JULIA OF ASSISI, fresh from the heart of things Franciscan, had been painfully struck by the heartlessness of Rome. In all the grandeur and the pride of the Seven Hills there is something which made her say to herself, as soon as she arrived, that it wasn’t the same as Assisi—a weak phrase, but she found the right expression before long. A want of heart!—for a time she wandered disconsolate, feeling that it was no place for her. What then was delight to discover in Rome her old friend and ally Professor Minchin—a man, as I believe, of European reputation, and a man for whom Julia has one of the frankest and most gurgling of passions. See her, hear her, on a perfect morning in the Forum, as she presents him with the party she has collected for the treat of a tour, under his guidance, among the excavated ruins. He knows them intimately, from the temple to the sewer; thereisa heart of things Roman after all, and the Professor undertakes to reveal it. Not in the great bleak galleries and the tawdry churches, but here among broken columns and crumbling masonry, still half buried in historic dust—here is that human and homely touch, or note, or message (for either word is used, if we follow Julia), which at first one took to be lacking altogether in Rome. The darling Professor had made all the difference to her enjoyment of the place; no wonder that she whinnied and panted in her enthusiasm, while she tried to keep us in a bunch and to marshal us properly for our treat.
The Professor seemed conscious of Julia as of some disturbance in the air, some unexplained flutter or flicker that confused him slightly; but he brushed it aside, he vaguely greeted the rest of us, and he flunghimself immediately into the zeal of his task. Miss Turnbull, I know, was a young woman easily stirred to ideal raptures, but I soon acknowledged that the Professor was irresistible. He had the appearance partly of a moth and partly of a scarecrow; and the mixture, as I recall it, surprisingly gives him the likeness of a soft and ragged rain-cloud, swept by a kindly gust. He veered at high speed across the broken floor of the Forum, and Julia had much difficulty in holding the half-dozen of us in her embrace while she trundled us after him. The Professor had his view of the particular drain or paving-stone where the study of Rome begins; and there was nothing for it, said Julia, but to accept his rule and to squeeze as we might into the awkward pit or cleft in which the fundamental object is to be found. “Mind the tail of your skirt, Mrs. Rollesby,” cried Julia, growing heated; “there’s room for Kathleen at this end, out of the puddle; wait, Professor, wait—I want Mr. Ram to hear this; really, Mr. Ram, if you crouch you can easily get in.” We were a handful, but Julia kept her head; the most trying member of the party was the Professor, who heeded nothing but the book which he had drawn from his pocket and from which he was gleefully reading aloud—translating as he went, for it was an ancient text.
It wasn’t the best situation for a classical lecture, and Mr. Ram, splashing in the puddle, sighed faintly in good Italian. “Per l’amor di Dio!” he murmured; he was very helpless, and the girl called Kathleen seized him with a manly arm and set him to rights on his perch. Crouching, scuffling, apologizing, we wedged ourselves about the lecturer—with sudden changes of pressure when Mrs. Rollesby leaned and peered over hercapacious bosom (she may have been one of Emmeline’s heroines) to see what was happening to her skirt. Under the Professor’s elbow sat a bewildered maiden with a pulled-out neck like a hen’s, and she distracted the whole company by taking notes of the lecture on a little pad—scrawling down words like “republican (said to be)” and “(?) Etruscan,” which we all tried to read. Julia listened fervently, her lips moving in the effort to get the message of the paving-stone by heart; and the message ran on, ran on, now translated from the ancient book, now poured forth at an amazing rate in the exposition of the Professor. He was inspired; he stood upon the mouth of the sewer (if sewer it was—“masonry doubtful (perhaps),” obscurely noted the hen-necked girl)—he stood there and flourished his book and flaunted his interpretation and ransacked the ages, casting up the history of races, of immigrations, of the colour of men’s hair, of the obscenities of their religion, of the shapes of their water-pots; and he whipped open his book again and triumphantly quoted, he dashed it away to remind us of Pelasgic sources and Punic infusions and Iberian influences; and perhaps I rather recall the heads of his discourse as they reached the bewildered pad than as they fell from the Professor, but they were various and bristling and abundant; for it all came in, it all came round, it all came finally back to the stone on which Mr. Ram was trying to twist himself into a tolerable attitude without spoiling his trousers. “Ah,” exclaimed Julia uncontrollably, “how onefeelsit on the very spot!” Mr. Ram seemed to think so too; he raised himself, ruefully inspecting the damp green traces it had left on the very spot. The Professor dived again into his book like a man possessed.
He kept us at last so long in our narrow pit that we must surely have laid the foundations of Rome and tunnelled its drains with all thoroughness; the notes on the pad were still dubious, but Mrs. Rollesby began to wonder if we hadn’t now reached the surface of the soil—she too had taken her share of the ooze of the ages. She signed to Julia with winks and nudges—and Mr. Ram appealed to Julia with a woeful smile, to which Kathleen added an imperative frown; everybody looked to Julia to take action—everybody except the maiden with the pad, intent upon the uncertainties of learning. The Professor was Julia’s property, it was for her to deal with him; and he had clearly forgotten that we were still underground, he didn’t even notice that the reason why he couldn’t get at the pocket in his coat-tail (he made a sketchy motion towards it now and then) was that the hen’s-neck stretched in the way. We might just as well be sitting comfortably in the sun, and between her responsibility and her rapture poor Julia was flustered. “Soon, very soon—the blue-eyed infusion predominant—I’ll get him to move in a moment—their pots were shallower”: Julia tried to whisper encouragingly to Mrs. Rollesby without dropping the thread of the message. (I don’t answer for her version of it.) But the Professor swept over her head, beaming in the zest of his approach to the real inwardness, the ultimate significance, the true truth of the origin of Rome—it appeared that we were only there, even now, and the first damp stone, so homely and said to be so Etruscan, had still to be laid. We were to stick in our cleft indefinitely, I thought, for Julia’s tactful advances and coughs made no impression. The hen-necked girl scratched out “Etruscan” and wrote wildly“theory abandoned (if at all)”; and the Professor struck her forcibly on the jaw as he flung out upon the climax, the glad surprise to which he had been gradually leading us—his discovery of the solution, the answer to all the queries of the distracted student.
“But first,” he said, “I fear I must disturb you.” He explained with apologies that we should be better able to judge the weight of his argument if we followed him—and he was gone, leaping to the upper air with a sudden agility that brought on one of the tiresome attacks to which Mrs. Rollesby is subject on being startled. These attacks take the form of an extraordinary surging and quaking of the bosom, and she has to be seized and supported and propelled to a spot where she can sit on something less painful than a heap of brickbats. So she says; but the girl Kathleen (who proved to be her niece) declared rather brutally that a little smart exercise would do her all the good in the world. “If shewillgobble at breakfast she’ll palpitate before lunch—naturally,” said Kathleen, who was as taut and muscular as a young tree. With all this the Professor had given us the slip, our party was adrift and scattered, Mr. Ram saw a chance of escape—he feared and detested Kathleen. But Julia signalled so excitedly through a gap in some ruinous brickwork, not far off, that she drew us together again for the Professor’s revelation. Mrs. Rollesby, still surging, was somehow hoisted through the gap, and here we found a more convenient space and a less Etruscan boulder, on which she was deposited. There was more room; but it seemed that the secret of Rome still lurks in rather confined and dingy places. The Forum on a spring morning is a sweet spot, and Mr. Ram assured me thathe loved every stone of it; the columns tower against the blue sky, roses scramble among the mouldering walls, the dark ilex-crown of the Palatine hangs nobly on its height. But the Professor dragged us away from the view and the roses, he thrust us into a dusty corner where there was nothing to be seen except the blank face of the brickwork to which he joyously pointed. Now, he said, we could perceive for ourselves the conclusion to which his argument had tended; and he shone so radiantly with his glee in the surprise prepared for us that Julia bravely gave a cry and a gasp of recognition on behalf of all. He was enchanted with his success. “I knew you would see it at once,” he said proudly; “thatspeaks for itself.” He patted and caressed it with the hand of a collector, a connoisseur; it appeared to be a little rim or ledge of greyish cement between the reddish bricks.
His triumph illuminated the shabby corner. Julia’s falsity, Mrs. Rollesby’s palpitation, Mr. Ram’s uneasy mistrust in the neighbourhood of Kathleen—he was rapt above all these in his blissful vision. I don’t know that any of us attained to a share in it; for even Julia, who perhaps came nearest, was so much disturbed by her own rashness and by the fear of being unmasked that she was altogether thrown out in her absorption of the message. She was soon in a fearful state of muddle between the homely touch and the human note, and if the Professor had had eyes for anything post-Iberian (but the pad must surely have got this word wrong) he couldn’t have failed to see that her attention wandered. I attribute my own confusion in the matter of the sewer and the grey cement in the first place to the hen-necked girl (whom Julia addressed as “Hicksiedear”)—for the eye was fatally drawn by her pad; and secondly to Mrs. Rollesby’s alarming attack—which in spite of her niece’s treatment abated little on the boulder, some of the symptoms being so tumultuous that they even affected the Professor in his cloud. Mr. Ram, moreover, was inclined to attach himself to me, as the only member of the party who wasn’t rather rough with him; for the dry bones of learning, he said, left him cold, and he wanted to point out to somebody that the past only lives for us when it is touched by a poetic imagination. So he pointed it out to me, and in principle I agreed with him; but I couldn’t admit that the Professor was wanting in poetry. To me he seemed romantically poetic, and though his argument escaped me I appreciated the spirit of his dream.
It was the spirit of those old fine men, the scholars of the great revival, to whom the glory of antiquity was disclosed in the recovery of the lost books and the forgotten tongue; and even more, perhaps, it was the spirit of the artist, the lover of the marble and the bronze, who stood in breathless expectation while the spade unearthed the buried goddess and gave her back after long eclipse to a newly adoring world. As Poggio over a brown Greek manuscript, as Michael over the great smooth limbs that had lain for a thousand years of oblivion in the soil of the vineyard—so our Professor was hailing no less than a revelation in his turn. What is the mere fidget of the foreground, the present, the transient, compared with the huge unchanging past, where everything is secured and established under the appearance of eternity?—and how, when the obstruction is wonderfully pierced, the page restored, the earth of the present shovelled away, shall we refrain from dashingheadlong into the world thrown open, serenely offering itself to our exploration? “There, there’s the appropriate country”—for no man can think rarely and intensely in the rattle of things proceeding, changing, palpitating, catching the eye momently with their ambiguous queries. A scholar shares the blest opportunity of the higher mathematician, and the two of them share it with the artist; all three, and doubtless the saint for a fourth, inhabit a region of completed things, of motionless truth. It is not to say that they are calm and motionless themselves—the Professor almost dances and leaps in the inspiration of his research, returning again and again to the wonder of the speaking brickwork. But the truth that he seeks is there before him, eternally disposed for the hand, the eye, the brain—and I am not afraid of Mr. Ram’s own word, for the poetic imagination—that is able to discern and seize it.
To the Professor it was as lovely as a lyric of Sappho or a torso of the golden age. His fingers rested on the battered brick, the rubbish, the rubble—whichever it was that held the secret—with a touch that might have been laid on the exquisite curves of the perfect marble. His statue had come to the light, he chanted its beauty, he was ready to linger over its gracious lines for the benefit even of a few ignorant gapers like ourselves. Homely indeed!—and human!—Julia was wide of the mark. It was divine, if the word means anything, in its immortal completeness; and as for homeliness, why it carries you off into the clouds, a soft tattered cloud yourself, so that the earth with its gapers and its great fat panting gobblers is forgotten—or would be if it weren’t for the singular moanings of the dying storm in Mrs. Rollesby’s breast. These, as I have said, did occasionally penetrate to the Professor; he glanced earthward with a puzzled look, as though he asked himself whether he had heard or only fancied the report of some commotion. Only fancy, he concluded; and he returned to the height of his discourse—which all this time you must imagine to have been ranging onward, sweeping backward, darting and circling as vivaciously as ever. The wretched Hicksie tore leaf after leaf from her pad, scattering fresh interrogations as fast as the last were answered. Julia was still bright and eager, but her bad conscience was beginning to show in the flush of her dishevelment. The Professor alone didn’t flag; we had given up all thought of the roses and the view, and we gazed stonily at his vigour. Oh, the common earth of the present had little with which to retain such a man; he was caught into the past, into the loving celebration of his statue, his lyric—which is my figure for the secret revealed to his exploring and divining scholarship. I envy him as I envy an artist and a saint, or even a mathematician; there, there’s where I would be, where things stand still and are silent, and you roam among them, chanting the rapture of your research, till you drop. That is a life.
And what was the secret after all? I picture it vaguely as a brilliant divination and revival of the past, the result of the play of the Professor’s penetrating insight upon the vast amassment of his learning. I think of his jubilant glee as aroused, how naturally, by some great spectacle of the ancient world that he perceives in the light of his patient faithful studies. Alas, it is vague to me; but he sees it as clearly, no doubt, beneath the dust and rubbish of the Forum, as I see the green-veiled woman who strays drearily into our corner,murmuring over her red handbook “to our right lie the rude substructures of the peristyle.” And in point of fact I am quite as wide of the mark as Julia herself. The Professor was not the man to have spent good time and good thought over the visionary fancies I ascribed to him; not for him to be a mere “popularizer of the specious”—a phrase that he utters with hissing scorn, for it is one of his side-hits at the showier lore of a “sister university.” No, the Professor took a different view of the scholar’s privilege. It is for the scholar to find a loose stone or an insidious chink in the work of his predecessors and to leave it tightened and slopped; then as he dies he tells himself that he has done something which needed doing—not every man can say as much. Was it a small thing?—it may seem a small thing to you or me, but the Professor retorts that in these matters our clumsy measure is of no authority; if a fact has been inserted where no fact was, then truth is the better for it—and with what sort of scale, pray, will you undertake to estimate the betterment of truth? All this nonsense of torsos and secrets and lyrics may be well enough in a pretty book; but the Professor has been putting a great deal of energy into an explanation, which I seem to have totally misunderstood, of the point that had baffled—or worse, that had deceived and misled—all researchers before him. He has demonstrated his own theory, and when I mention that it has found complete acceptance even at the “sister university” (where to be sure they consider it a trifling matter—theywould!) I think we may assume that a fanciful amateur, vacantly gaping, is not likely to find a flaw in it. Here is something accomplished for a man to rest upon with satisfaction—so much so that even now, after anhour of mercurial discourse, the Professor is still prepared to go springing off to the next dusty corner and rude substructure that speaks for itself in support of his view.
But what is it, what is it? At this distance of time I long to know, but I confess that at the moment, what with the wear and tear of the various distractions I have described, I could only agree with Mr. Ram that the day was indeed growing “sultry”—I never heard this word on the lips of anyone else—and that it would be pleasant to seek a little repose and refreshment. Mr. Ram looked at his watch—“Time for a littlevino, a littlespaghetti,” he insinuated gently and playfully; and though he spoke aside to me, the suggestion was caught up with promptitude by Mrs. Rollesby. All eyes were again directed upon Julia, and poor harassed Julia had once more to begin coughing and sniffing significantly at each of the Professor’s full slops. Kathleen indeed told her aunt plainly that lunch on the top of “all that stodge” at breakfast would be disastrous for one so lately startled; and Mr. Ram drew a sharp breath between his teeth as she added, swinging round at him and pointing to his waist, “Yes, and for you too, Mr. Ram—you’d much better come for a tramp with me before you lay on any more of that deposit.” Hicksie also seemed to have no thought of food or rest; her scribbling was by this time almost delirious in the fever of its queries, but she stuck to it. And the Professor ran on, ran on, blind to Mrs. Rollesby, deaf to Julia—until it happened as before, he suddenly apologized for being compelled to disturb us again, and was gone. This time he was gone so imperceptibly that Mrs. Rollesby was unfluttered; she was consulting Mr.Ram with regard to the handiest place for her lunch. Might we decently take it that the lecture was finished? Not so—Julia, beckoning me to follow, had dashed in pursuit of the Professor; we saw her scrambling up a steep bank to a sort of platform among the ruins, elevated and exposed, where he was renewing his exposition to an audience of one—for the faithful Hicksie had kept pace with him and was sitting at his feet, bent already over a new page. Julia gained the height and doubled his audience; and Mr. Ram and I, glancing at each other rather guiltily, suggested that they seemed very well as they were. The Professor was clearly quite unconscious of the dwindling of his audience; we seized our chance.
Over oursorso di vino, as Mr. Ram still called it, I was inclined to think that we had indeed been very near the heart of things Roman that morning—very near, if not completely in touch with it. The Professor’s single-minded certainty was contagious; he held his faith as a grain of mustard-seed, and his passion almost convinced me that we waste our time in our random researches, away from his guidance, after the heart of Rome. Suppose Julia was right, and it was the Professor who had really the clue—for indeed there was a quality in his faith, with its blankness to vulgar appeals, which hadn’t been noticeable on the whole among the rest of our band. Unfortunately I couldn’t put my question to Mr. Ram; he was pre-occupied with his own more tender, more understanding and sensitive love of every stone of the Forum. It hurt him to see the Forum treated as a class-room, and he blamed himself for having suffered Miss Julia to include him, much against his rule, in the class. He didn’t wish to speakof the Professor, but rather of the impression that the Forum, familiar as it was, had made upon himself last evening in a strangely “bistred” afterglow, whatever that may be. But with all his tenderness the faith of Mr. Ram was a languid thing beside that of the Professor, and I returned to the impression that the Forum had made upon myself in the iridescent halo (thus I capped Mr. Ram) of the Professor’s ardour. Where had I seen the like of it? Nowhere at all, I reflected, except perhaps in one place—and that was the great church, when the genius of Rome came riding and swaying over the heads of the multitude. Those eager votaries, yelling their homage—the Professor dancing in his zeal: they had come to Rome with something in common, their single mind.
ASTUDIO!—I found myself at last in the studio of an artist. Deering had mocked my bookish and antiquated notions of Roman life and I had obediently dropped them; I had thrown over Hawthorne and Andersen, even the ingenuous romance of poor old Zola, and my pursuit of reality had carried me along the path that I have traced. But at last I arrived at a studio, and I hadn’t spent ten minutes there before I was back again in the dear familiar company of the Improviser and the Faun, the friends of my sentimental and pre-Deering past. I had had an inkling of them even as I approached the door; for the Via Margutta, tucked under the terrace of the Pincian Hill, is a corner of Rome where you might well expect to be brushed by their gentle ghosts. It is a street of studios, or it was a few days ago—perhaps it is a street of motor-works and cinema-houses by now; and a quiet bystreet not far from the Spanish Steps, full of shabby buildings with high northern lights, was still populous with Kenyon and Donatello and Roderick, for me at least it was, in that spring-time of the middle distance to which I now look back. Even as I turned into the Via Margutta, then, I had a hint that Deering had deceived me; and ten minutes later I knew he had, for I stood before the canvases that lined the studio of Mr. Vickery.
He was as loud and deaf and picturesque as I had seen and heard at Miss Gainsborough’s; he wore a great blue smock and a loose slouch-cap of black velvet, his white hair coiled upon his shoulders. There was a bewildering crowd of people in the big room, and there were several low tables spread out with fine old chinaand a lavish refection; and at first I was rather taken aback, for Mr. Vickery’s invitation to me had implied that I should find him lost to the world as usual and dabbling in his paints, but glad to welcome a friend to the casual cheer of an old Bohemian. He was casually welcoming such a crowd, and the strawberry-dishes were so many, and the room was so grand with tapestries and armour and cushioned divans, that I was struck shy and lonely at the start, forgetting my pleasant hint of Kenyon outside; but Mr. Vickery rolled jovially to greet me—he had a large rocking movement on his legs that was full of heartiness—and begged me to put up with the easy ways of an old Bohemian like himself. He was very loud and clear upon the point, and I heard him reiterate it as he rambled among his guests; I made out that we had all dropped in upon him casually, and must take him as we found him in the rude simplicity of his workshop. Presently he had picked up a palette daubed with colours and was wearing it on his thumb; and he clutched a sheaf of long-handled brushes that he threw down with splendid geniality to grasp the hand of somebody arriving or departing. We had surprised him, it appeared, at work on a gigantic canvas, a landscape, which was hoisted on an easel so tremendous that he had to climb by a step-ladder to reach the azure distances of the Alban hills. He climbed to them again from time to time, and he looked wonderfully striking, I must say, as he stood on the steps, his brush poised, glancing over his shoulder with a laughing boyish word to the crowd below.
The great picture represented a view of the Roman Campagna; the azure hills were seen through the straddling stilted arches of one of the ruined aqueducts;in the foreground was a party of goats, attended by a handsome old man, sheepskin-clad, who shaded his eyes and looked benignantly across at a boy blowing a pipe in the left-hand corner—and the boy, as I live, had matted curls and a pair of weather-stained velvet breeches. My mind flew to Deering—he should hear of this! Deering was too clever by half, with his derision of my innocent fancies; here was an artist, just as I had supposed, who duly studied the “picturesque models” of the English ghetto and introduced them into a picture as venerable and as romantic and as big almost as the Campagna itself. Is it into a picture, moreover? It is into fifty pictures, hung on the walls or tilted on easels all about the studio; and I wandered from one to another, very pleasantly, in the recovered company of my familiar old friends. Hawthorne murmured his prim harmonious phrases; another and a younger figure, very watchful under the careful correctness of his bearing, noticed everything and said little; and we passed from picture to picture, pausing before each with a smile of charmed recognition. The old man in his sheepskin, the boy in his curls, met us by many a crumbling arch of a sun-bathed aqueduct; and sometimes they met us in a street-scene, by a splashing fountain and a gay flower-stall, where they were joined by a girl with gleaming teeth and black provocative eyes; and again they met us in deep mountain-valleys, very verdurous and lonely, where there was a ruined temple on the height of a crag and a bandit at the mouth of a cavern; and everywhere the sheepskin and the curls and the fine dark glances had a charm for us, away from Deering’s sarcastic eye, to which I for one surrendered in comfort and peace. This was a worldI knew; it was quite a relief to cease from facing reality for a few minutes.
I was brought back to reality by encountering Miss Gadge, who said (as my shadowy companions vanished) that there was nothing she enjoyed more, as an old Roman, than a prowl round the studio of a true artist. She delighted in the temple and the bandit, but she seemed a little distraught in her reverence by her desire to talk about the people present. She had a great deal of information concerning all the company, and she hastened to impart it—for it would interest me, she said, to know something of the kind of types one met in a typically Roman studio. She went through them all, giving of each what is called a “thumbnail” sketch; she admitted that the phrase was Emmeline’s, and that in Emmeline’s society she had fallen into the habit of seeing people always in an intensely typical light—Emmeline says that a novelist does so quite instinctively. “Now that girl there with the blue beads—she’s a kind you only see in Rome: very charming, very lady-like and that—pretty Idon’tsay, and a bad complexion, but that’s neither here nor there; well, her name is Sandra Deeprose (an odd name, isn’t it?)—” Miss Gadge’s sketches seemed to be wanting in crispness, and for an observer of type she was excessively occupied with the individual, but she wandered on over the company and presented me with a large number of facts and names. Mr. Vickery, she told me, was held to be thedoyenof the “colony” in Rome; he had lived in Rome for ever, from far back in the ancient days of the Pope-King; he had known everybody, he had known the Brownings—and sharply on that word I looked round to devour the strange new wonderful sight of a man who had knownthe Brownings. He happened to be standing at the far end of the room with his back against a darkly figured hanging of tapestry; and his head in its florid grandeur, so carefully composed, was relieved upon its background like a daring portrait—brilliantly, slashingly painted, you might say, by some artist not afraid of an obvious effect. Of his own effect Mr. Vickery was very sure, and with reason; he offered himself as a finished achievement of art and nature, sufficient as he stood. But far from it, he was at that moment nothing in himself, he was everything for what he implied—to one pair of eyes at least, fixed on him with intensity. He had known the Brownings—how strange it seems and new!
It was true enough, no doubt; Miss Gadge was certain of the fact, she had heard him speak of “picnics in the Campagna” with the Brownings—the throb of the thought was almost painful to me as she said it. But how delightful, she pursued, to know that I was a “Browning-lover” like herself; and she dropped the subject of the picnics in order to quote, to declaim some lines from “Rabbi ben Ezra” in a strangulated sing-song, quite unlike her ordinary voice, which expressed the power of her devotion to the poet. “Grow old along with me—” she intoned the lines in a hoarse and quavering wail; and I broke out on her with a passionate cry, though it remained unheard, over the depth of her misunderstanding. If a wish could have struck her in the face she would have reeled on the spot; but though I had struck her I couldn’t have made her understand how completely she mistook my feeling. “It’s notthat,” I might have burst out, “not in the least likethat!”—and how should she have understood that my sudden interest in Mr. Vickery was larger andrarer and stranger than that of a “Browning-lover,” even of one who could intone the chant of the Rabbi from end to end. I could any day have repeated the poems of Browning against Miss Gadge, though not on the pitch of her wail; but I was high abovethem, I felt, when I started at the sight of Mr. Vickery—at the gleam of the eagle-feather. I was with the Brownings in the Campagna, suddenlywiththem, stopping to speak to them: don’t you understand?—I wasn’t repeating their poems, which I have known by heart for years. It was useless to try explaining this to Miss Gadge, and I let her quaver on while I gazed my fill at the wonder. It was a strange excitement; and I don’t pretend to make light of it as I now look back, or to smile distantly at the thought of the thrill, the wild sweet breeze that ran through the imagination of the youthful onlooker. A man who had known the Brownings—there he stood!
The company thinned at length, and I was able to approach him, though I knew full well that the demon of shyness would prevent my questioning him, as I longed to question, on the subject of the picnics. But first I was held awhile longer by Miss Gadge, who on discovering that I was a less worthy worshipper of the poet than she had imagined went on with her study of type; and this brought her to a shabby and crumpled little old woman who was slipping furtively about the room with a purposeful air, talking to nobody. Miss Gadge named her, and the name was indeed a surprise—Mrs. Vickery; she was actually the wife of our resplendent host, but Miss Gadge threw a world of meaning into her headshake and her delicate grimace as she referred to her. Poor Mr. Vickery, all through his long and sumptuous career that dowdy impediment had hung tohim; and Miss Gadge, like all his admirers, was impressed by his fidelity—though indeed you might equally call it his wife’s tenacity. But to do her justice she kept to the background when his brilliance was turned to the world; I could see this for myself, as she slunk among his visitors without attempting to pretend they were hers. Look, however—at that moment Mrs. Vickery did venture to accost one of them, a queer untidy bundle of a woman not unlike herself, though much more colourful and bold-eyed. “Ah yes, of course,” said Miss Gadge, nodding shrewdly, “she talks to the reporter”; for the bold bundle, it seemed, was a common type, a haunter of studios and public places andsomedrawing-rooms even, where she picked up what she could for the exceedingly vulgar and brazen newspaper that you know so well. Mrs. Vickery fastened upon her with decision and drew her apart; and they stood together by one of the easels—not indeed looking at the picture, but evidently speaking of it, for Mrs. Vickery jerked her thumb at the bandit and proceeded to explain something very minutely to the journalist, emphasizing her points with a finger tapped on her palm. I caught a snatch of her explanation as I passed up the room. “Heneverasks less,” Mrs. Vickery was saying earnestly—“and he feels it should beknown.”
The artist was now at work again; he was mounted on his step-ladder, that is to say, with brush poised and palette displayed, and at intervals he gave a masterly stroke to the Alban hills. He wanted to get “a little more nerve, morerace, into the folds”: such was his odd expression. The crowd had cleared, but there was a small knot of people still clustered about him, and thebraver occasionally sent a compliment or a question bawling up at him. “Don’t talk to me of ‘movements,’”he genially cried back; “the only movement a painter should think of isthis”—and he twirled his brush in a narrowing spiral till it lighted on tiptoe in a fold of the hills. “The only movement I attend to is my own,” he exclaimed, swinging round, flashing on us superbly; “it extends from my house to my studio and back again. ‘Don’t talk about art—show me your work—here’s mine’: that’s what I say to the youngsters. My trade is paint, and I stick to it. An honest tradesman before the world—that’s what an artist should make and keep himself. Before the world, mark you!—his dreams are his own affair. Ah, his dreams—!” Mr. Vickery paused, dropping his brush, and he smote his hand to his eyes and held it there in a long silence. “My God, his dreams!” he murmured. The little group of us stood in a row below him, hushed and intent. The grand old figure of the painter towered against the monument of his toil, and the light of a spacious age seemed to beat on him in the hush. An old master-craftsman of the Renaissance, in his flat velvet cap, his loose blue working-garb—a tradesman he called himself, sturdy in his pride, but we had a glimpse of what he hid from the world. More than a glimpse indeed; for it was a long minute, I should think, before he turned and caught up his brush and set boisterously to work again. As he did so I was sharply prodded from behind—by the lady-reporter, I discovered. “What was that about dreams?” she asked; “did he meanart-dreams?” She wanted to have it clear, but Mrs. Vickery stole swiftly forward and nudged her for another point. “You quite understand,” Mrs. Vickery distinctly whispered, “that it mustn’t appear to come fromhim—what I told you.”
Before long the painter stepped down from his ladder, inspected the nerve of the hills from the proper distance and declared himself satisfied. He stretched his arms with a long happy sigh. “Well, well, well, it’s a great game—thank the gods for it! Where should I have been without it these fifty years? Can you imagine me without my poor old toys, Marchesa? Colour-box and canvas—give me them and take the rest! ‘He was born, he painted, he died’—my biography; when you write it don’t add another word.” The Marchesa looked at him with kind timid eyes (she was a very tall and angular Englishwoman) and answered vaguely; she spoke vaguely because it was impossible for her to reach Mr. Vickery’s hearing with her gentle huskiness, so that it didn’t matter what she said. The artist motioned her to a big divan and threw himself beside her among the cushions. He talked on. “Ah, there has been some work done in this old room for fifty years! What’s been happening all that time in the world, Marchesa? You great ones of the earth have had your hour and your power, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it. A poor painter wishes well to the world, always, for so long as the world is happy and busy it will forget the poor painter—he counts on that.” Mr. Vickery’s glance roved for a moment, taking in the circle of his listeners; his wife was still engaged with the reporter at a distance, but she looked hastily round on the pause and gave the reporter a little push, directing her towards the divan. This lady hurried across and took a vacant chair by my side. Mr. Vickery had turned again to address the Marchesa, and he proceededto speak with emotion of the long lonely laborious service to which a painter is dedicated; and insensibly he lifted the veil, musing to himself, and the light fell upon the hope, the faith, the ambition that an artist so jealously hugs and hides. “He hugs them like a secret,” said Mr. Vickery, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, “a secret that he daren’t profane.” Once more there was a silence. My neighbour bent to me anxiously: “Did he say ‘profane’?” she enquired; “why profane, do you think?—do ask him.”
I don’t know in what form the “Roman studio-chat” appeared in the brazen journal, but if the good lady had as much difficulty in sorting her impressions as I had over mine she can’t have got them ready for the following Saturday. The Marble Faun, the Brownings, the goatherd and the bandit, and then the resplendence of Mr. Vickery—in all this there was far too much for an easy cosy column with plenty of “cross-headings,” even if one left out the array of the types. Mrs. Vickery by herself might be the substance of a leisurely chat; she didn’t attend the session of the divan—she was very busy at a writing-table in a far corner, where she seemed to be sorting papers, making entries in books, stowing things into drawers and locking them up with jingling keys. She at least was forgotten by the world and obviously knew she could count on it; but if one happened to notice her she appeared as the one small sign of lonely concentration in the decorative staging of an artist’s life. I watched her examining a slip of paper, biting her pen; and presently she left her place, edged round the wall to the divan, and unobtrusively offered the paper and the pen to one of our party, a well-fed middle-aged man with side-whiskers. “You’veforgotten to fill in the date,” I heard her say softly. He filled it in, apologizing, and as she moved away she added that it would be sent without fail to his hotel next morning. Mrs. Vickery was attending to business, assured that the world was happy without her; she locked up the slip of paper and returned to the entries in her note-book. Yes, I think she would have made the best subject of all for one of the “jottings in Rome”; but the jotter missed it—she was preparing to ask Mr. Vickery about the profanity that she had also inadvertently missed.
He gave her no opportunity, however, so I suppose she had to supply it herself in the chat. I too had had my own question for Mr. Vickery, if I could have found the courage to bawl it—or rather if I could have framed it in any words. But I no longer desired to ask him about the Brownings, and indeed the air of the studio wasn’t favourable to questions, with its comfort so easy and public and its pictures so candid and explicit. If you want the answer to any question, look round you!—the room tells you all there is to be told. There was certainly nothing mysterious about the pictures; with one voice they declared themselves, repeating their frank formula with the glibness of fifty voluble years. There was nothing questionable about the luxurious installation of their maker—nothing, at any rate, if one noticed the obscure corner of industry that attracted so little attention. And least of all did the painter himself provoke any doubts that he didn’t plainly satisfy, with his picturesque frontage turned so full to the light; the fumbling reporter was the only person who had missed a syllable of anything he intended to convey. And the upshot of it all was that Mr. Vickery had endured froma blander age, bringing a waft of its goodly confidence and ease, trailing a train of its illustrious memories—onlynotbringing, as it happened, the forgotten secret on which its glory and its confidence reposed. The blander world of romantic Rome didn’t greatly trouble itself with questions, didn’t object to a florid style, wasn’t afraid of the telling effect of a handsome old head against the bluest hills of Italy; but therehadbeen something else, and Mr. Vickery didn’t chance to have brought it with him—it remained with the Brownings, they kept it. Let me ask Miss Gadge what it was. She thinks it must have been theirdepth, and she is ready to intone the whole of “Abt Vogler” to bear out her opinion.
Mr. Vickery, then, survived in our thin and acid air, to meet the assault of carping doubts from which his prime was protected; and he hadn’t the depth (if that is Miss Gadge’s word) to keep the faith of the romantic age as impressively as it was kept in his youth. I was glad that he had escaped the eye of Deering, to whom I should never betray him; Mr. Vickery, taken as he stood, too freely gave away the honour of Roman romance to be revealed to Deering. With me it was safe; but that sardonic observer, I am sure, wouldn’t consent to view the old survivor as I did, as I still can, when he placed himself before the dark tapestry with the golden light streaming full upon his patriarchal nobility. For me he was the man who remembered the great days, who had roamed in the Campagna with poets, and the man in whose studio the shadows of genius were still to be seen and talked with if one loved them. I loved them myself so dearly that I could easily give Mr. Vickery the benefit of their presence; and in their presence one didn’t take him as he stood, far fromit, but with the lustre of his association upon him, strange and new. Deering wouldn’t have had this fond understanding; indeed he would have steeled himself against it with his modern doctrine that one mustn’t read books, at any rate in Rome. “Come out of your books,” he had exhorted me, and it wasn’t likely that he would relapse with me into Browning at this hour—into Browning, whose influence had been strong on him during a period of manly piety through which he had passed in the nursery. So I kept Mr. Vickery to myself, hugging him in secret, and I was content to ask no questions about those eagle-feathered picnics of the past. It is much for us if we can catch but a reflection of the light of the great days; it is enough, even though their depth is screened from us by fifty commoner years. Mr. Vickery shall not be exposed to the daunting chill of Deering’s irony if I can help it.
Such was my feeling; for it seemed clear to me that Mr. Vickery had lived on incautiously till he faced a critical age, knowing nothing of its deadly arts, needing protection. And thereupon I noticed that he was now conducting the Marchesa and the well-fed man on a tour round the studio, pausing at one after another of the pictures; and I began to perceive, following and listening, how much he required my kindly care while he was flanked by the great ones of the earth. The well-fed man was Lord Veneering (or something to that effect), and he explained to the Marchesa that he was “forming a gallery” at a little place he had bought in the country, and that Mr. Vickery had very obligingly “aided him with expert advice”; and the Marchesa said pleasantly that one couldn’t do better than follow Mr. Vickery’s taste, because he possessed, what is nowadays so rare,the spirit of the great masters. “This,” said Mr. Vickery, indicating one of the canvases, “is a little smudge of paint that pleases me as well as anything I ever did—which may seem odd to a layman, for it’s purely a painter’s picture. Very bad policy, in these days, to spend time over work like that; but we paint for each other, we of the trade—we understand.” The velvet breeches and the sheepskin seemed to me to occupy their usual places in this picture, but his lordship was particularly struck by their “high relief.” Mr. Vickery didn’t hear, he was lost for a moment in contemplation. “Yes,” he said, “a painter would understand what I’ve tried to say there.” Our carping age, represented by the Marchesa and Lord Veneering, reverently gazed. Mrs. Vickery, still over her papers at the table, glanced up at her husband with a look that understood more, I incline to think, than many painters. Certainly he was well muffled against our chilling and doubting day; but I wonder how he would have shielded his complacency if his wife had spoken her mind. However she was much too deep in her entries and reckonings for a wild idea like that.
IDON’T pledge myself to the actual street, twisting into the dark heart of Rome, that led me to the great solemn palace of the Marchesa; but it might have been the street of the Dark Shops, and I am apt to think it may. It rambled vaguely into the gloom of all the ages and brought me to a stand before an immenseportone, the doorway of a family whose classic name was inscribed in monumental lettering upon the lintel. What a name!—it strode away across the long centuries, it wore the purple and the tiara, it raised its shout in the bloody brawls of its faction, it disappeared into the barbaric night; and again it emerged, plain to see, clear in the classic day, the pride and the renown of the young republic. It seems, as you read it over the doorway, to speak casually of Scipio, of Cincinnatus, friends of yesterday, vanished so lately that there has barely been time to miss them; and there may be a touch of parade in this, but who shall prove it?—and anyhow it is a great and glorious name, nobly time-worn from its immemorial journey, and it is written over the dark archway of the palace for its only and sufficient decoration. You enter accordingly under the sign of all the Roman history that you ever read, you cross the cloistered court and mount the broad sweep of the staircase; and you find yourself in the presence of a shy kind elderly Englishwoman, who appears to be still wondering a little, after many years, how she came there.
The great old family, though it still held up its head with high dignity, seemed to have outlived its fortune in the world. The Marchesa sat in the midst of tattered and shredded relics of splendour, mildly boiling her kettle over a spirit-lamp; and I don’t know how shecame there, but in many years she had never succeeded in wearing her faded state with confidence, and she looked forlorn and patient, quietly accepting as a duty a condition of things that she didn’t understand. She was too lady-like in her gentle manners for the worldly pride of her majestic drawing-room; and whereas its majesty held aloof more proudly than ever in impoverishment, she herself was too humble to reject the little comfort and kindness of a hissing kettle and a few sociable friends to tea. She tried to keep one hand upon their homely support without losing touch at the same time with the palatial scorn that watched her; and yet there was a disconnexion somehow, and she hadn’t the power, the impudence, the adaptability, whatever it might be, to make herself the link between the two. It may have been easier in the Marchese’s lifetime (he was long departed); but now she had to carry her prodigious name by herself, and the weight of the responsibility, and her earnest sense of her duty, and her simple unassuming inefficiency—what with it all there was much to make her look anxious and bewildered while we sat, she and I, waiting for the kettle to boil. She was conscious of having too much history on her hands; and yet she couldn’t in loyalty disown it and settle comfortably down upon the style and culture of a plain quiet Englishwoman.
The good Marchesa, she had somehow been left all alone in her august establishment by deaths, accidents, dispositions that are obscure to me; but the result of them was that she sat by herself in a corner of her mighty palace, watched and terrorized from a distance by a crowd of her kindred, offshoots in many degrees of her husband’s race—a needy Roman throng possessing complicated claims on her, rights to bully her, chances to torment her with conscientious scruples; and no doubt she had found that her integrity and her perfect manners were a very poor match for the guile of twenty centuries of Rome. “I’m expecting two English nephews of mine this afternoon,” she said—“such dear boys”; and again, “My sister writes to me from Devonshire to ask me if I can introduce them to a few nice friends”: that was the tone of the Marchesa, and it wouldn’t seem that she could offer much resistance to a band of hungry wily Romans. It was more, however, than might be thought, for her back was straight and firm in her duty at any cost to herself; only it all made a puzzling task, and there was no one and nothing around to support her, to stand by her side with encouragement and explanation, unless it was the companionable English tea-cup in a corner of her huge old drawing-room. It will presently appear how it is that I can read such a tale in her shy plainness, but much of it would be legible even without what I afterwards learned. She was an exceedingly simple soul.
The Principessa was simple too in her way, but it was not the same way. “Why, Gertrude,” she cried, rustling down the long room from the doorway, “don’t you look lovely to-day!” (It was the voice of New York.) “But that’s nothing new—I don’t tell you what you don’tverywell know—only it strikes me fresh every time I see you!” And indeed the slight flush and smile that began to spread upon the Marchesa’s brownish pallor did become her, as she rose to greet her guest. “Every time I see you,” repeated the Principessa, brightly glancing. “There’s something about you that’s perfection, and I shallneverknow just what it is.Don’t you want to tell me what it is? You needn’t be afraid—I shan’t ever be able to copy it. I watch my little girl every day to see if she won’t catch a look of it somehow. ‘My blessed child,’ I say to her, ‘for mercy’s sake try to lookreal—like the Marchesa.’ But she doesn’t, she looks like her father—and you know the sort of old Greek plaster-cast thatheis, and all his family. I tell them they can’t impose onmewith their grand pretences; I’ve seen the real thing. I never meant to marry Filippo, I meant to marry a man out of an English novel—yes, the same novel thatyoucome out of, Gertrude, whichever it is; if I happen to find it I shall throw over Filippo and bolt—he’s well aware of it. Don’t you want to tell me his name, Gertrude—the name of the hero in your novel? Maltravers, Sir John Mauleverer, something like that; you know I come here in the hope of meeting him. Some day he’ll turn up and I shall fly into his arms; he’ll quite understand.”
The Principessa was perfect too in her way, but it was not the way of the Marchesa. They sat side by side on a broad couch; and if the most eloquent aspect of their contrast was on their lips and in their speech, there was another almost as vivid that was plainly displayed at this moment on the floor. The Marchesa’s long flat foot, with its well-worn shoe and the hole in her grey stocking, rested on the floor beside the Principessa’s smart little arch, with its dolphin-like plunge from heel to toe and its exquisite casing of down-soft leather and filigree silk; it was a lucid contrast, the two of them side by side. The Principessa was altogether small, compact, and neater than I should have thought it possible for any one to be neat on our rolling globe; but small and trim as she was she managed to rustle (torustle!—I revive the forgotten word in an age that no longer knows the liquefaction of her clothes whenas she goes!)—she rustled in a manner that the Marchesa, though with so much more height to sweep from, had never dreamed of emulating. Rustling, it may be, depended more on depth of purse than height of person; and indeed you couldn’t notice the tip of the Principessa’s little finger, let alone the brilliant arch of her foot, without observing that it cost more at every breath she drew than the whole angular person of the Marchesa through the long quiet day. The Principessa was consummately expensive—though with a finely pointed extremity of taste that again the Marchesa had never caught a glimpse of; from the tilt of her big hat the little Principessa was the spirit of expense to the click of her neat heel. And yet, yet—what is it that she sees in the good incompetent Marchesa, sees and admires and owns to be beyond imitation? Let me ask—why yes, most appropriately, let me ask Miss Gilpin.
Miss Gilpin, however, is not so ready with information as Miss Gadge; for Miss Gilpin in the palace of the Marchesa is considerably more pre-occupied, less communicative, than she is in the lodging of the Clarksons. Several other people had arrived or were arriving, and a side-glance of her attention in passing was all she could spare for her awkward young friend. She was very agile and easy herself, slipping among the company like a bird of pretty plumage, moving so lightly that you would never suppose such a fresh young thing to be a woman of professional learning and experience. She lifts her wide clear gaze to the face of the person whom she addresses, and it might be almost embarrassing in its frank admiration, but her gay little well-wordedremarks relieve it; and she never lingers, never clings, she is drawn away to somebody else and flits on with a shining look behind her; and so she weaves her dance-figure through the company, and it brings her gradually to the side of the Principessa—at sight of whom she gives a tiny jump, as the unexpected pleasure beams out in her childlike eyes. The Principessa seemed to be less surprised, and Miss Gilpin got rather a cool return for her sparkle of delight. The dance was arrested with some abruptness; but there is this about Miss Gilpin, that she always has her wits about her and can adapt herself to a sudden change of plan. Her eye darted quickly forward to the Marchesa—and it was to the Marchesa after all that she had a particular word to say, if the other lady would forgive her for hastening on. One can safely count on the excellent Marchesa; yet it must be confessed that life is complicated, and Miss Gilpin sank a little wearily into an absorbing conversation with our hostess.
But what was the pretty plumage of Miss Gilpin, even at its most unruffled, compared with the rich hues of the creature that now swooped upon the modest gathering? Half flower and half bird—half peony and half macaw—Madame de Baltasar was in our midst; and so much so that nothing else for a while was in our midst—the central object was Madame de Baltasar. Peony in face, macaw in voice and raiment, she embraced and enveloped the Marchesa—who closed her eyes, evidently in prayer, as she nerved herself for the assault. The poor pale lady bore it unflinchingly, but that was all; she was cowed, she was numbed, by the mere voice of the visitor, equally penetrating in any language. The visitor, however, had no further need for theMarchesa; what she needed was a slim and very beautiful young man who happened to be talking to the Principessa—she plucked and removed him without delay. Even as she did so another young man, also very well in his fashion, appeared accidentally in her path; he too was annexed; and Madame de Baltasar, doing what she could to lend them a conquering rather than a consenting air, established them in a corner with herself between them. The Marchesa, reviving, gave a sudden gasp at the sight; for the second victim, who was a very British and candid-looking youth in naval uniform, was one of the dear boys, her nephews, and a glimpse of the peony-face beside him brought the letter from Devonshire very sharply to her mind. “A few nice friends—!” The Principessa looked up with humour. “I feel for you, dear Gertrude,” she said, “but what do you expect? Why ever do you let that woman into your house?” “I don’t let her,” wailed the Marchesa, very helpless. “Well, she’s grabbed Don Mario from me and your nephew from you,” said the Principessa comically; “at any rate they’ll keep her quiet for a time.” A peal of liberal shrieks rang out from the lady in the corner, and the Marchesa closed her eyes again in a mute petition.
It was a pleasantly expressive picture all the same, that of the group in the corner. The parti-coloured lady, who was by no means young, had so settled herself that she appeared imprisoned, penned in her place by two masterful men; and it would be natural to suppose that the two men were disputing for possession of her, but this effect was less easily contrived—since one of the men was English, of an odd unchivalrous tribe whose ways are beyond calculation. I don’t know what racehad produced Madame de Baltasar—the united effort of them all, may be, for all their tongues were mingled in her shrieks; but there was no doubt concerning Don Mario—he was the last perfection of Latinity and he played his part. He was peerlessly beautiful, and he sat with his long fingers entwined about his knee, his eyes attentively upon the peony, his cold profile turned with utter correctness to his rival. He was far too mannerly, of course, to be jealous, to be hostile in any open movement; even when his rival failed to notice the lady’s glove on the floor it was only by the barest implication of a gesture that Don Mario rebuked and triumphed over him. A lady in a corner may rely on Don Mario; however hard she begins to find it to tighten that horrid loose fold under her chin, however mauve the powder on her cheek now shows upon the underlying crimson, Don Mario’s eyes are still fixed on her in deep unwavering attention. And Madame de Baltasar, I dare say, had by this time schooled herself to be blind to something that she might easily have seen, if she had chosen, in his steady regard—in that knightly “belgarde” which she accepted without scrutinizing it too closely; for he wasn’t troubled to hide the serene amused impudence with which he played his part. The crazy old ruin, with her cautious neckband and her ruddled wrinkles—he lent himself politely to her ancient game, remarking that she had grown careless in the handling of the orange lights in her hair, which were certainly fitful and obscured towards the roots. But a lady needn’t concern herself with the finer shades in Don Mario’s eloquent looks; he can be thoroughly trusted, at any rate in a public corner of a drawing-room.
An Englishman on the other hand, a candid youngBriton, is a queer untutored thing of which you can never be really sure. The Marchesa’s nephew was pink and pleasant, and his undisguised interest in Madame de Baltasar might please her, you would think, for any one could see that it was much more genuine than Don Mario’s. It did please her, no doubt, and she liberally challenged and rallied him; she gave him more than his share, it was he who had the full blaze of her charms. He luminously faced them in return with the frankest interest and wonder; never, never had he seen such a wildly remarkable object. “Well, of all the queer old picture-cards—!” he said to himself; and he laughed with a volleying explosion at the freedom of her humour. He liked her too, the quaint old freak and spark that she was; you couldn’t help liking her loud familiar cackle, her point-blank coquetries discharged with such brass and bounce; she brisked you up and rattled you on in a style you don’t expect in the Marchesa’s solemn saloon. To Madame de Baltasar, no doubt, the pink British face was an open book, and in his barbaric fashion the young man was well enough, and she enjoyed herself. But then his barbarism was declared in a manner of simplicity which proved to her, yes, that these island-seamen are not to be trusted as one may trust Don Mario. The open young sailor, instead of turning his own more faulty profile to his rival and ousting him in triumph—what must he do but burst out pleasantly to the knightly Latin, appeal to him with mirthful eyes, join hands with him hilariously to watch the sport! It was so, there was no mistaking it; the young British monster had drawn the other man, his antagonist, into a partnership of youth, irreverent, unchivalrous, to watch the raree-show of this marvellousold bird and stimulate her to wilder efforts. And so naturally too, so ingenuously, like the great silly oaf that he really was, with his long legs and huge hands! It hadn’t so much as crossed his mind that a woman, still a fine woman in her ripeness, was signally honouring a man; he only saw a crazy jolly absurd old sport who made him laugh so heartily that he had to share the fun with his neighbour. One can’t be surprised if Madame de Baltasar asked herself what, in heaven’s name, they teach these young monsters in their barbaric wild.
I find it impossible to tear my eyes from the group. What, I wonder, does Don Mario think of the young Englishman? They were evidently much of an age; but Don Mario could regard himself, no doubt, as a highly experienced gentleman compared with this bubbling school-boy. He knew the world, he knew himself, he very well knew the lady; and I fear it must be inferred that he thought the Englishman a negligible simpleton. The school-boy’s familiarity could hardly please him, but he took it with his accomplished amenity, transformed it into a quiet and neutral kindness and handed it back; and the Englishman—ah, this is where the simple youth enjoys such an advantage, where he is unassailable—he saw no difference at all between what he gave and what he received again, he supposed they were the same. The same—his own thoughtless guffaw of companionship, Don Mario’s civilized and discriminating smile!—well might Don Mario feel that the barbarian took much for granted. Communication upon such terms is out of the question, with the Englishman ready to fall on your neck—in fact the islander’s arm was affectionately round Don Mario’s at this moment—if you decently mask your irony in a fine thinsmile. But let it not be imagined that the Romanciviltà, heritage of the centuries, will exhibit any signal of discomfort, even with the hand of the savage patting it sociably and encouragingly on the back. Don Mario talked easily and with all his charm; he told a story, some experience of his own, for the entertainment of the lady. The details escape me, but it was a story in which the Englishman, listening closely, seemed to detect a drift and purpose, an approach to a point; and he listened still more carefully, gazing at the speaker, working it out in his mind; and his brow contracted, he was lost—but aha! he suddenly saw the light and he seized the point. “You mean you’re inlovewith somebody,” he jovially exclaimed. The words fell with a strange clatter on the polished surface of the tale, but Don Mario had caught them up in a wink. “Why certainly,” he said—“I’m in love with Madame de Baltasar.” Lord!—for the moment it was too quick for the blank and simple youth; but relief came with the lady’s scream of delighted amusement, and he broke into the humour of the jest with resounding appreciation. A good fellow, this Don Whatever-he-is, and a sound old sport, Madame de What’s-her-name—and altogether a cheerier time than one would look for at Aunt Gertrude’s rather alarming tea-fight.
The Marchesa herself was finding it less enlivening; one of the dear boys had got into the wrong corner, the other was still missing, poor Nora Gilpinwouldtry to waylay the Principessa; and though the Marchesa was used to the sense that nothing in the world goes ever easily, she betrayed in her look the weight of all she was carrying. But she was grateful to the Principessa, and with cause; for so long as Miss Gilpin was kept at adistance the little American was indeed a treasure to an anxious hostess. Nothing gayer, nothing more ornamental and affable could be desired for a festival that threatened to languish. She sat on a round stool or tuffet, her small person erect, her knee tilted and her toe pointed like a porcelain shepherdess—a wonder of art, an exquisite toy of the eighteenth century; and one could infer how precious and rare the little figure must be from the fact that it was entirely perfect, not a finger broken, not a rose damaged on her decorative hat—which showed with what scrupulous care she had been packed and kept. One could almost have sworn that the tint of clear colour in her cheek was alert and alive, that it came and went with a living pulse; she was a triumph of the hand of the craftsman who produced her. And to think that she came, not from the cabinet of the Pompadour, but from the roaring market of democracy—how have they learnt such perfection of delicate workmanship over there? She seemed as manifestly the result of ages of inherited skill as Don Mario himself; at least I should say so, perhaps, but for the chance that again places them side by side before me. For Don Mario, the party in the corner having at last broken up, had returned to the Principessa; and he stood by her side, charmingly inclined, with glances more burning, less scorching, than those he had levelled at the orange-clouded fringe. And I now remark that with all Don Mario’s beautiful finish he doesn’t set one gaping at the price he must have cost; one sees in a moment than an object of that sort is not to be bought with money. “Not to be bought?”—I can imagine the tone of the Principessa, if she chose to speak: “He looks as though he weren’t to be bought? Why, it’s exactlythatthatwill fetch his price, and well he knows it. Not to be bought indeed!—I could tell you a little about that. Now there behind you—there’swhere money fails, if you like!”
She meant of course the Marchesa; and with the unspoken word of the china shepherdess in my ear I swing round towards the spectacle she faces. The sudden movement surprises the effect to which the Principessa no doubt alluded; I catch the Marchesa from the right point of view and I understand. The harassed soul was easier now, for the tropical intruder had departed and the simple seaman was re-established in more temperate company; the letter from Devonshire was no longer a reproach. The Marchesa breathed more freely; she stood for a moment unoccupied, resting upon her relief, almost persuaded that the world was leaving her in peace. She was no worldling, the good lady; neither she nor her forefathers had taken thought to be prepared for the world, to study the arts with which it may be repulsed, attracted, trodden under or turned to account. The Marchesa had no manners, no glances, no speeches—no raiment even, you might say—but those of her kindly nature, the well-meaning right-intending soul that she happened to be. She was not a work of art; and therein is the effect that she makes in her Roman palace, the effect you may surprise if you follow the word of the Principessa and look suddenly round. There clings about her, and she seems to diffuse it upon the company, a pallor of simple daylight, a grey uncertain glimmer from a morning in Devonshire; and it gives her a friendly gentle air, for it is the light to which she was born and it is natural to her; but to the Principessa, to Don Mario, even to theRoman palace, it is not a trifle disastrous. The pretty little work of art upon the tuffet was aware of it, and I could fancy that she bids me look, look again ather, to see how ghastly her china-tints have become in the dimness of a rainy English morning. I won’t say that—the Principessa exaggerated, perhaps defiantly; but it certainly was plain that she wasn’t intended to face the open weather. Good Aunt Gertrude, troubled and incompetent in facing the world, could be left out in rain and storm at any time, and none the worse. The fibre that is by this betokened is not, we understand, to be bought for money. The Principessa may be right, but I doubt whether she honestly wishes her child to acquire it. After all the Marchesa is about as ornamental as the waterproof in which as a girl she braved the weather of an uncertain climate.
And now there arrived, there crossed the room with a quick step, there shook hands ceremoniously with the Marchesa, a personage whose appearance in that company I hadn’t at all expected. Deering!—who could have supposed that Deering would present himself here, and that too at the very hour which is consecrated to the plush and marble of the real Rome in the Via Nazionale? He caught my eye as he crossed the room, and he smiled, as I thought, self-consciously; it put him slightly to the blush that I should see him attending the mild tea-pot of the Marchesa. She greeted him with pleased effusion and drew him aside; I wasn’t near enough to hear their talk, but the Marchesa had evidently much to say, and Deering listened with his well-known gleam of sarcastic observation. He was quite becomingly at his ease, and his flower-droop was markedly successful—it was clearly one of his moreslender days; but I noticed that in the patched and tattered saloon, which had struck me as the topmost height of all the Romanism I had met with, the careful composition of his Roman clothing looked alien and singular. He may have been dressed in the taste of the real Rome, but the result was to make him appear as much of a stranger in the palace of the Dark Shops as the forlorn Marchesa herself. That good lady presently released him, and he made his way towards me—but with a signal to me to wait as he did so, for he stopped momentarily in passing beside the Marchesa’s nephew and laid a light finger on his shoulder. The young seaman looked round, nodded familiarly and went on with his talk. I shall never get to the end of Deering, and I told him so when he joined me; for I didn’t see how or where these excellent people should fit into the circle of his associations, those with which he had dazzled me when we met last month by the Tortoises. I had been supposing thatmyway, though it was he who had smarted me on it, was steadily leading me further from the world he had sketched so brilliantly as his own. Yes, said Deering, I might well be surprised; but he could assure me it was much more surprising to himself. He had no intention, however, of lingering—he proposed that I should come away with him at once. Could he fly so soon?—it seemed abrupt, but he waved off my scruple and led me immediately to the Marchesa to take our leave. “Good-bye, Aunt Gertrude,” he said—“I fear I must be going.” “Good-bye, dear boy,” returned the Marchesa; “come very soon and see me again.”
He was the missing nephew!—the stroke of his revelation of the fact was thoroughly successful, for ittook me absurdly by surprise. My thought travelled back to the poor flimsy mountebanks of the Via Nazionale, and I perceived that they had divined my detached and scornful Deering, him with the gypsy in his blood, even more shrewdly than I had supposed—or rather, no doubt, they had had fuller information than mine. He had told them nothing, but they knew all about him, trust them—they knew how firmly his other foot was planted upon a solider world than theirs. When Deering and I now issued from the portal of the classic name I stopped him, I pointed to the name and the vast grey palace-front, and I asked him how he had had the face to talk to me in my innocence about his “real Rome” of the tram-lines and the plate-glass windows—with all this within a few yards of us at the very moment. Had he been ashamed of me, unwilling to present me to Aunt Gertrude and the monument of history up his sleeve?—no indeed, and I didn’t even put the question, for Deering’s motives are much loftier than this. Rather it was magnificent of him, I confessed, to drop the palace, disregard the grandiose name, neglect it as unworthy of mention compared with the company of the mountebanks at the marble-topped table. But how he had deceived me—I now trusted his word no more, and I began to see trickery of some sort even in that chance encounter with him the other day by the English tea-room; he was probably then on his way to join the Marchesa in her afternoon drive on the Pincio. And it was he, perverse and double-lived, who had for a brother that soul of open candour I had just been studying. “I have never consented,” said Deering rather primly, “to be judged in the light of my relations. I take my way, and I gave you the opportunity of takingit too. You have bungled it so shockingly that it has brought you to this.”
It had brought us in fact to the neighbouring Square of the Tortoises; there were the four boys crouched beneath the bowl of the fountain, clutching the tails of the tortoises in the ripple of the water, the dapple of the sunlight. Where would Deering’s line have brought me if I had clung to him throughout? In the end, it would seem, to the palace of the Marchesa, which I had reached on my own account; what I may have missed on the way to it I shall never know. I could declare to him, none the less, that I had seen many things of singular mark, things that I should never have discovered in the state of romantic innocence which he had been the first to corrupt; and for this I thanked him, though on the matter of Rome’s reality I was even now in confusion as deep as ever. My authorities wouldn’t agree; and on the whole I maintained to Deering that my own romance, when now and then I had caught a glimpse of it between the heads of the crowd, had to my eye a more substantial look than most of the realities that had been offered me in the place of it. What had he to say to that? Well then he had to say, regretfully but distinctly, that I was incurable; and one of the Botticelli hands was laid upon my arm in a gesture that resigned me, with tenderness, with compassion, with finality, to the sad ravages of my illusion. “Go back to your books,” he sighed; “I have done my best—good-bye!” It was touchingly felt and spoken; the attitude was striking. But his farewell, I am glad to say, was only rhetorical. We shuffled for a long while to and fro across the sunny little square, discussing my month of blunders.