Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-34.djvu/26

April in Granada.

An atmosphere so limpid that the sky meets the earth in a pure cerulean line,—cerulean not only where it touches the grand Sierra, but over the green Vega, where the mountains sink low, like a crowd kneeling about the horizon before that dazzling white presence. Here are no earthly splendors of Italy, where dusky red and orange are fused in violet, none of the pallid silver into which the heavens faint downward to American mountain and plain. The sky descends in all its glory, and the earth in all its glory rises to meet it in a serene and perfect union.

A gentleman and three ladies were walking through the gardens of the Greneralife. The gentleman was a friend encountered by chance by the wife of an American foreign minister, and was now acting as cicerone for her and her party. She walked at his right, and at her other hand was an elderly woman, who acted as dueña, the ambassadress, as she insisted on being called, being a young woman, and having come into Spain without the protection of her husband's company.

The three talked with great vivacity, questions, answers, and exclamations following each other in rapid succession.

The third lady loitered behind her companions, and was perfectly silent, and almost entirely inattentive to their talk. She was young, and was dressed in deep mourning, and all the life in her white face centred in the large languid eyes that saw everything without brightening. No smile stirred the lovely mouth; there was no quick movement of the head or of the deeply-fringed lids in answer to the exclamations of her companions. Yet it seemed that those eyes might have been vivacious, and there was a sparkle of life even in the loosely-waving hair, that must have been steeped in gold before being covered with shadows, such sunny lights came and went in it. Neither did any tremulous sigh tell of a grief which shifts its burden uneasily this way and that. Quiet, pale, and languid, as if her heart were crushed beyond power of movement, she walked through that earthly paradise, neither murmuring nor rejoicing.

All the air was delicately fragrant. In a sunken garden the slender cypresses were clipped to ball-crowned columns as dark as serpentine, and almost as impervious to the light. Against one of them hung a cloud of rosy peach-blossoms, the very type of youth and joy. Up the high walls, and covering them, was a veil of rose-vines of such ardent growth that the foliage was a silken brown as yet, not having had time to become green, and the sheaths of the red bursting roses were brown too. The roses would not wait.

Steps went up and down from terrace to terrace of those lovely gardens, which were all up and down, from the cloistered hollow where you saw above you only a square of blue sky propped by roses and cypress-balls, to the Mirador, as high above it as the minaret is above the Mihrab, which gave to your eyes the cleft pomegranate from which Granada issues, the villa-strewn green Vega, the shining rivers, the circling mountains, and the thousand glittering angles of the crowned Sierra dominating all.

There were myrtle-hedges only high enough to bar an infant's passage, and there was water everywhere. The exquisite Moor was a fairy prince, and water was his Cinderella. Hissing with speed, the severed Darro rushed through the midst of the garden, bearing coolness and refreshment down to the Alhambra. It ran deep, swift, and shining through the flowers and the green. Hundreds of concealed jets lurked beneath the ground or under stairs, ready