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Then she told me all the story of the intrigues by which Marcia poisoned the Emperor's mind against the Empress, until Crispina fell under all sorts of suspicion in the eyes of Commodus: of how at the same time Marcia subtly laid snares for Crispina and enticed her into injudicious behavior with several gallants, until finally the Emperor put her under surveillance, later relegated her to Capri, then to some more distant island, and finally had her brought back to Rome, publicly tried, convicted and executed.
Finally, as is usual in life, a compromise prevails. We decide to continue for half an hour longer and see what the weather is. No sooner have we set forward over the brow of a hill than it grows lighter on the sea horizon in the southwest, the ruins on the peak become visible, Capri is in full sunlight.
Our friend Catherine Sedgwick, writing to me a day or two ago, speaks in raptures of it. She says it is like the haze over Soracte or Capri. So you see my paragraph has led me from winter to summer. Summer is gone to New York a week since. No doubt it will produce beautiful flowers in due time, many of them culled from far distant lands, but most of them native, I ween.
The stories of the wicked doings of Tiberius in Capri were malicious slanders. The Emperor was an elderly invalid living in dignified retirement. As for the slaves, we might set our minds at rest in regard to them. If any of them fell over the cliff it was pure accident. We must give up the idea that the invalid Emperor pushed them off.
But there are springs upon the neighboring plains whose precious liquid is brought up the steep trail daily on the heads of women, in three or five gallon jars, the carrying of which gives to the poise of the head and neck a native grace and elegance, as characteristic of Pueblo women as of the girls of Capri.
A sweet and peaceful scene in the foreground, it must have been, and a whole horizon of enchantment beyond the sunny peninsula over which it lorded: the Mediterranean, with poetic Capri, and Ischia, and all the classic shore from Cape Misenum, Baiae, and Naples, round to Vesuvius; all the sparkling Bay of Naples; and on the other side the Bay of Salerno, covered with the fleets of the commerce of Amalfi, then a republican city of fifty thousand people; and Grecian Paestum on the marshy shore, even then a ruin, its deserted porches and columns monuments of an architecture never equaled elsewhere in Italy.
Powell smiled pleasantly, and pressed the offered hand; but the eyes, blue and cold as the stalactites of Capri, scanned the orphan's countenance, and when Edna had seen fully into their depths, she could not avoid recalling Heine's poem of Loreley. "My daughter Gertrude promises herself much pleasure in your society, Miss Earl; for uncle's praises prepare her to expect a most charming companion.
Every peasant has a handful of Roman coins to part with for a few soldi. The churches of the island and the royal palaces of the mainland are full of costly columns which have been removed from the ruins of Capri; and the Museum of Naples is largely indebted for its treasures of statuary to the researches made here at the close of the last century.
Yonder sleeps in the azure distance the enchanted isle of Capri, haunted for ever by dreadful memories of the unnameable atrocities with which the Emperor Tiberius had stained its peaceful bowers. On the neighbouring heights of Posilipo are traces of the villa of Vedius, and of the celebrated fish-ponds where he fed his murenæ with the flesh of his disobedient slaves.
Against his wicker-bound carafe of pale Capri wine stood propped an old Paris edition of the New York Herald. It was folded so that a portrait of a woman could be seen to the best advantage, and to the exclusion of flagstoned courtyards and trellised, overhanging vines; to the exclusion of the bay's great jewel of beauty, this picture held the eyes of the man who lunched alone.
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