Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/487

 24, 1863.]

seniors of the party, whose comfortable and reasonable arrangements were all thus disturbed and traversed by Dan Cupid’s tricksy perversities and self-willed rebelliousness, were not, however, disposed to give up the game without some further attempt at winning it. And matters stood at Bella Luce as has been indicated in the preceding chapter, when shrewd old Sandro Bartoldi, the rich Fano attorney, made a move with a view of weakening the enemy by a diversion. Intent on a scheme he had concocted with this purpose, the attorney ordered his stout, well-fed cob, one fine March morning, for a ride up to Bella Luce. Neither Sandro nor his beast were so well inclined to active movement as they once had been. They took the uphill work easily, therefore, among the lanes that crept up the green valleys; and though they left Fano betimes in the morning, only reached their destination some half an hour before noon.

That, indeed, was the hour at which the attorney had wished to time his arrival. For his errand required that he should hold a conference with the head of the Bella Luce family; and he knew very well that on this precious bright March morning all the males of the place would be at their avocations in the fields. But at noon came the hour of repose, and of the mid-day meal—the hours, rather, for few labourers, either in city or in country, of whatever class, allow themselves or are allowed by their employers less than two hours—from twelve till two.

March is a busy month in the country in Italy. It is the time for pruning and dressing the vines. And it was on this work that old Paolo Vanni and his two sons were engaged when Sandro Bartoldi rode up the last steep bit of the hollow lane that climbed from the bottom of the valley to the level of the house.

A French vineyard is one of the ugliest agricultural sights in nature. Nothing can be more unsightly than little low bushes, not much bigger than ugly brown cabbages, set in rows along the fields. But France produces good wine, and declares that this is the only way to do so. For the present, however, Italy is content to drink her somewhat harsher and coarser, but more generous wines, and to hold to the picturesque old method of cultivation that Virgil has described. Paolo, Beppo, and Carlo Vanni were tending their vines exactly as any Corydon, or Tityrus, or Thyrsis did two thousand years ago on the same hill-sides—marrying them with wedding-knots of withy, not exactly to elms, but to the white mulberry trees. Those also had been previously pruned, and the wood and the leaves carefully gathered, till little remained save the trunks, whose office was to support the vines, and a few leading branches cut into a cup-shaped form at the top of the trunk, destined to produce a fresh crop of shoots and leaves from the old, much-scarred, pollard head.

The rich, red tilled land of the large field in which they were all three at work, was now nearly covered with the bright green of the young crop. For the Italian agriculturist, unlike the French, does not think that his field has done enough when it has given him wine; the same land must give its corn, too; and, generally, to make up the Scriptural trio, its oil also.

The father and the two sons were in different parts of the field, at some distance from each other, each engaged on a separate tree. They were all mounted on broad double ladders, some five feet wide at the base, tapering as they rose to a height of about twelve feet or so from the ground, to a width of six or eight inches, and ending in a little platform of those dimensions. The old man was in his shirt-sleeves, and wore short fustian knee-breeches, and bright blue worsted stockings. The two young men wore trousers of cloth;—for Bella Luce was not utterly beyond the limits of fashion’s jurisdiction; though her writs were made returnable thence a considerable time after they were issued. Beppo and Carlo Vanni also had retained their jackets, either in consequence of a falling off from the hardiness of the previous generation, or from a sentiment of respect for the presence of the lovely Giulia. Each of the three had a peculiarly shaped small hatchet suspended, save at the moments when it was in use, by a hook at the end of its handle, from a strap around their loins, and a bundle of slender osier twigs tied in front of their shoulders;—the first to do the pruning; the second for the tying of that Virgilian marriage knot, which was to unite the drooping vine firmly to its support, till after the vintage.

Giulia was in the field, as has been intimated, and was busy in gathering, and binding into bundles the prunings, to be carefully carried to the homestead as precious food for the sheep and goats. This duty required her presence under the different trees on which the three men were engaged, one after the other; and Giulia was very careful to linger no longer over her work under the one tree than under the other. What! give old Paolo an opportunity of grumbling, or Carlo a chance of sneering, that she sought to make time for saying a few tête-à-tête words to poor Beppo! Not if she were never to have the chance of saying another!

Perhaps ball-room belles fancy that their lot only subjects them to the delicate embarrassments of similar considerations, and that the “happy simplicity of the peasant’s life,” frees them from all such little troubles. Ah! Giulia Vanni in