At midday Murietta stood half leaning against a marble pillar by the pool and fountain of Trevi. The sun was pitching down into the cool clear basin of water, over the top of the shops to the south; and women, pretty brown Roman peasant women in short petticoats of gay colours, were comng and going with their pitchers; and now and then one would lift up her great dark eyes to the dreamer as she passed, and wonder who his love might be, and why she kept him waiting and looking all the time so forlorn and lone.
The man was thinking of Annette. He was devoutly wishing he had never seen the countess. True, he had never given her a thought or look that suggested love. Yet he somehow felt that he had been disloyal, and he was unhappy.
Had he ever, at any time, had any affecion for the lady in pink in all the forty days just past, he would have had a fearful account to settle with himself as he stood there listening to the soft call of the waters so like a cascade of the mountains.
But nothing of the kind had ever been, and he was not, therefore, much at war with himself; but was certainly very ill content, to say the least of it, and was fast shaping a resolve in his heart to see the pink countess no more, if he could so devise it without wounding her very sensitive nature.
And this, not because the world advised it, but because he felt that he was becoming disloyal to his ideal love. True, he had overthrown his ideal love. He had driven a dagger through her image. He had stood up and sworn to himself to forget her, and to put her utterly away from his heart. Yea, the man had done all this, and done it but a little time before. Thereore, like a true lover, of that type and temperament, he now stood damning himself before himself, and holding her dearer in his heart than ever.
The people were packed as tight as toys in a box. Carriages were coming and going past, and people on foot were wedged in and making their way along among the wheels as only Italians can.
"Bet your life it's he!"
Murietta, as one just awakened from a dream, looked up.
"There! there! what did I tell you. Murietta!"
The carriages stopped, and the artist, hearing his name called by the loud, clear voiced Californian girl, turned and made his way through the crowd.
The countess put out her little hand in a little pearl-coloured glove, and smiling, said in a low, sweet voice, —
"I have kept the Appian Way as somehing sacred, as a sort of dessert to be taken when all else palls, you see."
** But, my dear lady, what are you speakng of?"
"Why, do you not understand?" The little hand fluttered about over the pink and rose robes of the lady as if it had been a sort of butterfly in a garden of flowers.
"We are on the way for a drive — my last drive in or around Rome. We are going over the Via Appia."
"A pleasant drive and a speedy return!" said the artist, lifting his hat, and stepping back to say good-bye.
"No, no, no! Come!" cried the countess, reaching her hand. "We will not go without you"
"Come along, stupid. Hop in! There! Take that if you won't sit by yourself." And little Mollie rose up, left the side of the countess, and sat opposite.
The street was getting blocked, and a little Roman, in a beautiful uniform overhadowed by an enormous plume of red cocks' feathers, came up smiling and bowing, and beckoning for the carriage to move on.
"Come!" cried Mollie, "you will have us all arrested"
"Well, sit back by the countess, and I am with you."
The artist climbed into the carriage just in time to escape a speech from the policeman, and the party moved slowly on through the jammed and crowded streets above the buried city, and around the partly excavated Forum of Trajan.
"And Mollie the Mischievous is well?" said the artist, settling down in his seat, and looking at the picture of health before him.
"Well, and happy, too, as an apple on a tree!" and the little California lady, as if just reminded of it, put her hand in her pocket, laughed while doing so, and then drawing it forth held it out full of nuts and raisins and candies.
"No, thank you."
Then she wanted to divide with the countess, who had settled back as if hiding away out of sight behind the bouncing, warm-hearted girl, and as if half hurt that she was not all the time the centre and the one person present.
"After all," said Marietta to himself, as he noticed this "she is only a woman; and what a perfect woman, too"
"Then you were going without me" The artist looked at the countess, and spoke as if he meant to reproach her.
"On the contrary; I should not have gone without you at all."
"But you did not know I was here"
"I knew you would be found on a mornng like this, and after a day like yesterday, either at the Fountain of Trevi listening to the water, or in the garden of the Palatine looking at the flowers. Had I not found you here, I should have driven directly to the gardens."
The artist sat silent, and was a bit embarrassed.
"Something more than a woman after all!" he said to himself. "For, true as I live, I was just thinking of turning my steps to the Palatine."
"You are moody and dissatisfied." The little butterfly-hand, in the pearloloured glove, again fluttered about over the flowers of rose and pink, and the great brown eyes looked at the man with their old wonder.
"Not at all." he answered — yet he answered with a sigh. "Not at all. On the contrary, I am glad to be with you this morning — glad to make this wonderful drive with you, whatever it may be. But what is the special attraction?"
"We shall see! In the first place, listen." The pearl-coloured butterfly fluttered about, and then dived down among the roses and pinks, and brought out a little Bible. "Listen to this," and the countess read :
"And from thence, when the brethren heard of us, they came to meet us as far as Appii forum, and The three taverns: whom when Paul saw, he thanked God, and took courage."— Acts^ xxviii. 15.
Then closing the book, and looking at the artist, while all the time Mollie sat munching her nuts and raisins and candies, she said, —
"We are going out over that road towards the Three Taverns, and over the same stones that were pressed by the feet of Saint Paul and his followers."
"Good," said Marietta. "You are more than kind. It is the one thing certainly in the world to do, a sort of pilgrimage."
Then he fell to wondering again what manner of woman this countess was, and found himself more puzzled than ever.
After a little time she began, —
"When a man from the far, far West, from the under world, as it were, makes his own way around the globe, and comes first upon the footprints of the Apostles, he is thrilled by a sort of awe that nothing else can produce. He feels somehow that he has come upon the confines of another world — a better world, and a fairer one — and he, for the day at least, is a better man for the fact."
Murietta leaned forward and listened. His heart was again vibrating between two idols. Here was a sincerity, a sort of reigious devotion that he had never seen in this woman before. He was certain he had done her wrong. The lady lifted her little pearl-coloured hand, as if she would put Rome and the ruins behind her.
"You get tired of Rome in a month or two, in spite of yourself," she said. "Ruins and galleries, towers and churches — (three hundred and sixty-five churches! and if there had been more days in the year there would have been more churches in Rome!) — and you want to get outside the great brick walls somewhere and sit down and rest. You are a sort of anaconda, that has at last swallowed an ox, and you want to steal away and lie down and digest it."
Just then a boy stood up on a box by the side of the driver of the carriage in advance, and shouted aloud "I say, Moll!"
"Oh Johnny! do sit down, or you will break your neck!" said Mollie, answering back.
"And who is Johnny?"queried the artist.
"Oh that's my big little brother, just down from school at Florence, and he is the worst — bet your life!-— he is the worst that ever was! Sit down there, Johnny, or you'll drive mother into the tan-tarams"
The mother and the good general also kept reaching out to the rosy, mischievous boy just from school, who would persist in riding on the box with the man with the fire-crackers; and Johnny, for their pains, kept them in a constant state of terror by standing up on the box and turning around and shouting back to sister "Moll."
"Oh Johnny! Johnny! will you never sit down till you break your neck?" cried Mollie.
"Never, Mollie, never!"
"Then break it and be done with it!" And the pouting Mollie once more filled her pretty mouth with goodies.
But Johnny still stood there on the seat, still looked back and called across his shoulder.
Mercy! the carriage wheel has bumped against a bit of tombstone, and Johnny is pitched forward on the horses, and lands among them and under their heels.
Murietta now had a good opportunity to observe, and did observe with a great deal of satisfaction, that the horses of degeneate Rome, under very aggravating circumstances, kick very much like the horses of the great American republic.
Johnny is fished out, however, at last; and like very many other bad boys, has escaped almost scot free. This boy and similar other boys convince one of the absolute necessity of a first class and well regulated hell.
The trouble is, these bad boys are nearly always as sharp as briars and as quick as traps. If they would only consent to be fools! You can compromise with a goodatured idiot, and get him to capitulate on very reasonable terms; but this boy among the tombs of the Via Appii was quite another thing.
As soon as the mother, who had been shrieking, wild with terror, discovered that he was not hurt, she said she wished he had broken his neck — a wish that was joined in by at least one of the party with more heartiness than she would have desired.
The party drew up for a moment beside the excavations of the Roman Forum, and getting down from their carriages, stood toether and leaned over the rails and looked down at the little indolent army of workers twenty five feet below them.
"There," said the countess, pointing to a heap of stones that stood on the clear pavement away down there, that had just been laid bare, "there is the spot, almost underneath us, where Caesar's body was burned, and Antony and Brutus spoke their respective pieces."
The general stood and looked earnestly at the work of excavation, and then said, —
"It looks for all the world like a Califomia mining claim!"/
The excavation, which lays bare the Forum as it was in the time of the Caesars, is about three hundred yards long, two hundred wide, and fifty feet deep.
"I think the owners are doing just about work to hold the claim," dsaid Mollie.
"Nothing," said the general thoughtully, "can more closely resemble a placer mine than this ugly excavation. There lies the bed-rock, the old Roman pavement, swept clean and creviced out; there are the picks and the wheelbarrows, and there the granite boulders and the quartz, only the quartz happens to be marble, and the granite boulders to be broken columns."
Mrs. Wopsus wiped her eyes, as if overome with some sort of emotion; and then she reached out her hand and took Johnny by the coat collar at the back of the neck, and held on to him till they again moved on, lest he should tumble over the bank and break his precocious neck.
People were standing in hundreds looking down idly over the rails at the idleworkmen. Here and there stood groups of tourists, with red guide books in their hands, that looked like lamps hung up by the authoriies to give notice of repairs.
Never did a live American see such indolent men as these Italians at their work. They move as if half asleep. Their tools are awkward, and always dull; their wheelbarrows have an old primitive wooden wheel, and hold about a saucepanfull of earth. They use no running planks, but push their load slowly up on the uneven ground.
"A Californian," said the general, "could carry twice the load in his hat."
"Ay, that he could," cried Johnny "particularly if it was apples from some forbidden garden."
The countess was thoughtful. Somehow this levity did not suit her. Then they climbed into their carriages, and went on to the gates of the Palatine Hill, only a pistol shot distant.
They passed through in the presence of the two or three Romans in uniform to be found at every gate in Italy, and then climbed up, up, up a thousand steps, and stood at last on the level where Romulus had set his capital.
The old general was puffing and blowng from the long ascent of the stairs, and his son Johnny was very affectionate, and very anxious that he should sit down and rest.
The old man was moved, was very much affected by his solicitude and tenderness. Mrs. Wopsus wept. At last Johnny led his tired father to a fallen column of African granite, that had once formed a part of Caesar's palace, and there the general did sit down.
And then, as if shot from a mortar, he sprang up into the air, with a yell that would have taken the first premium in a Comanche war dance. The gentle hearted Johnny Had slipped a prickly pear into his father's coat-tail pocket.
The countess kept aloof from the party. She patted the little she wolf on the head, gave her some nuts, and asked her about Romulus and Remus. The wolf only drooped her bushy tail, scratched in the crack of the floor for a nut which she had dropped, and pretended not to hear.
The countess turned to Murietta, and to him alone all the day, as she now did, and told him every little thing that might be of interest, as if to keep the way open between their hearts. He, on the other hand, would have built a wall colossal and high between them.
"Two of these wolves are kept at the public expense — the one on the Capitoline Hill, and this one on the Palatine."
"And shabby, dirty, indolent looking things they are, to be sure," answered the artist "They are just the size, build, and colour of the Californian coyote."
Further along the hill and on the other side of the beautiful garden of flowers, they came upon the excavations where the frescoes of twenty centuries ago are laid bare. But the countess would not decend from the roses and sunshine.
Mollie ranged herself beside the others at the edge of the garden, and standing on the bank, called attention to the little negro lad that had just been exhumed.
"Bet your life, pa, he's a New York negro! My! just look at him with his head held sideways as he looks up at you! I could almost hear him say, ' Black'er boots, sah? black'er boots?"
"What is most remarkable about this statue," said the countess, "is that its nose is perfectly intact! It is the only very old face in Rome that has not a broken nose. Of course this is because it has such a broad foundation, and is set so closely to the face; but it is none the less noticeable."
"But oh! to think," said Mollie "what this curly-headed good-natured little felow has had to endure for two thousand years. Two thousand years to endure the smells of Rome!"
'Monk and Mussulman, Pagan and Jew' all have filed past our woolly-hcacled little friend, have left their filth, and gone away."
Then Mrs. Wopsus, holding her handerchief to her nose with one hand and holding Johnny by the collar with the other, slowly spoke and said,
"No wonder that Mr. Caesar and Citizen Brutus and General Antony, and all the rest, have had their noses broken to the very base"
"We must push on," said the countess, after a moment, as she looked at the sun. "Will you allow me?" She took the artist's arm, and they returned together through the garden of roses to the gate.
"You are not strong?" he said as he handed her into the carriage.
The lady's face was pink and rose as her dress, for the blood mounted to her cheeks as she said,
"I fear I lean heavily on your arm."
"No, no, not at all! not that, only -"
"Never mind!" cried Mollie" Take a peanut!" And she laughed and reached her full hand to the artist as the carriages whirled away from the crowd of beggars that was gathering around.
They drove under the Triumphal Arch of Titus. On the marble pillars of the gate Murietta marked the figures of great strong men bearing the holy candlesticks and other sacred vessels of the Taberacle which were brought to Rome by the son of Vespasian when he overthrew Jerusalem.
"Tradition," began the countess, talking entirely to Muriettai, "says they were thrown into the Tiber, when the Vandals came down and plundered Rome. There is strong talk of turning the course of the river to search for this and other treasure supposed to be hidden there."
The carriages rumbled on down a slopng hill, over a very rough and broken section of old Roman pavement that has lain there unrepaired for perhaps a thousand years.
Suddenly the countess reached a pink and pearl hand to the left, and lifted her beautiful face all aglow with enthusiasm as she said, pointing,
"Now we come to the shadows of the Coliseum! The gray Coliseum, lifting its stony circles against the eternal rounds of Time!"
"But Time," cried Mollie, "has set his teeth in it!"
"How old!" said Murietta.
"No," said the countess"it does not look old! It is not old! It has outlived the Caesars, the Charlemagnes, and will probably outlive the Kaisers of Germany. But the Coliseum does not look old! It has stood as a stone quarry for a whole city, for centuries, and all the fine palaces of Rome have been built from it, and yet it does not seem to have suffered any material damage!"
"Damage!" rejoined Mollie, munching away at her nuts, "no, not a bit! It still looks as though it might furnish material for two or three Chicagos, and yet hold its place as the biggest thing out of doors"
The carriages stopped for a time, and sitting there together, they contemplated the colossal structure.
"Look up there! Holy Spoons! What can that man be doing up there with a broom?" cried little Johnny as he pointed to the topmost ruin of the Coliseum. The party looked as the boy pointed with his hand; and lo! there stood an Italian leaning on his broom in the most graceful pose, as if he was standing on a cross street calmly waiting the approach of some goodatured countryman whom his quick eye had selected from the crowd as a probable contributor.
Then the man with the broom swept right and left, walked on along his lofty preciice, poised his broom in the air on his forefinger, and danced as he did so, and sang a snatch of an opera. After that he stooped as if he had discovered something in a crevice of the rock, drew a pair of nippers from his pocket as if he was a sort of travelling dentist, and inserting it in the opened lips of the crevice, he seized and drew forth and flourished in the air a blade of grass so large that it seemed to be distinctly visible to him as he held it up before him, and contemplated it with an air of triumph without the aid of glasses.
"And look there!" cried Johnny agam, as they drove still nearer to the Coliseum. "Look up and down the broken wall and on the borders there. Do you see those people clinging here and there, and pulling little weeds and grasses from out the crevices of the rocks "
Sure enough, there they hung and clung, some by ropes, and some by help of the broken and decayed parts of the wall that gave them a foothold, while they jerked at the grass and weeds as if they had been of a species of two-legged goat.
"And what does it all mean?" asked the general curiously.
"It means," answered the countess, "that the government of Italy is spending the genius of her gifted sons, and the revenues of her coffers, in a glorious attempt to accomplish the work of renovation."
The general looked puzzled.
"Ah, you are surprised," continued the countess sarcastically. "But let me give you the reasons of these Italians, and recount some of their labours in that line."
The general settled back and prepared to listen, while the party drove slowly and pleasantly on between the avenues of over-arching trees and shade.
The countess dusted down the folds of her pink dress with a little baby hand in a pearl-coloured glove, and went on;
"You see, the Coliseum had only stood two thousand years when this new order of things was established in Italy. It is true it was not at all affected by Time in this little period of twenty centuries, for those blocks of tufa of which it is built, are about as tough and imperishable as the lead that held the blocks together. But then these gentle Italians began to fear that it would be affected if they left it standing out here in its coat of grass and its glorious company of old fig-trees and splendid folds of ivy; and so they cut all that away, and made the Collseum seem the newest thing in Rome"
"And what are they sweeping it down for?" queried the general, twisting his head and looking back at the actor on the top of the ruin with his broom.
"Oh, they intend to paint it perhaps!" laughed the countess. "Paint it— paint it in the three colours of Italy!"
"Certainly paint it, whitewash it, you know, and make it look gay and lively!" chimed in Johnny.
"Yes, and then put green window-blinds in its windows" said Mollie, leaning over and looking into the old general's face, "and oh! won't that be a jolly ruin then! bet your life!" laughed the little maiden from California.
"To be serious, general," began the countess again, as the little baby-hand smoothed down the rose-coloured silk; "to be serious about a really serious matter, these men are mad about their ruins. They see the whole world come here to look upon these relics of old Rome; and these men, now lacking even the little sense shown by the pope who thought to make a woollen mill of the Coliseum, have, in these few years, almost destroyed what it took nearly two thousand years to attain."
"But," remonstrated the generali, "the people were destroying the Coliseum. You see whole palaces built of it in Rome."
"Not for nearly a century," said the countess, "not for nearly a century has a hand been laid on a stone of it, till these new Vandals came and cut down the trees and tore away the ivy."
"And why not?"
"Because these popes counted it as a holy spot. They set up a cross there, and the stones became sacred. And, "said the countess with earnestness" that was the only one of their hundreds of shrines and churches that I would have bent before within the walls of Rome! for it was, indeed, a temple that Nature had reclaimed from man. It was so magnificent, and so imposing, that she took it as if it had been her own work and made a garden of it, and planted flowers there, found nowhere else on earth."
The general wrinkled his brows with wonder.
"It is very true," the countess went on, "when the place was undisturbed, the botanists came here, and on the walls, and about the floors among the fallen columns, they found hundreds of plants and flowers that were utterly new to the world. Look at it now!"
"The floor is llke a parade ground," said Murietta.
"The walls are bare as if built yesteray," said the countess.
"There is a man employed like a parour maid dusting it down with a broom as if it was a sort of child's toy, or at most a parlour wall."
The party drove on. The irrepressible Johnny bawled back from his father's cariage that he would like to see old Joshua march around that, and toot his horn, and see what would come of it; and then his mother reached and took him by the collar.
They now passed under the great Trimphal Arch of Constantine, and then had a long leafy ride through a lane of elms.
Peasants were spinning ropes of flax to the right; and all along they came and went to and from the city with great loads on their heads, and leading their little children by the hand.
"The urns that lined this road," said the countess, after a long silence, "have disappeared. At one place you can pass through that high stone wall for a franc, and see some of the old jars of ashes; but there is nothing now to be seen from the carriage."
Then again the party was silent, for Mollie was absorbed in her nuts and candies, and Murietta was moody, and his mind was drifting far away.
They passed through the great wall of Rome, and were in the wide open Camagna, a place that looks more like a bit of the great American plains than anything to be seen in Europe.
Barefooted peasant girls, and beautiful, too, as red May roses, were going into town in Indian file, with bundles of wood and cane on their heads. A shoemaker sat in his cottage door as they passed, with half-dozen children at his knees, and he stopped work to look at Johnny, who had set his thumb against his nose, and was wriggling his fingers in the air in the direction of his mother.
"I never saw so many shoemakers in my life as there are in Rome," said Murietta at last. "At the door of almost every house you enter there sits a little, driedi udp, wrinkled old shoemaker."
The great soft eyes of the countess twinkled just the least bit mischievously here as she looked at Murietta, and said, —
"Is it not possible now, after all, that this is why Rome is called the 'City of the Soul?'"
He only smiled in reply, and there was again a long silence as the carriages rattled on over the rough stones.
The Appian Way is dreadfully disapointing. It is not more than twenty or twenty five feet wide, and there is not a shady tree to be seen along the way.
On either hand lift great walls that hide the gardens and peasants at their labour; and but for the interesting relics which compose these walls in part, you would find but little to amuse you.
These walls, in many places, have been repaired, or were originally built of broken marble, plundered from Heaven knows what ruined city or palace; for these Romans seem to have had no respect whatver for antiquity. The great St. Peter's Church, for example, is built for the most part out of stones taken from their most picturesque ruins.
You will notice a broken arm reaching helplessly out of this wall on the Appian Way in one place as you pass; and in another you will see a pretty cluster of flowers. A part of a giant serpent is also to be seen along with a hundred other like fragments of art, where storms and time have laid bare the rough masonry of the wall.
Latterly, however, these gentle Romans have come to preserve all these things, and stick them up in the stucco walls of the houses all along the roads. This, of course, spoils the effect, and you take less interest in the broken marbles when you find they are posted up for exhibition.
Capuchin monks, in brown gowns and sandals, go by, indolent looking and filthy, though they are the best of their kind, and very attentive to the sick in times of the plague.
Then they met a family of peasants going into town. They all had loads on their heads, and chatted, and sang, and seemed very happy. Then came another party of Capuchin monks, and looking at them, Mollie observed, —
"I have never yet seen a monk carry anything heavier than his little basket, where he puts whatever may be given him in charity."
"And that," answered the countess, "is just one basket more than I have seen any clergyman carry."
There was another silence as they still rumbled on over the stones of the Via Appii.
Virgins and holy families look down from niches in the walls, and here and there is a Madonna with a burning lamp. One or two mossy urns only now are noticeable of all the thousands that sat of old on either side of the way.
Johnny climbed the wall as they stopped for a moment for a carriage full of English people to get by; and lifting the lid of an urn, bawled out to his mother to know if she would have "pickle"
"Here in this little church to the left are the two footprints of our Saviour in the stone," said the countess, as they drove up, and found two monks at the door stringing beads. Then as they looked in the countess told the party this story of the footprints.
St. Peter had been condemned in Rome to be crucified; but his heart had failed him, and, having met with an opportunity to escape, he was now making his way at night along the Appian Way toward the sea. But suddenly here, on the site of this church, which is built over the old road so that the new road has to pass around, he came face to face with his Master.
Peter said "Master , whither goest thou?"
" I go to Rome to be crucified."
At this Peter returned to Rome, and died at the hands of the Romans on the site of St. Peter's church.
The very paving stones of the old road are still here, and form the floor of the church. But the good priest told them that this was only a copy of the stone in which the feet of the Saviour pressed as he spoke to Peter.
Start reading Chapter 34 ofThe One Fair Lady