Four Phases of Love Part 10

"I never knew one who did not take me for a fool if I spoke well of them. Pardon me. You are not a Roman?"

"I am a German."

"Bless G.o.d for it."

They reached the gate in silence, and turned into the Piazza Barberini.

The wounded man pointed to a small house in the corner of the place, ruinous and dark. When the horse stopped before the humble door, its rider let himself slide off before the other could a.s.sist him, but then sank helplessly down. "It is worse than I thought." he said; "do me one kindness more, and help me in,--here is the key." The young man supported him, called to a boy to hold the horse, and to a loiterer to open the door. It was quite dark within, the damp cold struck unpleasantly upon them. He bore him as directed, to the left, into a large bare room.

"Where is your bed?" asked the German.

"Where you will; but I would rather lie over there by the wall. This brave old Palazzo! They are going to pull it down in the spring; I fancy that it will not have the patience to wait for them."

"And you still remain here?"

"It is the cheapest way of getting buried," said the man, drily. "I can play the host here gratis."

In the mean time, the boy had struck fire, and lighted the little bra.s.s lamp that stood in the window. The young man helped the wounded one to a coverlid spread on some straw, and covered him scantily enough with his tattered cloak. With a deep sigh the powerful frame sank down, and the eyes closed. The German gave the boy money and directions, and then went out without leave-taking, sprang up on his horse, and rode hastily away.

In about a quarter of an hour he returned, bringing with him a surgeon.

Whilst the latter examined and bound up the wounds on arm and leg, which the wounded man permitted him to do without a murmur escaping him, the young German looked around the room: it was bare, and the plaster had fallen in large ma.s.ses from the walls. The joists of the ceiling stood naked and blackened, the wretched window let in the cutting night air, there was but little furniture. Meanwhile the boy brought in an armful of wood, and made a fire on the hearth. As it gleamed up redly some dusty clay figures and plaster casts became visible in the corner. A large dolphin which bore a dead boy on its back, a Medusa in relief, colossal, the hair, not yet vivified into serpents, curled wildly around the sorrow-laden brow. He could not remember that he had ever seen this rendering in an antique. Casts from the arms, bust, and feet of a young girl, amongst hasty sketches in clay, stood and lay in confusion. On a table were the different kinds of apparatus used by cameo-cutters, and some sticks with half-finished works, for the most part Medusa heads, resembling the great one, but with different degrees of pa.s.sion and grandeur. Uncut sh.e.l.ls, casts of gems, and casts in gla.s.s and plaster, lay in a box near them.

"I think there is no danger," said the surgeon, at last. "Let them get some ice, and make the boy sit up and keep the bandages cool during the night. They have treated you roughly, Senor Carlo! But what on earth induced you to wander about the campagna at this time of night, and this time of year?"

"This obstinate rascal, the chimney," answered the artist, "he refused to do his duty unless one stuffed his throat with f.a.ggots. I was out of temper with my old Palazzo, Senor Vottore, and felt inclined to give him a kick or two, to warm us both; and so I thought it better to run away before it came to blows between us."

"You are ill looked after here," said the good-natured little man, wiping his spectacles, which had become suddenly dimmed. "My wife shall send you another coverlid, and I will see you again tomorrow. Sleep will soon come, and he is the doctor who beats us all."

The young man accompanied him to the door, and spoke a few words with him in the pa.s.sage.

"I only know him by name," said the doctor. "He goes his own strange misanthropical way. Prefers sitting in the wine-shop with the lowest faccini, and squanders what he earns. But there is not a man in Rome who is his equal at a cameo. He inherits it from his father, Giovanni Bianchi, who has long been dead."

"Are his wounds really not dangerous?"

"If he only spares himself and not the ice. He has limbs of iron, or he could not have made head so long against the brutes. Five, do you say?

The fool-hardy man! But that is just one of his tricks. Well, well, he will sleep now. Dispel your anxiety, Senor Theodore."

He was already asleep, when Theodore returned to his room, although he had turned his face towards the blazing fire. Theodore studied him long. He was very handsome, though the nose was a little too thin; his hair here and there sprinkled with grey; his beard untended; from between the breathing, half-opened lips gleamed the white teeth. When Theodore raised the cloak to place fresh ice on the wounds, he perceived the great strength of his limbs.

He sent the boy away, after he had brought a fresh supply of wood and ice, and ordered him to return in the morning. He then drew a chair to the side of the hearth, and seated himself, wrapped in his cloak, to watch. It was about ten o'clock, the bright night reigned without over the deserted square, and the slender stream from the fountain plashed lightly into the Triton's sh.e.l.l. From a neighbouring house he heard a girl's voice, singing:--

"Chi sa se mai Ti soverrai di me!"

The refrain of an old sorrowful song. Then it ceased, but hummed wordless within him still.

He fancied himself again at the edge of the abyss at Tivoli, on the footway opposite the cascades, which in wintry scantiness gushed down from their many mouths. They walked, but not arm in arm, near each other; he and that fair girl and her lively little companion, who hastened unweariedly along the narrow, toilsome path.

"We ought to have returned with your parents, Mary," she said more than once in English; "indeed, we ought to do so now. Look, child! there they are up above by the cascade, and will soon be sitting comfortably by the fire in the sibyl, and here the wind is cutting our very noses off; yours is quite red already; dear me! how cold you look, child! The wind blows so chilly across the water too. You said that it would, sir, and warned us fairly; but our pet must have her fancies. Bless me, we have seen the view in the autumn already, and in the summer too, and then rode safely and comfortably down the path that we are half stumbling, half sliding down now."

"It is not much farther, dear Miss Betsy," said the girl, laughing, "and the path will improve. Our friend offered you his arm; why did you refuse it?"

The little woman drew closer to her, and said softly, "My dear Mary, what a question to ask! you know that I have my reasons for declining to be helped down hills by unmarried young gentlemen! when one slips and holds him tight to save oneself from falling, he might take each pinch for a proof of affection; you quite shock me, child!"

Mary smiled almost imperceptibly; then she went calmly on her way. Her dark bonnet hid all her face from the young man except the waving brown curls.

"It was intended as no mere compliment, sir." she said, glancing unembarra.s.sed towards him; "when my father confessed that your absence had caused him pain: if I remember rightly, you have only called on us four times since my poor brother's death."

"Four times!" he cried; "and have you counted them?"

"We must often hear the number from him. 'Since I lost Edward,' he says frequently, 'I care to talk to no one who has not known him; how can they ever learn to know _me_?' Then he always refers to you, and praises you, and misses you so much."

"I confess," said Theodore, "that the kindness and heartiness with which your parents greeted me when we met here, surprised and affected me very much; and I too have wanted companions.h.i.+p this winter more than formerly. In the one before, which was my first, I drew back from nothing which pressed itself forward and promised to be advantageous. I see now that I have only lost. The society here is in contradiction to the place. It feels it itself, and as it still desires to be something, it is obliged to overstrain itself: that is discordant and neutralizes the productive disposition of thoughtful men like myself; so now I live only for myself, or for some few who have fared no better than I have, and yet from my youth up I have been accustomed to find permanent happiness in pure family existence alone."

"You have been long away from your parents?"

"I have lost them." he said gently; "they both died in the same week; then I went over the Alps, and G.o.d knows whether I shall ever return!"

They pa.s.sed beneath the light shadow of the olive plantation--the path was perfectly dry--over them, amongst the branches, the sun glanced from the fleeting snow, which it had thawed upon the leaves, till they had glimmered as from a soft spring shower. The little friend was in the best possible humour, and talked of her wanderings about Rome.

People suspected that she was writing a book about Rome. However that might be, it was clearly proved that she had done such violence to her well-grounded opinions, as to permit it to be reported that she had explored the baths of Caracalla with an entirely unknown and youthful Italian, and had not even refused his offer of protection to her own house.

"Do you believe, Mary," she cried now, "that I could easily make up my mind never to see my dear old England again? You know that at first we did not intend to stop here a single month. For you must know, sir, that I come of an old family, and my first ancestor fell at Hastings, winning his bit of land for himself and his descendants. And so my little bit of England is as much mine as the big one of a great landowner; and who likes to leave his own behind him? And yet who knows whether I might not be induced to pa.s.s the rest of my life here, if it were not dishonourable to forget one's fatherland, even though it forgets us and the good service our forefathers have done it?"

"I do not know." answered Theodore, laughing, "you only do old England a service if you conquer a bit of Rome for yourself, and so tread in the footsteps of your forefathers."

"You are pleased to be witty!" she said, and gave him a light tap with her fan. "But even suppose that I were of an age which made your joke more appropriate, do you seriously think--supposing that there was any foundation for your innuendo, and any one _should_ trouble himself about me,--do you think, I repeat, that English and Italian, or more properly Roman character, would in the long run, be able to get on together?"

"You know, my dear Miss Betsy, that love works wonders, fills up valleys and pulls down mountains. As far as mere _character_ goes, I am not afraid. If the sentiments agree, what may the heart not do? I have seen more marriages rendered unhappy by difference of taste, than from difference of feeling. But what Roman would not share in your taste for everything Roman, for example?"

"You are right," she said; "at the bottom, love is a matter of taste."

Then she drew her green veil over her face, and seemed to wish to be left to her own reflections.

The two young people went a little in advance, for they heard Miss Betsy beginning to talk half aloud to herself, as was often her custom, and they had no wish to overhear her dreamings. "Good creature!" said Mary, with her gentle voice; "the journey has quite unsettled her. She always used to have strange ideas, but in England they took an innocent political direction; but with her first step on the continent arose this strange fancy of inventing experiences, which has already indeed given us much anxiety on the journey, but which has perhaps as often afforded an excuse for a hearty laugh."

"This fantastic state of being must have suited her charmingly when she was younger," said Theodore; "older people generally discover that they have quite enough to do to meet adventures as they happen, and are by no means inclined to seek them. It is to be hoped that she will soon be as little in earnest with her new Roman friend, as he seems to have been with her from the beginning."

"I saw them both returning home. He was a good-looking man, with rather insolent, but still fine eyes, and much younger than she is."

"What restrained you from giving an opinion on the question which Miss Betsy proposed?" asked Theodore, after a pause.

"Which one?"

"Whether individuals of different nations are suited to each other?"

Mary was silent for a while. "The more people want from each other,"

she said, at last, "and the more they wish to give each other, the closer the connection between them ought to be--at least, I think so."

"And even, I once knew an Englishman who had married a creole, they both took life easily and gaily. He was happy at having a handsome wife, and she appeared satisfied because he could shower wealth upon her. And yet there was always something between them, something climatic, live where they would. They were never really happy with each other."

"They were from different zones. But if they both had had northern blood----"