The spectacle was fair enough to
touch any fancy: brown domes and facades set in new-leaved gardens and
surrounded by vineyards extending to the nearest acclivities;
country-houses glancing through the fresh green of planes and willows;
monastery-walls cresting the higher ridges; and westward the Po winding
in sunlit curves toward the Alps.
Odo had lost none of his sensitiveness to such impressions; but the sway
of another mood turned his eye from the outstretched beauty of the city
to the vernal solitude about him. It was the season when old memories of
Donnaz worked in his blood; when the banks and hedges of the fresh
hill-country about Turin cheated him with a breath of budding
beech-groves and the fragrance of crushed fern in the glens of the high
Pennine valleys. It was a mere waft, perhaps, from some clod of loosened
earth, or the touch of cool elastic moss as he flung himself face
downward under the trees; but the savour, the contact filled his
nostrils with mountain air and his eyes with dim-branched distances. At
Donnaz the slow motions of the northern spring had endeared to him all
those sweet incipiencies preceding the full choral burst of leaf and
flower: the mauve mist over bare woodlands, the wet black gleams in
frost-bound hollows, the thrust of fronds through withered bracken, the
primrose-patches spreading like pale sunshine along wintry lanes. He had
always felt a sympathy for these delicate unnoted changes; but the
feeling which had formerly been like the blind stir of sap in a plant
was now a conscious sensation that groped for speech and understanding.
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