Chapter Four.The misery, want, and degradation of Rome have this advantage over that of other cities, that they are lodged almost sumptuously in what should have been palaces. Those huge and hideous blocks of building which rear themselves in what are called the new quarters are no tumble-down age-stricken rabbit-warrens; they have marble staircases, airy rooms, balconies, ornamental ironwork, lofty doorways. Built for riches, they have never represented anything beyond rags, dirt, loathsome crowding, and, for their owners, bankruptcy; but they are better than dark cellars and fetid streets; and air, light, and sun, at least, visit their inhabitants. Moreover, blots as they are upon the old beauty of Rome, it is noticeable already from distant points, such as the front of Sant’ Onofrio, or farther along the Janiculum drive, where form is scarcely to be distinguished, that in colour, at least, they begin to harmonise better with their surroundings, and that the sun, the great alchemist of the South, is turning raw whites and greys into tawny gold and amber, and that soft indescribable tone which is at once the joy and the despair of the painter.Seen more closely, however, their aggressive ugliness is appalling, and Teresa, as she walked along certain streets which lay below the ascent to San Pietro in Montorio, glanced at the overgrown blocks with extreme distaste. She could see something of the emptiness and dirt of the houses, the strings of ragged clothes fluttering from balconies, the evil-looking old hags stretching out skinny hands and muttering curses on her as she passed, the children with pinched and hungry faces, bare-footed, scantily clothed, with touzled hair and a smile which belongs to Italy, and Italy only. “Un soldo, signorina, un soldo! Ho fame!” Heaven help them; it was probably true; but Teresa, though she had soup tickets in her pocket, dared not give them yet, because she knew the word would pass from street to street, and that when she reappeared she would be surrounded, almost torn to pieces, by struggling claimants.She found the number she was looking for, and picked her way up a broad staircase thick with accumulations of dirt. A ragged boy guided her to a door, at which she knocked. Another boy opened it, small, sickly, and lame. The two children stared at Donna Teresa, and she looked into the room with interest. It was fairly clean, miserably bare, and empty as to the man she wanted. In answer to her question, the lame boy shook his head. Cesare was his brother, he was out, he did not know when he would return. Teresa was unconsciously annoyed by a whine in his voice of the same kind as that which she had just passed through. She sent away the first boy, who peeped and listened from round a corner, and asked questions, getting, oddly enough, exactly the answers she expected. Cesare was long absent. Angelino, his brother, was often hungry—oh, often, and his back hurt him, but, certainly, that often, too. With easiest flexibility of conscience he was prepared to admit all suggested evils and to invent any others which might affect this signora in a benevolent direction, so soon as he caught a hint of what would best serve his purpose. Teresa was shrewd enough at last to find this out, and it changed her plan. Without giving a name she told the cripple that she would write to his brother, presented him with a lira for his own amusement, and fled. On her way home she reflected, with the result that in the evening a letter went to Cesare Bandinelli, enclosing five hundred lire and a few words: “Will you remember that I owe you a reparation, and accept this for Angelo.—T. di Sant’ E.”She drew a sigh of relief when it was out of the house.The next day was yet early when Nina, dumb but expressive, brought her a packet, which she recognised with a sinking heart. The money and her own letter were crammed into an envelope, as if thrust there by trembling and furious fingers. Not a word came with them, and Teresa’s face tingled as if she had been struck. After she had thought about it all day, she felt there was nothing to do except to accept defeat and to tell Wilbraham, hating the telling as we hate to repeat an insult, but forcing herself, under the impression that the incident counted better for Cesare than for herself.“I ought not to have done it,” she owned.“No, you ought not,” assented Wilbraham coldly. “He’s an ungrateful hound.”Teresa fired.“I can’t see where ingratitude comes in! Do you expect him to be grateful for my mistake?”“How was he the worse for it?”“How? Hasn’t he suffered?”“Suffered! A night in a police cell!” said Wilbraham with a smile, which she thought insufferable. “My dear Donna Teresa, he has probably made acquaintance with such quarters before—or, at any rate, I will engage to find you fifty men who, for a hundredth part of what you offer, would occupy them with all the goodwill in the world.”It is the truth in our opponent’s arguments which we find annoying. Teresa knew that Wilbraham spoke like a man of experience, and was angry. She flung up her head.“You seem to forget that I said the money had been returned. Perhaps you will find fifty men to do that?”“It would require sifting of my scoundrels,” laughed Wilbraham. “I grant you that only the cleverest would remain.” He sat forward, and began to drive in his truths. “Don’t you see that the fellow is shrewd enough to read your thoughts and trade upon them?”The air in the room had grown heated. Mrs Brodrick’s eyes rested anxiously for an instant upon the young marchesa’s displeased face. Teresa did not speak. Wilbraham went on—“You may be sure he hopes to get more out of you than even your prodigal five hundred lire. He proposes to work upon your—what shall I call it?—sensitiveness.”Teresa was sitting upright, and her eyes were very bright.“Is that the best you have yet found in human nature?” she said quietly.“It is what I have most often found,” returned Wilbraham with a little surprise.She glanced at him so strangely that he felt an odd desire to excuse himself, almost a new sensation, but before he could speak, Sylvia broke in with the appealing timidity which he recognised as a pleasant contrast to her sister’s impetuosity.“I am sure you have done everything you could think of, Teresa, and so has Mr Wilbraham. I daresay it will all come right by-and-by, when Cesare understands that it was only a mistake. Everybody makes mistakes now and then, of course.”It was these platitudes, announced as discoveries, which were apt to irritate Mrs Brodrick. But she owned that occasionally they had their uses. Wilbraham now turned to Sylvia with an air of interest, while Teresa’s face softened.“Come,” she cried more gaily, “let us talk of something else. Talk of to-morrow. Thank goodness, that must always be a new subject. What shall we do, good people? Shall we drive to Ostia?”Sylvia opened her eyes. She was opening her mouth as well, when her grandmother spoke.“If you do, I think I’ll go with you.”“That settles it,” said Teresa happily. She had recovered herself so completely that even Mrs Brodrick wondered at the swift change, especially when she turned kindly to Wilbraham. “You’ll come, too, won’t you? I’ll undertake to keep off dangerous subjects, and then I shan’t be cross.”“I’ll come if I may.”His tone was still a little stiff, and Teresa, glancing at him, saw that he was looking at Sylvia.Except for the Tiber—and that can often be as grim as its history—the road to Ostia begins wearyingly. Farther on it grows rapidly in interest, till, when you reach Ostia itself, you think no more about beauty or interest, or your own passing sensations—it is too great. Sad, even in clearest sunshine, with rifled temples, ruined splendour, and the melancholy of its deserted gods, the sombre weight of centuries broods over it. The Tiber—no mere river here, but the symbol of a lost empire—swirls sullenly by, and as the sun sets and Vulcan’s shrine crimsons in its glow, fever creeps shivering from misty pools and clutches its victims. Those who go to Ostia should not linger too long.But this day, on which Teresa brought her there, the sadness was but delicately suggestive and not oppressive. The air was warm, yet fresh and invigorating, and Teresa herself was in high spirits.“Come,” she cried breathlessly, when she had climbed a steep bank, and stood looking out at the Tiber, now faintly yellow and grey, “come, Sylvia, and let us be foolish by ourselves.”“Foolish!” repeated Sylvia startled.Mrs Brodrick, had she been near enough, would have smiled, but Teresa nodded gaily.“As foolish as we like. Mr Wilbraham can look after granny and improve her, while we enjoy our ignorance. It’s much better fun to imagine things than to know them. Let us run down there to begin with, and peep behind those columns. Who knows what might not be hiding there! Come, Sylvia!”And she held out her hand.But the girl looked round her doubtfully. She did not like foolishness when she heard of it, and her sister’s imagination was apt to make her uncomfortable. Slow doubt crept into her voice.“If you like—if you’re sure it’s safe.” She added more quickly, “It’s so very lonely there, isn’t it?”Teresa instantly yielded.“Let us sit where we are then. Nothing can be more charming,” she went on, dropping on the short turf and clasping her knees, while Sylvia took elaborate precautions against the damp she dreaded. “Oh, Sylvia!” sighed Teresa, “to think that I should really be sitting here and talking to you, after that life!”“At Florence, do you mean? I suppose the old marchesa was very unkind, for you to have disliked it so much?”The other did not answer at once.“Unkind? Well, no, she did not mean to be unkind. Do you know, I believe you would have got on very well with her. I’m sometimes so dreadfully difficult! But we won’t talk about Florence. We are here, here, at Ostia, you, and granny, and I!”“And Mr Wilbraham,” put in Sylvia conscientiously.“Yes, Mr Wilbraham. You mustn’t remind me of him when he is off our hands.” And Teresa shot a small grimace in his direction. “Let us talk of something nice. What shall we do with all our money? I shall get a dog. What will you have?”“Do you really mean I can choose something?”“Oh, silly! Of course you may. What’s the good of it otherwise?”“A new hat—”“Hat, frock, umbrella. Oh, you do want a new umbrella, Sylvia! Yours is in holes. We’ll make a list. Have you got a watch?”“No,” said Sylvia, in amazement.Her mouth remained open, while Teresa dragged out a card and jotted down thing after thing.“We must find out the best watchmaker,” she said thoughtfully. “We must ask.”“Mr Wilbraham,” suggested Sylvia.“Mr Wilbraham! He doesn’t know everything.”“Oh, no, I didn’t mean that he did.” Sylvia was often prosaically explanatory, desiring what thoughts she had to be distinctly outlined. “I meant that he was a man, and heard of things more than we could; granny said so.”“Well, if it satisfies you, we’ll ask him. He will be so pleased!”“Why?”“Why?” The young marchesa laughed. “He likes to stand on a pedestal, that’s why, my child.” Seeing Sylvia’s puzzled face she dropped the subject. “Let us go on. The last thing was a watch. Now, what next? Ivory brushes?”“Teresa! Don’t get me anything more.”“Then we’ll take the other side of the paper for granny. I’m afraid she’s going to be disappointing,” said Teresa gloomily. “I intend to order a carriage by the month, of course, but when I ask her about other things she doesn’t seem to care. She says habits are nicer than anything else when you’re old. She likes to be frugal, because she’s had to be all her life.”“She loves books about Rome,” hazarded the younger girl.“Oh, so she does! She shall have them, she shall have them all,” said the marchesa with a fine spread of imagination. “How clever of you! Now the next thing is to find out about them.”“Mr Wilbraham would know,” said Sylvia, and Teresa, turning upon her with an impatient laugh, was struck suddenly dumb by catching a wistful glance flung towards the spot a little way off where Wilbraham stood patiently pointing out the intricacies of a ruined columned court. It seemed to her as if, in the shock of the surprise, her heart stopped beating. Most women have intuitions which are not unlike another sense, for they are as sure and as inexplicable; and hers swept the past days and took in the result in an instant. She had not thought of Sylvia marrying, because of that intangible want, of which she was conscious herself, while she resented the consciousness in Mrs Brodrick. Yet, after all, what was it? Sylvia was not quite clever—might sometimes be thought a little tiresome. A man might condone all that for a look in her face.“Shall we go back to the others?” she said hesitatingly.“Oh, yes!” cried the girl, springing up.The marchesa, suddenly observant, began to think there was no doubt as to Sylvia’s feelings. But what of his?“I must find out,” she said to herself gravely.Her grandmother greeted them with a smile.“We were coming,” she said, “but I have been reading my book, and you have skipped all the improving pages.”“Do you mean Murray?” asked Sylvia innocently.“Sylvia knows that my grandmother and her Murray are inseparable,” hastily interposed Teresa. She need not have minded. Wilbraham was looking at the girl with a pleased satisfaction. He thought that women were much alike, except that some were prettier than others. Mrs Brodrick laughed, and did not resent her granddaughter’s explanation, but her eyes were grave and looked as if she, too, were observing. Teresa saw this, and saw that another had hit upon her discovery. She was very swift in carrying out her impulses, and she made up her mind that if Sylvia really liked this man her part must be to smooth matters for her happiness. The thought she flung at Wilbraham was tinged with a slight wonder, but his action was his own affair. She would do what seemed best for her sister.“You are right, granny,” she said, “we have wasted our time disgracefully. It was my fault. Sylvia wanted to come and be informed. So now!”“Now we will have our food. All that I have heard has made me hungry.” She spoke lightly, but her old eyes were still grave, and Teresa could see that what had come to them both was troubling her grandmother. The consciousness of this roused a reckless spirit in herself. Wilbraham, who was not a keen-witted man where women were concerned, knew nothing more than that this luncheon of theirs, taken on a grassy hillock with the river close beneath the bank, and red ruins lying in sunlight, was pleasanter than anything he had experienced of late. He connected it with Sylvia, who sat beside him, and chirruped cheerful truisms. Mrs Brodrick, who knew better, watched Teresa.They strolled about afterwards, and went back through the ruins to fetch a young guide, who came out to them pale with ague. Teresa contrived that Wilbraham and Sylvia should be much together, but never alone. She fastened all her attention upon her sister, many times interposing with some guiding remark, only to slip again easily out of the conversation. They went into the little temple of Mithras, which interested Wilbraham immensely.“Sylvia never heard of Mithras,” reflected Teresa uneasily, and, while the younger girl opened an inquiring mouth, struck in with an intentionally ignorant question. Wilbraham answered, and Sylvia drank in his words without in the least understanding them. But Wilbraham was one of those men with whom attention is prized beyond intelligence, or perhaps supposed to represent the same quality.Then they talked of the leading impression which touches us in such places as Ostia, where a far past reigns.“Sylvia and I are vague,” said Teresa boldly.“Isn’t it a wonder that man should so quickly go, and his works so long outlive him?” asked Wilbraham.“Isn’t it a conviction that that is impossible?” put in Mrs Brodrick.“Perhaps,” said Wilbraham gravely, and glancing at Sylvia. He was not a very religious man himself, but he would wish his wife to be religious. And then he hastily put aside the thought as ridiculous.
The misery, want, and degradation of Rome have this advantage over that of other cities, that they are lodged almost sumptuously in what should have been palaces. Those huge and hideous blocks of building which rear themselves in what are called the new quarters are no tumble-down age-stricken rabbit-warrens; they have marble staircases, airy rooms, balconies, ornamental ironwork, lofty doorways. Built for riches, they have never represented anything beyond rags, dirt, loathsome crowding, and, for their owners, bankruptcy; but they are better than dark cellars and fetid streets; and air, light, and sun, at least, visit their inhabitants. Moreover, blots as they are upon the old beauty of Rome, it is noticeable already from distant points, such as the front of Sant’ Onofrio, or farther along the Janiculum drive, where form is scarcely to be distinguished, that in colour, at least, they begin to harmonise better with their surroundings, and that the sun, the great alchemist of the South, is turning raw whites and greys into tawny gold and amber, and that soft indescribable tone which is at once the joy and the despair of the painter.
Seen more closely, however, their aggressive ugliness is appalling, and Teresa, as she walked along certain streets which lay below the ascent to San Pietro in Montorio, glanced at the overgrown blocks with extreme distaste. She could see something of the emptiness and dirt of the houses, the strings of ragged clothes fluttering from balconies, the evil-looking old hags stretching out skinny hands and muttering curses on her as she passed, the children with pinched and hungry faces, bare-footed, scantily clothed, with touzled hair and a smile which belongs to Italy, and Italy only. “Un soldo, signorina, un soldo! Ho fame!” Heaven help them; it was probably true; but Teresa, though she had soup tickets in her pocket, dared not give them yet, because she knew the word would pass from street to street, and that when she reappeared she would be surrounded, almost torn to pieces, by struggling claimants.
She found the number she was looking for, and picked her way up a broad staircase thick with accumulations of dirt. A ragged boy guided her to a door, at which she knocked. Another boy opened it, small, sickly, and lame. The two children stared at Donna Teresa, and she looked into the room with interest. It was fairly clean, miserably bare, and empty as to the man she wanted. In answer to her question, the lame boy shook his head. Cesare was his brother, he was out, he did not know when he would return. Teresa was unconsciously annoyed by a whine in his voice of the same kind as that which she had just passed through. She sent away the first boy, who peeped and listened from round a corner, and asked questions, getting, oddly enough, exactly the answers she expected. Cesare was long absent. Angelino, his brother, was often hungry—oh, often, and his back hurt him, but, certainly, that often, too. With easiest flexibility of conscience he was prepared to admit all suggested evils and to invent any others which might affect this signora in a benevolent direction, so soon as he caught a hint of what would best serve his purpose. Teresa was shrewd enough at last to find this out, and it changed her plan. Without giving a name she told the cripple that she would write to his brother, presented him with a lira for his own amusement, and fled. On her way home she reflected, with the result that in the evening a letter went to Cesare Bandinelli, enclosing five hundred lire and a few words: “Will you remember that I owe you a reparation, and accept this for Angelo.—T. di Sant’ E.”
She drew a sigh of relief when it was out of the house.
The next day was yet early when Nina, dumb but expressive, brought her a packet, which she recognised with a sinking heart. The money and her own letter were crammed into an envelope, as if thrust there by trembling and furious fingers. Not a word came with them, and Teresa’s face tingled as if she had been struck. After she had thought about it all day, she felt there was nothing to do except to accept defeat and to tell Wilbraham, hating the telling as we hate to repeat an insult, but forcing herself, under the impression that the incident counted better for Cesare than for herself.
“I ought not to have done it,” she owned.
“No, you ought not,” assented Wilbraham coldly. “He’s an ungrateful hound.”
Teresa fired.
“I can’t see where ingratitude comes in! Do you expect him to be grateful for my mistake?”
“How was he the worse for it?”
“How? Hasn’t he suffered?”
“Suffered! A night in a police cell!” said Wilbraham with a smile, which she thought insufferable. “My dear Donna Teresa, he has probably made acquaintance with such quarters before—or, at any rate, I will engage to find you fifty men who, for a hundredth part of what you offer, would occupy them with all the goodwill in the world.”
It is the truth in our opponent’s arguments which we find annoying. Teresa knew that Wilbraham spoke like a man of experience, and was angry. She flung up her head.
“You seem to forget that I said the money had been returned. Perhaps you will find fifty men to do that?”
“It would require sifting of my scoundrels,” laughed Wilbraham. “I grant you that only the cleverest would remain.” He sat forward, and began to drive in his truths. “Don’t you see that the fellow is shrewd enough to read your thoughts and trade upon them?”
The air in the room had grown heated. Mrs Brodrick’s eyes rested anxiously for an instant upon the young marchesa’s displeased face. Teresa did not speak. Wilbraham went on—
“You may be sure he hopes to get more out of you than even your prodigal five hundred lire. He proposes to work upon your—what shall I call it?—sensitiveness.”
Teresa was sitting upright, and her eyes were very bright.
“Is that the best you have yet found in human nature?” she said quietly.
“It is what I have most often found,” returned Wilbraham with a little surprise.
She glanced at him so strangely that he felt an odd desire to excuse himself, almost a new sensation, but before he could speak, Sylvia broke in with the appealing timidity which he recognised as a pleasant contrast to her sister’s impetuosity.
“I am sure you have done everything you could think of, Teresa, and so has Mr Wilbraham. I daresay it will all come right by-and-by, when Cesare understands that it was only a mistake. Everybody makes mistakes now and then, of course.”
It was these platitudes, announced as discoveries, which were apt to irritate Mrs Brodrick. But she owned that occasionally they had their uses. Wilbraham now turned to Sylvia with an air of interest, while Teresa’s face softened.
“Come,” she cried more gaily, “let us talk of something else. Talk of to-morrow. Thank goodness, that must always be a new subject. What shall we do, good people? Shall we drive to Ostia?”
Sylvia opened her eyes. She was opening her mouth as well, when her grandmother spoke.
“If you do, I think I’ll go with you.”
“That settles it,” said Teresa happily. She had recovered herself so completely that even Mrs Brodrick wondered at the swift change, especially when she turned kindly to Wilbraham. “You’ll come, too, won’t you? I’ll undertake to keep off dangerous subjects, and then I shan’t be cross.”
“I’ll come if I may.”
His tone was still a little stiff, and Teresa, glancing at him, saw that he was looking at Sylvia.
Except for the Tiber—and that can often be as grim as its history—the road to Ostia begins wearyingly. Farther on it grows rapidly in interest, till, when you reach Ostia itself, you think no more about beauty or interest, or your own passing sensations—it is too great. Sad, even in clearest sunshine, with rifled temples, ruined splendour, and the melancholy of its deserted gods, the sombre weight of centuries broods over it. The Tiber—no mere river here, but the symbol of a lost empire—swirls sullenly by, and as the sun sets and Vulcan’s shrine crimsons in its glow, fever creeps shivering from misty pools and clutches its victims. Those who go to Ostia should not linger too long.
But this day, on which Teresa brought her there, the sadness was but delicately suggestive and not oppressive. The air was warm, yet fresh and invigorating, and Teresa herself was in high spirits.
“Come,” she cried breathlessly, when she had climbed a steep bank, and stood looking out at the Tiber, now faintly yellow and grey, “come, Sylvia, and let us be foolish by ourselves.”
“Foolish!” repeated Sylvia startled.
Mrs Brodrick, had she been near enough, would have smiled, but Teresa nodded gaily.
“As foolish as we like. Mr Wilbraham can look after granny and improve her, while we enjoy our ignorance. It’s much better fun to imagine things than to know them. Let us run down there to begin with, and peep behind those columns. Who knows what might not be hiding there! Come, Sylvia!”
And she held out her hand.
But the girl looked round her doubtfully. She did not like foolishness when she heard of it, and her sister’s imagination was apt to make her uncomfortable. Slow doubt crept into her voice.
“If you like—if you’re sure it’s safe.” She added more quickly, “It’s so very lonely there, isn’t it?”
Teresa instantly yielded.
“Let us sit where we are then. Nothing can be more charming,” she went on, dropping on the short turf and clasping her knees, while Sylvia took elaborate precautions against the damp she dreaded. “Oh, Sylvia!” sighed Teresa, “to think that I should really be sitting here and talking to you, after that life!”
“At Florence, do you mean? I suppose the old marchesa was very unkind, for you to have disliked it so much?”
The other did not answer at once.
“Unkind? Well, no, she did not mean to be unkind. Do you know, I believe you would have got on very well with her. I’m sometimes so dreadfully difficult! But we won’t talk about Florence. We are here, here, at Ostia, you, and granny, and I!”
“And Mr Wilbraham,” put in Sylvia conscientiously.
“Yes, Mr Wilbraham. You mustn’t remind me of him when he is off our hands.” And Teresa shot a small grimace in his direction. “Let us talk of something nice. What shall we do with all our money? I shall get a dog. What will you have?”
“Do you really mean I can choose something?”
“Oh, silly! Of course you may. What’s the good of it otherwise?”
“A new hat—”
“Hat, frock, umbrella. Oh, you do want a new umbrella, Sylvia! Yours is in holes. We’ll make a list. Have you got a watch?”
“No,” said Sylvia, in amazement.
Her mouth remained open, while Teresa dragged out a card and jotted down thing after thing.
“We must find out the best watchmaker,” she said thoughtfully. “We must ask.”
“Mr Wilbraham,” suggested Sylvia.
“Mr Wilbraham! He doesn’t know everything.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean that he did.” Sylvia was often prosaically explanatory, desiring what thoughts she had to be distinctly outlined. “I meant that he was a man, and heard of things more than we could; granny said so.”
“Well, if it satisfies you, we’ll ask him. He will be so pleased!”
“Why?”
“Why?” The young marchesa laughed. “He likes to stand on a pedestal, that’s why, my child.” Seeing Sylvia’s puzzled face she dropped the subject. “Let us go on. The last thing was a watch. Now, what next? Ivory brushes?”
“Teresa! Don’t get me anything more.”
“Then we’ll take the other side of the paper for granny. I’m afraid she’s going to be disappointing,” said Teresa gloomily. “I intend to order a carriage by the month, of course, but when I ask her about other things she doesn’t seem to care. She says habits are nicer than anything else when you’re old. She likes to be frugal, because she’s had to be all her life.”
“She loves books about Rome,” hazarded the younger girl.
“Oh, so she does! She shall have them, she shall have them all,” said the marchesa with a fine spread of imagination. “How clever of you! Now the next thing is to find out about them.”
“Mr Wilbraham would know,” said Sylvia, and Teresa, turning upon her with an impatient laugh, was struck suddenly dumb by catching a wistful glance flung towards the spot a little way off where Wilbraham stood patiently pointing out the intricacies of a ruined columned court. It seemed to her as if, in the shock of the surprise, her heart stopped beating. Most women have intuitions which are not unlike another sense, for they are as sure and as inexplicable; and hers swept the past days and took in the result in an instant. She had not thought of Sylvia marrying, because of that intangible want, of which she was conscious herself, while she resented the consciousness in Mrs Brodrick. Yet, after all, what was it? Sylvia was not quite clever—might sometimes be thought a little tiresome. A man might condone all that for a look in her face.
“Shall we go back to the others?” she said hesitatingly.
“Oh, yes!” cried the girl, springing up.
The marchesa, suddenly observant, began to think there was no doubt as to Sylvia’s feelings. But what of his?
“I must find out,” she said to herself gravely.
Her grandmother greeted them with a smile.
“We were coming,” she said, “but I have been reading my book, and you have skipped all the improving pages.”
“Do you mean Murray?” asked Sylvia innocently.
“Sylvia knows that my grandmother and her Murray are inseparable,” hastily interposed Teresa. She need not have minded. Wilbraham was looking at the girl with a pleased satisfaction. He thought that women were much alike, except that some were prettier than others. Mrs Brodrick laughed, and did not resent her granddaughter’s explanation, but her eyes were grave and looked as if she, too, were observing. Teresa saw this, and saw that another had hit upon her discovery. She was very swift in carrying out her impulses, and she made up her mind that if Sylvia really liked this man her part must be to smooth matters for her happiness. The thought she flung at Wilbraham was tinged with a slight wonder, but his action was his own affair. She would do what seemed best for her sister.
“You are right, granny,” she said, “we have wasted our time disgracefully. It was my fault. Sylvia wanted to come and be informed. So now!”
“Now we will have our food. All that I have heard has made me hungry.” She spoke lightly, but her old eyes were still grave, and Teresa could see that what had come to them both was troubling her grandmother. The consciousness of this roused a reckless spirit in herself. Wilbraham, who was not a keen-witted man where women were concerned, knew nothing more than that this luncheon of theirs, taken on a grassy hillock with the river close beneath the bank, and red ruins lying in sunlight, was pleasanter than anything he had experienced of late. He connected it with Sylvia, who sat beside him, and chirruped cheerful truisms. Mrs Brodrick, who knew better, watched Teresa.
They strolled about afterwards, and went back through the ruins to fetch a young guide, who came out to them pale with ague. Teresa contrived that Wilbraham and Sylvia should be much together, but never alone. She fastened all her attention upon her sister, many times interposing with some guiding remark, only to slip again easily out of the conversation. They went into the little temple of Mithras, which interested Wilbraham immensely.
“Sylvia never heard of Mithras,” reflected Teresa uneasily, and, while the younger girl opened an inquiring mouth, struck in with an intentionally ignorant question. Wilbraham answered, and Sylvia drank in his words without in the least understanding them. But Wilbraham was one of those men with whom attention is prized beyond intelligence, or perhaps supposed to represent the same quality.
Then they talked of the leading impression which touches us in such places as Ostia, where a far past reigns.
“Sylvia and I are vague,” said Teresa boldly.
“Isn’t it a wonder that man should so quickly go, and his works so long outlive him?” asked Wilbraham.
“Isn’t it a conviction that that is impossible?” put in Mrs Brodrick.
“Perhaps,” said Wilbraham gravely, and glancing at Sylvia. He was not a very religious man himself, but he would wish his wife to be religious. And then he hastily put aside the thought as ridiculous.
Chapter Five.“Teresa!”“Granny!”The young marchesa, who was moving about the room, touching her flowers, and musing as to an improved angle for a tall bamboo which had arrived that morning to fill a lonely corner, turned with a shade of defiance in voice and manner.“Do you know what you are doing?”There was a momentary hesitation before the answer came.“Who does?”The defiance was already tinged with uneasiness, and facing the keen old eyes Teresa dropped her own.“Then I will tell you,” said Mrs Brodrick gravely. “You are playing a very dangerous game.”“Everything that is worth anything has its dangers,” said Teresa, trying to speak lightly.“But we have no right to push other people into them.”“Push!” Now the marchesa laughed outright. “Push! Oh, be just. Do you pretend to say it would be possible to push Mr Wilbraham into any position he hadn’t deliberately chosen? You know better. He will walk round and round, and look at it closely from every side, and advance only when he is convinced it is eminently desirable and safe. He’s a hundred years old if he’s a day.”“That’s as you like. He is a good man.”Teresa, imagining—perhaps with truth—that she detected a shade of regret in the tone, fired up promptly.“Not too good for my Sylvia.”“Not too good. But too clever, too exacting.”“You are never quite fair to Sylvia.”“Nor,” said Mrs Brodrick with a quick smile, “are you.”Teresa moved uneasily.“She is very pretty.”“Very.”“And very good-tempered.”“Very.”Then they paused.“Well, isn’t that enough for any man?” Teresa asked, with a show of conviction.“It will not be enough for Mr Wilbraham.”“That’s for him to judge. Why do you scold me? I’m doing nothing.”“I should have said you were spending your energies in making ways smooth and pleasant,” her grandmother added after a momentary hesitation. “Well?”“Well, I have a theory that Love cuts his own paths when he wants them.”“Oh, granny,” protested Teresa, “but you—you are so romantic! Things have changed.”“No, no, they are eternally the same,” said Mrs Brodrick, with a smile at her own failure.After all, Teresa was not doing her justice, for her fears chiefly centred on Sylvia. Wilbraham, she agreed in her mind, could take care of himself, but if Sylvia suffered an acute sorrow, was her character strong enough to keep its equilibrium? She doubted. And she only faintly hoped that what she had said might influence Teresa, for, though it cost her something to offer advice she had very little belief in its being taken.She began to wish they were out of Rome.A month had passed since the day at Ostia; Wilbraham lingered, and had even arrived at the point of acknowledging to himself that he was lingering, which is a long step for a cautious man. It was true that other friends of his and of Mrs Brodrick’s had arrived, and were in a hotel not far from the Porta Pinciana. Their advent seemed to fling him yet more comfortably with his first acquaintances, for a second man put him at his ease. Moreover, Colonel and Mrs Maxwell wanted to see everything, since, although she had been born in Italy, he had never been in Rome. Teresa made herself his guide, and Sylvia fell naturally to Wilbraham. Teresa was still on the watch to cover blunders, but they had passed the stage in which she had been afraid to leave her alone with him. She even doubted whether he were alive to the difference in the conversation between Sylvia and Mrs Maxwell, who could talk brilliantly. There she was mistaken. He saw, and, on the whole, thought he preferred simplicity to brilliancy in a woman. He would have resented anything which made him ridiculous; short of that, the girl he married would require few mental gifts.There had been talk of the marchesa finding a larger apartment.“There is all this money to be spent,” she said with a laugh, “and honestly I don’t quite know how.”“Do you want to go?” asked her grandmother cheerfully.“Not I.”“Nina hopes, if you do,” remarked Sylvia, looking up from knitting a sock, “that you will be very careful to take another crooked room; it’s lucky, she says.”“I’ll have nothing more to do with Nina’s lucky theories,” said Teresa.“Imagine, Mary,” she went on to Mrs Maxwell, who was lazily skimming an Italian newspaper, “on All Saints’ Day she brought us horrible biscuits made like cross-bones, and expected us to eat them! Biscuits of the dead, she called the dreadful things, and groaned all day over my want of devout feeling, when I couldn’t look at them.”“I wish you hadn’t minded,” said Sylvia again, with some uneasiness.Mrs Brodrick fidgeted.“And the other day, instead of our Italian paper, she brought word that the man had sold his out, but that he assured me it didn’t matter, because there was nothing in it.”“Your Nina sounds a hundred times more entertaining than my Peppina,” remarked Mrs Maxwell. “She knows nothing, and breaks everything. But then she is in love, and when she looks in my face with her beautiful eyes, and mentions that fact as a reason for all my misfortunes, what am I to do?”“Is her lover in Rome?” asked Mrs Brodrick, rather from politeness than interest.“Yes. Every now and then he swoops down upon her, and she insists upon going out with him. I point out the inconvenience, and she cries, but goes. Then she comes back, and breaks more things. I wish he weren’t quite such a strong character.”“What is his occupation?” said Teresa, amused.“So far as I can make out, it is pulling down the kingdom. This keeps him exceedingly busy. He has no money to speak of, and a lame little brother to support.”“Oh!” cried the marchesa, suddenly intent.“What is that?” inquired her grandmother, as keenly.“Why this stir?” said Mrs Maxwell, opening her blue eyes. “Are you two by any chance in the conspiracy?”“Does he live under S. Pietro in Montorio? Is he called Cesare Bandinelli? And has he a history?” Teresa questioned breathlessly. Then she jumped up and closed the window to shut out the noise of the electric tram and of the men who were crying “O-olive—go-o-omberi!” with broad intonations. She came back exclaiming—“This is extraordinarily interesting. I know that Cesare, poor fellow!”“I don’t think you ought to call him poor fellow, Teresa,” corrected Sylvia. “Mr Wilbraham thinks him a very dangerous man.”“Oh, he’s dangerous, he’s dangerous, I daresay,” agreed her sister, “but in our affair I was the sinner. Listen, Mary.” And she told her story, ending oracularly, “So you see!”Mrs Maxwell was looking at her queerly.“Yes, I see,” she said at last. “I’m beginning to put things together. And,” she went on, recovering herself with a laugh, “that always happens after I hear about Cesare.”Teresa was too much interested and excited to notice anything unusual in Mary Maxwell’s manner. Mrs Brodrick, more experienced, watched her without asking questions.“Perhaps we might manage to do something for the boy through Peppina?” Teresa suggested eagerly. “I needn’t show.”“I think you had better leave it alone,” Mrs Maxwell replied slowly. “But I’ll ask my husband,” she added, noticing the young marchesa’s disappointment.“Oh, he’ll say the same. Men do. Please remember, Mary, that it would take a weight off my mind.”“I’ll remember. I’ll do all I can.” Mrs Maxwell promised so lavishly that Mrs Brodrick was certain nothing was meant to come of it. And she was right, for nothing came of it, though Mrs Maxwell kept her promise to remember.“I don’t like it,” she said to her husband in the evening when they were alone, and he was admiring a cleverly blackened and altogether worthless picture, which he had picked up as a great bargain that day, at ten times its actual value.“You know nothing about it,” he returned in an affronted tone. “The light and shade—”“Light and shade? Oh! I didn’t mean the picture, I meant Cesare, Peppina’s lover. Now do you understand? It must be our Mr Wilbraham whom he is vowing vengeance against.”Colonel Maxwell’s ideas of Italian life were borrowed from the stage.“Rum chaps. Always vowing vengeance, aren’t they?” he said indifferently. “I wouldn’t bother about Wilbraham. He can take care of himself.”“Well I don’t like it,” repeated his wife.“If the fellow’s a brute, get rid of Peppina.”“That is absurd.” Mrs Maxwell was not accustomed to have her affairs interfered with so trenchantly, and she spoke with indignation. “That is so like a man. Peppina—when she isn’t breaking things—is the comfort of my life. The one comfort,” she added emphatically.“All right.” He stepped back to gaze rapturously at his picture. “Now I wonder who’s the best man here to trust with this sort of thing. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if it turned out a Pinturicchio.”Mrs Maxwell, who knew much better, held revenge in her hand, and yet somehow could not use it. It would have been too downright, too brutal. She looked at him pityingly.“You had better not trust it to anybody,” she said sweetly. “They might steal it. If I were you I should keep to soap and water. And,” she added, quite inconsequently, as he thought, “Jim, you’re a dear old donkey!”That ended it.Mrs Brodrick was restless; Teresa, who could not, or would not, understand why, chose to insist that her grandmother wanted change of air, and suggested many manner of places, but places where they might all go together.“It would be such a pity to break us up,” she said.For a moment Mrs Brodrick was silent.“Where are we to go?” she asked a little wearily.“Oh, darling,” cried Teresa, flying to kiss her, “don’t say it in such a tone. Don’t be so tragically sorry! Everything is arranging itself so prettily! And I’ll tell you where we’ll go,” she hurried on, much as if she wished to block argument. “Let us have a day or two at Perugia, so as to see Assisi.”“All?”“How could we leave any one out?” asked Teresa reproachfully. “You and Sylvia and I, of course.”“Of course.”“And the Maxwells, of course.”“Of course.”“And Mr Wilbraham, of course.”But Mrs Brodrick was obstinately silent again.The drag up to Assisi is long and dusty, yet with Assisi itself lying always splendidly as a goal in front, it is possible to forget both heat and dust. Olive groves straggle all about, chicory and blue thistles fringe the side of the road; a personality which the world has not yet forgotten makes itself curiously felt when you come in sight of his fields, his mountains, his wide skies, and look back at the dome of Saint Mary of the Angels bathed in soft mist. A Miss Sandiland, one of the many single women who go about the world alone, was of the party which was to spend a night at the Subisio. Hence they, at once, pursued by clamorous beggars, climbed the stony streets to the broad arcaded spaces before the great church, Lombard and Gothic, with its square and round towers and vast magnificent porch. Then from the clear sunlight they turned into darkness—but what darkness! Darkness out of which colours glow, colours laid on by Cimabue and Giotto, darkness shrouding in mystery those strange grave impassible faces looking down into a world which does not touch them. Teresa stood silent, squeezing her hands; Sylvia asked many questions, and Wilbraham answered them; a monk came forward and pointed out this, that, and the other; another monk arranged hideous imitation flowers on the central altar. Presently Wilbraham came back to where Teresa stood.“The others are gone,” he said.“Will you come?”“Gone, gone where?” she said, starting and looking round, “gone away?”“No, no,” he said indulgently, remembering that she was always scatterbrained, “oh no. But have you forgotten that there’s an upper church?”“Yes,” returned Teresa briefly, “I had forgotten.”“May I show you the way?”She followed silently up the stone staircase, and when they reached the top, he did not see that she again paused and left him to join the others.After the gloom of the lower, the almost joyous gaiety of the upper church contrasts with it so amazingly that the effect must have been counted upon. Everything is in light delicate harmony. Slender columns of alternate pink and grey; bays roofed with ultramarine dividing others in which Cimabue’s frescoes gleam with strange greens and yellows; choir-stalls with shell-like canopies, lined with blue and gold, surmounting grave tarsia work of saints and angels. There is a small apse with an arcaded gallery, the shafts of pink and grey, and at the back great angels stand on guard. An exquisite small stone pulpit is placed against the wall by the high altar, the column is cut away to give it room, and where it begins again is supported by a grasping hand. Under foot all is pink stone, and round the altar finest cosmatesque mosaic. The lower part of the wall is painted in soft reds and golds to represent looped hangings, and above this, on loveliest blue-green backgrounds, are the Giottos. Noble figures of Cimabue’s look down from the roof; stately angels with red wings tipped with light visit Abraham: the saints’ nimbuses are worked out in raised plaster, the great Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory, talk with monks in their cells; all is light, colour, glory; and the windows are large, with delicately stained glass, or, like that at the west, white.Teresa came up to the others abruptly, and only Mrs Brodrick noticed that her eyes were wet.“It’s too much,” she said with a quick motion of her hand. “What did they mean? Earth and heaven?—struggle and victory?—the church militant and triumphant?”“Don’t you like it, Teresa?” asked Sylvia anxiously. “Mr Wilbraham has been telling me so much about it. Did you know that Giotto was a shepherd boy—”“Was he?” and Teresa, who knew all there is to know about Giotto, shot down from the heights to come to her sister’s help.“And Cimabue was his master,” went on Sylvia, marshalling her little facts with pride.“It makes it much more interesting to know about them, doesn’t it?” said the young marchesa, smiling at her, but glancing also at Wilbraham. She need not have feared. His eyes were on Sylvia, he was seeing the young fair face, with its innocent expression, with lips just parted, and reading more than there was, and yet less. What did he care that she should not have Italian painters at her fingers’ ends? He knew them himself, and the knowledge did not seem very valuable. Determination suddenly fired him, and Teresa seeing the look smiled again, this time triumphantly, and turned away.When they came forth into the piazza, Colonel Maxwell’s fever for “picking up” things broke out.“It’s absurd to think one can’t find something in a place like this,” he remarked argumentatively. “I shall have a look at some of the side streets. I don’t want to drag any of you, you know.”“I must go with him,” sighed Mary Maxwell, gathering her dress round her with the air of a martyr,—“in self-defence. I don’t know otherwise what awful things he may bring to me to pack. Don’t anybody else come.”“I am coming. I like experiences,” said Miss Sandiland.So these three went away, and the others set themselves to climb the steep broken streets towards the ruined Porta S. Giovanni.“One is rather breathless, but after all it is not such a long step back to the Middle Ages as I thought,” said Mrs Brodrick, as they passed between the rough grey stone houses, and turned to look at the sunset. There before them stretched the great plain, encompassed with hills of full blue-grey. A few small clouds, edged dazzlingly with gold, barred the sun, and hung over the mountains; above these a clear green Perugino sky melted overhead into the tenderest blue, and, lying across the seas of light, stretched clouds of most exquisite form and colour, their edges bright rosy red. Then they set themselves again to climb steep streets, past broad, striding arches, low and dark, houses flinging out vast sheltering eaves, green doors, carnations hanging from windows, birdcages, squalor, vivid colour, women with their waterpots.“Where are the others?” said Mrs Brodrick suddenly, as they came out on the ruined gate.“Never mind, granny,” answered Teresa, smiling softly, “I think they are doing very well.”“You are like other women,” said her grandmother, shaking her head; “you will only see as much as you want to see.”“At any rate it’s too late now to see more.”“How do you know?”“I don’t know. I’m only convinced. Really and truly I’m delighted,” she went on triumphantly, “and so you ought to be. What could you wish for better? We know all about Mr Wilbraham—except—no, I don’t know his Christian name. Has he one?”Mrs Brodrick refused to laugh. Teresa gazed at her with mock anxiety.“Granny, I shall be really relieved when this affair is finished, I don’t quite like you over it,” she sighed. “Do you dream of anything dark in the background? Or if I dislike it ever so much, do you suppose it could be stopped now?”“No,” admitted her grandmother. She added whimsically: “But isn’t that rather like starting a rock down hill, and asking whether you can be expected to stop it?”“Perhaps,” Teresa said. “I don’t think your simile pretty, all the same,” she went on. “Nobody is going to be crushed; and I believe you’ll see that this being loved is just what Sylvia wanted to give her confidence. She’ll develop.”Mrs Brodrick wanted to ask what would develop, and didn’t dare. She thought of Sylvia as a pretty face and a sweet nature masking an absolutely empty mind, and doubted. The young marchesa could not be always at hand to turn a stupid remark into something which did not seem so stupid after all, and she did not believe that Sylvia could stand on her own feet. She had done her best to stop what was happening and had failed. Age is tolerant, and there was nothing for it now save to accept failure.“You and I,” said Teresa, with a caressing hand, “will always live together.”“Always,” said Mrs Brodrick bravely, a smile covering the pain in her heart.And she turned to go down.When they reached the piazza the sky had changed. All the gold had gone. In its stead a long red line stretched across the mountainous horizon; above it, light deepened into blue, masses of clouds had suddenly trooped up from the south. Sylvia and Wilbraham came out quite unexpectedly from the shadow of the great church. Sylvia flew to her sister and caught her hand.“Teresa, Teresa!” she cried under her breath.
“Teresa!”
“Granny!”
The young marchesa, who was moving about the room, touching her flowers, and musing as to an improved angle for a tall bamboo which had arrived that morning to fill a lonely corner, turned with a shade of defiance in voice and manner.
“Do you know what you are doing?”
There was a momentary hesitation before the answer came.
“Who does?”
The defiance was already tinged with uneasiness, and facing the keen old eyes Teresa dropped her own.
“Then I will tell you,” said Mrs Brodrick gravely. “You are playing a very dangerous game.”
“Everything that is worth anything has its dangers,” said Teresa, trying to speak lightly.
“But we have no right to push other people into them.”
“Push!” Now the marchesa laughed outright. “Push! Oh, be just. Do you pretend to say it would be possible to push Mr Wilbraham into any position he hadn’t deliberately chosen? You know better. He will walk round and round, and look at it closely from every side, and advance only when he is convinced it is eminently desirable and safe. He’s a hundred years old if he’s a day.”
“That’s as you like. He is a good man.”
Teresa, imagining—perhaps with truth—that she detected a shade of regret in the tone, fired up promptly.
“Not too good for my Sylvia.”
“Not too good. But too clever, too exacting.”
“You are never quite fair to Sylvia.”
“Nor,” said Mrs Brodrick with a quick smile, “are you.”
Teresa moved uneasily.
“She is very pretty.”
“Very.”
“And very good-tempered.”
“Very.”
Then they paused.
“Well, isn’t that enough for any man?” Teresa asked, with a show of conviction.
“It will not be enough for Mr Wilbraham.”
“That’s for him to judge. Why do you scold me? I’m doing nothing.”
“I should have said you were spending your energies in making ways smooth and pleasant,” her grandmother added after a momentary hesitation. “Well?”
“Well, I have a theory that Love cuts his own paths when he wants them.”
“Oh, granny,” protested Teresa, “but you—you are so romantic! Things have changed.”
“No, no, they are eternally the same,” said Mrs Brodrick, with a smile at her own failure.
After all, Teresa was not doing her justice, for her fears chiefly centred on Sylvia. Wilbraham, she agreed in her mind, could take care of himself, but if Sylvia suffered an acute sorrow, was her character strong enough to keep its equilibrium? She doubted. And she only faintly hoped that what she had said might influence Teresa, for, though it cost her something to offer advice she had very little belief in its being taken.
She began to wish they were out of Rome.
A month had passed since the day at Ostia; Wilbraham lingered, and had even arrived at the point of acknowledging to himself that he was lingering, which is a long step for a cautious man. It was true that other friends of his and of Mrs Brodrick’s had arrived, and were in a hotel not far from the Porta Pinciana. Their advent seemed to fling him yet more comfortably with his first acquaintances, for a second man put him at his ease. Moreover, Colonel and Mrs Maxwell wanted to see everything, since, although she had been born in Italy, he had never been in Rome. Teresa made herself his guide, and Sylvia fell naturally to Wilbraham. Teresa was still on the watch to cover blunders, but they had passed the stage in which she had been afraid to leave her alone with him. She even doubted whether he were alive to the difference in the conversation between Sylvia and Mrs Maxwell, who could talk brilliantly. There she was mistaken. He saw, and, on the whole, thought he preferred simplicity to brilliancy in a woman. He would have resented anything which made him ridiculous; short of that, the girl he married would require few mental gifts.
There had been talk of the marchesa finding a larger apartment.
“There is all this money to be spent,” she said with a laugh, “and honestly I don’t quite know how.”
“Do you want to go?” asked her grandmother cheerfully.
“Not I.”
“Nina hopes, if you do,” remarked Sylvia, looking up from knitting a sock, “that you will be very careful to take another crooked room; it’s lucky, she says.”
“I’ll have nothing more to do with Nina’s lucky theories,” said Teresa.
“Imagine, Mary,” she went on to Mrs Maxwell, who was lazily skimming an Italian newspaper, “on All Saints’ Day she brought us horrible biscuits made like cross-bones, and expected us to eat them! Biscuits of the dead, she called the dreadful things, and groaned all day over my want of devout feeling, when I couldn’t look at them.”
“I wish you hadn’t minded,” said Sylvia again, with some uneasiness.
Mrs Brodrick fidgeted.
“And the other day, instead of our Italian paper, she brought word that the man had sold his out, but that he assured me it didn’t matter, because there was nothing in it.”
“Your Nina sounds a hundred times more entertaining than my Peppina,” remarked Mrs Maxwell. “She knows nothing, and breaks everything. But then she is in love, and when she looks in my face with her beautiful eyes, and mentions that fact as a reason for all my misfortunes, what am I to do?”
“Is her lover in Rome?” asked Mrs Brodrick, rather from politeness than interest.
“Yes. Every now and then he swoops down upon her, and she insists upon going out with him. I point out the inconvenience, and she cries, but goes. Then she comes back, and breaks more things. I wish he weren’t quite such a strong character.”
“What is his occupation?” said Teresa, amused.
“So far as I can make out, it is pulling down the kingdom. This keeps him exceedingly busy. He has no money to speak of, and a lame little brother to support.”
“Oh!” cried the marchesa, suddenly intent.
“What is that?” inquired her grandmother, as keenly.
“Why this stir?” said Mrs Maxwell, opening her blue eyes. “Are you two by any chance in the conspiracy?”
“Does he live under S. Pietro in Montorio? Is he called Cesare Bandinelli? And has he a history?” Teresa questioned breathlessly. Then she jumped up and closed the window to shut out the noise of the electric tram and of the men who were crying “O-olive—go-o-omberi!” with broad intonations. She came back exclaiming—“This is extraordinarily interesting. I know that Cesare, poor fellow!”
“I don’t think you ought to call him poor fellow, Teresa,” corrected Sylvia. “Mr Wilbraham thinks him a very dangerous man.”
“Oh, he’s dangerous, he’s dangerous, I daresay,” agreed her sister, “but in our affair I was the sinner. Listen, Mary.” And she told her story, ending oracularly, “So you see!”
Mrs Maxwell was looking at her queerly.
“Yes, I see,” she said at last. “I’m beginning to put things together. And,” she went on, recovering herself with a laugh, “that always happens after I hear about Cesare.”
Teresa was too much interested and excited to notice anything unusual in Mary Maxwell’s manner. Mrs Brodrick, more experienced, watched her without asking questions.
“Perhaps we might manage to do something for the boy through Peppina?” Teresa suggested eagerly. “I needn’t show.”
“I think you had better leave it alone,” Mrs Maxwell replied slowly. “But I’ll ask my husband,” she added, noticing the young marchesa’s disappointment.
“Oh, he’ll say the same. Men do. Please remember, Mary, that it would take a weight off my mind.”
“I’ll remember. I’ll do all I can.” Mrs Maxwell promised so lavishly that Mrs Brodrick was certain nothing was meant to come of it. And she was right, for nothing came of it, though Mrs Maxwell kept her promise to remember.
“I don’t like it,” she said to her husband in the evening when they were alone, and he was admiring a cleverly blackened and altogether worthless picture, which he had picked up as a great bargain that day, at ten times its actual value.
“You know nothing about it,” he returned in an affronted tone. “The light and shade—”
“Light and shade? Oh! I didn’t mean the picture, I meant Cesare, Peppina’s lover. Now do you understand? It must be our Mr Wilbraham whom he is vowing vengeance against.”
Colonel Maxwell’s ideas of Italian life were borrowed from the stage.
“Rum chaps. Always vowing vengeance, aren’t they?” he said indifferently. “I wouldn’t bother about Wilbraham. He can take care of himself.”
“Well I don’t like it,” repeated his wife.
“If the fellow’s a brute, get rid of Peppina.”
“That is absurd.” Mrs Maxwell was not accustomed to have her affairs interfered with so trenchantly, and she spoke with indignation. “That is so like a man. Peppina—when she isn’t breaking things—is the comfort of my life. The one comfort,” she added emphatically.
“All right.” He stepped back to gaze rapturously at his picture. “Now I wonder who’s the best man here to trust with this sort of thing. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if it turned out a Pinturicchio.”
Mrs Maxwell, who knew much better, held revenge in her hand, and yet somehow could not use it. It would have been too downright, too brutal. She looked at him pityingly.
“You had better not trust it to anybody,” she said sweetly. “They might steal it. If I were you I should keep to soap and water. And,” she added, quite inconsequently, as he thought, “Jim, you’re a dear old donkey!”
That ended it.
Mrs Brodrick was restless; Teresa, who could not, or would not, understand why, chose to insist that her grandmother wanted change of air, and suggested many manner of places, but places where they might all go together.
“It would be such a pity to break us up,” she said.
For a moment Mrs Brodrick was silent.
“Where are we to go?” she asked a little wearily.
“Oh, darling,” cried Teresa, flying to kiss her, “don’t say it in such a tone. Don’t be so tragically sorry! Everything is arranging itself so prettily! And I’ll tell you where we’ll go,” she hurried on, much as if she wished to block argument. “Let us have a day or two at Perugia, so as to see Assisi.”
“All?”
“How could we leave any one out?” asked Teresa reproachfully. “You and Sylvia and I, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And the Maxwells, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And Mr Wilbraham, of course.”
But Mrs Brodrick was obstinately silent again.
The drag up to Assisi is long and dusty, yet with Assisi itself lying always splendidly as a goal in front, it is possible to forget both heat and dust. Olive groves straggle all about, chicory and blue thistles fringe the side of the road; a personality which the world has not yet forgotten makes itself curiously felt when you come in sight of his fields, his mountains, his wide skies, and look back at the dome of Saint Mary of the Angels bathed in soft mist. A Miss Sandiland, one of the many single women who go about the world alone, was of the party which was to spend a night at the Subisio. Hence they, at once, pursued by clamorous beggars, climbed the stony streets to the broad arcaded spaces before the great church, Lombard and Gothic, with its square and round towers and vast magnificent porch. Then from the clear sunlight they turned into darkness—but what darkness! Darkness out of which colours glow, colours laid on by Cimabue and Giotto, darkness shrouding in mystery those strange grave impassible faces looking down into a world which does not touch them. Teresa stood silent, squeezing her hands; Sylvia asked many questions, and Wilbraham answered them; a monk came forward and pointed out this, that, and the other; another monk arranged hideous imitation flowers on the central altar. Presently Wilbraham came back to where Teresa stood.
“The others are gone,” he said.
“Will you come?”
“Gone, gone where?” she said, starting and looking round, “gone away?”
“No, no,” he said indulgently, remembering that she was always scatterbrained, “oh no. But have you forgotten that there’s an upper church?”
“Yes,” returned Teresa briefly, “I had forgotten.”
“May I show you the way?”
She followed silently up the stone staircase, and when they reached the top, he did not see that she again paused and left him to join the others.
After the gloom of the lower, the almost joyous gaiety of the upper church contrasts with it so amazingly that the effect must have been counted upon. Everything is in light delicate harmony. Slender columns of alternate pink and grey; bays roofed with ultramarine dividing others in which Cimabue’s frescoes gleam with strange greens and yellows; choir-stalls with shell-like canopies, lined with blue and gold, surmounting grave tarsia work of saints and angels. There is a small apse with an arcaded gallery, the shafts of pink and grey, and at the back great angels stand on guard. An exquisite small stone pulpit is placed against the wall by the high altar, the column is cut away to give it room, and where it begins again is supported by a grasping hand. Under foot all is pink stone, and round the altar finest cosmatesque mosaic. The lower part of the wall is painted in soft reds and golds to represent looped hangings, and above this, on loveliest blue-green backgrounds, are the Giottos. Noble figures of Cimabue’s look down from the roof; stately angels with red wings tipped with light visit Abraham: the saints’ nimbuses are worked out in raised plaster, the great Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory, talk with monks in their cells; all is light, colour, glory; and the windows are large, with delicately stained glass, or, like that at the west, white.
Teresa came up to the others abruptly, and only Mrs Brodrick noticed that her eyes were wet.
“It’s too much,” she said with a quick motion of her hand. “What did they mean? Earth and heaven?—struggle and victory?—the church militant and triumphant?”
“Don’t you like it, Teresa?” asked Sylvia anxiously. “Mr Wilbraham has been telling me so much about it. Did you know that Giotto was a shepherd boy—”
“Was he?” and Teresa, who knew all there is to know about Giotto, shot down from the heights to come to her sister’s help.
“And Cimabue was his master,” went on Sylvia, marshalling her little facts with pride.
“It makes it much more interesting to know about them, doesn’t it?” said the young marchesa, smiling at her, but glancing also at Wilbraham. She need not have feared. His eyes were on Sylvia, he was seeing the young fair face, with its innocent expression, with lips just parted, and reading more than there was, and yet less. What did he care that she should not have Italian painters at her fingers’ ends? He knew them himself, and the knowledge did not seem very valuable. Determination suddenly fired him, and Teresa seeing the look smiled again, this time triumphantly, and turned away.
When they came forth into the piazza, Colonel Maxwell’s fever for “picking up” things broke out.
“It’s absurd to think one can’t find something in a place like this,” he remarked argumentatively. “I shall have a look at some of the side streets. I don’t want to drag any of you, you know.”
“I must go with him,” sighed Mary Maxwell, gathering her dress round her with the air of a martyr,—“in self-defence. I don’t know otherwise what awful things he may bring to me to pack. Don’t anybody else come.”
“I am coming. I like experiences,” said Miss Sandiland.
So these three went away, and the others set themselves to climb the steep broken streets towards the ruined Porta S. Giovanni.
“One is rather breathless, but after all it is not such a long step back to the Middle Ages as I thought,” said Mrs Brodrick, as they passed between the rough grey stone houses, and turned to look at the sunset. There before them stretched the great plain, encompassed with hills of full blue-grey. A few small clouds, edged dazzlingly with gold, barred the sun, and hung over the mountains; above these a clear green Perugino sky melted overhead into the tenderest blue, and, lying across the seas of light, stretched clouds of most exquisite form and colour, their edges bright rosy red. Then they set themselves again to climb steep streets, past broad, striding arches, low and dark, houses flinging out vast sheltering eaves, green doors, carnations hanging from windows, birdcages, squalor, vivid colour, women with their waterpots.
“Where are the others?” said Mrs Brodrick suddenly, as they came out on the ruined gate.
“Never mind, granny,” answered Teresa, smiling softly, “I think they are doing very well.”
“You are like other women,” said her grandmother, shaking her head; “you will only see as much as you want to see.”
“At any rate it’s too late now to see more.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know. I’m only convinced. Really and truly I’m delighted,” she went on triumphantly, “and so you ought to be. What could you wish for better? We know all about Mr Wilbraham—except—no, I don’t know his Christian name. Has he one?”
Mrs Brodrick refused to laugh. Teresa gazed at her with mock anxiety.
“Granny, I shall be really relieved when this affair is finished, I don’t quite like you over it,” she sighed. “Do you dream of anything dark in the background? Or if I dislike it ever so much, do you suppose it could be stopped now?”
“No,” admitted her grandmother. She added whimsically: “But isn’t that rather like starting a rock down hill, and asking whether you can be expected to stop it?”
“Perhaps,” Teresa said. “I don’t think your simile pretty, all the same,” she went on. “Nobody is going to be crushed; and I believe you’ll see that this being loved is just what Sylvia wanted to give her confidence. She’ll develop.”
Mrs Brodrick wanted to ask what would develop, and didn’t dare. She thought of Sylvia as a pretty face and a sweet nature masking an absolutely empty mind, and doubted. The young marchesa could not be always at hand to turn a stupid remark into something which did not seem so stupid after all, and she did not believe that Sylvia could stand on her own feet. She had done her best to stop what was happening and had failed. Age is tolerant, and there was nothing for it now save to accept failure.
“You and I,” said Teresa, with a caressing hand, “will always live together.”
“Always,” said Mrs Brodrick bravely, a smile covering the pain in her heart.
And she turned to go down.
When they reached the piazza the sky had changed. All the gold had gone. In its stead a long red line stretched across the mountainous horizon; above it, light deepened into blue, masses of clouds had suddenly trooped up from the south. Sylvia and Wilbraham came out quite unexpectedly from the shadow of the great church. Sylvia flew to her sister and caught her hand.
“Teresa, Teresa!” she cried under her breath.
Chapter Six.Late into the night, facing the window, and the broad starlit sky stretching over the plain, Teresa sat with Sylvia’s hands in hers, listening. She said little, she was trying to gather what were the girl’s sensations—whether, as she unconsciously expected, things were awakening under this new touch. What perhaps surprised her most, though nothing would have induced her to own it, was Sylvia’s own want of surprise. She, who was generally so timid, so scrupulous, seemed to take all as a matter of course. Teresa reflected that Wilbraham’s wooing must have been amazingly effective, for Sylvia no longer seemed to have a doubt about anything. She talked of “we,” she alluded to plans with innocent egoism, she repeated some of the pretty things he had said. Once she jumped up and ran to the funny little looking-glass stuck against the wall, and came back smiling.“He thinks my eyes charming,” she said frankly. “You never said much about them?”“One waits for lovers to do that,” laughed Teresa.“I don’t see why. Did the marchese admire yours?”“How could he!” Teresa spoke with sharp pain, the pain of remembrance. “I was never pretty, like you, child.”“No,” said Sylvia, looking at her with her head on one side, “I suppose not. Walter said you were not.”“Oh, Walter. That’s his name, is it?”Teresa hated herself for speaking with a certain asperity. It is so much easier to disparage one’s self than to bear with others doing it. But Sylvia was at last genuinely amazed.“Do you mean that all this time you never knewthat? Why, I have always known it. Teresa, how very funny! You have never thought about him as Mr Walter Wilbraham? It is such a beautiful name! But that you should not—Teresa, youarefunny!”“I shall know now.”“Of course you will.” The girl gazed at her almost with compassion, as at one whom Wilbraham had called absent-minded. “It will be my name, you know. At least, I think so, as there is his mother. Perhaps,” she added pityingly, “perhaps you have forgotten that there is a mother?”Teresa turned and kissed her impulsively.“A mother—yes, what does it matter, what does anything matter? Only be happy, be happy, dear!”“I am very happy,” said Sylvia simply. “And I like so much talking to you about it.”“Always talk to me—not to any one else.”“Not to granny?”“No, not to granny—not even to granny. I’m your sister, I can understand,” cried Teresa, with a protective yearning in her heart, a defiant uprising against Mrs Brodrick’s prognostications.“But I shall talk to Walter first,” said Sylvia; “of course, I shall tell him everything.”“Of course,” returned her sister. Yet her heart sank, and long after Sylvia was sleeping peacefully in her little bed, Teresa sat at the window, her hands clasping one knee, while she looked out at the wonderful night, and wondered how soon Wilbraham, who was not a fool, would find out that he had indeed reached the bottom of everything.But by the morning her fears had left her. By the morning she was her energetic, suggestive self, with an added touch of cordiality in her manner towards Wilbraham. She owned, as they sat at breakfast in the uninviting feeding-room of the Subisio, that he was a striking-looking man, taller than most, and broadly made. There was a greater suggestion of strength about him than she had yet realised, and, like other women, Teresa liked strength. Generally she felt an inclination to contradict him, but this morning she adopted all his suggestions readily—so readily, that once Mrs Maxwell, who had not yet been enlightened, and was unused to seeing Teresa so meek, put down her cup and stared at her. Teresa laughed a little, and went on being pleasant.“You’ll see how good I am going to be,” she said triumphantly to Mary Maxwell, when she had told her.“Well, don’t turn the man’s head,” replied her friend.“My dear, the only thing that can turn a man’s head is a pretty face.”“I’m not so sure.”“That’s because you’ve one of your own.”“Oh!” cried Mrs Maxwell delightedly, “you’re charming! I had almost forgotten what a compliment was like. If Jim had the sense to throw me a few, I should be ready to swear all his discoveries were genuine. Why, why are husbands so foolish?”Later, when they were clambering again up the stony streets, she caught Mrs Brodrick alone.“Let us forget all about Saint Francis for a few minutes and talk about Saint Sylvia,” she said; “she is our heroine to-day, and the best of creatures, isn’t she?”“As good as gold,” assented Mrs Brodrick hastily.“But the best of creatures may be the least little bit in the world—tiresome? Oh, don’t let us be quite good ourselves, let us say what is on the tip of our tongues. How can any one look at Sylvia when Teresa is by?”“When you’re my age,” said the older woman, “you will have given up asking questions.”“When I’m your age I shall try to answer other people’s,” said Mary, with a laugh. “Do you believe for a moment that it can go on?—particularly when Teresa withdraws, as she must, into the background, and leaves Sylvia to stand alone?”Our own thoughts are apt to look the uglier, held up by another person, and Mrs Brodrick would have chosen silence. As it was she said quietly:“Mr Wilbraham is not the man to make mistakes.”Mary Maxwell laughed shrewdly.“You mean he’s not the man to acknowledge them. There you’re right. I daresay he will stick to Sylvia rather than own himself in the wrong. Well, perhaps obstinacy has its uses. I wonder what they are talking about now?” she added, wickedly.At the moment when she asked the question, the two concerned were also climbing steep streets—since at Assisi you must go up or down—stopping every now and then to look through narrow vistas of grey stone houses, towards the fair blue distances which lay beyond. Wilbraham was not so much in love that he had not some uncertainty as to how much he ought to say about it; sometimes, indeed, he felt that he had said but little. Sylvia, however, was quite satisfied. She was not exacting, and she had been brought up in an atmosphere which had given her trustfulness. When Wilbraham had once said he loved her, it would not have occurred to her to doubt the fact.So, as they went, she babbled cheerfully and disconnectedly, turning to him from time to time the face which invariably gave him a renewed feeling of satisfaction. Had he pulled his own feelings to pieces, he would have realised that his love was not a sweeping force, but, rather, intermittent, moving in jerks, or brightening up now and then like a flame stirred by a sudden current. As it was, he felt quite sufficiently sure of himself to be content.“What charming children!” cried Sylvia, stopping to smile at a group. “Aren’t they sweet? I always think the Italian children have such beautiful eyes. Have you ever noticed it?”He assured her that he had.“I like them so much when they don’t comequiteclose, because, do you know, they are not very clean. Poor little souls, I daresay they can’t help it, though. Oh, please, please send them away!”“Be off!” cried Wilbraham, coming to the rescue.Sylvia hurried on till she was breathless.“I can’t think why they beg so!” she said piteously. “They really frighten one!”The sweet helpless eyes turned towards him stirred the flame again. He took her hand in his.“My darling,” he said tenderly, “you mustn’t be frightened when I am by, and they were very little children.”“They were dreadfully dirty—all rags,” she said.“When we’re married, Sylvia—”“Yes?”She lifted her face, and he kissed it, forgetting what he was going to say.“I suppose there are plenty of schools and things at Blackmere?” she asked reflectively.“Oh, I suppose so.”“I hope I shan’t have to teach the multiplication tables?”“Why should you?” he said briefly. The flame had again died down.“I fancied people did. Do you know, I was thinking about it in the night.”“The multiplication table?”“I never could learn beyond six times. Until one came to ten, of course,” she added triumphantly. “And granny says Teresa could say it backwards—when she liked.”“I wouldn’t trouble my head about it.”“No, I won’t,” said the girl obediently.Wandering about a tangle of narrow streets, rugged, uneven, unchanged to all appearance from those Middle Ages when men’s lives and men’s thoughts were both simpler and more frankly expressed than in our subtler days, they found themselves in the central piazza, where Minerva’s columns have faced the sun of centuries. Wilbraham had made his way there the evening before, and had been so much impressed by their grandeur that he had looked forward to bringing Sylvia. This morning he said to himself that they were not what he had imagined them, and Sylvia hardly glanced in their direction, until he pointed them out.“I see. They are very pretty,” she commented. “What did you call them?”“They belonged to a temple of Minerva.”Sylvia reflected.“Then—” she hesitated—“they must be old, I suppose?”“Very,” he said, smiling.“Ah, I thought so. I know one used to learn something about Minerva in one’s lesson books.”Wilbraham almost started. He had accepted the fact that Sylvia was rather unusually ignorant, but somehow or other until now Teresa had been there, to toss aside any wonder with a jest. It had never come before him in so staringly obtrusive a light. And Sylvia, anxious to prove her interest, went on gravely—“Hadn’t she something to do with an owl?”But, as she said it, kind fate made her turn her face again up towards his. He looked, and laughed.“You’ve remembered one thing, haven’t you, darling? We’ll read up about Minerva some day. People do forget their classics.”“I know those gods and goddesses always seemed very silly,” she returned, encouraged. “They never lived, and the things couldn’t have happened, so why should we think about them?”Why indeed? And, with the thought, visions of beautiful myths floated up before his eyes, and he wondered whether the time would come when he could as easily dismiss them. He did not as yet understand that they had never yet touched her at all, so that it was no question of dismissal. And she had her eyes still turned to his.“You like real history better? Well, let’s go back to Saint Francis; he’s real enough. Or—” and his voice changed, for love, even a little love, will show people truths, if only they will let it; and for the first, the very first time in his life, Wilbraham wondered whether he were indeed a prig—“or never mind any of them, dear, we’ll only think about to-day.”“Yes,” she said happily, drawing a little closer to him as his hand sought hers, “yes, that is nicer.”And as they strolled round the piazza, and looked—with his eyes—at the pictures which lived all round them, at shadowy eaves, flowers in dark windows, bits of carving, children in bright rags, women carrying pitchers; mules, vegetables, big umbrellas, gourds, maize, tomatoes, shade, sun, he said again and again to himself, how sweet she was, and how content a man should be with such a wife.They were standing at last by an open washing place at the side of the street, where a group of women thumped and wrung, much to Sylvia’s distress—for it seemed to her a destructive way of washing clothes—when Teresa and Miss Sandiland came round a corner.“Oh!” murmured Miss Sandiland, catching sight of them, and slackening her steps significantly.But the young marchesa marched on. When she had not Sylvia before her, unacknowledged uneasiness fretted her; she was sure that by a look she could judge how the two were getting on, and whether Sylvia had, as Mrs Maxwell would have said, yet put her foot in it.“Well,” she called out, “you two got the start of us. I expect you have seen everything.”“Yes, everything,” said the girl confidently. “There isn’t much, is there? It’s not like Rome, of course.”“And you’ve a kinder taskmaster. Poor Sylvia,” she went on to Wilbraham; “you know the sort of muddle one gets into with too much sightseeing? That’s where I’ve landed her. I worked her too hard, and I’m not up in things myself, and—I think she’s a good deal mixed by this time,” she ended with a laugh.“Oh, I don’t think I am,” remonstrated Sylvia, nodding her head; “you know I can find my way about Rome as well as you.”“So that you won’t be like the lady who asked her husband if she’d seen the Coliseum,” put in Wilbraham, smiling at her.“No-o-o,” she said, more doubtfully.“Did she really? I wonder she didn’t remember that, because it’s so big.”“We’re going on to the piazza,” said Teresa hastily. “Please put us in the way. Oh, look!”For across the street beyond them swept, with long strides, the figure of Colonel Maxwell. Something—they could not see what—he was clasping in his arms; and at his heels—laden, one with a piece of stone, another with a panel of carving; some (and these were naturally the most clamorous) with only disappointed hopes—ran half-a-dozen or more children. Behind the last, at breathless distance, followed his wife. She waved a despairing greeting to the group, and vanished.“Actaeon and Diana,” said Miss Sandiland, as soon as she could speak.“Or,” suggested Wilbraham, “the Pied Piper.”“Who was he?” Sylvia asked.“Oh, he’s Browning,” Teresa answered promptly, “and Browning’s beyond me.” She observed, with added uneasiness, that Sylvia’s changed circumstances encouraged her to talk and ask more questions than usual.Curiosity and laughter made them hasten up the hill, and turn into the street which had engulfed their friends. Nothing could be seen of the Maxwells, but two or three of the less lucky of the children were coming back slowly. Strangely for Assisi, where the past reigns, and its stones have set themselves down greyly and determinedly as the earth itself, a piece of wall had yielded so far to time that it was evidently held dangerous, and had been propped by one or two not very strong supports. The English people passed by it, Wilbraham last. He glanced up, and saw a quiver, an ominous bulge. The wall was falling, and underneath was a little creature of four or five years old, staring at him with large unheeding eyes! There was no time to snatch her away. Wilbraham was a very strong man, and he shouted, flung his weight against the falling stones, and for a moment held them back. Teresa turned, saw, rushed, caught at the child, dashed her into safety, would have run back once more, but it was too late; the whole mass was sliding and crumbling into a heap in the road, and Wilbraham, borne down with it, lay motionless.
Late into the night, facing the window, and the broad starlit sky stretching over the plain, Teresa sat with Sylvia’s hands in hers, listening. She said little, she was trying to gather what were the girl’s sensations—whether, as she unconsciously expected, things were awakening under this new touch. What perhaps surprised her most, though nothing would have induced her to own it, was Sylvia’s own want of surprise. She, who was generally so timid, so scrupulous, seemed to take all as a matter of course. Teresa reflected that Wilbraham’s wooing must have been amazingly effective, for Sylvia no longer seemed to have a doubt about anything. She talked of “we,” she alluded to plans with innocent egoism, she repeated some of the pretty things he had said. Once she jumped up and ran to the funny little looking-glass stuck against the wall, and came back smiling.
“He thinks my eyes charming,” she said frankly. “You never said much about them?”
“One waits for lovers to do that,” laughed Teresa.
“I don’t see why. Did the marchese admire yours?”
“How could he!” Teresa spoke with sharp pain, the pain of remembrance. “I was never pretty, like you, child.”
“No,” said Sylvia, looking at her with her head on one side, “I suppose not. Walter said you were not.”
“Oh, Walter. That’s his name, is it?”
Teresa hated herself for speaking with a certain asperity. It is so much easier to disparage one’s self than to bear with others doing it. But Sylvia was at last genuinely amazed.
“Do you mean that all this time you never knewthat? Why, I have always known it. Teresa, how very funny! You have never thought about him as Mr Walter Wilbraham? It is such a beautiful name! But that you should not—Teresa, youarefunny!”
“I shall know now.”
“Of course you will.” The girl gazed at her almost with compassion, as at one whom Wilbraham had called absent-minded. “It will be my name, you know. At least, I think so, as there is his mother. Perhaps,” she added pityingly, “perhaps you have forgotten that there is a mother?”
Teresa turned and kissed her impulsively.
“A mother—yes, what does it matter, what does anything matter? Only be happy, be happy, dear!”
“I am very happy,” said Sylvia simply. “And I like so much talking to you about it.”
“Always talk to me—not to any one else.”
“Not to granny?”
“No, not to granny—not even to granny. I’m your sister, I can understand,” cried Teresa, with a protective yearning in her heart, a defiant uprising against Mrs Brodrick’s prognostications.
“But I shall talk to Walter first,” said Sylvia; “of course, I shall tell him everything.”
“Of course,” returned her sister. Yet her heart sank, and long after Sylvia was sleeping peacefully in her little bed, Teresa sat at the window, her hands clasping one knee, while she looked out at the wonderful night, and wondered how soon Wilbraham, who was not a fool, would find out that he had indeed reached the bottom of everything.
But by the morning her fears had left her. By the morning she was her energetic, suggestive self, with an added touch of cordiality in her manner towards Wilbraham. She owned, as they sat at breakfast in the uninviting feeding-room of the Subisio, that he was a striking-looking man, taller than most, and broadly made. There was a greater suggestion of strength about him than she had yet realised, and, like other women, Teresa liked strength. Generally she felt an inclination to contradict him, but this morning she adopted all his suggestions readily—so readily, that once Mrs Maxwell, who had not yet been enlightened, and was unused to seeing Teresa so meek, put down her cup and stared at her. Teresa laughed a little, and went on being pleasant.
“You’ll see how good I am going to be,” she said triumphantly to Mary Maxwell, when she had told her.
“Well, don’t turn the man’s head,” replied her friend.
“My dear, the only thing that can turn a man’s head is a pretty face.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“That’s because you’ve one of your own.”
“Oh!” cried Mrs Maxwell delightedly, “you’re charming! I had almost forgotten what a compliment was like. If Jim had the sense to throw me a few, I should be ready to swear all his discoveries were genuine. Why, why are husbands so foolish?”
Later, when they were clambering again up the stony streets, she caught Mrs Brodrick alone.
“Let us forget all about Saint Francis for a few minutes and talk about Saint Sylvia,” she said; “she is our heroine to-day, and the best of creatures, isn’t she?”
“As good as gold,” assented Mrs Brodrick hastily.
“But the best of creatures may be the least little bit in the world—tiresome? Oh, don’t let us be quite good ourselves, let us say what is on the tip of our tongues. How can any one look at Sylvia when Teresa is by?”
“When you’re my age,” said the older woman, “you will have given up asking questions.”
“When I’m your age I shall try to answer other people’s,” said Mary, with a laugh. “Do you believe for a moment that it can go on?—particularly when Teresa withdraws, as she must, into the background, and leaves Sylvia to stand alone?”
Our own thoughts are apt to look the uglier, held up by another person, and Mrs Brodrick would have chosen silence. As it was she said quietly:
“Mr Wilbraham is not the man to make mistakes.”
Mary Maxwell laughed shrewdly.
“You mean he’s not the man to acknowledge them. There you’re right. I daresay he will stick to Sylvia rather than own himself in the wrong. Well, perhaps obstinacy has its uses. I wonder what they are talking about now?” she added, wickedly.
At the moment when she asked the question, the two concerned were also climbing steep streets—since at Assisi you must go up or down—stopping every now and then to look through narrow vistas of grey stone houses, towards the fair blue distances which lay beyond. Wilbraham was not so much in love that he had not some uncertainty as to how much he ought to say about it; sometimes, indeed, he felt that he had said but little. Sylvia, however, was quite satisfied. She was not exacting, and she had been brought up in an atmosphere which had given her trustfulness. When Wilbraham had once said he loved her, it would not have occurred to her to doubt the fact.
So, as they went, she babbled cheerfully and disconnectedly, turning to him from time to time the face which invariably gave him a renewed feeling of satisfaction. Had he pulled his own feelings to pieces, he would have realised that his love was not a sweeping force, but, rather, intermittent, moving in jerks, or brightening up now and then like a flame stirred by a sudden current. As it was, he felt quite sufficiently sure of himself to be content.
“What charming children!” cried Sylvia, stopping to smile at a group. “Aren’t they sweet? I always think the Italian children have such beautiful eyes. Have you ever noticed it?”
He assured her that he had.
“I like them so much when they don’t comequiteclose, because, do you know, they are not very clean. Poor little souls, I daresay they can’t help it, though. Oh, please, please send them away!”
“Be off!” cried Wilbraham, coming to the rescue.
Sylvia hurried on till she was breathless.
“I can’t think why they beg so!” she said piteously. “They really frighten one!”
The sweet helpless eyes turned towards him stirred the flame again. He took her hand in his.
“My darling,” he said tenderly, “you mustn’t be frightened when I am by, and they were very little children.”
“They were dreadfully dirty—all rags,” she said.
“When we’re married, Sylvia—”
“Yes?”
She lifted her face, and he kissed it, forgetting what he was going to say.
“I suppose there are plenty of schools and things at Blackmere?” she asked reflectively.
“Oh, I suppose so.”
“I hope I shan’t have to teach the multiplication tables?”
“Why should you?” he said briefly. The flame had again died down.
“I fancied people did. Do you know, I was thinking about it in the night.”
“The multiplication table?”
“I never could learn beyond six times. Until one came to ten, of course,” she added triumphantly. “And granny says Teresa could say it backwards—when she liked.”
“I wouldn’t trouble my head about it.”
“No, I won’t,” said the girl obediently.
Wandering about a tangle of narrow streets, rugged, uneven, unchanged to all appearance from those Middle Ages when men’s lives and men’s thoughts were both simpler and more frankly expressed than in our subtler days, they found themselves in the central piazza, where Minerva’s columns have faced the sun of centuries. Wilbraham had made his way there the evening before, and had been so much impressed by their grandeur that he had looked forward to bringing Sylvia. This morning he said to himself that they were not what he had imagined them, and Sylvia hardly glanced in their direction, until he pointed them out.
“I see. They are very pretty,” she commented. “What did you call them?”
“They belonged to a temple of Minerva.”
Sylvia reflected.
“Then—” she hesitated—“they must be old, I suppose?”
“Very,” he said, smiling.
“Ah, I thought so. I know one used to learn something about Minerva in one’s lesson books.”
Wilbraham almost started. He had accepted the fact that Sylvia was rather unusually ignorant, but somehow or other until now Teresa had been there, to toss aside any wonder with a jest. It had never come before him in so staringly obtrusive a light. And Sylvia, anxious to prove her interest, went on gravely—
“Hadn’t she something to do with an owl?”
But, as she said it, kind fate made her turn her face again up towards his. He looked, and laughed.
“You’ve remembered one thing, haven’t you, darling? We’ll read up about Minerva some day. People do forget their classics.”
“I know those gods and goddesses always seemed very silly,” she returned, encouraged. “They never lived, and the things couldn’t have happened, so why should we think about them?”
Why indeed? And, with the thought, visions of beautiful myths floated up before his eyes, and he wondered whether the time would come when he could as easily dismiss them. He did not as yet understand that they had never yet touched her at all, so that it was no question of dismissal. And she had her eyes still turned to his.
“You like real history better? Well, let’s go back to Saint Francis; he’s real enough. Or—” and his voice changed, for love, even a little love, will show people truths, if only they will let it; and for the first, the very first time in his life, Wilbraham wondered whether he were indeed a prig—“or never mind any of them, dear, we’ll only think about to-day.”
“Yes,” she said happily, drawing a little closer to him as his hand sought hers, “yes, that is nicer.”
And as they strolled round the piazza, and looked—with his eyes—at the pictures which lived all round them, at shadowy eaves, flowers in dark windows, bits of carving, children in bright rags, women carrying pitchers; mules, vegetables, big umbrellas, gourds, maize, tomatoes, shade, sun, he said again and again to himself, how sweet she was, and how content a man should be with such a wife.
They were standing at last by an open washing place at the side of the street, where a group of women thumped and wrung, much to Sylvia’s distress—for it seemed to her a destructive way of washing clothes—when Teresa and Miss Sandiland came round a corner.
“Oh!” murmured Miss Sandiland, catching sight of them, and slackening her steps significantly.
But the young marchesa marched on. When she had not Sylvia before her, unacknowledged uneasiness fretted her; she was sure that by a look she could judge how the two were getting on, and whether Sylvia had, as Mrs Maxwell would have said, yet put her foot in it.
“Well,” she called out, “you two got the start of us. I expect you have seen everything.”
“Yes, everything,” said the girl confidently. “There isn’t much, is there? It’s not like Rome, of course.”
“And you’ve a kinder taskmaster. Poor Sylvia,” she went on to Wilbraham; “you know the sort of muddle one gets into with too much sightseeing? That’s where I’ve landed her. I worked her too hard, and I’m not up in things myself, and—I think she’s a good deal mixed by this time,” she ended with a laugh.
“Oh, I don’t think I am,” remonstrated Sylvia, nodding her head; “you know I can find my way about Rome as well as you.”
“So that you won’t be like the lady who asked her husband if she’d seen the Coliseum,” put in Wilbraham, smiling at her.
“No-o-o,” she said, more doubtfully.
“Did she really? I wonder she didn’t remember that, because it’s so big.”
“We’re going on to the piazza,” said Teresa hastily. “Please put us in the way. Oh, look!”
For across the street beyond them swept, with long strides, the figure of Colonel Maxwell. Something—they could not see what—he was clasping in his arms; and at his heels—laden, one with a piece of stone, another with a panel of carving; some (and these were naturally the most clamorous) with only disappointed hopes—ran half-a-dozen or more children. Behind the last, at breathless distance, followed his wife. She waved a despairing greeting to the group, and vanished.
“Actaeon and Diana,” said Miss Sandiland, as soon as she could speak.
“Or,” suggested Wilbraham, “the Pied Piper.”
“Who was he?” Sylvia asked.
“Oh, he’s Browning,” Teresa answered promptly, “and Browning’s beyond me.” She observed, with added uneasiness, that Sylvia’s changed circumstances encouraged her to talk and ask more questions than usual.
Curiosity and laughter made them hasten up the hill, and turn into the street which had engulfed their friends. Nothing could be seen of the Maxwells, but two or three of the less lucky of the children were coming back slowly. Strangely for Assisi, where the past reigns, and its stones have set themselves down greyly and determinedly as the earth itself, a piece of wall had yielded so far to time that it was evidently held dangerous, and had been propped by one or two not very strong supports. The English people passed by it, Wilbraham last. He glanced up, and saw a quiver, an ominous bulge. The wall was falling, and underneath was a little creature of four or five years old, staring at him with large unheeding eyes! There was no time to snatch her away. Wilbraham was a very strong man, and he shouted, flung his weight against the falling stones, and for a moment held them back. Teresa turned, saw, rushed, caught at the child, dashed her into safety, would have run back once more, but it was too late; the whole mass was sliding and crumbling into a heap in the road, and Wilbraham, borne down with it, lay motionless.