Chapter 9

“Look, John!” cried Allegra, laughing, as she pointed to the hedge of red roses in front of them, and the clusters of creamy bloom hanging over the verandah. “The roses have been blooming ever since we came to Italy. It is always rose-time here. You remember our reading in the dedication of ‘To Leeward’ how Marion Crawford strewed his wife’s pathway with roses on Christmas Day at Sorrento. We can find a flowery land for our honeymoon at any season of the year.”“But why wait a year? Can you not prove me trusty and true in less than a year?”“You are so impatient,” she said, plucking a handful of roses, and scattering the petals at her feet. “A year is so short a time.”“Short, love! why, eight weeks have seemed an eternityto me without you; and you honoured me just now by saying that the time had appeared long, even to you—even to my liege lady, sitting serene in her palace of art, painting contadinas and their olive-faced offspring—even to you, whose love is as a thread of silk against a cable, compared to mine. Even to you, my mistress and my tyrant.”“That was because you were so far away. But there will be nothing to hinder our seeing each other, as often as you may find convenient. I have set my heart upon painting steadily for a twelvemonth, without any distractions.”“There is no such place as Venice for a painter. Think of the Miss Montalbas, and the splendid work they have done at Venice. Would you not like to be like them?”“Would I not like to be like Apelles?”“Well, Venice will be your treasury; Venice will fill that busy brain with ideas. You shall be fed upon pictures old and new—the new living pictures in the narrow streets and canals; the old masters in the churches and palaces. You shall learn of Tintoret and Veronese. You shall paint as much as you like. You shall have no distractions. We shall be strangers there, can live as we choose. Summer is the time for Venice, Allegra. Benighted English people have an idea that Italy is a place to winter in, and they go and shiver in marble palaces, and watch the torrential rain beating against windows that were never meant to shut out bad weather. The Italians know that their land is a land of summer, and they know how to enjoy sunny days and balmy nights. You don’t know how delicious life is on the Lido when the night is only a brief interval of starshine betwixt sunset and dawn. You don’t know what a dream of delight it is to float along the lagoons and watch the lamp-lit city melt into the mists of evening, breathing faint echoes of music and song. A great many things of beauty have been turned to ugliness, Allegra, since printing and the steam engine were invented; but, thank God! Venice is not one of them. You will think of my plan, won’t you, love? At the least, it is a thing to be considered.”“Anything you say is worthy to be considered, John. And now come in and see Isola and Martin.”He felt that he had gone far enough—he felt that it were unwise to press the question too much at first. He meant to be gently persistent; and he meant to have his own way.He followed Allegra into the drawing-room—a room full of light and sunshine, which had been beautified and made home-like by the addition of a few Japaneseries and a little old Italian furniture which Martin Disney had picked up at a bric-à-brac shop in the Via Vittorio Emanuelo. There were flowers everywhere, in the bright Italian pottery, so artless, so cheap, so gay, in its varieties of form and colouring. To Hulbert’s fancy it was the prettiest room he had seen for an age.“You seem to have made yourself uncommonly comfortable here,” he said, after cordial greetings, settling down into a bamboo chair near Isola’s little olive-wood table, littered with Tauchnitz novels and fancy work. “It is a pleasant sensation for a rolling stone who has hardly ever known what home means to drop into such a nest as this. You will have too much of my company, I’m afraid. You’ll be shocked to hear that I have taken rooms at the Anglais, down there,” pointing down the valley, “within a stone’s throw of you.”“We are not shocked. We are very glad you will be near us,” said Isola, smiling at him. “It has been a dull life for Allegra, I’m afraid.”“Dull! dull in this land of beauty!” cried Allegra. “I have never known a dull hour since I came here; though, of course,” with a shy glance at her lover, “I have naturally thought sometimes of absent friends, and wished they were with me to revel in the loveliness of these woods and hills.”“Well, one of your friends has come to you, one who would as gladly have come had you been in regions where the sun never shines, or where his chariot wheels scorch the torrid sands.”Captain Hulbert stayed with them all the evening, andplanned a sail to Mentone for the following day, Isola again begging to be left out of their plans, as she had done at Fowey.“You need feel no compunction about leaving me,” she paid. “I shall be perfectly happy in the woods with nurse, and baby, and my books.”They obeyed her, and the little excursion was arranged. They were to start soon after the early breakfast, carrying what their Italian cook called a pique-nique with them, in the shape of a well-provided luncheon-basket. Isola sat in the olive wood, watching the white sails moving slowly towards Bordighera. It was an exquisite day—a day for dreaming on the water rather than for rapid progress. The yacht scarcely seemed to move as Isola watched her from the cushioned corner which Löttchen had arranged in an angle of the low stone wall—all amongst ferns and mosses, brown orchises and blue violets—an angle sheltered by a century-old olive, whose gnarled trunk sprawled along the ground, rugged and riven, but with another century’s life in it yet. Far down in the valley, below the old gateway, a company of cypresses rose dark against the blue of the sea, and Isola knew that just on that slope of the shore where the cypresses grew tallest the graves of English exiles were gathered. Many a fair hope, many a broken dream, many a disappointed ambition lay at rest under those dark spires, within the sound of that summer sea.This was one of many days which the young mother spent in the woods or in the garden with her baby for her companion, while Allegra and the colonel sailed east or west in theVendetta. Her doctor would have liked her to go with them, but she seemed to have an absolute aversion to the sea, and he did not press the point.“Nothing that she dislikes will do her any good,” he told Colonel Disney. “There is no use in being persistent about anything. Fancies and whims stand for a great deal in such an illness as hers.”A week or two later the same kind doctor discovered thathis patient was fast losing ground. Her strength had flagged considerably in a short time. He recommended change of scene.“This quiet life suited her wonderfully well for the first month or so, but we are no longer making any headway. You had better try a gayer place—a little more life and movement.”Martin Disney was ready to obey. He and Allegra took counsel together, and then—in the lightest strain, one evening after dinner—they discussed the notion of a change.“Shall we strike our tents, Isola? Are you tired of San Remo?”“No, Martin. I am tired of myself, sometimes—never of these olive woods and lemon groves. Sometimes the stillness and the silent beauty of the place make me feel unhappy, without knowing why; but that is a kind of unhappiness no one can escape.”“Is there any place in the world within tolerable easy reach of this that you would like to see?” asked her husband.“Yes, there is one city in the world that I have been longing to see ever since I began to have thoughts and wishes.”“And that is——”“Rome! I should like to see Rome before I die, Martin; if it were not too troublesome for you——”“Troublesome! My dearest, can anything be troublesome to me if it can but give you pleasure? You shall see Rome—not once—but again and again, in the course of a long and happy life, I hope. I am more than twenty years older than you; but I count upon at least thirty years more upon this planet, before I blow out my candle and say ‘Bon soir.’”“God grant that you may live to a good old age, Martin. The world is better for such a man as you.”“The world would be no place for me without my wife,” he said. “And so you would like to see Rome, Isa? What has put that fancy into your head?”“Oh, it is an old dream, as I said just now. And lately I have been talking to Father Rodwell, who knows Rome aswell as if he were a Roman citizen, and he has made me more and more anxious to go there. If it would not be a great plague to you, Martin.”“On the contrary, it would be a great pleasure. We will go to Rome, Isa, if your doctor approve. Allegra will like it, I know.”“Like it?” echoed Allegra, “I shall simply be intoxicated with delight. I know the catalogues of all the picture-galleries by heart. I think I know every one of the seven hills as well as if I had walked upon them from my childhood. I have read so many descriptions of the place and its surroundings—so many raptures penned by people whom I have envied for nothing else than that they have known Rome; they have lived in Rome.”The whole business was easily settled. Captain Hulbert was the only person who regretted the change. He had been a month at San Remo, a month of summer idleness in February and March, a month of summer sails on an azure sea; of mountain walks and rides, high up from stage to stage, until the region of lemon groves and olive woods gave place to the pines on the loftier hills. He had been able to spend all his days in Allegra’s society.There were no pictures, except in that one little gallery at Colla. There was nothing to distract her from her lover. In Rome there would be all the wonders of the most wonderful city in the world. It would be art first and love second.The doctor approved; Father Rodwell wrote to an agent in Rome, and after some negotiation a suite of apartments was found on the high ground near the Trinità de’ Monti, which seemed to meet all the requirements of the case. The priest vouched for the honesty and good faith of the agent, and on his responsibility the rooms were taken for the month of April, with liberty to occupy them later if it were so desired.CHAPTER XXI.“THE WOODS ARE ROUND US, HEAPED AND DIM.”It was their last day at San Remo. Everything had been packed for the journey, and the drawing-room at Lauter Brunnen had a dreary look now that it was stripped of all those decorations and useful prettinesses with which Allegra had made it so gay and home-like.The morning was brilliant, and Martin, Allegra, and Captain Hulbert set off at nine o’clock upon a long-deferred expedition to San Romolo. They would be home in good time for the eight-o’clock dinner; and Isola promised to amuse herself all day, and to be in good spirits to welcome them on their return.“You have a duty to do for your sister,” she said, when her husband felt compunction at leaving her. “Think of all she has done for us, her devotion, her unselfishness. The least we can do is to help her to be happy with her lover; and all the burden of that duty has fallen upon you. I think you ought to be called Colonel Gooseberry.”She looked a bright and happy creature as she stood on the mule-path in the olive wood, waving her hand to them as they went away—Allegra riding a donkey, the two men walking, one on each side of her bridle, and the guide striding on ahead, leading a second donkey which was to serve as an occasional help by-and-by, if either of the pedestrians wanted a lift. Her cheeks were flushed with walking, and her eyes were bright with a new gladness.She was full of a childish pleasure in the idea of their journey, and the realization of a dream which most of us have dreamt a long time before it assumed the shape of earthly things—the dream of Rome.Isola stood listening to their footsteps, as they passed the little painted shrine on the hill path. She heard them give the time of day to a party of peasant women, with emptybaskets on their heads, going up to gather the last of the olives. Then she roamed about the wooded valley and the slope of the hill towards Colla for an hour or two, and then, growing suddenly tired, she crept home, in time to sit beside her baby while he slept his placid noontide sleep. She bent over the little rosebud mouth and kissed it, in a rapture of maternal love.“So young to see Rome,” she murmured. “And to think that those star-like eyes will see and take no heed; to think that such a glorious vision will pass before him, and he will remember nothing.”The day was very long, something like one of those endless days at Trelasco, when her husband was in Burmah and she had only the dog and the cat for her companions. She thought of those fond friends to-day with a regretful sigh—the sleepy Shah, so calm and undemonstrative in his attachment, but with a placid, purring delight in her society which seemed to mean a great deal; the fox-terrier, so active and intense in his affection, demanding so much attention, intruding himself upon her walks and reveries with such eager, not-to-be-denied devotion. She had no four-footed friends here; and the want of them made an empty space in her life.In the afternoon the weather changed suddenly. The sky became overcast, the sea a leaden colour; and the mistral came whistling up the valley with a great rustling and shivering of the silver-green foliage and creaking of the old bent branches, like the withered arms of witch or sorceress. All the glory of the day was gone, and the white villas on the crest of the eastward hill stood out in livid distinctness against the blackened sky.Isola wandered up the hill-path, past the little shrine where the way divided, the point at which she had seen her husband and his party vanish in the sunny morning. She felt a sudden sense of loneliness now the sun was gone; a childish longing for the return of her friends, for evening and lamplight, and the things that make for cheerfulness.She was cold and dull, and out of spirits. She had left the house while the sun was shining, and she had come without shawl or wrap of any kind, and the mistral made her shiver. Yet she had no idea of hurrying home. The loneliness of the house had become oppressive before she left it; and she knew there would be some hours to wait for the return of the excursionists. So she mounted the steep mule-path, slowly and painfully, till she had gone two-thirds of the way to Colla; and then she sat down to rest on the low stone wall which enclosed a little garden in a break of the wood, from which point there was a far-stretching view seaward.She was very cold, but she was so tired as to be glad to rest at any hazard of after-suffering. Drowsy from sheer exhaustion, she leant her head against a great rugged olive, whose roots were mixed up with the wall, and fell fast asleep. She awoke, shivering, from a confused dream of sea and woods, Roman temples and ruined palaces. She had been wandering in one of those dream-cities that have neither limit nor settled locality. It was here in the woods below Colla, and yet was half Rome and half Trelasco. There was a classic temple upon a hill that was like the Mount, and the day was bleak, and dark, and rainy, and she was walking on the footpath through Lord Lostwithiel’s park, with the storm-driven rain beating against her face, just as on that autumn evening, when the owner of the soil had taken compassion upon her and had given her shelter. The dream had been curiously vivid—a dream which brought the past back as if it were the present, and blotted out all that had come afterwards. She woke bewildered, forgetting that her husband had come back from India, and that she was in Italy, thinking of herself as she had been that October evening when she and Lostwithiel met for the first time.The sea was darker than when she fell asleep. There was the dull crimson of a stormy sunset yonder, behind the jutting promontory of Bordighera, while the sky above wasbarred with long, black clouds, and the wind was howling across the great deep valley like an evil spirit tortured and imprisoned, shrieking to his gods for release. Exactly opposite her, as she stood in the deep cleft of the hills, a solitary vessel was labouring under press of canvas towards the point upon whose dusky summit the chapel of the Madonna della Guardia gleamed whitely in the dying day. The vessel was a schooner yacht, of considerable tonnage, certainly larger than theVendetta.Isola stood, still as marble, watching that labouring boat, the straining sails, the dark hull beaten by the stormy dash of the waves. She watched with wide, open eyes, and parted lips, quivering as with an over-mastering fear, watched in momentary expectation of seeing those straining sails dip for the last time, that labouring hull founder and vanish betwixt black wave and white surf. She watched in motionless attention till the boat disappeared behind the shoulder of the hill; and then, shivering, nervous, and altogether over-strung, she hurried homewards, feeling that she had stayed out much too long, and that she had caught a chill which might be the cause of new trouble.If those narrow mule-paths had been less familiar, she might have lost her way in the dusk; but she had trodden them too often to be in any difficulty, and she reached the villa without loss of time, but not before the return of the picnic party.Allegra and Captain Hulbert were watching at the gate. Colonel Disney had gone into the wood to look for her, and had naturally taken the wrong direction.“Oh, Isola; how could you stop out so late, and on such a stormy evening?” remonstrated Allegra.“I fell asleep before the storm came on.”“Fell asleep—out-of-doors—and at sunset! What dreadful imprudence.”“I went out too late, I’m afraid; but I was so tired of waiting for you. A kind of horror of the house and the silence came upon me—and I felt I must go out into thewoods. I walked too far—and fell asleep from sheer fatigue; and when I woke I saw a yacht fighting with the wind. I’m afraid she’ll go down.”“What, you noticed her too?” exclaimed Hulbert. “I didn’t think you cared enough about yachts to take notice of her. I was watching her as we came down the hill; rather too much canvas; but she’s right enough. She’s past Arma di Taggia by this time, I dare say. I’ll go and look for Disney, and tell him you’re safe and sound. Perhaps I shall miss him in the wood. It’s like a Midsummer Night’s Dream, isn’t it, Allegra?” he said, laughing, as he went out of the gate.“If it were only mid-summer, I shouldn’t care,” answered his sweetheart, with her arm round Isola, who stood beside her, pale and shivering. “Come in, dear, and let me make you warm, if I can.”“If they should all go down in the darkness!” said Isola, in a low, dreamy voice. “The boat looked as if it might be wrecked at any moment.”Allegra employed all her arts as a sick-nurse in the endeavour to ward off any evil consequence from that imprudent slumber in the chill hour of sunset; but her cares were unavailing. Isola was restless and feverish all night, yet she insisted on getting up at her usual hour next morning, and declared herself quite capable of the journey to Genoa. Allegra and her brother, however, insisted on her resting for a day or two. So the departure was postponed, and the doctor sent for. He advised at least three days’ rest, with careful nursing; and he reproved his patient severely for her imprudence in exposing herself to the evening air.Captain Hulbert appeared at teatime, just returned from a railway journey to Allassio.“I’ve a surprise for you, Mrs. Disney,” he said, seating himself by the sofa where Isola was lying, surrounded by invalid luxuries, books, lemonade, fan, and eau de Cologne flask, her feet covered with a silken rug.“A surprise!” she echoed faintly, as if life held no surprises for her. “What can that be?”“You remember the yacht you saw last night?”“Yes,” she cried, roused in an instant, and clasping her hands excitedly. “Did she go down?”“Not the least little bit. She is safe and sound at Allassio. She is called theEurydice, she hails last from Syracuse, and my brother is on board her. He wired to me this morning to go over and see him. I’m very glad I went, for he is off to Corfu to-morrow. TheFlying Dutchmanisn’t in it with him.”There was a curious silence. Martin Disney was sitting on the other side of his wife’s sofa, where he had been reading selected bits of theTimes, such portions of the news of men and nations as he fancied might interest her. Allegra was busy with a piece of delicate needlework, and did not immediately reply; but it was she who was first to speak.“How frightened you would have been yesterday evening had you known who was on board the boat,” she said.“I don’t know about being frightened, but he was certainly carrying too much canvas. I told him so this morning.”“What did he say?”“Laughed at me. ‘You sailors never believe that a landsman can sail a ship,’ he said. I wanted to talk to his sailing-master, but he told me he was his own sailing-master. If his ship was doomed to go down, he meant to be at the helm himself.”“That sounds as if he were foolhardy,” said Allegra.“I told him I did not like the rig of his boat, nor the name of his boat, and I reminded him how I saw theEurydiceoff Portland with all her canvas spread the day she went down. I was with the Governor of the Prison, a naval man, who had been commander on my first ship, and we stood side by side on the cliff, and watched her as she went by. ‘If this wind gets much stronger, that ship willgo down,’ said my old captain, ‘unless they take in some of their canvas.’ And a few hours later these poor fellows had all gone to the bottom. I asked Lostwithiel why he called his boat theEurydice. ‘Fancy,’ he said; he had a fancy for the name. ‘I’ve never forgotten the old lines we used to hammer out when we were boys,’ he said—‘Ah, miseram, Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat; Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripæ.’”“I don’t think the name matters, if she is a good boat,” said Allegra, with her calm common sense.“Well, she is, and she isn’t. She is a finer boat than theVendetta; but I’d sooner handle theVendettain a storm. There are points about his new boat that I don’t quite like. However, he had her built by one of the finest builders on the Clyde, and it will be hard if she goes wrong. He has given me theVendettaas a wedding-present—in advance of the event—on condition that I sink her when I’m tired of her; and he said he hoped she’d be luckier to me than she had been to him.”Martin Disney sat silent by his wife’s sofa. He could never hear Lord Lostwithiel’s name without a touch of pain. His only objection to Hulbert as a brother-in-law was the thought that the two men were of the same race—that he must needs hear the hated name from time to time; and yet he believed his wife’s avowal that she was pure and true. His hatred of the name came only from the recollection that she had been slandered by a man whom he despised. He looked at the wasted profile on the satin pillow, so wan, so transparent in its waxen pallor, the heavy eyelid drooping languidly, the faintly coloured lips drawn as if with pain—a broken lily. Was this the kind of woman to be suspected of evil—this fair and fragile creature, in whom the spiritual so predominated over the sensual? He hated himself for having been for a moment influenced by that underbred scoundrel at Glenaveril, for having been base enough to doubt his wife’s purity.He had pained and humiliated her, and now the stamp ofdeath was on the face he adored, and before him lay the prospect of a life’s remorse.They left San Remo three days afterwards, Isola being pronounced able to bear the journey, though her cough had been considerably increased by that imprudent slumber in the wood. She was anxious to go; and doctor and husband gave way to her eagerness for new scenes.“I am so tired of this place,” she said piteously. “It is lovely; but it is a loveliness that makes me melancholy. I want to be in a great city where there are lots of people moving about. I have never lived in a city, but always in quiet places—beautiful, very beautiful, but so still—so still—so full of one’s self and one’s own thoughts.”CHAPTER XXII.ECCO ROMA.The agent had proved himself worthy of trust, and had chosen the lodging for Colonel Disney’s family with taste and discretion. It was a first floor over a jeweller’s shop in a short street behind the Piazza di Spagna, and under the Pincian Gardens. There were not too many stairs for Isola to ascend when she came in from her drive or walk. The gardens were close at hand, and all around there were trees and flowers, and an atmosphere of verdure and retirement in the midst of the great cosmopolitan city.It was dark when the train came into the terminus; and Isola was weary and exhausted after the long hot journey from Pisa, the glare of the sun, and the suffocating clouds of dust, and the beautiful monotony of blue sea and sandy plains, long level wastes, where nothing grew but brushwood and osier, and stretches of marshy ground, with water pools shining here and there, like burnished steel, and distant islets dimly seen athwart a cloud of heat. Then evening closed in, and it was through a grey and formless worldthat they approached the city whose very name thrilled her.The railway station was very much like any other great terminus; like Milan, like Genoa. There was the same close rank of omnibuses. There were the same blue blouses and civil, eager porters, far too few for the work to be done, rapacious but amiable, piling up the innumerable packages of the Italian traveller, loading themselves like so many human beasts of burden, and with no apparent limit to their capacity for carrying things. Two flys were packed with the miscellaneous luggage, nurse and baby, and then Isola was handed to her place in another, with Allegra by her side, and through the narrow streets of tall houses, under the dim strip of soft April night, she drove through the city of heroes and martyrs, saints and apostles, wicked emperors and holy women, the city of historical contrasts, of darkness and light, refinement and barbarism, of all things most unlike each other, from Nero to Paul, from Gregory the Great to the Borgias.The glory and the beauty of Rome only began to dawn upon her next morning, in the vivid sunlight, when she climbed the steps of the Trinità de’ Monti, and then with Allegra’s arm to lean upon went slowly upward and again upward to the topmost terrace on the Pincian Hill, and stood leaning on the marble balustrade, and gazing across the city that lay steeped in sunshine at her feet—over palace and steeple, pinnacle and tower, to the rugged grandeur of Hadrian’s Tomb, and to that great dome whose vastness makes all other temples seem puny and insignificant. This was her first view of the world’s greatest church.The air was clear and cool upon this height, although the city below showed dimly through a hazy veil of almost tropical heat. Everywhere there was the odour of summer flowers, the overpowering sweetness of lilies of the valley, and great branches of lilac, white and purple, brimming over in the baskets of the flower-sellers.On such a morning as this one could understand how the Romans came to call April the joyous month, and to dedicate this season of sunshine and flowers to the Goddess of Beauty and Love.Isola’s face lighted up with a new gladness, a look of perfect absorption and self-forgetfulness, as she leant upon the balustrade, and gazed across that vast panorama, gazed and wondered, with eyes that seemed to grow larger in their delight.“And is this really Rome?” she murmured softly.“Yes, this is Rome,” cried Allegra. “Isn’t it lovely? Isn’t it all you ever dreamt of or hoped for? And yet people have so maligned it—called it feverish, stuffy, disappointing, dirty! Why, the air is ether—inspiring, health-giving! April in Rome is as fresh as April in an English forest; only it is April with the warmth and flowers of June. I feel sure you will grow ever so much stronger after one little week in Rome.”“Yes, I know I shall be better here. I feel better already,” said Isola, with a kind of feverish hopefulness. “It was so good of Martin to bring me. San Remo is always lovely—and I shall love it to the end of my life, because it was my first home in Italy—but I was beginning to be tired—not of the olive woods and the sea, but of the people we met, and the sameness of life. One day was so like another.”“It was monotonous, of course,” agreed Allegra; “and being a little out of health, you would be bored by monotony sooner than Martin or I. It was such a pity you did not like the yacht. That made such a change for us. The very olive woods and the mountain villages seem new when one sees them from the water. I was never tired of looking at the hills between San Remo and Bordighera, or the promontory of Monaco, with its cathedral towers. It was a pleasure lost to you, dear; but it could not be helped, I suppose. Yet once upon a time you used to be so fond of the sea, when you and I went in our row-boat, tempting danger round by Neptune Point.”“I may have been stronger then,” Isola faltered.“Oh, forgive me, darling! What an inconsiderate wretch I am! But Rome will give you back your lost strength; and we shall round Neptune Point again, and feel the salt spray dashing over our heads as we go out into the great fierce Atlantic. I confess that sometimes, when that divine Mediterranean which we are never tired of worshipping has been lying in the sunshine like one vast floor oflapis lazuli, I have longed for something rougher and wilder—for such a sea as you and I have watched from the Rashleigh Mausoleum.”Colonel Disney and his wife and sister went about in a very leisurely way in their explorations. In the first place, he was anxious to avoid anything approaching fatigue for his wife; and in the second place it was only the beginning of April, and they were to be in Rome for at least a month; there was therefore no need for rushing hither and thither at the tourist pace, with guide-books in their hands, and anxious, heated countenances, perspiring through the streets, and suffering deadly chills in the churches. Allegra’s first desire was naturally to see the picture-galleries, and to these she went for the most part alone, leaving Isola and her husband free to wander about as they pleased, upon a friendly equality of ignorance, knowing very little more than Childe Harold and Murray could teach them. Isola’s Rome was Byron’s Rome.There was one spot she loved better than any other in the city of mighty memories. It was not hallowed by the blood of saint or hero, sage or martyr. It had no classical associations. He whose heart lay buried there under the shadow of the tribune’s mighty monument, perished in the pride of manhood, in the freshness and glory of life; and that heart—so warm and generous to his fellow-men—had hardened itself against the God of saint and martyr, the God of Peter and Paul, Lawrence and Gregory, Benedict and Augustine. Yet for Isola there was no grave in Rome so fraught with spiritual thoughts as Shelley’s grave, no sweeter memoryassociated with the eternal city than the memory of his wanderings and meditations amidst the ruined walls of the Baths of Caracalla, where his young genius drank in the poetry of the long past, and fed upon the story of the antique dead.She came to Shelley’s grave as often as she could steal away from the anxious companions of her drives and walks.“I like to be alone now and then,” she told her husband. “It rests me to sit by myself for an hour or two in this lovely place.”There was a coachman in the Piazza who was in the habit of driving Colonel Disney’s family—an elderly man, sober, steady and attentive, with intelligence that made him almost as good as a guide. He was on the watch for his English clients every morning. They had but to appear on the Piazza, and he was in attendance, ready to take them to the utmost limit of a day’s journey, if they liked. Were they in doubt where to go, he was always prompt with suggestions.He would drive Isola to the door of the English cemetery, leave her there, and return at her bidding to take her home again. Disney knew she was safe when this veteran had her in charge. The man was well known in the Piazza, and of established character for honesty. She took a book or two in her light basket, buying a handful of flowers here and there from the women and children as she went along, till the books were hidden under roses and lilac. The custodian of the cemetery knew her, and admitted her without a word. He had watched her furtively once or twice, to see that she neither gathered the flowers nor tried to scratch her name upon the tombs. He had seen her sitting quietly by the slab which records Shelley’s death—and the death of that faithful friend who was laid beside him, sixty years afterwards. Sixty years of loving, regretful memory, and then union in the dust. Shall there not be a later and a better meeting, when those two shall see each other’s faces andhear each other’s voices again, in a world where old things shall be made new, where youth and its wild freshness shall come back again, and Trelawney shall be as young in thought and feeling as Shelley?The English burial-place was a garden of fairest flowers at this season—a paradise of roses and clematis, azaleas and camelias—and much more beautiful for its wilder growth of trailing foliage and untended shrubs, the pale cold blue of the periwinkle that carpeted slope and bank, and for the background of old grey wall, severe in its antique magnificence, a cyclopean rampart, relic of time immemorial, clothed and beautified with weed and floweret that grew in every cleft and cranny.Here, in a sheltered angle to the left of the poet’s grave, Isola could sit unobserved, even when the custodian brought a party of tourists to see the hallowed spot, which occurred now and then while she sat there. The tourists for the most part stared foolishly, made some sentimental remark if they were women, or if they were men, betrayed a hopeless ignorance of the poet’s history, and not unfrequently confounded him with Keats. Isola sat half-hidden in her leafy corner, where the ivy and the acanthus hung from the great grey buttress against which she leant, languid, half-dreaming, with two books on her lap.One was her Shelley—her much-read Shelley—a shabby, cloth-bound volume, bought in her girlhood at the book-seller’s in the Place Duguesclin, where English books could be got by special order, and at special prices. The other was an Italian Testament, which her husband had bought her at San Remo, and in which she had read with extreme diligence and with increasing fervour as her mind became more deeply moved by Father Rodwell’s sermons. It was not that she had ever been one of those advanced thinkers who will accept no creed which does not square with their own little theories and fit in to their own narrow circle of possibilities. She had never doubted the creed she had been taught in her childhood, but she had thought verylittle about serious things, since she was a young girl, preparing for her confirmation, touched with girlish enthusiasm, and very much in earnest. In these fair spring days, and in this city of many memories, all young thoughts had reawakened in her mind. She pored over the familiar Gospel-stories, and again, as in the first freshness of her girlhood, she saw the sacred figure of the Redeemer and Teacher in all the vivid light and colour of a reality, close at hand. Faith stretched a hand across the abyss of time, and brought the old world of the Gospel-story close to her; the closer, because she was in Rome, not far from that church which enshrines the print of the Divine footstep, when He who was God and Man, appeared to His disciple, to foreshadow approaching martyrdom, to inspire the fortitude of the martyr. Yes, although the Saviour’s earthly feet never entered the city, every hill and every valley within and without those crumbling walls has interwoven itself so closely with the story of His life—through the work of His saints and martyrs—that it is nowise strange if the scenes and images of the sacred story seem nearer and more vivid in Rome than in any other place on earth, not excepting Jerusalem. It was from Rome, not from Jerusalem, that the Cross went out to the uttermost ends of the world. It is the earth of the Colosseum and the Borgo that is steeped in the blood of those who have died for Christ. It was Rome that ruled the world, through the long night of barbarism and feudal power, by the invincible force of His name.It might seem strange that Isola should turn from the story of the Evangelists to the works of a poet whose human sympathies were so wrung by the evil that has been wrought in the name of the Cross that he was blind to the infinitely greater good which Christianity has accomplished for mankind. Shelley saw the blood of the martyrs, not as a sublime testimony to the Godlike power of faith, not as a sacrifice rich in after-fruits, sad seed of a joyous harvest—but as the brutal outcome of man’s cruelty, using any name, Christ, orBuddha, Mahomet, or Brahma—as the badge of tyranny, the sanction to torture and to slay.Shelley’s melancholy fate seemed brought nearer to her now that she sat beside his grave, in the summer stillness, and in the shadow of the old Aurelian Wall. It was only his heart that was lying there, the imperishable heart, snatched by Trelawney’s hand from the flame of the Greek pyre, from the smoke of pine-logs and frankincense, wine and oil. Sixty years had passed before that hand lay cold in the grave beside the buried heart of the poet, sixty years of severance, and fond faithful memory, before death brought re-union.What a beautiful spirit this, which was so early quenched by the cruelest stroke of Fate—a light such as seldom shone out of mortal clay, a spirit of fire and brightness, intangible, untamable, not to be shut within common limits, nor judged by common laws!CHAPTER XXIII“SEEK SHELTER IN THE SHADOW OF THE TOMB.”Of the people who came to look upon the grave, some to lay a tributary flower upon the stone, and some to pluck a leaf or two of acanthus or violet, all hitherto had been strangers to Isola, had gone away without seeing her, or had glanced indifferently, as at one more unfortunate with a sketching-block, spoiling paper in the pursuit of the unattainable. There were so many amateur artists sitting about in the outskirts of the city, that such a figure in a romantic spot challenged nobody’s attention. So far people had come and gone, and had taken no notice; but one afternoon a figure in a long black cassock came suddenly between her and the golden light, and Isola looked up with a cry of surprise on recognizing Father Rodwell.“You did not expect to see me here,” he said, holding out his hand.She had risen from her seat on the low grassy bank, and she gave him her hand, half in pleasure, half in a nervous apprehension which his keen eye was quick to perceive. His life had been spent in dealings with the souls of men and women, and he had learnt to read those living pages as easily as he read Plato or Spinosa.“No,” she said. “I had no idea you were in Rome. You told us you were going back to London.”“I meant to go back to London and hard work, but my doctor insisted upon my prolonging my holiday for a few weeks, so I came here instead. Rome always draws me, and is always new. Rome gives me fresh life and fresh power when my heart and brain have been feeling benumbed and dead. I am glad they brought you here, Mrs. Disney. You were looking languid and ill when you left San Remo. I hope Rome has revivified you.”He looked at her earnestly. Her face had been in shadow until now, but as she moved into the sunlight, he saw that the lines had sharpened in the pale, wan face, and that there was the stamp of wasting disease in the hollow cheeks, and about the sunken eyes, and in the almost bloodless lips. As he looked at her in friendliest commiseration those pathetic grey eyes—whose expression had baffled his power of interpretation hitherto—filled suddenly with tears, and in the next moment she clasped her hands before her face in an agony of grief.The Italian Testament which she had been reading when he approached dropped at her feet, and stooping to pick it up Father Rodwell saw that it was open at the fourth chapter of St. John, the story of the woman of Samaria, the sinner with whom Christ talked at the well. A leaf from Shelley’s grave lay upon the book, as if to mark where Isola had been reading, and Father Rodwell’s quick glance saw that the page was blotted with tears.“My dear Mrs. Disney,” he said gently, “is there anythingwrong at home? Your husband, your boy are well, I hope?”“Yes, thank God, they are both well. God has been very good to me. He might have taken those I love. He has been merciful.”“He is merciful to all His creatures; though there are times when His dealings with us seem very hard. Oh, Mrs. Disney, you can’t think how difficult a priest’s office is sometimes when he has to reconcile the afflicted with the Providence that has seen fit to lay some heavy burden on them. They cannot understand; they cannot say it is well. They cannot kiss the rod. But as you say, God has been good to you. Your lines have been set in pleasant places. You are hedged round and sheltered by love. I never saw greater affection in husband for wife than I have seen in your husband. I never saw sister more devoted to sister than your sister-in-law is to you.”She had sunk again into a sitting position on the low bank at the foot of the wall. Her face was still hidden, and her sobs came faster as he spoke to her.“Why should you grieve at the thought of their love? Is it because it may please God to take you from them in the morning of your life? If it is that dread which agitates you I entreat you to put it aside. There is nothing in your case that forbids hope, and hope will do much to help your recovery. You should tell yourself how valuable your life is to those who love you. The thought of their affection should give you courage to struggle against apathy and languor. Believe me, invalids have their condition a great deal more in their own power than they are inclined to believe. So much can be overcome where the spirit is strong and brave, where faith and hope fight against bodily weakness. You ought not to be sitting alone here in this saddening spot. It is lovely, but with the beauty of death. You ought to be driving out to Frascati or to Tivoli with your husband. You ought to be watching the carriages in the Pincian Gardens, or amusing yourself in one of the picture galleries.”“I had rather be alone,” she said, wiping away her tears, and in some degree recovering her self-possession.“That is a morbid fancy, and one that hinders your recovery.”“I have no wish to recover. I only want to die.”“My dear Mrs. Disney, it is your duty to fight against these melancholy moods. Can you be indifferent to your husband’s feelings? Have you not the mother’s natural desire to watch over your child’s early years, to see him reach manhood?”“No, no, no!” she cried passionately. “I have had enough of life. They are dear to me, very dear. No wife ever loved and honoured her husband more than I love and honour mine—but it is all over, it is past, and ended. I am more than resigned to death—I am thankful that God has called me away.”He watched her closely as she spoke, watched her with his hand upon hers, which was cold as ice. He had heard such words before from the early doomed, but they had been accompanied by religious exaltation; they had been the outpouring of a faith that saw the gates of heaven opened and the Son of man sitting in glory—of a love that longed to be with God. Here there was no sign of hope or exaltation. There were only the tokens of despair.He remembered how agitated he had seen her many times in the little church at San Remo, and how, although hanging eagerly upon his preaching, she had persistently avoided anything like serious conversation with him upon the few occasions when he had found himself alone with her.He had her Testament still in his hand, and looking down at the tear-stained page it seemed to him that there lay the clue to her melancholy.“You have been reading the story of the woman of Samaria,” he said.“Yes.”“And you have read that other story of her who knelt inthe dust at her Saviour’s feet, and to whom He said, ‘Neither do I condemn thee.’”“Yes.”“Is there anything in either of those stories to sadden you more than the thought of sin and sorrow saddens all of us?”She looked at him shrinkingly, pale as death, as if he had a dagger in his hand ready to strike her.“No, I don’t suppose there is anything that goes home to my heart any more than to other hearts,” she said, after a pause, trying to speak carelessly. “We are all sinners. The Gospel teaches us that in every line! We are none of us altogether worthy—not even my husband, I suppose, although to me he seems a perfect Christian.”“I can believe that he is a Christian, Mrs. Disney, and a man of strong convictions. If he had wronged anybody, I do not think he would rest till he had atoned for that wrong.”“I am sure he would not. He would do his uttermost to atone. And so would I—although I do not pretend to be half so good a Christian as he is. I would do all in my power to atone for any wrong I had done to one I loved.”“As you love your husband, for instance.”“Yes, as I love him. He is first in the world for me. Dear as my child is, Martin must always be first.”“And you would not for the world do him any wrong?” pursued the priest, more and more earnest as he went on, pale with emotion, his whole power of observation concentrated upon the whitening face and lowered eyelids of the woman sitting at his feet.“Not for the world, not for my life,” she said, with her hands tightly clasped, her eyes still hidden under the heavy lids, tearless now—and with dry and quivering lips, from which the words came with a dull and soulless sound. “I would die to save him an hour’s pain. I would fling away this wretched life rather than grieve him for a moment.”“Poor soul!” murmured the priest, pitying that debt of self-abasement which he understood so well, under whatsoever guise she might hide her contrition. “Poor soul, you talk too lightly of that great mystery which we should all face in a spirit of deep humility. Do you feel that you can contemplate that passage through death to a new life without fear of the issue? Have you no reckoning to make with the God who pardons repentant sinners? Do you stand before Him with a clear conscience—having kept nothing back—cherished no hidden sin?”“No one can be without sin in His sight. Do you suppose that I am sinless, or that I have ever believed myself sinless? I know how weak and poor a thing I am—a worm in the sight of Him who rules the universe. But if—if He cares for such as I, He knows that I am sorry for every sinful thought and every sinful act of my life.”She spoke in short sentences, each phrase broken by a sob. She felt as if he were tearing out her heart, this man who had been heretofore so kindly and indulgent in his speech and manner that he seemed to make religion an easy thing, a garment as loose and expansive as philosophy itself. And, now, all at once he appeared before her as a judge, searching out her heart, cruel, inflexible, weighing her in the balance, and finding her wanting.“If I am sorry,” she murmured, between her sobs, “what more can God or man require of me?”“Nothing, if your sorrow is that true sorrow which means repentance, and goes hand-in-hand with atonement. Forgive me, my dear friend, for presuming to speak unreservedly to you. If I try to find out the nature of your wound it is only that I may help you to heal it. Ever since I have known you I have seen the tokens of a wounded heart, a bruised and broken spirit. I saw you surrounded with all the blessings that make woman’s lot happy. It was hardly possible to conceive fairer surroundings and truer friends. Can you wonder, then, if my compassionate interest was awakened by the indications of a deep-rooted sorrow for which there wasno apparent cause? I saw your emotion in church, saw how quickly your heart and mind responded to the appeal of religion—saw in you a soul attuned to heavenly things, and day by day my interest in you and yours grew stronger. The hope of seeing you again, of helping you to bear your burden, of ultimately lightening it, was one of my reasons for coming to Rome. I felt somehow that you and I had not met in vain—that my power to move you was not without a meaning in both our lives; that if, as I thought, you needed spiritual help and comfort, it was my vocation to help and comfort you. And so I came to Rome, and so I found out where you spent your quiet hours, and so I have followed you here this afternoon. Tell me, Mrs. Disney, did I presume too much? Was it the preacher’s vanity or the priest’s intuition that spoke?”“It was intuition,” she said. “You saw that I had sinned. None but a sinner could shed such tears—could so feel the terror of God’s wrath.”“It is of His love I want you to think. Of His immeasurable love and pity. Of His Son’s Divine compassion. If you have any special need of His pardon; if there is any sinful secret locked in your heart; do not let the golden hours go by—the time meet for repentance.”“I have repented,” she cried piteously. “My life has been one long repentance ever since my sin.”“And your husband—he who so fondly loves you—he knows all, and has forgiven all?”“Knows!” The word broke from her lips almost in a shriek of horror. “He knows nothing—he must never know. He would despise me, leave me to die alone, while he went far away from me, to the very end of the world. He would take his son with him. I should be left alone—alone to face death—the most desolate creature God ever looked upon. Oh, Father Rodwell, why have you wrung my secret from me?” she cried, grovelling on her knees in the long grass beside him, clinging to his hand as he bent over her, gravely compassionate, deeply moved by her distress. “How cruelto question—to torture me—how cruel to use your power of reading guilty hearts. You will tell my husband, who so loves and trusts me. You will tell him what a guilty wretch I am.”“Tell him, Mrs. Disney! Can you forget that I am a priest—for whom the sinner’s confession is sacred? Do you think I have never talked with the tempted and the sorrowing before to-day? Do you think that grief such as yours can be an unknown experience to a man who has worked in a crowded London parish for nearly twenty years? I wanted to know the worst, so that I might be able to advise and to console you. If I have questioned you to-day, it has been as a priest has the right to question; and this place where you and I have met to-day is in my sight as sacred as the confessional. You need have no fear that I shall tell your husband the secret of your sorrow. All I will do is to help you to find strength to tell him yourself.”“Oh no, no, no!” she cried piteously. “Never! never! I can die, I am prepared to die; but I can never tell him—I cannot, I dare not.”“Yet you could dare to die with a lie upon your lips—you who are ready to meet your Judge—you whose whole life is a lie—you who have cheated and betrayed the best of men. Oh, Mrs. Disney, reflect what this thing is which you are doing; reflect what kind of sin it is you are committing. If, as your own sorrowing words acknowledge, you have been a false wife—a false wife to the best and truest of husbands, can you dare to act out that falsehood to the last, to die with that guilty secret locked in your heart, from him who has a right to know,—and who alone upon earth has a right to pardon.”“Oh, how cruel you are!” she said, lifting up her streaming eyes to his earnest, inflexible face. “Is it a Christian’s part to be so cruel, to break the bruised reed, to crush anything so weak and wretched as I am? Is not repentance enough? I have spent long nights in penitence and tears, long days in dull aching remorse. I would have given allmy future life to atone for one dreadful hour—one unpremeditated yielding to temptation. Ihavegiven my life—for my secret has killed me. What more can man or God demand of me? What more can I do to win forgiveness?”“Only this—tell your husband the truth—however painful, however humiliating the confession. That will be your best atonement. That is the sacrifice which will help to reconcile you with your God. You cannot hope for God’s love and pardon hereafter, if you live and die as a hypocrite here. God’s saints were some of them steeped in the darkness of guilt before they became the children of light—but there was not one of them who shrank from the confession of his sins.”“You are a man,” sobbed Isola. “You do not know what it is for a woman to confess that she is unworthy of her husband’s love. You do not know. It is not possible for a man to know the meaning of shame.”“You are wrong there,” he said, gently lifting her from the ground, and placing her beside him on the bank. “What chastity is to a woman, honour is to a man. Men have had to stand up before their fellow-men and acknowledge their violation of man’s code of honour; knowing that such acknowledgment made them dirt, and very dirt, in the sight of honourable men. You, as a woman, know not how deep men’s scorn cuts a man who has sinned against the law which governs gentlemen. A woman thinks there is no such sting as the sting of her shame. Men know better. Yes, I know that it will be most bitter, more bitter than death—for you to tell Colonel Disney that you are not what you have seemed to him; but apart from all considerations of duty, do not his love and devotion deserve the sacrifice of self-love on your part? Can you bear yourself to the last, as a virtuous wife—enjoying his respect—knowing that it is undeserved——”“I will tell him—at the last,” she faltered. “In that parting hour I shall not shrink from telling him all—how I sinned against him—almost unawares—drifting half unconsciouslyinto a fatal entanglement—and then—and then—against my will—in my weakness and helplessness—alone in the power of the man I loved—betrayed into sin. Oh God! why do you make me remember?” she cried wildly, turning upon the priest in passionate reproachfulness. “For years I have been trying to forget—trying to blank out the past—praying, praying, praying that my humble, tearful love for my husband and my child might cancel those hours of sin. And you come to me, and question me, and on pretence of saving my soul, you force me to look back upon that bygone horror—to live again through that time of madness—the destruction of my life. Cruel, cruel, cruel!”“Forgive me!” said Father Rodwell, very gently, seeing that she was struggling with hysteria. “I have been too hard, perhaps, too eager to convince you of the right! There are some men, even of my sacred calling, who would judge your case otherwise—who would say the husband is happy in his ignorance; the wife has repented of her sin.Non quieta movere.But it is not in my nature to choose the easy pathways; and it may be that I am too severe a teacher. We will not talk any more about serious things to-day. Only believe that I am your friend—your sincere and devoted friend. If I have spoken hard things, be assured I would have spoken in the same spirit had you been my own sister. Let us say no more yet awhile—and perhaps when you have thought over our interview to-day you will come to see things almost as I see them. I won’t press the matter. I will leave your own heart and conscience to plead with you. And now may I walk home with you, before the beauty of the afternoon begins to fade?”“The vetturino will be waiting for me at the gate,” Isola answered, with a dull, dead voice, rising languidly, and adjusting the loosened hair about her forehead with tremulous fingers.She had thrown off her hat a little while before, and now she took it up, and straightened the loops of ribbon with a nervous touch here and there, and then put the hat on again,and arranged the gossamer veil, which she hoped might hide her swollen eyelids and tear-stained cheeks.“If Martin should come to meet me, what will he think? she said piteously.“Let me go with you, and I may be able to distract his attention—if you don’t want him to see that you have been crying.”“No, no. He must not see. He would wonder, and question me—and guess, perhaps—as you did just now. How was it you knew—what made you guess?” she asked, with a sense of rebellion against this man who had pierced the veil behind which she had been hiding herself so long.“I saw your sorrow; and I knew that there could scarcely be so deep a sorrow if there were no memory of sin. Will you take my arm down this steep path?”“No, thank you. I know every step. I could walk about this place in my sleep. You have been cruel to me, Father Rodwell, very cruel. Promise me one thing by way of atonement for your cruelty. Promise me that if I die in Rome I shall be buried in this place, and as near Shelley’s grave as they can find room to lay me.”“I promise. Yes, it is a sweet spot, is it not? It was down yonder in the old burial-ground that Shelley looked upon the grave of Keats, and said it was a spot to make one in love with death. But I would not have you think yourself doomed to an early death, Mrs. Disney. Have you never read in the ‘Lives of the Saints’ how some who were on the point of death have revived at the touch of the holy oil, and have lived and have renewed their strength, and re-entered the world to lead a holier and nobler life than they had led before? Who knows if you were to confess your sin, and patiently suffer whatever penance you were called upon to bear, new vistas might not open for you? There is more than one way of being happy in this world. If you could never again know the sweetness of a domestic life—as trusted wife and happy mother—there are other and wider lives inwhich you would count your children and your sisters by hundreds. There are sisterhoods in which your future might be full of usefulness and full of peace. Or if you had no vocation for that wider life, it might be that touched by your helplessness in the past, and your remorse in the present, your husband might find it in his heart to forgive that bygone sin, and still to cherish, and still to hold you dear.”“No, no,” she cried impatiently. “I would not live for an hour after he knew. I know what he would do. He has told me. He would leave me—at once, and for ever. I should never see his face again. I should be dead to him, by a worse death than the grave; for he would only think of me to shudder at my name. Oh, Father Rodwell, Christianity must be a cruel creed if it can demand such a sacrifice from me. What good can come of his knowing the truth? Only agony to him and shame and despair to me. Can that be good?”“Truth is life, and falsehood is death,” answered the priest, firmly. “You must choose your own course, Mrs. Disney; but there is one argument I may urge as a man of the world rather than as a priest. Nothing is ever hidden for very long in this life. There is no secret so closely kept that some one has not an inkling of it. Better your husband should hear the truth from you, in humble self-accusation, than that he should learn it later—perhaps after he has mourned you for years—from a stranger’s lips.”“Oh, that would be horrible—too horrible. But I will confess to him; I will tell him everything—on my deathbed. Yes, when life is ebbing, when the end is close, I will tell him. He shall know what a false and perjured creature I am. I swore to him—swore before God that I was true and faithful—that I loved him and no other. And it was true, absolute truth, when I took that oath. My sin was a thing of the past. I had loved another, and I had let my love lead me into sin. And then my husband asked me ifI had been true and pure always; always. ‘Is that true, Isola? I call upon God to hear your answer,’ he said. And I answered yes, it was true. I lied before God rather than lose my husband’s love; and God heard me, and the blight of His anger has been upon me ever since, withering and consuming me.”They went down the steep pathway, Father Rodwell first, Isola following, between the crowded graves, the azaleas and camelias, veronica and guelder rose, lilac and magnolia, and on either hand a wilderness of roses, red and white.The shadows of the cypresses closed over them in that deep alley, and the twilight gloom might seem symbolic of the passage through death to life; for beyond the gates, and through a gap in the cypress screen, the level landscape and the city domes and bell-towers were shining in the yellow light of afternoon.CHAPTER XXIV.“OH, OLD THOUGHTS THEY CLING, THEY CLING!”Colonel Disney and Allegra were both pleased to welcome Father Rodwell to their home in the great city; pleased to find that his own rooms were close by in the Via Babuino, and that he was likely to be their neighbour for some weeks. His familiarity with all that was worth seeing in the city and its surroundings made him a valuable companion for people whose only knowledge had been gathered laboriously from books. Father Rodwell knew every picture and every statue in the churches and galleries. There was not a building in Christian or Pagan Rome which had not its history and its associations for the man who had chosen the city as the holiday ground of his busy life long before he left the university, and who had returned again and again,year after year, to tread the familiar paths and ponder over the old records. He had seen many of those monuments of Republic and Empire emerge from the heaped-up earth of ages; had seen hills cut down, and valleys laid bare; some picturesque spots made less picturesque; other places redeemed from ruin. He had seen the squalor and the romance of Mediæval Rome vanish before the march of improvement; and he had seen the triumph of the commonplace and the utilitarian in many a scene where the melancholy beauty of neglect and decay had once been dear to him.With such a guide it was delightful to loiter amidst the Palace of the Cæsars, or tread the quiet lanes and by-paths of the Aventine, that historic hill from whose venerable church the bearers of Christ’s message of peace and love set out for savage Britain. Allegra was delighted to wander about the city with such a companion, lingering long before every famous picture, finding out altar-pieces and frescoes which no guide-book would have helped her to discover; sometimes disputing Father Rodwell’s judgment upon the artistic value of a picture; sometimes agreeing with him—always bright, animated, and intelligent.Isola joined in these explorations as far as her strength would allow. She was deeply interested in the churches, and in the stories of priest and pope, saint and martyr, which Father Rodwell had to tell of every shrine and tomb, whose splendour might otherwise have seemed colourless and cold. There was a growing enthusiasm in the attention with which she listened to every record of that wonder-working Church which created Christian Rome in all its pomp and dignity of architecture, and all its glory of art. The splendour of those mighty basilicas filled her with an awful sense of the majesty of that religion which had been founded yonder in darkness and in chains, in Paul’s subterranean prison—yonder in tears where Paul and Peter spoke the solemn words of parting—yonder in blood on the dreary road to Ostia, where the headsman’s axe quenchedthe greatest light that had shone upon earth since the sacrifice of Calvary.Isola went about looking at those things like a creature in a dream. These stupendous tabernacles impressed her with an almost insupportable sense of their magnitude. And with that awestricken sense of power in the Christian Church there was interwoven the humiliating consciousness of her own unworthiness; a consciousness sharpened and intensified by every word that Father Rodwell had spoken in that agonizing hour of her involuntary confession.He was so kind to her, so gentle, so courteous in every word and act, that she wondered sometimes whether he had forgotten that miserable revelation; whether he had forgotten that she was one of the lost ones of this earth, a woman who had forfeited woman’s first claim to man’s esteem. Sometimes she found herself lifting her eyes to his face in an unpremeditated prayer for pity, as they stood before some exquisite shrine of the Madonna, and the ineffable purity in the sculptured face looking down at her struck like a sharp sword into her heart. That mute appeal of Isola’s seemed to ask, “Has the Mother of Christ any pity for such a sinner as I?”Colonel Disney was full of thoughtfulness for his wife in all their going to and fro; and before their day’s rambles were half done he would drive her to any quiet spot where she might choose to spend a restful hour in the afternoon sunshine—in this or that convent garden, in some shaded corner on the Aventine, or among the wild flowers that flourish and grow rank amidst the ruins of palace and temple on the Palatine. Her favourite resort was still the English cemetery, and she always begged to be set down within reach of that familiar gate, where the custodian knew her as well as if she had been some restless spirit whose body lay under one of those marble urns, and whose ghost passed in and out of the gate every day.It was in vain that her husband or her sister offered to beher companion in these restful hours. She always made the same reply.“I am better alone,” she would say. “It does me good to be alone. I don’t like being alone indoors—I get low-spirited and nervous—but I like to sit among the flowers, and to watch the lizards darting in and out among the graves. I am never dull there. I take a book with me; but I don’t read much. I could sit there for hours in a summer dream.”Martin Disney made a point of giving way to her will in all small things. She might be capricious, she might have morbid fancies. That was no business of his. It was his part to indulge her every whim, and to make her in love with life. All that he asked of Heaven was to spin out that attenuated thread. All that he desired was to hold her and keep her for his own against Death himself.TheVendettawas at Civita Vecchia, from which port her skipper frequently bore down upon Rome, distracting Allegra from her critical studies in the picture-galleries, and from her work in her own studio, a light, airy room on the fourth floor, with a window looking over the Pincian Gardens. Captain Hulbert was a little inclined to resent Father Rodwell’s frequent presence in the family circle, and his too accomplished guidance in the galleries. It was provoking to hear a man talk, with an almost Ruskinesque enthusiasm and critical appreciation, of pictures which made so faint an appeal to the seaman. Here and there John Hulbert could see the beauty and merit of a painting, and was really touched by the influence of supreme art; but of technical qualities he knew nothing, and could hardly distinguish one master from another, was as likely as not to take Titian for Veronese, or Tintoret for Titian.

“Look, John!” cried Allegra, laughing, as she pointed to the hedge of red roses in front of them, and the clusters of creamy bloom hanging over the verandah. “The roses have been blooming ever since we came to Italy. It is always rose-time here. You remember our reading in the dedication of ‘To Leeward’ how Marion Crawford strewed his wife’s pathway with roses on Christmas Day at Sorrento. We can find a flowery land for our honeymoon at any season of the year.”“But why wait a year? Can you not prove me trusty and true in less than a year?”“You are so impatient,” she said, plucking a handful of roses, and scattering the petals at her feet. “A year is so short a time.”“Short, love! why, eight weeks have seemed an eternityto me without you; and you honoured me just now by saying that the time had appeared long, even to you—even to my liege lady, sitting serene in her palace of art, painting contadinas and their olive-faced offspring—even to you, whose love is as a thread of silk against a cable, compared to mine. Even to you, my mistress and my tyrant.”“That was because you were so far away. But there will be nothing to hinder our seeing each other, as often as you may find convenient. I have set my heart upon painting steadily for a twelvemonth, without any distractions.”“There is no such place as Venice for a painter. Think of the Miss Montalbas, and the splendid work they have done at Venice. Would you not like to be like them?”“Would I not like to be like Apelles?”“Well, Venice will be your treasury; Venice will fill that busy brain with ideas. You shall be fed upon pictures old and new—the new living pictures in the narrow streets and canals; the old masters in the churches and palaces. You shall learn of Tintoret and Veronese. You shall paint as much as you like. You shall have no distractions. We shall be strangers there, can live as we choose. Summer is the time for Venice, Allegra. Benighted English people have an idea that Italy is a place to winter in, and they go and shiver in marble palaces, and watch the torrential rain beating against windows that were never meant to shut out bad weather. The Italians know that their land is a land of summer, and they know how to enjoy sunny days and balmy nights. You don’t know how delicious life is on the Lido when the night is only a brief interval of starshine betwixt sunset and dawn. You don’t know what a dream of delight it is to float along the lagoons and watch the lamp-lit city melt into the mists of evening, breathing faint echoes of music and song. A great many things of beauty have been turned to ugliness, Allegra, since printing and the steam engine were invented; but, thank God! Venice is not one of them. You will think of my plan, won’t you, love? At the least, it is a thing to be considered.”“Anything you say is worthy to be considered, John. And now come in and see Isola and Martin.”He felt that he had gone far enough—he felt that it were unwise to press the question too much at first. He meant to be gently persistent; and he meant to have his own way.He followed Allegra into the drawing-room—a room full of light and sunshine, which had been beautified and made home-like by the addition of a few Japaneseries and a little old Italian furniture which Martin Disney had picked up at a bric-à-brac shop in the Via Vittorio Emanuelo. There were flowers everywhere, in the bright Italian pottery, so artless, so cheap, so gay, in its varieties of form and colouring. To Hulbert’s fancy it was the prettiest room he had seen for an age.“You seem to have made yourself uncommonly comfortable here,” he said, after cordial greetings, settling down into a bamboo chair near Isola’s little olive-wood table, littered with Tauchnitz novels and fancy work. “It is a pleasant sensation for a rolling stone who has hardly ever known what home means to drop into such a nest as this. You will have too much of my company, I’m afraid. You’ll be shocked to hear that I have taken rooms at the Anglais, down there,” pointing down the valley, “within a stone’s throw of you.”“We are not shocked. We are very glad you will be near us,” said Isola, smiling at him. “It has been a dull life for Allegra, I’m afraid.”“Dull! dull in this land of beauty!” cried Allegra. “I have never known a dull hour since I came here; though, of course,” with a shy glance at her lover, “I have naturally thought sometimes of absent friends, and wished they were with me to revel in the loveliness of these woods and hills.”“Well, one of your friends has come to you, one who would as gladly have come had you been in regions where the sun never shines, or where his chariot wheels scorch the torrid sands.”Captain Hulbert stayed with them all the evening, andplanned a sail to Mentone for the following day, Isola again begging to be left out of their plans, as she had done at Fowey.“You need feel no compunction about leaving me,” she paid. “I shall be perfectly happy in the woods with nurse, and baby, and my books.”They obeyed her, and the little excursion was arranged. They were to start soon after the early breakfast, carrying what their Italian cook called a pique-nique with them, in the shape of a well-provided luncheon-basket. Isola sat in the olive wood, watching the white sails moving slowly towards Bordighera. It was an exquisite day—a day for dreaming on the water rather than for rapid progress. The yacht scarcely seemed to move as Isola watched her from the cushioned corner which Löttchen had arranged in an angle of the low stone wall—all amongst ferns and mosses, brown orchises and blue violets—an angle sheltered by a century-old olive, whose gnarled trunk sprawled along the ground, rugged and riven, but with another century’s life in it yet. Far down in the valley, below the old gateway, a company of cypresses rose dark against the blue of the sea, and Isola knew that just on that slope of the shore where the cypresses grew tallest the graves of English exiles were gathered. Many a fair hope, many a broken dream, many a disappointed ambition lay at rest under those dark spires, within the sound of that summer sea.This was one of many days which the young mother spent in the woods or in the garden with her baby for her companion, while Allegra and the colonel sailed east or west in theVendetta. Her doctor would have liked her to go with them, but she seemed to have an absolute aversion to the sea, and he did not press the point.“Nothing that she dislikes will do her any good,” he told Colonel Disney. “There is no use in being persistent about anything. Fancies and whims stand for a great deal in such an illness as hers.”A week or two later the same kind doctor discovered thathis patient was fast losing ground. Her strength had flagged considerably in a short time. He recommended change of scene.“This quiet life suited her wonderfully well for the first month or so, but we are no longer making any headway. You had better try a gayer place—a little more life and movement.”Martin Disney was ready to obey. He and Allegra took counsel together, and then—in the lightest strain, one evening after dinner—they discussed the notion of a change.“Shall we strike our tents, Isola? Are you tired of San Remo?”“No, Martin. I am tired of myself, sometimes—never of these olive woods and lemon groves. Sometimes the stillness and the silent beauty of the place make me feel unhappy, without knowing why; but that is a kind of unhappiness no one can escape.”“Is there any place in the world within tolerable easy reach of this that you would like to see?” asked her husband.“Yes, there is one city in the world that I have been longing to see ever since I began to have thoughts and wishes.”“And that is——”“Rome! I should like to see Rome before I die, Martin; if it were not too troublesome for you——”“Troublesome! My dearest, can anything be troublesome to me if it can but give you pleasure? You shall see Rome—not once—but again and again, in the course of a long and happy life, I hope. I am more than twenty years older than you; but I count upon at least thirty years more upon this planet, before I blow out my candle and say ‘Bon soir.’”“God grant that you may live to a good old age, Martin. The world is better for such a man as you.”“The world would be no place for me without my wife,” he said. “And so you would like to see Rome, Isa? What has put that fancy into your head?”“Oh, it is an old dream, as I said just now. And lately I have been talking to Father Rodwell, who knows Rome aswell as if he were a Roman citizen, and he has made me more and more anxious to go there. If it would not be a great plague to you, Martin.”“On the contrary, it would be a great pleasure. We will go to Rome, Isa, if your doctor approve. Allegra will like it, I know.”“Like it?” echoed Allegra, “I shall simply be intoxicated with delight. I know the catalogues of all the picture-galleries by heart. I think I know every one of the seven hills as well as if I had walked upon them from my childhood. I have read so many descriptions of the place and its surroundings—so many raptures penned by people whom I have envied for nothing else than that they have known Rome; they have lived in Rome.”The whole business was easily settled. Captain Hulbert was the only person who regretted the change. He had been a month at San Remo, a month of summer idleness in February and March, a month of summer sails on an azure sea; of mountain walks and rides, high up from stage to stage, until the region of lemon groves and olive woods gave place to the pines on the loftier hills. He had been able to spend all his days in Allegra’s society.There were no pictures, except in that one little gallery at Colla. There was nothing to distract her from her lover. In Rome there would be all the wonders of the most wonderful city in the world. It would be art first and love second.The doctor approved; Father Rodwell wrote to an agent in Rome, and after some negotiation a suite of apartments was found on the high ground near the Trinità de’ Monti, which seemed to meet all the requirements of the case. The priest vouched for the honesty and good faith of the agent, and on his responsibility the rooms were taken for the month of April, with liberty to occupy them later if it were so desired.CHAPTER XXI.“THE WOODS ARE ROUND US, HEAPED AND DIM.”It was their last day at San Remo. Everything had been packed for the journey, and the drawing-room at Lauter Brunnen had a dreary look now that it was stripped of all those decorations and useful prettinesses with which Allegra had made it so gay and home-like.The morning was brilliant, and Martin, Allegra, and Captain Hulbert set off at nine o’clock upon a long-deferred expedition to San Romolo. They would be home in good time for the eight-o’clock dinner; and Isola promised to amuse herself all day, and to be in good spirits to welcome them on their return.“You have a duty to do for your sister,” she said, when her husband felt compunction at leaving her. “Think of all she has done for us, her devotion, her unselfishness. The least we can do is to help her to be happy with her lover; and all the burden of that duty has fallen upon you. I think you ought to be called Colonel Gooseberry.”She looked a bright and happy creature as she stood on the mule-path in the olive wood, waving her hand to them as they went away—Allegra riding a donkey, the two men walking, one on each side of her bridle, and the guide striding on ahead, leading a second donkey which was to serve as an occasional help by-and-by, if either of the pedestrians wanted a lift. Her cheeks were flushed with walking, and her eyes were bright with a new gladness.She was full of a childish pleasure in the idea of their journey, and the realization of a dream which most of us have dreamt a long time before it assumed the shape of earthly things—the dream of Rome.Isola stood listening to their footsteps, as they passed the little painted shrine on the hill path. She heard them give the time of day to a party of peasant women, with emptybaskets on their heads, going up to gather the last of the olives. Then she roamed about the wooded valley and the slope of the hill towards Colla for an hour or two, and then, growing suddenly tired, she crept home, in time to sit beside her baby while he slept his placid noontide sleep. She bent over the little rosebud mouth and kissed it, in a rapture of maternal love.“So young to see Rome,” she murmured. “And to think that those star-like eyes will see and take no heed; to think that such a glorious vision will pass before him, and he will remember nothing.”The day was very long, something like one of those endless days at Trelasco, when her husband was in Burmah and she had only the dog and the cat for her companions. She thought of those fond friends to-day with a regretful sigh—the sleepy Shah, so calm and undemonstrative in his attachment, but with a placid, purring delight in her society which seemed to mean a great deal; the fox-terrier, so active and intense in his affection, demanding so much attention, intruding himself upon her walks and reveries with such eager, not-to-be-denied devotion. She had no four-footed friends here; and the want of them made an empty space in her life.In the afternoon the weather changed suddenly. The sky became overcast, the sea a leaden colour; and the mistral came whistling up the valley with a great rustling and shivering of the silver-green foliage and creaking of the old bent branches, like the withered arms of witch or sorceress. All the glory of the day was gone, and the white villas on the crest of the eastward hill stood out in livid distinctness against the blackened sky.Isola wandered up the hill-path, past the little shrine where the way divided, the point at which she had seen her husband and his party vanish in the sunny morning. She felt a sudden sense of loneliness now the sun was gone; a childish longing for the return of her friends, for evening and lamplight, and the things that make for cheerfulness.She was cold and dull, and out of spirits. She had left the house while the sun was shining, and she had come without shawl or wrap of any kind, and the mistral made her shiver. Yet she had no idea of hurrying home. The loneliness of the house had become oppressive before she left it; and she knew there would be some hours to wait for the return of the excursionists. So she mounted the steep mule-path, slowly and painfully, till she had gone two-thirds of the way to Colla; and then she sat down to rest on the low stone wall which enclosed a little garden in a break of the wood, from which point there was a far-stretching view seaward.She was very cold, but she was so tired as to be glad to rest at any hazard of after-suffering. Drowsy from sheer exhaustion, she leant her head against a great rugged olive, whose roots were mixed up with the wall, and fell fast asleep. She awoke, shivering, from a confused dream of sea and woods, Roman temples and ruined palaces. She had been wandering in one of those dream-cities that have neither limit nor settled locality. It was here in the woods below Colla, and yet was half Rome and half Trelasco. There was a classic temple upon a hill that was like the Mount, and the day was bleak, and dark, and rainy, and she was walking on the footpath through Lord Lostwithiel’s park, with the storm-driven rain beating against her face, just as on that autumn evening, when the owner of the soil had taken compassion upon her and had given her shelter. The dream had been curiously vivid—a dream which brought the past back as if it were the present, and blotted out all that had come afterwards. She woke bewildered, forgetting that her husband had come back from India, and that she was in Italy, thinking of herself as she had been that October evening when she and Lostwithiel met for the first time.The sea was darker than when she fell asleep. There was the dull crimson of a stormy sunset yonder, behind the jutting promontory of Bordighera, while the sky above wasbarred with long, black clouds, and the wind was howling across the great deep valley like an evil spirit tortured and imprisoned, shrieking to his gods for release. Exactly opposite her, as she stood in the deep cleft of the hills, a solitary vessel was labouring under press of canvas towards the point upon whose dusky summit the chapel of the Madonna della Guardia gleamed whitely in the dying day. The vessel was a schooner yacht, of considerable tonnage, certainly larger than theVendetta.Isola stood, still as marble, watching that labouring boat, the straining sails, the dark hull beaten by the stormy dash of the waves. She watched with wide, open eyes, and parted lips, quivering as with an over-mastering fear, watched in momentary expectation of seeing those straining sails dip for the last time, that labouring hull founder and vanish betwixt black wave and white surf. She watched in motionless attention till the boat disappeared behind the shoulder of the hill; and then, shivering, nervous, and altogether over-strung, she hurried homewards, feeling that she had stayed out much too long, and that she had caught a chill which might be the cause of new trouble.If those narrow mule-paths had been less familiar, she might have lost her way in the dusk; but she had trodden them too often to be in any difficulty, and she reached the villa without loss of time, but not before the return of the picnic party.Allegra and Captain Hulbert were watching at the gate. Colonel Disney had gone into the wood to look for her, and had naturally taken the wrong direction.“Oh, Isola; how could you stop out so late, and on such a stormy evening?” remonstrated Allegra.“I fell asleep before the storm came on.”“Fell asleep—out-of-doors—and at sunset! What dreadful imprudence.”“I went out too late, I’m afraid; but I was so tired of waiting for you. A kind of horror of the house and the silence came upon me—and I felt I must go out into thewoods. I walked too far—and fell asleep from sheer fatigue; and when I woke I saw a yacht fighting with the wind. I’m afraid she’ll go down.”“What, you noticed her too?” exclaimed Hulbert. “I didn’t think you cared enough about yachts to take notice of her. I was watching her as we came down the hill; rather too much canvas; but she’s right enough. She’s past Arma di Taggia by this time, I dare say. I’ll go and look for Disney, and tell him you’re safe and sound. Perhaps I shall miss him in the wood. It’s like a Midsummer Night’s Dream, isn’t it, Allegra?” he said, laughing, as he went out of the gate.“If it were only mid-summer, I shouldn’t care,” answered his sweetheart, with her arm round Isola, who stood beside her, pale and shivering. “Come in, dear, and let me make you warm, if I can.”“If they should all go down in the darkness!” said Isola, in a low, dreamy voice. “The boat looked as if it might be wrecked at any moment.”Allegra employed all her arts as a sick-nurse in the endeavour to ward off any evil consequence from that imprudent slumber in the chill hour of sunset; but her cares were unavailing. Isola was restless and feverish all night, yet she insisted on getting up at her usual hour next morning, and declared herself quite capable of the journey to Genoa. Allegra and her brother, however, insisted on her resting for a day or two. So the departure was postponed, and the doctor sent for. He advised at least three days’ rest, with careful nursing; and he reproved his patient severely for her imprudence in exposing herself to the evening air.Captain Hulbert appeared at teatime, just returned from a railway journey to Allassio.“I’ve a surprise for you, Mrs. Disney,” he said, seating himself by the sofa where Isola was lying, surrounded by invalid luxuries, books, lemonade, fan, and eau de Cologne flask, her feet covered with a silken rug.“A surprise!” she echoed faintly, as if life held no surprises for her. “What can that be?”“You remember the yacht you saw last night?”“Yes,” she cried, roused in an instant, and clasping her hands excitedly. “Did she go down?”“Not the least little bit. She is safe and sound at Allassio. She is called theEurydice, she hails last from Syracuse, and my brother is on board her. He wired to me this morning to go over and see him. I’m very glad I went, for he is off to Corfu to-morrow. TheFlying Dutchmanisn’t in it with him.”There was a curious silence. Martin Disney was sitting on the other side of his wife’s sofa, where he had been reading selected bits of theTimes, such portions of the news of men and nations as he fancied might interest her. Allegra was busy with a piece of delicate needlework, and did not immediately reply; but it was she who was first to speak.“How frightened you would have been yesterday evening had you known who was on board the boat,” she said.“I don’t know about being frightened, but he was certainly carrying too much canvas. I told him so this morning.”“What did he say?”“Laughed at me. ‘You sailors never believe that a landsman can sail a ship,’ he said. I wanted to talk to his sailing-master, but he told me he was his own sailing-master. If his ship was doomed to go down, he meant to be at the helm himself.”“That sounds as if he were foolhardy,” said Allegra.“I told him I did not like the rig of his boat, nor the name of his boat, and I reminded him how I saw theEurydiceoff Portland with all her canvas spread the day she went down. I was with the Governor of the Prison, a naval man, who had been commander on my first ship, and we stood side by side on the cliff, and watched her as she went by. ‘If this wind gets much stronger, that ship willgo down,’ said my old captain, ‘unless they take in some of their canvas.’ And a few hours later these poor fellows had all gone to the bottom. I asked Lostwithiel why he called his boat theEurydice. ‘Fancy,’ he said; he had a fancy for the name. ‘I’ve never forgotten the old lines we used to hammer out when we were boys,’ he said—‘Ah, miseram, Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat; Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripæ.’”“I don’t think the name matters, if she is a good boat,” said Allegra, with her calm common sense.“Well, she is, and she isn’t. She is a finer boat than theVendetta; but I’d sooner handle theVendettain a storm. There are points about his new boat that I don’t quite like. However, he had her built by one of the finest builders on the Clyde, and it will be hard if she goes wrong. He has given me theVendettaas a wedding-present—in advance of the event—on condition that I sink her when I’m tired of her; and he said he hoped she’d be luckier to me than she had been to him.”Martin Disney sat silent by his wife’s sofa. He could never hear Lord Lostwithiel’s name without a touch of pain. His only objection to Hulbert as a brother-in-law was the thought that the two men were of the same race—that he must needs hear the hated name from time to time; and yet he believed his wife’s avowal that she was pure and true. His hatred of the name came only from the recollection that she had been slandered by a man whom he despised. He looked at the wasted profile on the satin pillow, so wan, so transparent in its waxen pallor, the heavy eyelid drooping languidly, the faintly coloured lips drawn as if with pain—a broken lily. Was this the kind of woman to be suspected of evil—this fair and fragile creature, in whom the spiritual so predominated over the sensual? He hated himself for having been for a moment influenced by that underbred scoundrel at Glenaveril, for having been base enough to doubt his wife’s purity.He had pained and humiliated her, and now the stamp ofdeath was on the face he adored, and before him lay the prospect of a life’s remorse.They left San Remo three days afterwards, Isola being pronounced able to bear the journey, though her cough had been considerably increased by that imprudent slumber in the wood. She was anxious to go; and doctor and husband gave way to her eagerness for new scenes.“I am so tired of this place,” she said piteously. “It is lovely; but it is a loveliness that makes me melancholy. I want to be in a great city where there are lots of people moving about. I have never lived in a city, but always in quiet places—beautiful, very beautiful, but so still—so still—so full of one’s self and one’s own thoughts.”CHAPTER XXII.ECCO ROMA.The agent had proved himself worthy of trust, and had chosen the lodging for Colonel Disney’s family with taste and discretion. It was a first floor over a jeweller’s shop in a short street behind the Piazza di Spagna, and under the Pincian Gardens. There were not too many stairs for Isola to ascend when she came in from her drive or walk. The gardens were close at hand, and all around there were trees and flowers, and an atmosphere of verdure and retirement in the midst of the great cosmopolitan city.It was dark when the train came into the terminus; and Isola was weary and exhausted after the long hot journey from Pisa, the glare of the sun, and the suffocating clouds of dust, and the beautiful monotony of blue sea and sandy plains, long level wastes, where nothing grew but brushwood and osier, and stretches of marshy ground, with water pools shining here and there, like burnished steel, and distant islets dimly seen athwart a cloud of heat. Then evening closed in, and it was through a grey and formless worldthat they approached the city whose very name thrilled her.The railway station was very much like any other great terminus; like Milan, like Genoa. There was the same close rank of omnibuses. There were the same blue blouses and civil, eager porters, far too few for the work to be done, rapacious but amiable, piling up the innumerable packages of the Italian traveller, loading themselves like so many human beasts of burden, and with no apparent limit to their capacity for carrying things. Two flys were packed with the miscellaneous luggage, nurse and baby, and then Isola was handed to her place in another, with Allegra by her side, and through the narrow streets of tall houses, under the dim strip of soft April night, she drove through the city of heroes and martyrs, saints and apostles, wicked emperors and holy women, the city of historical contrasts, of darkness and light, refinement and barbarism, of all things most unlike each other, from Nero to Paul, from Gregory the Great to the Borgias.The glory and the beauty of Rome only began to dawn upon her next morning, in the vivid sunlight, when she climbed the steps of the Trinità de’ Monti, and then with Allegra’s arm to lean upon went slowly upward and again upward to the topmost terrace on the Pincian Hill, and stood leaning on the marble balustrade, and gazing across the city that lay steeped in sunshine at her feet—over palace and steeple, pinnacle and tower, to the rugged grandeur of Hadrian’s Tomb, and to that great dome whose vastness makes all other temples seem puny and insignificant. This was her first view of the world’s greatest church.The air was clear and cool upon this height, although the city below showed dimly through a hazy veil of almost tropical heat. Everywhere there was the odour of summer flowers, the overpowering sweetness of lilies of the valley, and great branches of lilac, white and purple, brimming over in the baskets of the flower-sellers.On such a morning as this one could understand how the Romans came to call April the joyous month, and to dedicate this season of sunshine and flowers to the Goddess of Beauty and Love.Isola’s face lighted up with a new gladness, a look of perfect absorption and self-forgetfulness, as she leant upon the balustrade, and gazed across that vast panorama, gazed and wondered, with eyes that seemed to grow larger in their delight.“And is this really Rome?” she murmured softly.“Yes, this is Rome,” cried Allegra. “Isn’t it lovely? Isn’t it all you ever dreamt of or hoped for? And yet people have so maligned it—called it feverish, stuffy, disappointing, dirty! Why, the air is ether—inspiring, health-giving! April in Rome is as fresh as April in an English forest; only it is April with the warmth and flowers of June. I feel sure you will grow ever so much stronger after one little week in Rome.”“Yes, I know I shall be better here. I feel better already,” said Isola, with a kind of feverish hopefulness. “It was so good of Martin to bring me. San Remo is always lovely—and I shall love it to the end of my life, because it was my first home in Italy—but I was beginning to be tired—not of the olive woods and the sea, but of the people we met, and the sameness of life. One day was so like another.”“It was monotonous, of course,” agreed Allegra; “and being a little out of health, you would be bored by monotony sooner than Martin or I. It was such a pity you did not like the yacht. That made such a change for us. The very olive woods and the mountain villages seem new when one sees them from the water. I was never tired of looking at the hills between San Remo and Bordighera, or the promontory of Monaco, with its cathedral towers. It was a pleasure lost to you, dear; but it could not be helped, I suppose. Yet once upon a time you used to be so fond of the sea, when you and I went in our row-boat, tempting danger round by Neptune Point.”“I may have been stronger then,” Isola faltered.“Oh, forgive me, darling! What an inconsiderate wretch I am! But Rome will give you back your lost strength; and we shall round Neptune Point again, and feel the salt spray dashing over our heads as we go out into the great fierce Atlantic. I confess that sometimes, when that divine Mediterranean which we are never tired of worshipping has been lying in the sunshine like one vast floor oflapis lazuli, I have longed for something rougher and wilder—for such a sea as you and I have watched from the Rashleigh Mausoleum.”Colonel Disney and his wife and sister went about in a very leisurely way in their explorations. In the first place, he was anxious to avoid anything approaching fatigue for his wife; and in the second place it was only the beginning of April, and they were to be in Rome for at least a month; there was therefore no need for rushing hither and thither at the tourist pace, with guide-books in their hands, and anxious, heated countenances, perspiring through the streets, and suffering deadly chills in the churches. Allegra’s first desire was naturally to see the picture-galleries, and to these she went for the most part alone, leaving Isola and her husband free to wander about as they pleased, upon a friendly equality of ignorance, knowing very little more than Childe Harold and Murray could teach them. Isola’s Rome was Byron’s Rome.There was one spot she loved better than any other in the city of mighty memories. It was not hallowed by the blood of saint or hero, sage or martyr. It had no classical associations. He whose heart lay buried there under the shadow of the tribune’s mighty monument, perished in the pride of manhood, in the freshness and glory of life; and that heart—so warm and generous to his fellow-men—had hardened itself against the God of saint and martyr, the God of Peter and Paul, Lawrence and Gregory, Benedict and Augustine. Yet for Isola there was no grave in Rome so fraught with spiritual thoughts as Shelley’s grave, no sweeter memoryassociated with the eternal city than the memory of his wanderings and meditations amidst the ruined walls of the Baths of Caracalla, where his young genius drank in the poetry of the long past, and fed upon the story of the antique dead.She came to Shelley’s grave as often as she could steal away from the anxious companions of her drives and walks.“I like to be alone now and then,” she told her husband. “It rests me to sit by myself for an hour or two in this lovely place.”There was a coachman in the Piazza who was in the habit of driving Colonel Disney’s family—an elderly man, sober, steady and attentive, with intelligence that made him almost as good as a guide. He was on the watch for his English clients every morning. They had but to appear on the Piazza, and he was in attendance, ready to take them to the utmost limit of a day’s journey, if they liked. Were they in doubt where to go, he was always prompt with suggestions.He would drive Isola to the door of the English cemetery, leave her there, and return at her bidding to take her home again. Disney knew she was safe when this veteran had her in charge. The man was well known in the Piazza, and of established character for honesty. She took a book or two in her light basket, buying a handful of flowers here and there from the women and children as she went along, till the books were hidden under roses and lilac. The custodian of the cemetery knew her, and admitted her without a word. He had watched her furtively once or twice, to see that she neither gathered the flowers nor tried to scratch her name upon the tombs. He had seen her sitting quietly by the slab which records Shelley’s death—and the death of that faithful friend who was laid beside him, sixty years afterwards. Sixty years of loving, regretful memory, and then union in the dust. Shall there not be a later and a better meeting, when those two shall see each other’s faces andhear each other’s voices again, in a world where old things shall be made new, where youth and its wild freshness shall come back again, and Trelawney shall be as young in thought and feeling as Shelley?The English burial-place was a garden of fairest flowers at this season—a paradise of roses and clematis, azaleas and camelias—and much more beautiful for its wilder growth of trailing foliage and untended shrubs, the pale cold blue of the periwinkle that carpeted slope and bank, and for the background of old grey wall, severe in its antique magnificence, a cyclopean rampart, relic of time immemorial, clothed and beautified with weed and floweret that grew in every cleft and cranny.Here, in a sheltered angle to the left of the poet’s grave, Isola could sit unobserved, even when the custodian brought a party of tourists to see the hallowed spot, which occurred now and then while she sat there. The tourists for the most part stared foolishly, made some sentimental remark if they were women, or if they were men, betrayed a hopeless ignorance of the poet’s history, and not unfrequently confounded him with Keats. Isola sat half-hidden in her leafy corner, where the ivy and the acanthus hung from the great grey buttress against which she leant, languid, half-dreaming, with two books on her lap.One was her Shelley—her much-read Shelley—a shabby, cloth-bound volume, bought in her girlhood at the book-seller’s in the Place Duguesclin, where English books could be got by special order, and at special prices. The other was an Italian Testament, which her husband had bought her at San Remo, and in which she had read with extreme diligence and with increasing fervour as her mind became more deeply moved by Father Rodwell’s sermons. It was not that she had ever been one of those advanced thinkers who will accept no creed which does not square with their own little theories and fit in to their own narrow circle of possibilities. She had never doubted the creed she had been taught in her childhood, but she had thought verylittle about serious things, since she was a young girl, preparing for her confirmation, touched with girlish enthusiasm, and very much in earnest. In these fair spring days, and in this city of many memories, all young thoughts had reawakened in her mind. She pored over the familiar Gospel-stories, and again, as in the first freshness of her girlhood, she saw the sacred figure of the Redeemer and Teacher in all the vivid light and colour of a reality, close at hand. Faith stretched a hand across the abyss of time, and brought the old world of the Gospel-story close to her; the closer, because she was in Rome, not far from that church which enshrines the print of the Divine footstep, when He who was God and Man, appeared to His disciple, to foreshadow approaching martyrdom, to inspire the fortitude of the martyr. Yes, although the Saviour’s earthly feet never entered the city, every hill and every valley within and without those crumbling walls has interwoven itself so closely with the story of His life—through the work of His saints and martyrs—that it is nowise strange if the scenes and images of the sacred story seem nearer and more vivid in Rome than in any other place on earth, not excepting Jerusalem. It was from Rome, not from Jerusalem, that the Cross went out to the uttermost ends of the world. It is the earth of the Colosseum and the Borgo that is steeped in the blood of those who have died for Christ. It was Rome that ruled the world, through the long night of barbarism and feudal power, by the invincible force of His name.It might seem strange that Isola should turn from the story of the Evangelists to the works of a poet whose human sympathies were so wrung by the evil that has been wrought in the name of the Cross that he was blind to the infinitely greater good which Christianity has accomplished for mankind. Shelley saw the blood of the martyrs, not as a sublime testimony to the Godlike power of faith, not as a sacrifice rich in after-fruits, sad seed of a joyous harvest—but as the brutal outcome of man’s cruelty, using any name, Christ, orBuddha, Mahomet, or Brahma—as the badge of tyranny, the sanction to torture and to slay.Shelley’s melancholy fate seemed brought nearer to her now that she sat beside his grave, in the summer stillness, and in the shadow of the old Aurelian Wall. It was only his heart that was lying there, the imperishable heart, snatched by Trelawney’s hand from the flame of the Greek pyre, from the smoke of pine-logs and frankincense, wine and oil. Sixty years had passed before that hand lay cold in the grave beside the buried heart of the poet, sixty years of severance, and fond faithful memory, before death brought re-union.What a beautiful spirit this, which was so early quenched by the cruelest stroke of Fate—a light such as seldom shone out of mortal clay, a spirit of fire and brightness, intangible, untamable, not to be shut within common limits, nor judged by common laws!CHAPTER XXIII“SEEK SHELTER IN THE SHADOW OF THE TOMB.”Of the people who came to look upon the grave, some to lay a tributary flower upon the stone, and some to pluck a leaf or two of acanthus or violet, all hitherto had been strangers to Isola, had gone away without seeing her, or had glanced indifferently, as at one more unfortunate with a sketching-block, spoiling paper in the pursuit of the unattainable. There were so many amateur artists sitting about in the outskirts of the city, that such a figure in a romantic spot challenged nobody’s attention. So far people had come and gone, and had taken no notice; but one afternoon a figure in a long black cassock came suddenly between her and the golden light, and Isola looked up with a cry of surprise on recognizing Father Rodwell.“You did not expect to see me here,” he said, holding out his hand.She had risen from her seat on the low grassy bank, and she gave him her hand, half in pleasure, half in a nervous apprehension which his keen eye was quick to perceive. His life had been spent in dealings with the souls of men and women, and he had learnt to read those living pages as easily as he read Plato or Spinosa.“No,” she said. “I had no idea you were in Rome. You told us you were going back to London.”“I meant to go back to London and hard work, but my doctor insisted upon my prolonging my holiday for a few weeks, so I came here instead. Rome always draws me, and is always new. Rome gives me fresh life and fresh power when my heart and brain have been feeling benumbed and dead. I am glad they brought you here, Mrs. Disney. You were looking languid and ill when you left San Remo. I hope Rome has revivified you.”He looked at her earnestly. Her face had been in shadow until now, but as she moved into the sunlight, he saw that the lines had sharpened in the pale, wan face, and that there was the stamp of wasting disease in the hollow cheeks, and about the sunken eyes, and in the almost bloodless lips. As he looked at her in friendliest commiseration those pathetic grey eyes—whose expression had baffled his power of interpretation hitherto—filled suddenly with tears, and in the next moment she clasped her hands before her face in an agony of grief.The Italian Testament which she had been reading when he approached dropped at her feet, and stooping to pick it up Father Rodwell saw that it was open at the fourth chapter of St. John, the story of the woman of Samaria, the sinner with whom Christ talked at the well. A leaf from Shelley’s grave lay upon the book, as if to mark where Isola had been reading, and Father Rodwell’s quick glance saw that the page was blotted with tears.“My dear Mrs. Disney,” he said gently, “is there anythingwrong at home? Your husband, your boy are well, I hope?”“Yes, thank God, they are both well. God has been very good to me. He might have taken those I love. He has been merciful.”“He is merciful to all His creatures; though there are times when His dealings with us seem very hard. Oh, Mrs. Disney, you can’t think how difficult a priest’s office is sometimes when he has to reconcile the afflicted with the Providence that has seen fit to lay some heavy burden on them. They cannot understand; they cannot say it is well. They cannot kiss the rod. But as you say, God has been good to you. Your lines have been set in pleasant places. You are hedged round and sheltered by love. I never saw greater affection in husband for wife than I have seen in your husband. I never saw sister more devoted to sister than your sister-in-law is to you.”She had sunk again into a sitting position on the low bank at the foot of the wall. Her face was still hidden, and her sobs came faster as he spoke to her.“Why should you grieve at the thought of their love? Is it because it may please God to take you from them in the morning of your life? If it is that dread which agitates you I entreat you to put it aside. There is nothing in your case that forbids hope, and hope will do much to help your recovery. You should tell yourself how valuable your life is to those who love you. The thought of their affection should give you courage to struggle against apathy and languor. Believe me, invalids have their condition a great deal more in their own power than they are inclined to believe. So much can be overcome where the spirit is strong and brave, where faith and hope fight against bodily weakness. You ought not to be sitting alone here in this saddening spot. It is lovely, but with the beauty of death. You ought to be driving out to Frascati or to Tivoli with your husband. You ought to be watching the carriages in the Pincian Gardens, or amusing yourself in one of the picture galleries.”“I had rather be alone,” she said, wiping away her tears, and in some degree recovering her self-possession.“That is a morbid fancy, and one that hinders your recovery.”“I have no wish to recover. I only want to die.”“My dear Mrs. Disney, it is your duty to fight against these melancholy moods. Can you be indifferent to your husband’s feelings? Have you not the mother’s natural desire to watch over your child’s early years, to see him reach manhood?”“No, no, no!” she cried passionately. “I have had enough of life. They are dear to me, very dear. No wife ever loved and honoured her husband more than I love and honour mine—but it is all over, it is past, and ended. I am more than resigned to death—I am thankful that God has called me away.”He watched her closely as she spoke, watched her with his hand upon hers, which was cold as ice. He had heard such words before from the early doomed, but they had been accompanied by religious exaltation; they had been the outpouring of a faith that saw the gates of heaven opened and the Son of man sitting in glory—of a love that longed to be with God. Here there was no sign of hope or exaltation. There were only the tokens of despair.He remembered how agitated he had seen her many times in the little church at San Remo, and how, although hanging eagerly upon his preaching, she had persistently avoided anything like serious conversation with him upon the few occasions when he had found himself alone with her.He had her Testament still in his hand, and looking down at the tear-stained page it seemed to him that there lay the clue to her melancholy.“You have been reading the story of the woman of Samaria,” he said.“Yes.”“And you have read that other story of her who knelt inthe dust at her Saviour’s feet, and to whom He said, ‘Neither do I condemn thee.’”“Yes.”“Is there anything in either of those stories to sadden you more than the thought of sin and sorrow saddens all of us?”She looked at him shrinkingly, pale as death, as if he had a dagger in his hand ready to strike her.“No, I don’t suppose there is anything that goes home to my heart any more than to other hearts,” she said, after a pause, trying to speak carelessly. “We are all sinners. The Gospel teaches us that in every line! We are none of us altogether worthy—not even my husband, I suppose, although to me he seems a perfect Christian.”“I can believe that he is a Christian, Mrs. Disney, and a man of strong convictions. If he had wronged anybody, I do not think he would rest till he had atoned for that wrong.”“I am sure he would not. He would do his uttermost to atone. And so would I—although I do not pretend to be half so good a Christian as he is. I would do all in my power to atone for any wrong I had done to one I loved.”“As you love your husband, for instance.”“Yes, as I love him. He is first in the world for me. Dear as my child is, Martin must always be first.”“And you would not for the world do him any wrong?” pursued the priest, more and more earnest as he went on, pale with emotion, his whole power of observation concentrated upon the whitening face and lowered eyelids of the woman sitting at his feet.“Not for the world, not for my life,” she said, with her hands tightly clasped, her eyes still hidden under the heavy lids, tearless now—and with dry and quivering lips, from which the words came with a dull and soulless sound. “I would die to save him an hour’s pain. I would fling away this wretched life rather than grieve him for a moment.”“Poor soul!” murmured the priest, pitying that debt of self-abasement which he understood so well, under whatsoever guise she might hide her contrition. “Poor soul, you talk too lightly of that great mystery which we should all face in a spirit of deep humility. Do you feel that you can contemplate that passage through death to a new life without fear of the issue? Have you no reckoning to make with the God who pardons repentant sinners? Do you stand before Him with a clear conscience—having kept nothing back—cherished no hidden sin?”“No one can be without sin in His sight. Do you suppose that I am sinless, or that I have ever believed myself sinless? I know how weak and poor a thing I am—a worm in the sight of Him who rules the universe. But if—if He cares for such as I, He knows that I am sorry for every sinful thought and every sinful act of my life.”She spoke in short sentences, each phrase broken by a sob. She felt as if he were tearing out her heart, this man who had been heretofore so kindly and indulgent in his speech and manner that he seemed to make religion an easy thing, a garment as loose and expansive as philosophy itself. And, now, all at once he appeared before her as a judge, searching out her heart, cruel, inflexible, weighing her in the balance, and finding her wanting.“If I am sorry,” she murmured, between her sobs, “what more can God or man require of me?”“Nothing, if your sorrow is that true sorrow which means repentance, and goes hand-in-hand with atonement. Forgive me, my dear friend, for presuming to speak unreservedly to you. If I try to find out the nature of your wound it is only that I may help you to heal it. Ever since I have known you I have seen the tokens of a wounded heart, a bruised and broken spirit. I saw you surrounded with all the blessings that make woman’s lot happy. It was hardly possible to conceive fairer surroundings and truer friends. Can you wonder, then, if my compassionate interest was awakened by the indications of a deep-rooted sorrow for which there wasno apparent cause? I saw your emotion in church, saw how quickly your heart and mind responded to the appeal of religion—saw in you a soul attuned to heavenly things, and day by day my interest in you and yours grew stronger. The hope of seeing you again, of helping you to bear your burden, of ultimately lightening it, was one of my reasons for coming to Rome. I felt somehow that you and I had not met in vain—that my power to move you was not without a meaning in both our lives; that if, as I thought, you needed spiritual help and comfort, it was my vocation to help and comfort you. And so I came to Rome, and so I found out where you spent your quiet hours, and so I have followed you here this afternoon. Tell me, Mrs. Disney, did I presume too much? Was it the preacher’s vanity or the priest’s intuition that spoke?”“It was intuition,” she said. “You saw that I had sinned. None but a sinner could shed such tears—could so feel the terror of God’s wrath.”“It is of His love I want you to think. Of His immeasurable love and pity. Of His Son’s Divine compassion. If you have any special need of His pardon; if there is any sinful secret locked in your heart; do not let the golden hours go by—the time meet for repentance.”“I have repented,” she cried piteously. “My life has been one long repentance ever since my sin.”“And your husband—he who so fondly loves you—he knows all, and has forgiven all?”“Knows!” The word broke from her lips almost in a shriek of horror. “He knows nothing—he must never know. He would despise me, leave me to die alone, while he went far away from me, to the very end of the world. He would take his son with him. I should be left alone—alone to face death—the most desolate creature God ever looked upon. Oh, Father Rodwell, why have you wrung my secret from me?” she cried, grovelling on her knees in the long grass beside him, clinging to his hand as he bent over her, gravely compassionate, deeply moved by her distress. “How cruelto question—to torture me—how cruel to use your power of reading guilty hearts. You will tell my husband, who so loves and trusts me. You will tell him what a guilty wretch I am.”“Tell him, Mrs. Disney! Can you forget that I am a priest—for whom the sinner’s confession is sacred? Do you think I have never talked with the tempted and the sorrowing before to-day? Do you think that grief such as yours can be an unknown experience to a man who has worked in a crowded London parish for nearly twenty years? I wanted to know the worst, so that I might be able to advise and to console you. If I have questioned you to-day, it has been as a priest has the right to question; and this place where you and I have met to-day is in my sight as sacred as the confessional. You need have no fear that I shall tell your husband the secret of your sorrow. All I will do is to help you to find strength to tell him yourself.”“Oh no, no, no!” she cried piteously. “Never! never! I can die, I am prepared to die; but I can never tell him—I cannot, I dare not.”“Yet you could dare to die with a lie upon your lips—you who are ready to meet your Judge—you whose whole life is a lie—you who have cheated and betrayed the best of men. Oh, Mrs. Disney, reflect what this thing is which you are doing; reflect what kind of sin it is you are committing. If, as your own sorrowing words acknowledge, you have been a false wife—a false wife to the best and truest of husbands, can you dare to act out that falsehood to the last, to die with that guilty secret locked in your heart, from him who has a right to know,—and who alone upon earth has a right to pardon.”“Oh, how cruel you are!” she said, lifting up her streaming eyes to his earnest, inflexible face. “Is it a Christian’s part to be so cruel, to break the bruised reed, to crush anything so weak and wretched as I am? Is not repentance enough? I have spent long nights in penitence and tears, long days in dull aching remorse. I would have given allmy future life to atone for one dreadful hour—one unpremeditated yielding to temptation. Ihavegiven my life—for my secret has killed me. What more can man or God demand of me? What more can I do to win forgiveness?”“Only this—tell your husband the truth—however painful, however humiliating the confession. That will be your best atonement. That is the sacrifice which will help to reconcile you with your God. You cannot hope for God’s love and pardon hereafter, if you live and die as a hypocrite here. God’s saints were some of them steeped in the darkness of guilt before they became the children of light—but there was not one of them who shrank from the confession of his sins.”“You are a man,” sobbed Isola. “You do not know what it is for a woman to confess that she is unworthy of her husband’s love. You do not know. It is not possible for a man to know the meaning of shame.”“You are wrong there,” he said, gently lifting her from the ground, and placing her beside him on the bank. “What chastity is to a woman, honour is to a man. Men have had to stand up before their fellow-men and acknowledge their violation of man’s code of honour; knowing that such acknowledgment made them dirt, and very dirt, in the sight of honourable men. You, as a woman, know not how deep men’s scorn cuts a man who has sinned against the law which governs gentlemen. A woman thinks there is no such sting as the sting of her shame. Men know better. Yes, I know that it will be most bitter, more bitter than death—for you to tell Colonel Disney that you are not what you have seemed to him; but apart from all considerations of duty, do not his love and devotion deserve the sacrifice of self-love on your part? Can you bear yourself to the last, as a virtuous wife—enjoying his respect—knowing that it is undeserved——”“I will tell him—at the last,” she faltered. “In that parting hour I shall not shrink from telling him all—how I sinned against him—almost unawares—drifting half unconsciouslyinto a fatal entanglement—and then—and then—against my will—in my weakness and helplessness—alone in the power of the man I loved—betrayed into sin. Oh God! why do you make me remember?” she cried wildly, turning upon the priest in passionate reproachfulness. “For years I have been trying to forget—trying to blank out the past—praying, praying, praying that my humble, tearful love for my husband and my child might cancel those hours of sin. And you come to me, and question me, and on pretence of saving my soul, you force me to look back upon that bygone horror—to live again through that time of madness—the destruction of my life. Cruel, cruel, cruel!”“Forgive me!” said Father Rodwell, very gently, seeing that she was struggling with hysteria. “I have been too hard, perhaps, too eager to convince you of the right! There are some men, even of my sacred calling, who would judge your case otherwise—who would say the husband is happy in his ignorance; the wife has repented of her sin.Non quieta movere.But it is not in my nature to choose the easy pathways; and it may be that I am too severe a teacher. We will not talk any more about serious things to-day. Only believe that I am your friend—your sincere and devoted friend. If I have spoken hard things, be assured I would have spoken in the same spirit had you been my own sister. Let us say no more yet awhile—and perhaps when you have thought over our interview to-day you will come to see things almost as I see them. I won’t press the matter. I will leave your own heart and conscience to plead with you. And now may I walk home with you, before the beauty of the afternoon begins to fade?”“The vetturino will be waiting for me at the gate,” Isola answered, with a dull, dead voice, rising languidly, and adjusting the loosened hair about her forehead with tremulous fingers.She had thrown off her hat a little while before, and now she took it up, and straightened the loops of ribbon with a nervous touch here and there, and then put the hat on again,and arranged the gossamer veil, which she hoped might hide her swollen eyelids and tear-stained cheeks.“If Martin should come to meet me, what will he think? she said piteously.“Let me go with you, and I may be able to distract his attention—if you don’t want him to see that you have been crying.”“No, no. He must not see. He would wonder, and question me—and guess, perhaps—as you did just now. How was it you knew—what made you guess?” she asked, with a sense of rebellion against this man who had pierced the veil behind which she had been hiding herself so long.“I saw your sorrow; and I knew that there could scarcely be so deep a sorrow if there were no memory of sin. Will you take my arm down this steep path?”“No, thank you. I know every step. I could walk about this place in my sleep. You have been cruel to me, Father Rodwell, very cruel. Promise me one thing by way of atonement for your cruelty. Promise me that if I die in Rome I shall be buried in this place, and as near Shelley’s grave as they can find room to lay me.”“I promise. Yes, it is a sweet spot, is it not? It was down yonder in the old burial-ground that Shelley looked upon the grave of Keats, and said it was a spot to make one in love with death. But I would not have you think yourself doomed to an early death, Mrs. Disney. Have you never read in the ‘Lives of the Saints’ how some who were on the point of death have revived at the touch of the holy oil, and have lived and have renewed their strength, and re-entered the world to lead a holier and nobler life than they had led before? Who knows if you were to confess your sin, and patiently suffer whatever penance you were called upon to bear, new vistas might not open for you? There is more than one way of being happy in this world. If you could never again know the sweetness of a domestic life—as trusted wife and happy mother—there are other and wider lives inwhich you would count your children and your sisters by hundreds. There are sisterhoods in which your future might be full of usefulness and full of peace. Or if you had no vocation for that wider life, it might be that touched by your helplessness in the past, and your remorse in the present, your husband might find it in his heart to forgive that bygone sin, and still to cherish, and still to hold you dear.”“No, no,” she cried impatiently. “I would not live for an hour after he knew. I know what he would do. He has told me. He would leave me—at once, and for ever. I should never see his face again. I should be dead to him, by a worse death than the grave; for he would only think of me to shudder at my name. Oh, Father Rodwell, Christianity must be a cruel creed if it can demand such a sacrifice from me. What good can come of his knowing the truth? Only agony to him and shame and despair to me. Can that be good?”“Truth is life, and falsehood is death,” answered the priest, firmly. “You must choose your own course, Mrs. Disney; but there is one argument I may urge as a man of the world rather than as a priest. Nothing is ever hidden for very long in this life. There is no secret so closely kept that some one has not an inkling of it. Better your husband should hear the truth from you, in humble self-accusation, than that he should learn it later—perhaps after he has mourned you for years—from a stranger’s lips.”“Oh, that would be horrible—too horrible. But I will confess to him; I will tell him everything—on my deathbed. Yes, when life is ebbing, when the end is close, I will tell him. He shall know what a false and perjured creature I am. I swore to him—swore before God that I was true and faithful—that I loved him and no other. And it was true, absolute truth, when I took that oath. My sin was a thing of the past. I had loved another, and I had let my love lead me into sin. And then my husband asked me ifI had been true and pure always; always. ‘Is that true, Isola? I call upon God to hear your answer,’ he said. And I answered yes, it was true. I lied before God rather than lose my husband’s love; and God heard me, and the blight of His anger has been upon me ever since, withering and consuming me.”They went down the steep pathway, Father Rodwell first, Isola following, between the crowded graves, the azaleas and camelias, veronica and guelder rose, lilac and magnolia, and on either hand a wilderness of roses, red and white.The shadows of the cypresses closed over them in that deep alley, and the twilight gloom might seem symbolic of the passage through death to life; for beyond the gates, and through a gap in the cypress screen, the level landscape and the city domes and bell-towers were shining in the yellow light of afternoon.CHAPTER XXIV.“OH, OLD THOUGHTS THEY CLING, THEY CLING!”Colonel Disney and Allegra were both pleased to welcome Father Rodwell to their home in the great city; pleased to find that his own rooms were close by in the Via Babuino, and that he was likely to be their neighbour for some weeks. His familiarity with all that was worth seeing in the city and its surroundings made him a valuable companion for people whose only knowledge had been gathered laboriously from books. Father Rodwell knew every picture and every statue in the churches and galleries. There was not a building in Christian or Pagan Rome which had not its history and its associations for the man who had chosen the city as the holiday ground of his busy life long before he left the university, and who had returned again and again,year after year, to tread the familiar paths and ponder over the old records. He had seen many of those monuments of Republic and Empire emerge from the heaped-up earth of ages; had seen hills cut down, and valleys laid bare; some picturesque spots made less picturesque; other places redeemed from ruin. He had seen the squalor and the romance of Mediæval Rome vanish before the march of improvement; and he had seen the triumph of the commonplace and the utilitarian in many a scene where the melancholy beauty of neglect and decay had once been dear to him.With such a guide it was delightful to loiter amidst the Palace of the Cæsars, or tread the quiet lanes and by-paths of the Aventine, that historic hill from whose venerable church the bearers of Christ’s message of peace and love set out for savage Britain. Allegra was delighted to wander about the city with such a companion, lingering long before every famous picture, finding out altar-pieces and frescoes which no guide-book would have helped her to discover; sometimes disputing Father Rodwell’s judgment upon the artistic value of a picture; sometimes agreeing with him—always bright, animated, and intelligent.Isola joined in these explorations as far as her strength would allow. She was deeply interested in the churches, and in the stories of priest and pope, saint and martyr, which Father Rodwell had to tell of every shrine and tomb, whose splendour might otherwise have seemed colourless and cold. There was a growing enthusiasm in the attention with which she listened to every record of that wonder-working Church which created Christian Rome in all its pomp and dignity of architecture, and all its glory of art. The splendour of those mighty basilicas filled her with an awful sense of the majesty of that religion which had been founded yonder in darkness and in chains, in Paul’s subterranean prison—yonder in tears where Paul and Peter spoke the solemn words of parting—yonder in blood on the dreary road to Ostia, where the headsman’s axe quenchedthe greatest light that had shone upon earth since the sacrifice of Calvary.Isola went about looking at those things like a creature in a dream. These stupendous tabernacles impressed her with an almost insupportable sense of their magnitude. And with that awestricken sense of power in the Christian Church there was interwoven the humiliating consciousness of her own unworthiness; a consciousness sharpened and intensified by every word that Father Rodwell had spoken in that agonizing hour of her involuntary confession.He was so kind to her, so gentle, so courteous in every word and act, that she wondered sometimes whether he had forgotten that miserable revelation; whether he had forgotten that she was one of the lost ones of this earth, a woman who had forfeited woman’s first claim to man’s esteem. Sometimes she found herself lifting her eyes to his face in an unpremeditated prayer for pity, as they stood before some exquisite shrine of the Madonna, and the ineffable purity in the sculptured face looking down at her struck like a sharp sword into her heart. That mute appeal of Isola’s seemed to ask, “Has the Mother of Christ any pity for such a sinner as I?”Colonel Disney was full of thoughtfulness for his wife in all their going to and fro; and before their day’s rambles were half done he would drive her to any quiet spot where she might choose to spend a restful hour in the afternoon sunshine—in this or that convent garden, in some shaded corner on the Aventine, or among the wild flowers that flourish and grow rank amidst the ruins of palace and temple on the Palatine. Her favourite resort was still the English cemetery, and she always begged to be set down within reach of that familiar gate, where the custodian knew her as well as if she had been some restless spirit whose body lay under one of those marble urns, and whose ghost passed in and out of the gate every day.It was in vain that her husband or her sister offered to beher companion in these restful hours. She always made the same reply.“I am better alone,” she would say. “It does me good to be alone. I don’t like being alone indoors—I get low-spirited and nervous—but I like to sit among the flowers, and to watch the lizards darting in and out among the graves. I am never dull there. I take a book with me; but I don’t read much. I could sit there for hours in a summer dream.”Martin Disney made a point of giving way to her will in all small things. She might be capricious, she might have morbid fancies. That was no business of his. It was his part to indulge her every whim, and to make her in love with life. All that he asked of Heaven was to spin out that attenuated thread. All that he desired was to hold her and keep her for his own against Death himself.TheVendettawas at Civita Vecchia, from which port her skipper frequently bore down upon Rome, distracting Allegra from her critical studies in the picture-galleries, and from her work in her own studio, a light, airy room on the fourth floor, with a window looking over the Pincian Gardens. Captain Hulbert was a little inclined to resent Father Rodwell’s frequent presence in the family circle, and his too accomplished guidance in the galleries. It was provoking to hear a man talk, with an almost Ruskinesque enthusiasm and critical appreciation, of pictures which made so faint an appeal to the seaman. Here and there John Hulbert could see the beauty and merit of a painting, and was really touched by the influence of supreme art; but of technical qualities he knew nothing, and could hardly distinguish one master from another, was as likely as not to take Titian for Veronese, or Tintoret for Titian.

“Look, John!” cried Allegra, laughing, as she pointed to the hedge of red roses in front of them, and the clusters of creamy bloom hanging over the verandah. “The roses have been blooming ever since we came to Italy. It is always rose-time here. You remember our reading in the dedication of ‘To Leeward’ how Marion Crawford strewed his wife’s pathway with roses on Christmas Day at Sorrento. We can find a flowery land for our honeymoon at any season of the year.”

“But why wait a year? Can you not prove me trusty and true in less than a year?”

“You are so impatient,” she said, plucking a handful of roses, and scattering the petals at her feet. “A year is so short a time.”

“Short, love! why, eight weeks have seemed an eternityto me without you; and you honoured me just now by saying that the time had appeared long, even to you—even to my liege lady, sitting serene in her palace of art, painting contadinas and their olive-faced offspring—even to you, whose love is as a thread of silk against a cable, compared to mine. Even to you, my mistress and my tyrant.”

“That was because you were so far away. But there will be nothing to hinder our seeing each other, as often as you may find convenient. I have set my heart upon painting steadily for a twelvemonth, without any distractions.”

“There is no such place as Venice for a painter. Think of the Miss Montalbas, and the splendid work they have done at Venice. Would you not like to be like them?”

“Would I not like to be like Apelles?”

“Well, Venice will be your treasury; Venice will fill that busy brain with ideas. You shall be fed upon pictures old and new—the new living pictures in the narrow streets and canals; the old masters in the churches and palaces. You shall learn of Tintoret and Veronese. You shall paint as much as you like. You shall have no distractions. We shall be strangers there, can live as we choose. Summer is the time for Venice, Allegra. Benighted English people have an idea that Italy is a place to winter in, and they go and shiver in marble palaces, and watch the torrential rain beating against windows that were never meant to shut out bad weather. The Italians know that their land is a land of summer, and they know how to enjoy sunny days and balmy nights. You don’t know how delicious life is on the Lido when the night is only a brief interval of starshine betwixt sunset and dawn. You don’t know what a dream of delight it is to float along the lagoons and watch the lamp-lit city melt into the mists of evening, breathing faint echoes of music and song. A great many things of beauty have been turned to ugliness, Allegra, since printing and the steam engine were invented; but, thank God! Venice is not one of them. You will think of my plan, won’t you, love? At the least, it is a thing to be considered.”

“Anything you say is worthy to be considered, John. And now come in and see Isola and Martin.”

He felt that he had gone far enough—he felt that it were unwise to press the question too much at first. He meant to be gently persistent; and he meant to have his own way.

He followed Allegra into the drawing-room—a room full of light and sunshine, which had been beautified and made home-like by the addition of a few Japaneseries and a little old Italian furniture which Martin Disney had picked up at a bric-à-brac shop in the Via Vittorio Emanuelo. There were flowers everywhere, in the bright Italian pottery, so artless, so cheap, so gay, in its varieties of form and colouring. To Hulbert’s fancy it was the prettiest room he had seen for an age.

“You seem to have made yourself uncommonly comfortable here,” he said, after cordial greetings, settling down into a bamboo chair near Isola’s little olive-wood table, littered with Tauchnitz novels and fancy work. “It is a pleasant sensation for a rolling stone who has hardly ever known what home means to drop into such a nest as this. You will have too much of my company, I’m afraid. You’ll be shocked to hear that I have taken rooms at the Anglais, down there,” pointing down the valley, “within a stone’s throw of you.”

“We are not shocked. We are very glad you will be near us,” said Isola, smiling at him. “It has been a dull life for Allegra, I’m afraid.”

“Dull! dull in this land of beauty!” cried Allegra. “I have never known a dull hour since I came here; though, of course,” with a shy glance at her lover, “I have naturally thought sometimes of absent friends, and wished they were with me to revel in the loveliness of these woods and hills.”

“Well, one of your friends has come to you, one who would as gladly have come had you been in regions where the sun never shines, or where his chariot wheels scorch the torrid sands.”

Captain Hulbert stayed with them all the evening, andplanned a sail to Mentone for the following day, Isola again begging to be left out of their plans, as she had done at Fowey.

“You need feel no compunction about leaving me,” she paid. “I shall be perfectly happy in the woods with nurse, and baby, and my books.”

They obeyed her, and the little excursion was arranged. They were to start soon after the early breakfast, carrying what their Italian cook called a pique-nique with them, in the shape of a well-provided luncheon-basket. Isola sat in the olive wood, watching the white sails moving slowly towards Bordighera. It was an exquisite day—a day for dreaming on the water rather than for rapid progress. The yacht scarcely seemed to move as Isola watched her from the cushioned corner which Löttchen had arranged in an angle of the low stone wall—all amongst ferns and mosses, brown orchises and blue violets—an angle sheltered by a century-old olive, whose gnarled trunk sprawled along the ground, rugged and riven, but with another century’s life in it yet. Far down in the valley, below the old gateway, a company of cypresses rose dark against the blue of the sea, and Isola knew that just on that slope of the shore where the cypresses grew tallest the graves of English exiles were gathered. Many a fair hope, many a broken dream, many a disappointed ambition lay at rest under those dark spires, within the sound of that summer sea.

This was one of many days which the young mother spent in the woods or in the garden with her baby for her companion, while Allegra and the colonel sailed east or west in theVendetta. Her doctor would have liked her to go with them, but she seemed to have an absolute aversion to the sea, and he did not press the point.

“Nothing that she dislikes will do her any good,” he told Colonel Disney. “There is no use in being persistent about anything. Fancies and whims stand for a great deal in such an illness as hers.”

A week or two later the same kind doctor discovered thathis patient was fast losing ground. Her strength had flagged considerably in a short time. He recommended change of scene.

“This quiet life suited her wonderfully well for the first month or so, but we are no longer making any headway. You had better try a gayer place—a little more life and movement.”

Martin Disney was ready to obey. He and Allegra took counsel together, and then—in the lightest strain, one evening after dinner—they discussed the notion of a change.

“Shall we strike our tents, Isola? Are you tired of San Remo?”

“No, Martin. I am tired of myself, sometimes—never of these olive woods and lemon groves. Sometimes the stillness and the silent beauty of the place make me feel unhappy, without knowing why; but that is a kind of unhappiness no one can escape.”

“Is there any place in the world within tolerable easy reach of this that you would like to see?” asked her husband.

“Yes, there is one city in the world that I have been longing to see ever since I began to have thoughts and wishes.”

“And that is——”

“Rome! I should like to see Rome before I die, Martin; if it were not too troublesome for you——”

“Troublesome! My dearest, can anything be troublesome to me if it can but give you pleasure? You shall see Rome—not once—but again and again, in the course of a long and happy life, I hope. I am more than twenty years older than you; but I count upon at least thirty years more upon this planet, before I blow out my candle and say ‘Bon soir.’”

“God grant that you may live to a good old age, Martin. The world is better for such a man as you.”

“The world would be no place for me without my wife,” he said. “And so you would like to see Rome, Isa? What has put that fancy into your head?”

“Oh, it is an old dream, as I said just now. And lately I have been talking to Father Rodwell, who knows Rome aswell as if he were a Roman citizen, and he has made me more and more anxious to go there. If it would not be a great plague to you, Martin.”

“On the contrary, it would be a great pleasure. We will go to Rome, Isa, if your doctor approve. Allegra will like it, I know.”

“Like it?” echoed Allegra, “I shall simply be intoxicated with delight. I know the catalogues of all the picture-galleries by heart. I think I know every one of the seven hills as well as if I had walked upon them from my childhood. I have read so many descriptions of the place and its surroundings—so many raptures penned by people whom I have envied for nothing else than that they have known Rome; they have lived in Rome.”

The whole business was easily settled. Captain Hulbert was the only person who regretted the change. He had been a month at San Remo, a month of summer idleness in February and March, a month of summer sails on an azure sea; of mountain walks and rides, high up from stage to stage, until the region of lemon groves and olive woods gave place to the pines on the loftier hills. He had been able to spend all his days in Allegra’s society.

There were no pictures, except in that one little gallery at Colla. There was nothing to distract her from her lover. In Rome there would be all the wonders of the most wonderful city in the world. It would be art first and love second.

The doctor approved; Father Rodwell wrote to an agent in Rome, and after some negotiation a suite of apartments was found on the high ground near the Trinità de’ Monti, which seemed to meet all the requirements of the case. The priest vouched for the honesty and good faith of the agent, and on his responsibility the rooms were taken for the month of April, with liberty to occupy them later if it were so desired.

CHAPTER XXI.

“THE WOODS ARE ROUND US, HEAPED AND DIM.”

It was their last day at San Remo. Everything had been packed for the journey, and the drawing-room at Lauter Brunnen had a dreary look now that it was stripped of all those decorations and useful prettinesses with which Allegra had made it so gay and home-like.

The morning was brilliant, and Martin, Allegra, and Captain Hulbert set off at nine o’clock upon a long-deferred expedition to San Romolo. They would be home in good time for the eight-o’clock dinner; and Isola promised to amuse herself all day, and to be in good spirits to welcome them on their return.

“You have a duty to do for your sister,” she said, when her husband felt compunction at leaving her. “Think of all she has done for us, her devotion, her unselfishness. The least we can do is to help her to be happy with her lover; and all the burden of that duty has fallen upon you. I think you ought to be called Colonel Gooseberry.”

She looked a bright and happy creature as she stood on the mule-path in the olive wood, waving her hand to them as they went away—Allegra riding a donkey, the two men walking, one on each side of her bridle, and the guide striding on ahead, leading a second donkey which was to serve as an occasional help by-and-by, if either of the pedestrians wanted a lift. Her cheeks were flushed with walking, and her eyes were bright with a new gladness.

She was full of a childish pleasure in the idea of their journey, and the realization of a dream which most of us have dreamt a long time before it assumed the shape of earthly things—the dream of Rome.

Isola stood listening to their footsteps, as they passed the little painted shrine on the hill path. She heard them give the time of day to a party of peasant women, with emptybaskets on their heads, going up to gather the last of the olives. Then she roamed about the wooded valley and the slope of the hill towards Colla for an hour or two, and then, growing suddenly tired, she crept home, in time to sit beside her baby while he slept his placid noontide sleep. She bent over the little rosebud mouth and kissed it, in a rapture of maternal love.

“So young to see Rome,” she murmured. “And to think that those star-like eyes will see and take no heed; to think that such a glorious vision will pass before him, and he will remember nothing.”

The day was very long, something like one of those endless days at Trelasco, when her husband was in Burmah and she had only the dog and the cat for her companions. She thought of those fond friends to-day with a regretful sigh—the sleepy Shah, so calm and undemonstrative in his attachment, but with a placid, purring delight in her society which seemed to mean a great deal; the fox-terrier, so active and intense in his affection, demanding so much attention, intruding himself upon her walks and reveries with such eager, not-to-be-denied devotion. She had no four-footed friends here; and the want of them made an empty space in her life.

In the afternoon the weather changed suddenly. The sky became overcast, the sea a leaden colour; and the mistral came whistling up the valley with a great rustling and shivering of the silver-green foliage and creaking of the old bent branches, like the withered arms of witch or sorceress. All the glory of the day was gone, and the white villas on the crest of the eastward hill stood out in livid distinctness against the blackened sky.

Isola wandered up the hill-path, past the little shrine where the way divided, the point at which she had seen her husband and his party vanish in the sunny morning. She felt a sudden sense of loneliness now the sun was gone; a childish longing for the return of her friends, for evening and lamplight, and the things that make for cheerfulness.She was cold and dull, and out of spirits. She had left the house while the sun was shining, and she had come without shawl or wrap of any kind, and the mistral made her shiver. Yet she had no idea of hurrying home. The loneliness of the house had become oppressive before she left it; and she knew there would be some hours to wait for the return of the excursionists. So she mounted the steep mule-path, slowly and painfully, till she had gone two-thirds of the way to Colla; and then she sat down to rest on the low stone wall which enclosed a little garden in a break of the wood, from which point there was a far-stretching view seaward.

She was very cold, but she was so tired as to be glad to rest at any hazard of after-suffering. Drowsy from sheer exhaustion, she leant her head against a great rugged olive, whose roots were mixed up with the wall, and fell fast asleep. She awoke, shivering, from a confused dream of sea and woods, Roman temples and ruined palaces. She had been wandering in one of those dream-cities that have neither limit nor settled locality. It was here in the woods below Colla, and yet was half Rome and half Trelasco. There was a classic temple upon a hill that was like the Mount, and the day was bleak, and dark, and rainy, and she was walking on the footpath through Lord Lostwithiel’s park, with the storm-driven rain beating against her face, just as on that autumn evening, when the owner of the soil had taken compassion upon her and had given her shelter. The dream had been curiously vivid—a dream which brought the past back as if it were the present, and blotted out all that had come afterwards. She woke bewildered, forgetting that her husband had come back from India, and that she was in Italy, thinking of herself as she had been that October evening when she and Lostwithiel met for the first time.

The sea was darker than when she fell asleep. There was the dull crimson of a stormy sunset yonder, behind the jutting promontory of Bordighera, while the sky above wasbarred with long, black clouds, and the wind was howling across the great deep valley like an evil spirit tortured and imprisoned, shrieking to his gods for release. Exactly opposite her, as she stood in the deep cleft of the hills, a solitary vessel was labouring under press of canvas towards the point upon whose dusky summit the chapel of the Madonna della Guardia gleamed whitely in the dying day. The vessel was a schooner yacht, of considerable tonnage, certainly larger than theVendetta.

Isola stood, still as marble, watching that labouring boat, the straining sails, the dark hull beaten by the stormy dash of the waves. She watched with wide, open eyes, and parted lips, quivering as with an over-mastering fear, watched in momentary expectation of seeing those straining sails dip for the last time, that labouring hull founder and vanish betwixt black wave and white surf. She watched in motionless attention till the boat disappeared behind the shoulder of the hill; and then, shivering, nervous, and altogether over-strung, she hurried homewards, feeling that she had stayed out much too long, and that she had caught a chill which might be the cause of new trouble.

If those narrow mule-paths had been less familiar, she might have lost her way in the dusk; but she had trodden them too often to be in any difficulty, and she reached the villa without loss of time, but not before the return of the picnic party.

Allegra and Captain Hulbert were watching at the gate. Colonel Disney had gone into the wood to look for her, and had naturally taken the wrong direction.

“Oh, Isola; how could you stop out so late, and on such a stormy evening?” remonstrated Allegra.

“I fell asleep before the storm came on.”

“Fell asleep—out-of-doors—and at sunset! What dreadful imprudence.”

“I went out too late, I’m afraid; but I was so tired of waiting for you. A kind of horror of the house and the silence came upon me—and I felt I must go out into thewoods. I walked too far—and fell asleep from sheer fatigue; and when I woke I saw a yacht fighting with the wind. I’m afraid she’ll go down.”

“What, you noticed her too?” exclaimed Hulbert. “I didn’t think you cared enough about yachts to take notice of her. I was watching her as we came down the hill; rather too much canvas; but she’s right enough. She’s past Arma di Taggia by this time, I dare say. I’ll go and look for Disney, and tell him you’re safe and sound. Perhaps I shall miss him in the wood. It’s like a Midsummer Night’s Dream, isn’t it, Allegra?” he said, laughing, as he went out of the gate.

“If it were only mid-summer, I shouldn’t care,” answered his sweetheart, with her arm round Isola, who stood beside her, pale and shivering. “Come in, dear, and let me make you warm, if I can.”

“If they should all go down in the darkness!” said Isola, in a low, dreamy voice. “The boat looked as if it might be wrecked at any moment.”

Allegra employed all her arts as a sick-nurse in the endeavour to ward off any evil consequence from that imprudent slumber in the chill hour of sunset; but her cares were unavailing. Isola was restless and feverish all night, yet she insisted on getting up at her usual hour next morning, and declared herself quite capable of the journey to Genoa. Allegra and her brother, however, insisted on her resting for a day or two. So the departure was postponed, and the doctor sent for. He advised at least three days’ rest, with careful nursing; and he reproved his patient severely for her imprudence in exposing herself to the evening air.

Captain Hulbert appeared at teatime, just returned from a railway journey to Allassio.

“I’ve a surprise for you, Mrs. Disney,” he said, seating himself by the sofa where Isola was lying, surrounded by invalid luxuries, books, lemonade, fan, and eau de Cologne flask, her feet covered with a silken rug.

“A surprise!” she echoed faintly, as if life held no surprises for her. “What can that be?”

“You remember the yacht you saw last night?”

“Yes,” she cried, roused in an instant, and clasping her hands excitedly. “Did she go down?”

“Not the least little bit. She is safe and sound at Allassio. She is called theEurydice, she hails last from Syracuse, and my brother is on board her. He wired to me this morning to go over and see him. I’m very glad I went, for he is off to Corfu to-morrow. TheFlying Dutchmanisn’t in it with him.”

There was a curious silence. Martin Disney was sitting on the other side of his wife’s sofa, where he had been reading selected bits of theTimes, such portions of the news of men and nations as he fancied might interest her. Allegra was busy with a piece of delicate needlework, and did not immediately reply; but it was she who was first to speak.

“How frightened you would have been yesterday evening had you known who was on board the boat,” she said.

“I don’t know about being frightened, but he was certainly carrying too much canvas. I told him so this morning.”

“What did he say?”

“Laughed at me. ‘You sailors never believe that a landsman can sail a ship,’ he said. I wanted to talk to his sailing-master, but he told me he was his own sailing-master. If his ship was doomed to go down, he meant to be at the helm himself.”

“That sounds as if he were foolhardy,” said Allegra.

“I told him I did not like the rig of his boat, nor the name of his boat, and I reminded him how I saw theEurydiceoff Portland with all her canvas spread the day she went down. I was with the Governor of the Prison, a naval man, who had been commander on my first ship, and we stood side by side on the cliff, and watched her as she went by. ‘If this wind gets much stronger, that ship willgo down,’ said my old captain, ‘unless they take in some of their canvas.’ And a few hours later these poor fellows had all gone to the bottom. I asked Lostwithiel why he called his boat theEurydice. ‘Fancy,’ he said; he had a fancy for the name. ‘I’ve never forgotten the old lines we used to hammer out when we were boys,’ he said—‘Ah, miseram, Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat; Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripæ.’”

“I don’t think the name matters, if she is a good boat,” said Allegra, with her calm common sense.

“Well, she is, and she isn’t. She is a finer boat than theVendetta; but I’d sooner handle theVendettain a storm. There are points about his new boat that I don’t quite like. However, he had her built by one of the finest builders on the Clyde, and it will be hard if she goes wrong. He has given me theVendettaas a wedding-present—in advance of the event—on condition that I sink her when I’m tired of her; and he said he hoped she’d be luckier to me than she had been to him.”

Martin Disney sat silent by his wife’s sofa. He could never hear Lord Lostwithiel’s name without a touch of pain. His only objection to Hulbert as a brother-in-law was the thought that the two men were of the same race—that he must needs hear the hated name from time to time; and yet he believed his wife’s avowal that she was pure and true. His hatred of the name came only from the recollection that she had been slandered by a man whom he despised. He looked at the wasted profile on the satin pillow, so wan, so transparent in its waxen pallor, the heavy eyelid drooping languidly, the faintly coloured lips drawn as if with pain—a broken lily. Was this the kind of woman to be suspected of evil—this fair and fragile creature, in whom the spiritual so predominated over the sensual? He hated himself for having been for a moment influenced by that underbred scoundrel at Glenaveril, for having been base enough to doubt his wife’s purity.

He had pained and humiliated her, and now the stamp ofdeath was on the face he adored, and before him lay the prospect of a life’s remorse.

They left San Remo three days afterwards, Isola being pronounced able to bear the journey, though her cough had been considerably increased by that imprudent slumber in the wood. She was anxious to go; and doctor and husband gave way to her eagerness for new scenes.

“I am so tired of this place,” she said piteously. “It is lovely; but it is a loveliness that makes me melancholy. I want to be in a great city where there are lots of people moving about. I have never lived in a city, but always in quiet places—beautiful, very beautiful, but so still—so still—so full of one’s self and one’s own thoughts.”

CHAPTER XXII.

ECCO ROMA.

The agent had proved himself worthy of trust, and had chosen the lodging for Colonel Disney’s family with taste and discretion. It was a first floor over a jeweller’s shop in a short street behind the Piazza di Spagna, and under the Pincian Gardens. There were not too many stairs for Isola to ascend when she came in from her drive or walk. The gardens were close at hand, and all around there were trees and flowers, and an atmosphere of verdure and retirement in the midst of the great cosmopolitan city.

It was dark when the train came into the terminus; and Isola was weary and exhausted after the long hot journey from Pisa, the glare of the sun, and the suffocating clouds of dust, and the beautiful monotony of blue sea and sandy plains, long level wastes, where nothing grew but brushwood and osier, and stretches of marshy ground, with water pools shining here and there, like burnished steel, and distant islets dimly seen athwart a cloud of heat. Then evening closed in, and it was through a grey and formless worldthat they approached the city whose very name thrilled her.

The railway station was very much like any other great terminus; like Milan, like Genoa. There was the same close rank of omnibuses. There were the same blue blouses and civil, eager porters, far too few for the work to be done, rapacious but amiable, piling up the innumerable packages of the Italian traveller, loading themselves like so many human beasts of burden, and with no apparent limit to their capacity for carrying things. Two flys were packed with the miscellaneous luggage, nurse and baby, and then Isola was handed to her place in another, with Allegra by her side, and through the narrow streets of tall houses, under the dim strip of soft April night, she drove through the city of heroes and martyrs, saints and apostles, wicked emperors and holy women, the city of historical contrasts, of darkness and light, refinement and barbarism, of all things most unlike each other, from Nero to Paul, from Gregory the Great to the Borgias.

The glory and the beauty of Rome only began to dawn upon her next morning, in the vivid sunlight, when she climbed the steps of the Trinità de’ Monti, and then with Allegra’s arm to lean upon went slowly upward and again upward to the topmost terrace on the Pincian Hill, and stood leaning on the marble balustrade, and gazing across the city that lay steeped in sunshine at her feet—over palace and steeple, pinnacle and tower, to the rugged grandeur of Hadrian’s Tomb, and to that great dome whose vastness makes all other temples seem puny and insignificant. This was her first view of the world’s greatest church.

The air was clear and cool upon this height, although the city below showed dimly through a hazy veil of almost tropical heat. Everywhere there was the odour of summer flowers, the overpowering sweetness of lilies of the valley, and great branches of lilac, white and purple, brimming over in the baskets of the flower-sellers.

On such a morning as this one could understand how the Romans came to call April the joyous month, and to dedicate this season of sunshine and flowers to the Goddess of Beauty and Love.

Isola’s face lighted up with a new gladness, a look of perfect absorption and self-forgetfulness, as she leant upon the balustrade, and gazed across that vast panorama, gazed and wondered, with eyes that seemed to grow larger in their delight.

“And is this really Rome?” she murmured softly.

“Yes, this is Rome,” cried Allegra. “Isn’t it lovely? Isn’t it all you ever dreamt of or hoped for? And yet people have so maligned it—called it feverish, stuffy, disappointing, dirty! Why, the air is ether—inspiring, health-giving! April in Rome is as fresh as April in an English forest; only it is April with the warmth and flowers of June. I feel sure you will grow ever so much stronger after one little week in Rome.”

“Yes, I know I shall be better here. I feel better already,” said Isola, with a kind of feverish hopefulness. “It was so good of Martin to bring me. San Remo is always lovely—and I shall love it to the end of my life, because it was my first home in Italy—but I was beginning to be tired—not of the olive woods and the sea, but of the people we met, and the sameness of life. One day was so like another.”

“It was monotonous, of course,” agreed Allegra; “and being a little out of health, you would be bored by monotony sooner than Martin or I. It was such a pity you did not like the yacht. That made such a change for us. The very olive woods and the mountain villages seem new when one sees them from the water. I was never tired of looking at the hills between San Remo and Bordighera, or the promontory of Monaco, with its cathedral towers. It was a pleasure lost to you, dear; but it could not be helped, I suppose. Yet once upon a time you used to be so fond of the sea, when you and I went in our row-boat, tempting danger round by Neptune Point.”

“I may have been stronger then,” Isola faltered.

“Oh, forgive me, darling! What an inconsiderate wretch I am! But Rome will give you back your lost strength; and we shall round Neptune Point again, and feel the salt spray dashing over our heads as we go out into the great fierce Atlantic. I confess that sometimes, when that divine Mediterranean which we are never tired of worshipping has been lying in the sunshine like one vast floor oflapis lazuli, I have longed for something rougher and wilder—for such a sea as you and I have watched from the Rashleigh Mausoleum.”

Colonel Disney and his wife and sister went about in a very leisurely way in their explorations. In the first place, he was anxious to avoid anything approaching fatigue for his wife; and in the second place it was only the beginning of April, and they were to be in Rome for at least a month; there was therefore no need for rushing hither and thither at the tourist pace, with guide-books in their hands, and anxious, heated countenances, perspiring through the streets, and suffering deadly chills in the churches. Allegra’s first desire was naturally to see the picture-galleries, and to these she went for the most part alone, leaving Isola and her husband free to wander about as they pleased, upon a friendly equality of ignorance, knowing very little more than Childe Harold and Murray could teach them. Isola’s Rome was Byron’s Rome.

There was one spot she loved better than any other in the city of mighty memories. It was not hallowed by the blood of saint or hero, sage or martyr. It had no classical associations. He whose heart lay buried there under the shadow of the tribune’s mighty monument, perished in the pride of manhood, in the freshness and glory of life; and that heart—so warm and generous to his fellow-men—had hardened itself against the God of saint and martyr, the God of Peter and Paul, Lawrence and Gregory, Benedict and Augustine. Yet for Isola there was no grave in Rome so fraught with spiritual thoughts as Shelley’s grave, no sweeter memoryassociated with the eternal city than the memory of his wanderings and meditations amidst the ruined walls of the Baths of Caracalla, where his young genius drank in the poetry of the long past, and fed upon the story of the antique dead.

She came to Shelley’s grave as often as she could steal away from the anxious companions of her drives and walks.

“I like to be alone now and then,” she told her husband. “It rests me to sit by myself for an hour or two in this lovely place.”

There was a coachman in the Piazza who was in the habit of driving Colonel Disney’s family—an elderly man, sober, steady and attentive, with intelligence that made him almost as good as a guide. He was on the watch for his English clients every morning. They had but to appear on the Piazza, and he was in attendance, ready to take them to the utmost limit of a day’s journey, if they liked. Were they in doubt where to go, he was always prompt with suggestions.

He would drive Isola to the door of the English cemetery, leave her there, and return at her bidding to take her home again. Disney knew she was safe when this veteran had her in charge. The man was well known in the Piazza, and of established character for honesty. She took a book or two in her light basket, buying a handful of flowers here and there from the women and children as she went along, till the books were hidden under roses and lilac. The custodian of the cemetery knew her, and admitted her without a word. He had watched her furtively once or twice, to see that she neither gathered the flowers nor tried to scratch her name upon the tombs. He had seen her sitting quietly by the slab which records Shelley’s death—and the death of that faithful friend who was laid beside him, sixty years afterwards. Sixty years of loving, regretful memory, and then union in the dust. Shall there not be a later and a better meeting, when those two shall see each other’s faces andhear each other’s voices again, in a world where old things shall be made new, where youth and its wild freshness shall come back again, and Trelawney shall be as young in thought and feeling as Shelley?

The English burial-place was a garden of fairest flowers at this season—a paradise of roses and clematis, azaleas and camelias—and much more beautiful for its wilder growth of trailing foliage and untended shrubs, the pale cold blue of the periwinkle that carpeted slope and bank, and for the background of old grey wall, severe in its antique magnificence, a cyclopean rampart, relic of time immemorial, clothed and beautified with weed and floweret that grew in every cleft and cranny.

Here, in a sheltered angle to the left of the poet’s grave, Isola could sit unobserved, even when the custodian brought a party of tourists to see the hallowed spot, which occurred now and then while she sat there. The tourists for the most part stared foolishly, made some sentimental remark if they were women, or if they were men, betrayed a hopeless ignorance of the poet’s history, and not unfrequently confounded him with Keats. Isola sat half-hidden in her leafy corner, where the ivy and the acanthus hung from the great grey buttress against which she leant, languid, half-dreaming, with two books on her lap.

One was her Shelley—her much-read Shelley—a shabby, cloth-bound volume, bought in her girlhood at the book-seller’s in the Place Duguesclin, where English books could be got by special order, and at special prices. The other was an Italian Testament, which her husband had bought her at San Remo, and in which she had read with extreme diligence and with increasing fervour as her mind became more deeply moved by Father Rodwell’s sermons. It was not that she had ever been one of those advanced thinkers who will accept no creed which does not square with their own little theories and fit in to their own narrow circle of possibilities. She had never doubted the creed she had been taught in her childhood, but she had thought verylittle about serious things, since she was a young girl, preparing for her confirmation, touched with girlish enthusiasm, and very much in earnest. In these fair spring days, and in this city of many memories, all young thoughts had reawakened in her mind. She pored over the familiar Gospel-stories, and again, as in the first freshness of her girlhood, she saw the sacred figure of the Redeemer and Teacher in all the vivid light and colour of a reality, close at hand. Faith stretched a hand across the abyss of time, and brought the old world of the Gospel-story close to her; the closer, because she was in Rome, not far from that church which enshrines the print of the Divine footstep, when He who was God and Man, appeared to His disciple, to foreshadow approaching martyrdom, to inspire the fortitude of the martyr. Yes, although the Saviour’s earthly feet never entered the city, every hill and every valley within and without those crumbling walls has interwoven itself so closely with the story of His life—through the work of His saints and martyrs—that it is nowise strange if the scenes and images of the sacred story seem nearer and more vivid in Rome than in any other place on earth, not excepting Jerusalem. It was from Rome, not from Jerusalem, that the Cross went out to the uttermost ends of the world. It is the earth of the Colosseum and the Borgo that is steeped in the blood of those who have died for Christ. It was Rome that ruled the world, through the long night of barbarism and feudal power, by the invincible force of His name.

It might seem strange that Isola should turn from the story of the Evangelists to the works of a poet whose human sympathies were so wrung by the evil that has been wrought in the name of the Cross that he was blind to the infinitely greater good which Christianity has accomplished for mankind. Shelley saw the blood of the martyrs, not as a sublime testimony to the Godlike power of faith, not as a sacrifice rich in after-fruits, sad seed of a joyous harvest—but as the brutal outcome of man’s cruelty, using any name, Christ, orBuddha, Mahomet, or Brahma—as the badge of tyranny, the sanction to torture and to slay.

Shelley’s melancholy fate seemed brought nearer to her now that she sat beside his grave, in the summer stillness, and in the shadow of the old Aurelian Wall. It was only his heart that was lying there, the imperishable heart, snatched by Trelawney’s hand from the flame of the Greek pyre, from the smoke of pine-logs and frankincense, wine and oil. Sixty years had passed before that hand lay cold in the grave beside the buried heart of the poet, sixty years of severance, and fond faithful memory, before death brought re-union.

What a beautiful spirit this, which was so early quenched by the cruelest stroke of Fate—a light such as seldom shone out of mortal clay, a spirit of fire and brightness, intangible, untamable, not to be shut within common limits, nor judged by common laws!

CHAPTER XXIII

“SEEK SHELTER IN THE SHADOW OF THE TOMB.”

Of the people who came to look upon the grave, some to lay a tributary flower upon the stone, and some to pluck a leaf or two of acanthus or violet, all hitherto had been strangers to Isola, had gone away without seeing her, or had glanced indifferently, as at one more unfortunate with a sketching-block, spoiling paper in the pursuit of the unattainable. There were so many amateur artists sitting about in the outskirts of the city, that such a figure in a romantic spot challenged nobody’s attention. So far people had come and gone, and had taken no notice; but one afternoon a figure in a long black cassock came suddenly between her and the golden light, and Isola looked up with a cry of surprise on recognizing Father Rodwell.

“You did not expect to see me here,” he said, holding out his hand.

She had risen from her seat on the low grassy bank, and she gave him her hand, half in pleasure, half in a nervous apprehension which his keen eye was quick to perceive. His life had been spent in dealings with the souls of men and women, and he had learnt to read those living pages as easily as he read Plato or Spinosa.

“No,” she said. “I had no idea you were in Rome. You told us you were going back to London.”

“I meant to go back to London and hard work, but my doctor insisted upon my prolonging my holiday for a few weeks, so I came here instead. Rome always draws me, and is always new. Rome gives me fresh life and fresh power when my heart and brain have been feeling benumbed and dead. I am glad they brought you here, Mrs. Disney. You were looking languid and ill when you left San Remo. I hope Rome has revivified you.”

He looked at her earnestly. Her face had been in shadow until now, but as she moved into the sunlight, he saw that the lines had sharpened in the pale, wan face, and that there was the stamp of wasting disease in the hollow cheeks, and about the sunken eyes, and in the almost bloodless lips. As he looked at her in friendliest commiseration those pathetic grey eyes—whose expression had baffled his power of interpretation hitherto—filled suddenly with tears, and in the next moment she clasped her hands before her face in an agony of grief.

The Italian Testament which she had been reading when he approached dropped at her feet, and stooping to pick it up Father Rodwell saw that it was open at the fourth chapter of St. John, the story of the woman of Samaria, the sinner with whom Christ talked at the well. A leaf from Shelley’s grave lay upon the book, as if to mark where Isola had been reading, and Father Rodwell’s quick glance saw that the page was blotted with tears.

“My dear Mrs. Disney,” he said gently, “is there anythingwrong at home? Your husband, your boy are well, I hope?”

“Yes, thank God, they are both well. God has been very good to me. He might have taken those I love. He has been merciful.”

“He is merciful to all His creatures; though there are times when His dealings with us seem very hard. Oh, Mrs. Disney, you can’t think how difficult a priest’s office is sometimes when he has to reconcile the afflicted with the Providence that has seen fit to lay some heavy burden on them. They cannot understand; they cannot say it is well. They cannot kiss the rod. But as you say, God has been good to you. Your lines have been set in pleasant places. You are hedged round and sheltered by love. I never saw greater affection in husband for wife than I have seen in your husband. I never saw sister more devoted to sister than your sister-in-law is to you.”

She had sunk again into a sitting position on the low bank at the foot of the wall. Her face was still hidden, and her sobs came faster as he spoke to her.

“Why should you grieve at the thought of their love? Is it because it may please God to take you from them in the morning of your life? If it is that dread which agitates you I entreat you to put it aside. There is nothing in your case that forbids hope, and hope will do much to help your recovery. You should tell yourself how valuable your life is to those who love you. The thought of their affection should give you courage to struggle against apathy and languor. Believe me, invalids have their condition a great deal more in their own power than they are inclined to believe. So much can be overcome where the spirit is strong and brave, where faith and hope fight against bodily weakness. You ought not to be sitting alone here in this saddening spot. It is lovely, but with the beauty of death. You ought to be driving out to Frascati or to Tivoli with your husband. You ought to be watching the carriages in the Pincian Gardens, or amusing yourself in one of the picture galleries.”

“I had rather be alone,” she said, wiping away her tears, and in some degree recovering her self-possession.

“That is a morbid fancy, and one that hinders your recovery.”

“I have no wish to recover. I only want to die.”

“My dear Mrs. Disney, it is your duty to fight against these melancholy moods. Can you be indifferent to your husband’s feelings? Have you not the mother’s natural desire to watch over your child’s early years, to see him reach manhood?”

“No, no, no!” she cried passionately. “I have had enough of life. They are dear to me, very dear. No wife ever loved and honoured her husband more than I love and honour mine—but it is all over, it is past, and ended. I am more than resigned to death—I am thankful that God has called me away.”

He watched her closely as she spoke, watched her with his hand upon hers, which was cold as ice. He had heard such words before from the early doomed, but they had been accompanied by religious exaltation; they had been the outpouring of a faith that saw the gates of heaven opened and the Son of man sitting in glory—of a love that longed to be with God. Here there was no sign of hope or exaltation. There were only the tokens of despair.

He remembered how agitated he had seen her many times in the little church at San Remo, and how, although hanging eagerly upon his preaching, she had persistently avoided anything like serious conversation with him upon the few occasions when he had found himself alone with her.

He had her Testament still in his hand, and looking down at the tear-stained page it seemed to him that there lay the clue to her melancholy.

“You have been reading the story of the woman of Samaria,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And you have read that other story of her who knelt inthe dust at her Saviour’s feet, and to whom He said, ‘Neither do I condemn thee.’”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything in either of those stories to sadden you more than the thought of sin and sorrow saddens all of us?”

She looked at him shrinkingly, pale as death, as if he had a dagger in his hand ready to strike her.

“No, I don’t suppose there is anything that goes home to my heart any more than to other hearts,” she said, after a pause, trying to speak carelessly. “We are all sinners. The Gospel teaches us that in every line! We are none of us altogether worthy—not even my husband, I suppose, although to me he seems a perfect Christian.”

“I can believe that he is a Christian, Mrs. Disney, and a man of strong convictions. If he had wronged anybody, I do not think he would rest till he had atoned for that wrong.”

“I am sure he would not. He would do his uttermost to atone. And so would I—although I do not pretend to be half so good a Christian as he is. I would do all in my power to atone for any wrong I had done to one I loved.”

“As you love your husband, for instance.”

“Yes, as I love him. He is first in the world for me. Dear as my child is, Martin must always be first.”

“And you would not for the world do him any wrong?” pursued the priest, more and more earnest as he went on, pale with emotion, his whole power of observation concentrated upon the whitening face and lowered eyelids of the woman sitting at his feet.

“Not for the world, not for my life,” she said, with her hands tightly clasped, her eyes still hidden under the heavy lids, tearless now—and with dry and quivering lips, from which the words came with a dull and soulless sound. “I would die to save him an hour’s pain. I would fling away this wretched life rather than grieve him for a moment.”

“Poor soul!” murmured the priest, pitying that debt of self-abasement which he understood so well, under whatsoever guise she might hide her contrition. “Poor soul, you talk too lightly of that great mystery which we should all face in a spirit of deep humility. Do you feel that you can contemplate that passage through death to a new life without fear of the issue? Have you no reckoning to make with the God who pardons repentant sinners? Do you stand before Him with a clear conscience—having kept nothing back—cherished no hidden sin?”

“No one can be without sin in His sight. Do you suppose that I am sinless, or that I have ever believed myself sinless? I know how weak and poor a thing I am—a worm in the sight of Him who rules the universe. But if—if He cares for such as I, He knows that I am sorry for every sinful thought and every sinful act of my life.”

She spoke in short sentences, each phrase broken by a sob. She felt as if he were tearing out her heart, this man who had been heretofore so kindly and indulgent in his speech and manner that he seemed to make religion an easy thing, a garment as loose and expansive as philosophy itself. And, now, all at once he appeared before her as a judge, searching out her heart, cruel, inflexible, weighing her in the balance, and finding her wanting.

“If I am sorry,” she murmured, between her sobs, “what more can God or man require of me?”

“Nothing, if your sorrow is that true sorrow which means repentance, and goes hand-in-hand with atonement. Forgive me, my dear friend, for presuming to speak unreservedly to you. If I try to find out the nature of your wound it is only that I may help you to heal it. Ever since I have known you I have seen the tokens of a wounded heart, a bruised and broken spirit. I saw you surrounded with all the blessings that make woman’s lot happy. It was hardly possible to conceive fairer surroundings and truer friends. Can you wonder, then, if my compassionate interest was awakened by the indications of a deep-rooted sorrow for which there wasno apparent cause? I saw your emotion in church, saw how quickly your heart and mind responded to the appeal of religion—saw in you a soul attuned to heavenly things, and day by day my interest in you and yours grew stronger. The hope of seeing you again, of helping you to bear your burden, of ultimately lightening it, was one of my reasons for coming to Rome. I felt somehow that you and I had not met in vain—that my power to move you was not without a meaning in both our lives; that if, as I thought, you needed spiritual help and comfort, it was my vocation to help and comfort you. And so I came to Rome, and so I found out where you spent your quiet hours, and so I have followed you here this afternoon. Tell me, Mrs. Disney, did I presume too much? Was it the preacher’s vanity or the priest’s intuition that spoke?”

“It was intuition,” she said. “You saw that I had sinned. None but a sinner could shed such tears—could so feel the terror of God’s wrath.”

“It is of His love I want you to think. Of His immeasurable love and pity. Of His Son’s Divine compassion. If you have any special need of His pardon; if there is any sinful secret locked in your heart; do not let the golden hours go by—the time meet for repentance.”

“I have repented,” she cried piteously. “My life has been one long repentance ever since my sin.”

“And your husband—he who so fondly loves you—he knows all, and has forgiven all?”

“Knows!” The word broke from her lips almost in a shriek of horror. “He knows nothing—he must never know. He would despise me, leave me to die alone, while he went far away from me, to the very end of the world. He would take his son with him. I should be left alone—alone to face death—the most desolate creature God ever looked upon. Oh, Father Rodwell, why have you wrung my secret from me?” she cried, grovelling on her knees in the long grass beside him, clinging to his hand as he bent over her, gravely compassionate, deeply moved by her distress. “How cruelto question—to torture me—how cruel to use your power of reading guilty hearts. You will tell my husband, who so loves and trusts me. You will tell him what a guilty wretch I am.”

“Tell him, Mrs. Disney! Can you forget that I am a priest—for whom the sinner’s confession is sacred? Do you think I have never talked with the tempted and the sorrowing before to-day? Do you think that grief such as yours can be an unknown experience to a man who has worked in a crowded London parish for nearly twenty years? I wanted to know the worst, so that I might be able to advise and to console you. If I have questioned you to-day, it has been as a priest has the right to question; and this place where you and I have met to-day is in my sight as sacred as the confessional. You need have no fear that I shall tell your husband the secret of your sorrow. All I will do is to help you to find strength to tell him yourself.”

“Oh no, no, no!” she cried piteously. “Never! never! I can die, I am prepared to die; but I can never tell him—I cannot, I dare not.”

“Yet you could dare to die with a lie upon your lips—you who are ready to meet your Judge—you whose whole life is a lie—you who have cheated and betrayed the best of men. Oh, Mrs. Disney, reflect what this thing is which you are doing; reflect what kind of sin it is you are committing. If, as your own sorrowing words acknowledge, you have been a false wife—a false wife to the best and truest of husbands, can you dare to act out that falsehood to the last, to die with that guilty secret locked in your heart, from him who has a right to know,—and who alone upon earth has a right to pardon.”

“Oh, how cruel you are!” she said, lifting up her streaming eyes to his earnest, inflexible face. “Is it a Christian’s part to be so cruel, to break the bruised reed, to crush anything so weak and wretched as I am? Is not repentance enough? I have spent long nights in penitence and tears, long days in dull aching remorse. I would have given allmy future life to atone for one dreadful hour—one unpremeditated yielding to temptation. Ihavegiven my life—for my secret has killed me. What more can man or God demand of me? What more can I do to win forgiveness?”

“Only this—tell your husband the truth—however painful, however humiliating the confession. That will be your best atonement. That is the sacrifice which will help to reconcile you with your God. You cannot hope for God’s love and pardon hereafter, if you live and die as a hypocrite here. God’s saints were some of them steeped in the darkness of guilt before they became the children of light—but there was not one of them who shrank from the confession of his sins.”

“You are a man,” sobbed Isola. “You do not know what it is for a woman to confess that she is unworthy of her husband’s love. You do not know. It is not possible for a man to know the meaning of shame.”

“You are wrong there,” he said, gently lifting her from the ground, and placing her beside him on the bank. “What chastity is to a woman, honour is to a man. Men have had to stand up before their fellow-men and acknowledge their violation of man’s code of honour; knowing that such acknowledgment made them dirt, and very dirt, in the sight of honourable men. You, as a woman, know not how deep men’s scorn cuts a man who has sinned against the law which governs gentlemen. A woman thinks there is no such sting as the sting of her shame. Men know better. Yes, I know that it will be most bitter, more bitter than death—for you to tell Colonel Disney that you are not what you have seemed to him; but apart from all considerations of duty, do not his love and devotion deserve the sacrifice of self-love on your part? Can you bear yourself to the last, as a virtuous wife—enjoying his respect—knowing that it is undeserved——”

“I will tell him—at the last,” she faltered. “In that parting hour I shall not shrink from telling him all—how I sinned against him—almost unawares—drifting half unconsciouslyinto a fatal entanglement—and then—and then—against my will—in my weakness and helplessness—alone in the power of the man I loved—betrayed into sin. Oh God! why do you make me remember?” she cried wildly, turning upon the priest in passionate reproachfulness. “For years I have been trying to forget—trying to blank out the past—praying, praying, praying that my humble, tearful love for my husband and my child might cancel those hours of sin. And you come to me, and question me, and on pretence of saving my soul, you force me to look back upon that bygone horror—to live again through that time of madness—the destruction of my life. Cruel, cruel, cruel!”

“Forgive me!” said Father Rodwell, very gently, seeing that she was struggling with hysteria. “I have been too hard, perhaps, too eager to convince you of the right! There are some men, even of my sacred calling, who would judge your case otherwise—who would say the husband is happy in his ignorance; the wife has repented of her sin.Non quieta movere.But it is not in my nature to choose the easy pathways; and it may be that I am too severe a teacher. We will not talk any more about serious things to-day. Only believe that I am your friend—your sincere and devoted friend. If I have spoken hard things, be assured I would have spoken in the same spirit had you been my own sister. Let us say no more yet awhile—and perhaps when you have thought over our interview to-day you will come to see things almost as I see them. I won’t press the matter. I will leave your own heart and conscience to plead with you. And now may I walk home with you, before the beauty of the afternoon begins to fade?”

“The vetturino will be waiting for me at the gate,” Isola answered, with a dull, dead voice, rising languidly, and adjusting the loosened hair about her forehead with tremulous fingers.

She had thrown off her hat a little while before, and now she took it up, and straightened the loops of ribbon with a nervous touch here and there, and then put the hat on again,and arranged the gossamer veil, which she hoped might hide her swollen eyelids and tear-stained cheeks.

“If Martin should come to meet me, what will he think? she said piteously.

“Let me go with you, and I may be able to distract his attention—if you don’t want him to see that you have been crying.”

“No, no. He must not see. He would wonder, and question me—and guess, perhaps—as you did just now. How was it you knew—what made you guess?” she asked, with a sense of rebellion against this man who had pierced the veil behind which she had been hiding herself so long.

“I saw your sorrow; and I knew that there could scarcely be so deep a sorrow if there were no memory of sin. Will you take my arm down this steep path?”

“No, thank you. I know every step. I could walk about this place in my sleep. You have been cruel to me, Father Rodwell, very cruel. Promise me one thing by way of atonement for your cruelty. Promise me that if I die in Rome I shall be buried in this place, and as near Shelley’s grave as they can find room to lay me.”

“I promise. Yes, it is a sweet spot, is it not? It was down yonder in the old burial-ground that Shelley looked upon the grave of Keats, and said it was a spot to make one in love with death. But I would not have you think yourself doomed to an early death, Mrs. Disney. Have you never read in the ‘Lives of the Saints’ how some who were on the point of death have revived at the touch of the holy oil, and have lived and have renewed their strength, and re-entered the world to lead a holier and nobler life than they had led before? Who knows if you were to confess your sin, and patiently suffer whatever penance you were called upon to bear, new vistas might not open for you? There is more than one way of being happy in this world. If you could never again know the sweetness of a domestic life—as trusted wife and happy mother—there are other and wider lives inwhich you would count your children and your sisters by hundreds. There are sisterhoods in which your future might be full of usefulness and full of peace. Or if you had no vocation for that wider life, it might be that touched by your helplessness in the past, and your remorse in the present, your husband might find it in his heart to forgive that bygone sin, and still to cherish, and still to hold you dear.”

“No, no,” she cried impatiently. “I would not live for an hour after he knew. I know what he would do. He has told me. He would leave me—at once, and for ever. I should never see his face again. I should be dead to him, by a worse death than the grave; for he would only think of me to shudder at my name. Oh, Father Rodwell, Christianity must be a cruel creed if it can demand such a sacrifice from me. What good can come of his knowing the truth? Only agony to him and shame and despair to me. Can that be good?”

“Truth is life, and falsehood is death,” answered the priest, firmly. “You must choose your own course, Mrs. Disney; but there is one argument I may urge as a man of the world rather than as a priest. Nothing is ever hidden for very long in this life. There is no secret so closely kept that some one has not an inkling of it. Better your husband should hear the truth from you, in humble self-accusation, than that he should learn it later—perhaps after he has mourned you for years—from a stranger’s lips.”

“Oh, that would be horrible—too horrible. But I will confess to him; I will tell him everything—on my deathbed. Yes, when life is ebbing, when the end is close, I will tell him. He shall know what a false and perjured creature I am. I swore to him—swore before God that I was true and faithful—that I loved him and no other. And it was true, absolute truth, when I took that oath. My sin was a thing of the past. I had loved another, and I had let my love lead me into sin. And then my husband asked me ifI had been true and pure always; always. ‘Is that true, Isola? I call upon God to hear your answer,’ he said. And I answered yes, it was true. I lied before God rather than lose my husband’s love; and God heard me, and the blight of His anger has been upon me ever since, withering and consuming me.”

They went down the steep pathway, Father Rodwell first, Isola following, between the crowded graves, the azaleas and camelias, veronica and guelder rose, lilac and magnolia, and on either hand a wilderness of roses, red and white.

The shadows of the cypresses closed over them in that deep alley, and the twilight gloom might seem symbolic of the passage through death to life; for beyond the gates, and through a gap in the cypress screen, the level landscape and the city domes and bell-towers were shining in the yellow light of afternoon.

CHAPTER XXIV.

“OH, OLD THOUGHTS THEY CLING, THEY CLING!”

Colonel Disney and Allegra were both pleased to welcome Father Rodwell to their home in the great city; pleased to find that his own rooms were close by in the Via Babuino, and that he was likely to be their neighbour for some weeks. His familiarity with all that was worth seeing in the city and its surroundings made him a valuable companion for people whose only knowledge had been gathered laboriously from books. Father Rodwell knew every picture and every statue in the churches and galleries. There was not a building in Christian or Pagan Rome which had not its history and its associations for the man who had chosen the city as the holiday ground of his busy life long before he left the university, and who had returned again and again,year after year, to tread the familiar paths and ponder over the old records. He had seen many of those monuments of Republic and Empire emerge from the heaped-up earth of ages; had seen hills cut down, and valleys laid bare; some picturesque spots made less picturesque; other places redeemed from ruin. He had seen the squalor and the romance of Mediæval Rome vanish before the march of improvement; and he had seen the triumph of the commonplace and the utilitarian in many a scene where the melancholy beauty of neglect and decay had once been dear to him.

With such a guide it was delightful to loiter amidst the Palace of the Cæsars, or tread the quiet lanes and by-paths of the Aventine, that historic hill from whose venerable church the bearers of Christ’s message of peace and love set out for savage Britain. Allegra was delighted to wander about the city with such a companion, lingering long before every famous picture, finding out altar-pieces and frescoes which no guide-book would have helped her to discover; sometimes disputing Father Rodwell’s judgment upon the artistic value of a picture; sometimes agreeing with him—always bright, animated, and intelligent.

Isola joined in these explorations as far as her strength would allow. She was deeply interested in the churches, and in the stories of priest and pope, saint and martyr, which Father Rodwell had to tell of every shrine and tomb, whose splendour might otherwise have seemed colourless and cold. There was a growing enthusiasm in the attention with which she listened to every record of that wonder-working Church which created Christian Rome in all its pomp and dignity of architecture, and all its glory of art. The splendour of those mighty basilicas filled her with an awful sense of the majesty of that religion which had been founded yonder in darkness and in chains, in Paul’s subterranean prison—yonder in tears where Paul and Peter spoke the solemn words of parting—yonder in blood on the dreary road to Ostia, where the headsman’s axe quenchedthe greatest light that had shone upon earth since the sacrifice of Calvary.

Isola went about looking at those things like a creature in a dream. These stupendous tabernacles impressed her with an almost insupportable sense of their magnitude. And with that awestricken sense of power in the Christian Church there was interwoven the humiliating consciousness of her own unworthiness; a consciousness sharpened and intensified by every word that Father Rodwell had spoken in that agonizing hour of her involuntary confession.

He was so kind to her, so gentle, so courteous in every word and act, that she wondered sometimes whether he had forgotten that miserable revelation; whether he had forgotten that she was one of the lost ones of this earth, a woman who had forfeited woman’s first claim to man’s esteem. Sometimes she found herself lifting her eyes to his face in an unpremeditated prayer for pity, as they stood before some exquisite shrine of the Madonna, and the ineffable purity in the sculptured face looking down at her struck like a sharp sword into her heart. That mute appeal of Isola’s seemed to ask, “Has the Mother of Christ any pity for such a sinner as I?”

Colonel Disney was full of thoughtfulness for his wife in all their going to and fro; and before their day’s rambles were half done he would drive her to any quiet spot where she might choose to spend a restful hour in the afternoon sunshine—in this or that convent garden, in some shaded corner on the Aventine, or among the wild flowers that flourish and grow rank amidst the ruins of palace and temple on the Palatine. Her favourite resort was still the English cemetery, and she always begged to be set down within reach of that familiar gate, where the custodian knew her as well as if she had been some restless spirit whose body lay under one of those marble urns, and whose ghost passed in and out of the gate every day.

It was in vain that her husband or her sister offered to beher companion in these restful hours. She always made the same reply.

“I am better alone,” she would say. “It does me good to be alone. I don’t like being alone indoors—I get low-spirited and nervous—but I like to sit among the flowers, and to watch the lizards darting in and out among the graves. I am never dull there. I take a book with me; but I don’t read much. I could sit there for hours in a summer dream.”

Martin Disney made a point of giving way to her will in all small things. She might be capricious, she might have morbid fancies. That was no business of his. It was his part to indulge her every whim, and to make her in love with life. All that he asked of Heaven was to spin out that attenuated thread. All that he desired was to hold her and keep her for his own against Death himself.

TheVendettawas at Civita Vecchia, from which port her skipper frequently bore down upon Rome, distracting Allegra from her critical studies in the picture-galleries, and from her work in her own studio, a light, airy room on the fourth floor, with a window looking over the Pincian Gardens. Captain Hulbert was a little inclined to resent Father Rodwell’s frequent presence in the family circle, and his too accomplished guidance in the galleries. It was provoking to hear a man talk, with an almost Ruskinesque enthusiasm and critical appreciation, of pictures which made so faint an appeal to the seaman. Here and there John Hulbert could see the beauty and merit of a painting, and was really touched by the influence of supreme art; but of technical qualities he knew nothing, and could hardly distinguish one master from another, was as likely as not to take Titian for Veronese, or Tintoret for Titian.

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