean that one leaves behind and below. No one can say that in Ruta there is a hardier labourer than the _manente_ who rents the larger portion of his villa from those silk-mercers of Genoa—owners of the white house on the ridge. It is sale-time and profit-time now; and though Giovanni may silently love the season best that is for tilling and sowing and reaping, it is not he who will shrink from any day’s work. Just an hour to eat the breakfast that a little neighbour’s wench will have prepared him, who comes in from hard-by to do such jobs at a modest price, just another little half-hour to go the dearly-loved round of his property and pluck more fruit and herbs for the new market, just a grim jest or two with the children of the _signori_ from the house, who frolic around and get many a handful of garden spoil—then Giovanni is away again, for Rappallo is a bit of way off, and one must be there not too late at the _stabilimento_, or others will have gotten the custom.

The sun glitters on the pale sea that is down and away a mile or more, beyond the sloping fields and gardens, and the dipping valley. Giovanni’s villa is above that part of Ruta’s village lying along the roadside, above the church too, and close upon the bend of a path that turns away from the sea into turf and chestnut woods; nevertheless, he keeps a hold on the great white water still, and can look over the valley that is rich of careful cultivation, can see churches standing cypress-guarded, and palaces where the land drops shore-ward—can see as much, and even more, of the sea-view than they can from the top windows of the old tavern in the village, where carriage-folk used to stop when carriages were many along the highway, and Ruta was a place for the horses to bait at and _vetturini_ to feed at, while their _signori_ got dinner on the terrace beneath the vines. For all he never remembers thinking of it, Giovanni would not like to have his back to the sea, not though it dazzle old eyes, even from far, as it dazzles them to-day, for no clouds have come up to make walking lighter beneath a burthen by the time Giovanni shoulders his fruit-baskets anew and comes down the steps upon the high road. The church bells ring a chime as he passes, and Maria, the _pedona_ who sells eggs, comes down the paved way behind to go to Rappallo as well. She is a woman of years, and fit to join company with Giovanni, to whom her tongue can wag none the less fast for his economy of response. The old _manente_ is a heavy-jawed and tough-hided specimen of _contadino_; one can see at a glance his words will be few, but Maria’s chatter flows not the less merrily because his deep-set eyes show no sign, and the wrinkles that strew his ancient face do not let themselves be displaced into smiles. Maria is an old woman in whose yellow cheeks the lines seem to have no rhythm, so purposeless is she; but every seam on the old husbandman’s countenance is as though set there by careful length of living. Striking into the tunnel that, just outside of Ruta’s village, covers the roadway, Maria turns to hurl a neighbourly jest after the girl whom they have met driving a donkey from some distant market. A sapphire-coloured morsel of sea lies behind a frail-foliaged aspen tree—lies framed in the green of shrubs that grow around the grotto’s mouth; a long, broken water-line hems the land that fondly goes out in crags and points to meet it, and puts forward her fairest vegetation to fringe the border; in the farthest distance the sea seems to creep into wider bays, and the cliffs to grow less, and the water margin straighter, till a mist gathers into shape, and holds dim white roofs and tall spires and domes within its folds where Genoa lies away to westward. Giovanni, standing with head bent beneath a burthen, Maria, with shrunken face and forehead bound about with crimson kerchief, have this and more before them as they linger a space out of the sunlight, but neither notes skies and seas so familiar, for Rappallo is yet a long way off. ‘The _parroco_ of San Martino has got to manage now without that serving-woman of his that he thought so much of,’ says Maria, as they step out into the cooler shadow on the grotto’s other side. ‘Did you know it? The foolish thing is going to marry! No husband will be what _that_ old master was to her. Yes—yes, poor holy man!—the feasts coming on, too, and he who scarcely knows where to lay hand on his own canonicals unless she’s by. And as for the sacred wafers, who, indeed, will see to them?’ Giovanni’s comment is but a suppressed murmur as he turns to look towards the priest of San Martino’s Church, whose spire lies up against a chestnut-mantled hill to left. The green is the brighter green of inland foliage here, for even olives are scarcer to mingle their silver-grey tones; hills lie behind and beside one another, and turf is fresh beneath these shadier woods, rills trickle and flowers grow; the Mediterranean’s memory is forgotten for a while, and the hot, grey aloe plants and Indian figs give place to gorse bushes and mountain ash. Giovanni tramps forward steadily, and both man and woman have soon left the few tall houses of _negozianti_ behind, that have been built on this side the archway by those who prefer land to sea breezes for change from town. And Maria beguiles the way with many a tale about these same _negozianti_, till, rounding a point in the smooth high road, Giovanni pauses to rest his burthen upon the wall just where the way turns to right again and, with mountains and chestnut-clad hills behind it still, looks forward once more upon the blue, sunny sheet of the sea. Figs, and aloes, and olives grow again by the roadside with vines between, and here the chestnut-woods flourish beside them as well, and dark cypress trees crown the long crests of hills to the front. So now, as the old people walk, the sea draws ever nearer again if a bend in the road hide it sometimes from view; but the mountains are not left behind all the same, nor the chestnuts shorn for other culture, and, when they reach Rappallo, a river winds about it, and mountains guard it, in whose cleft the town lies; greenest woods girdle it round, though its front be spread beside the waves, and the _stabilimento_ be aptly enough placed for the bathing. Maria sells her new-laid eggs for the summer visitors, Giovanni has disposed of green herbs and melons enough; but the one lingers to return with the sunset cool, and the other hastens back betimes to the village that is his home, and to the _villa_ that reaps all his labours and his fondest affections.

And Maria beguiles the way with many a tale, till, rounding
a point in the smooth high road, Giovanni pauses to rest his
burden upon a wall.]

La Donna di Casa.

The Country Housekeeper.

Portofino’s bay lies calmly blue beneath a morning sky: the sun shines, and its glamour is set upon dainty ripples of restless sea, where the Mediterranean sways and washes without a quiet harbour. The Villa C—— stands to westward, with face set seaward toward Sestri’s opposite shore, and terrace built inward over the bay. It was a fortified castle once upon a time, long ago, when battles were fought along the coast, and Genoa was a great maritime power; the castle’s battlements are there still, built down into the rock that lies sunk in the waves; around their base aloes and sweet thyme cling to barren soil, and upon their crown a modern dwelling-house has grown into shape, with windows that see the water a hundred feet below, and a patch of terrace-garden growing upon scant mould, between the old walls of the fortifications. A goodly fig-tree finds room spite of scant space, and spreads wide boughs into the castle’s very windows, with fresh big leaves upon them, and luscious fruit thick between; the gate is to the hinder side, looking inland, and, when you find its mouth in the hill-side among the olives, dank and rugged stone steps will lead you within the house, and through the house out again on to that terrace upon the battlements that is sea-framed.

Here lived Teresa years ago when the Villa C—— belonged to an old Genoese _marchese_ of lone life and bachelor ways, and Teresa is the country housekeeper. Her master is her pride, her pet, and her slave; she scorns the _negoziante_ class who can grow rich in a trice, and buy a title, too, since the year 1848! She would tell lies, white or black, for an old family’s honour; day and night her simple soul schemes to uphold, amid poverty, the traditions of a race for whom she has lived alone these twenty years; the coronet of the house of C—— is the fairest of all in her eyes, and there is no place, though ruined, like Portofino Castle and Portofino Bay.