Irma in Italy Part 26

"One carriage would hardly hold seven persons."

"No, there would be two carriages, and each would have a pair of these fine Sienese horses. I have never seen stronger or better kept beasts in Europe, and one carriage shall be driven by that rosy-cheeked _cocchiere_, who has been so devoted to you, mother, and we'll find his twin for the other carriage, and when any two in one carriage grow tired of any other two, why they will change places with the others. And we'll have two huge luncheon baskets for supper on the way, for of course to avoid the heat we must leave late in the afternoon. Oh, it will be great; and it's only twenty-five miles, and if you wished you couldn't go by train, nearer than Poggibonsi."

"You seem to have it so well arranged that the rest of us need not say or do anything," said Uncle Jim, with an attempt at sarcasm that could not cut very deep.

"Well, what do the others say? You, Marion, for example?"

"Oh, it might be worth trying," responded Marion, and when no one really disagreed with Richard, he felt that the matter was settled as he wished.

The next day Aunt Caroline and Uncle Jim devoted themselves to the Accademia. With Ellen and Marion, Irma did walk through the Accademia, with its countless pictures, a complete exhibition of the renowned Sienese school, but there were very few paintings before which she cared to linger.

"You won't go shopping with me?" asked Aunt Caroline, as she turned away. "They make fine old furniture here and beautiful carved frames."

"Yes, and genuine old masters,--madonnas, bambinos, and all the saints,"

said Marion. "Some one has been telling me about them."

"Ah, but I am not looking for an old master," said Aunt Caroline, "and I shall like the furniture all the better if it isn't old."

The rest of this morning the young people strolled along the narrow picturesque streets, occasionally going inside some old building where Richard knew there was something to see, or standing at a corner, he would give them the details of some b.l.o.o.d.y street combat between Guelphs and Ghibellines. Once he took them up into a high building, from which they viewed the old city wall, and from the same window he pointed toward the field of Montaperto where the Sienese completely routed their great enemies, the Florentines.

"The battlefield is six miles away," he explained. "I am only pointing in its general direction. It's hard to believe that the Sienese killed twelve thousand Florentines and made six thousand prisoners, though that was when Siena had a hundred thousand inhabitants, instead of twenty-five thousand, as now."

Richard took them to the Litza, the pretty park that is thronged with Sienese, old and young, every afternoon, and he explained the nearness of the farms that Irma had noticed between the Litza and the back of their hotel.

Finally in the afternoon she went with Richard and Marion to visit the house of the famous Saint Catherine, in the street of the dyers, for Catherine's father, Bernincasa, had been a dyer, and in this small house Catherine was born in 1347.

Every room of the small house on this steep street had been turned into a chapel or oratory. Life-size paintings of St. Catherine were on the wall. The pavement she had trodden was covered with wooden slats. The rooms where, as a little girl, she had helped her mother in her humble household tasks were now richly decorated with paintings. There was a certain solemnity in all the rooms, in the smaller oratories, as in the larger lower church. The pictures on the walls spoke of the saint's good deeds, and Richard told stories he had read of her kindness to the poor, of her comfort to prisoners, in one case staying by young Niccolo di Toldo, holding his head even while the executioners were severing it.

One of her missions was to the pope at Avignon, another to Rome, where she went with a band of her disciples, and her influence made itself felt wherever she was.

"She must have been a wonderful woman. Her memory is as fresh in Siena as if she had lived but last year, and the reverence for her began even before her death, more than six hundred years ago."

The rest of the afternoon pa.s.sed quickly, and all the young people spent the evening pleasantly together. Although Irma was aware of a slight unfriendliness on Katie's part, the two girls talked and laughed about Cranston people, some of whom Katie knew better than Irma, as she had made many visits at her grandmother's in Cranston.

When the day dawned when Mrs. Sanford and her party were to drive to San Gimignano, it was clear that Richard had carried his point. Aunt Caroline at breakfast announced that she had decided to shorten her stay at Siena. "Our trunks have already gone on to Florence, and there is nothing to prevent our driving to San Gimignano with the Sanfords." The plan pleased Irma, who was really anxious to see the strange town that Richard had described. Uncle Jim professed to be resigned to anything that suited Aunt Caroline; and Marion, although he said nothing, was evidently interested in what promised to be a novel experience.

Accordingly, toward four o'clock, two large comfortable carriages drove up to the door of the _pension_, each drawn by a pair of st.u.r.dy horses, with a young, red-cheeked, amiable driver. All the employes of the house, down to the cook and a little scullion, lined up beside the door, with hands extended for the centimes and francs that Uncle Jim and Richard doled out, some of the boarders waved a good-by from the little balcony--and then they were off.

At first Marion and Aunt Caroline were in the carriage with Mrs. Sanford and Katie.

"Families do get so bored by one another travelling," said Richard.

"That's one reason I hoped we might take this trip together. Any one who grows particularly tired of any one else has only to ask to exchange to the other carriage. Ellen and I usually get on very well together, but Katie----"

"Hush, Richard," and Ellen laid a warning finger on her brother's lips.

The road over which they travelled was hard and smooth, and although houses were few, there was much of interest on every side. Richard invented many tales by the way, about n.o.ble Florentines riding this road, only to be waylaid and killed by Sienese rivals. In his stories the Sienese were always as successful as they were in the paintings on the walls of the public buildings in Siena. Once they stopped to look back, and the coachman chose the most favorable point for a last view of the city wall, with one of the old gates.

Richard and Ellen both understood Italian, and spoke it fairly well.

"I have just been complimenting the _cocchiere_ on his accent," said Richard, "and he took it quite as a matter of course. He says that every one knows that only in Siena can one hear the true Italian, and that the strangers who wish to speak Tuscan properly come to Siena to study."

"I thought that it was Florence where one must go," said Ellen.

"Hush, hush," whispered Richard; "if our coachman should understand you, I should fear for our lives. The very horses might run away and dash us into a ditch. Florence and Siena forsooth!"

The coachman himself did his part in entertaining them. He pointed out the entrance to one estate, and told a story or two about its owner, whose house was set far back and hidden from the road by extensive woods.

"Where do the working people live who cultivate these great farms?"

asked Ellen, and the man answered by pointing to a large house in the distance. "Sometimes twenty or thirty people live in one of the houses of the _contadino_, or farmer. Their real home is in some town, but they stay with the farmer while he needs them."

Even with the best of company a long ride on a warm afternoon becomes tiresome. After a time Irma found herself counting the milestones, or kilometre stones, and she saw that instead of being perfectly plain blocks, most of them had some little carved ornament. On one hill they saw a wall that enclosed an old town, and the coachman could hardly find words to express the rapidity with which the population was diminishing.

"Why in the world should any one wish to live on the top of a hill?"

asked Uncle Jim. "It was all very well when war was their occupation, but in these piping days of peace it would be too much like work to have to mount that hill daily for the protection of that old castle wall."

After a while the party came to a place where they could draw up by the side of the road and examine their lunch baskets.

"The first hotel luncheon I ever saw," exclaimed Uncle Jim, "without chicken legs and b.u.t.terless rolls."

"You never before had me to order for you," said Richard. "I know their tricks and their manners, and so I did a little shopping on my own account. At this time of day I knew we would need nothing very substantial, and now you may praise the Sienese fruit and pastry to your heart's content, for that luncheon came chiefly from the little shops, and not from the landlady's larder."

"We can show appreciation without mere words." And soon the luncheon was finished to the last crumb, with due appreciation.

The air was cooler, and shortly they were pa.s.sing through a factory town at the foot of a hill. As working hours were just over, people were sitting at their open doors, or going in and out of the little shops, much as they would in a New England village. Indeed, Uncle Jim said it made him think of a certain New Hampshire town that he knew well, until, as the horses clattered up the hilly street, suddenly at one side were the high substantial walls of a mediaeval town.

Through an open gate they could see the old, narrow streets and high houses. In the beginning there had been but a castle here, around which the town had grown. Now, in modern times, it had spread all over the hill, or perhaps had spread up from the little mill that had had its first humble beginning on the stream below.

"I seem to be looking at history as it is made," said Irma.

"That's a fine way of putting it," cried Richard.

"Irma sees things exactly as they are," added Uncle Jim.

Soon they had descended the other side of the high hill they had so lately mounted. Ahead of them, and still a good distance away, was another hill with a coronet of slender towers.

"San Gimignano!" exclaimed Richard.

"I have never seen it before, but I know it from the pictures. Isn't it picturesque? I wanted to surprise you, Ellen, so I have said hardly anything to you about it. But you all know," and he included Uncle Jim and Irma in his remarks, "that you are soon to be inside of the one town in Italy that has kept its old mediaeval towers. If the whole town is as quaint as the towers, you will thank me for bringing you here."

"We thank you now," said Uncle Jim.

"Why is the carriage ahead waiting for us?" asked Ellen.

"Katie thought you might like to come in here for the rest of the journey."

"Probably Katie herself wishes to change," whispered Richard.

Whereupon Ellen jumped lightly from the carriage, and a moment later she and Katie had exchanged places.

San Gimignano lost none of its picturesqueness as they drew near it, pa.s.sing olive orchards and vineyards as they went up the hill.