Chapter 12 - Page 2

fascinated stare, and with a perfect docility of attitude. He
concerned himself not a particle about the itinerary, or about any
of the wayside arrangements; he took no trouble, and he gave none. He
assented to everything that was proposed, talked very little, and led
for a week a perfectly contemplative life. His mother rarely removed
her eyes from him; and if, a while before, this would have extremely
irritated him, he now seemed perfectly unconscious of her observation
and profoundly indifferent to anything that might befall him. They spent
a couple of days on the Lake of Como, at a hotel with white porticoes
smothered in oleander and myrtle, and the terrace-steps leading down
to little boats with striped awnings. They agreed it was the earthly
paradise, and they passed the mornings strolling through the perfumed
alleys of classic villas, and the evenings floating in the moonlight in
a circle of outlined mountains, to the music of silver-trickling
oars. One day, in the afternoon, the two young men took a long stroll
together. They followed the winding footway that led toward Como, close
to the lake-side, past the gates of villas and the walls of vineyards,
through little hamlets propped on a dozen arches, and bathing their feet
and their pendant tatters in the gray-green ripple; past frescoed walls
and crumbling campaniles and grassy village piazzas, and the mouth
of soft ravines that wound upward, through belts of swinging vine and
vaporous olive and splendid chestnut, to high ledges where white chapels
gleamed amid the paler boskage, and bare cliff-surfaces, with their
sun-cracked lips, drank in the azure light. It all was confoundingly
picturesque; it was the Italy that we know from the steel engravings in
old keepsakes and annuals, from the vignettes on music-sheets and
the drop-curtains at theatres; an Italy that we can never confess to
ourselves--in spite of our own changes and of Italy's--that we have
ceased to believe in. Rowland and Roderick turned aside from the little
paved footway that clambered and dipped and wound and doubled beside
the lake, and stretched themselves idly beneath a fig-tree, on a grassy
promontory. Rowland had never known anything so divinely soothing as the
dreamy softness of that early autumn afternoon. The iridescent mountains
shut him in; the little waves, beneath him, fretted the white pebbles at
the laziest intervals; the festooned vines above him swayed just visibly
in the all but motionless air.

Roderick lay observing it all with his arms thrown back and his hands
under his head. "This suits me," he said; "I could be happy here and
forget everything. Why not stay here forever?" He kept his position for
a long time and seemed lost in his thoughts. Rowland