ting drew
nearer, the little Princess, as her travelling carriage toiled up the
Apennine valleys, did not feel some terror of the future and the
unknown. The spring comes late to those regions; in the middle of April
the blackthorn is scarcely budding on the rocks, the violets are still
plentiful underneath the leafless roadside hedges; scarcely a faint
yellow, more like autumn that spring, is beginning to tinge the scraggy
outlines of the poplars, which rise in spectral regiments out of the
river beds. Wherever the valley widens, or the road gains some hill-crest,
a huge peak white with newly-fallen snow confronts you, closes in the
view, bringing bleakness and bitterness curiously home to the feelings.
These valleys, torrent-tracks between the steep rocks of livid basalt or
bright red sandstone, bare as a bone or thinly clothed with ilex and
juniper scrub, are inexpressibly lonely and sad, especially at this time
of year. You feel imprisoned among the rocks in a sort of catacomb open
to the sky, where the shadows gather in the early afternoon, and only
the light on the snow-peaks and on the high-sailing clouds tells you
that the sun is still in the heavens. Villages there seem none; and you
may drive for an hour without meeting more than a stray peasant cutting
scrub or quarrying gravel on the hill-side, a train of mules carrying
charcoal or faggots; the towns are far between, bleak, black, filthy,
and such as only to make you feel all the more poignantly the utter
desolateness of these mountains. No sadder way of entering Italy can
well be imagined than landing at Ancona and crossing through the
Apennines to Rome in the early spring. To a girl accustomed to the fat
flatness of Flanders, to the market-bustle of a Flemish provincial town,
this journey must have been overwhelmingly dreary and dismal. During
those long hours dragging up these Apennine valleys, did a shadow fall
across the mind of the pretty, fair-haired, brilliant-complexioned
little Canoness of Mons, a shadow like the cold melancholy blue which
filled the valleys between the sun-smitten peaks? And did it ever occur
to her, as the horses were changed in the little post-towns, that it was
in honour of Holy Week that the savage-looking bearded men, the big,
brawny, madonna-like women had got on their best clothes? Did it strike
her that the unplastered church-fronts were draped with black, the
streets strewn with laurel and box, as for a funeral, that the be