CHAPTER XLII

A NEW CURRENT OF LIFE.

It was with a heart beating warm and wild, that Murietta mounted the great wide stairway, with its rows of plants and flowers set on either side behind the shining brass banisters, leading to the door that should open to him, for the first time, upon the One Fair Woman.

He found the door closed when he had mounted the stairway, and was glad of it, for it gave him time to rest and collect his thoughts. As he stood there he could hear the beating of his heart.

To the right, as if guarding the door, stood a great Californian lion, with his head lifted and his mouth wide open.

"Ah, my old friend, my whilom old companion of the Cordilleras, we have met before" said Murietta, as he advanced and stroked his broad lifted head. "It seems to me it is a good omen to meet you here. It is like shaking hands with an old friend on a field of battle. Well, guard her well, my Californian lion, guard her well!" said the dreamer, and he stepped back to the door and drew the bell.

A man stood before him — a man, as the door opened, who looked as if he had been chiselled by some of those wonderful sculptors out of a solid piece of the blackest midnight.

Then the great African, with a manner made up out of combined ease and indolence, took his hat and coat, led through the great saloon to the door of a still greater one, and announced his name. Then there was a little flutter among the dozen birds of beautiful plumage gathered there, a lady came forward — the One Fair Woman — and the man stood face to face with what I may call his Destiny.

Even this great saloon was a forest of flowers, right and left, as he entered. His feet sank in the soft and seamless carpet, as he advanced to be presented to the fair woman's mother, and to take the hand of the good old general, who seemed to come down from out his battle cloud for no other purpose than to give his hand, for in a moment he was off again, drifting and dreaming and riding higher and higher, on his cloud of battle smoke.

Sofas and settees and ottomans and every oriental luxury that a fervid imagination could conceive of as places of repose, were scattered here and there like little flowerbeds in a garden, and in these flowerbeds were blossoming many beautiful flowers.

There were tiger skins scattered about the floor in a wild and careless way, and back in a corner of the saloon on the wall, half hidden by flowers, were hanging some implements of war. Great beams of oak crossed overhead, and the ceiling was so frescoed that it looked as though it was some old ruin overrun with ivy.

People were lounging here and there, or passing up and down, or taking tea, or talking by twos and threes in a dreamy and silent sort of a way that pleased the nervous and sensitive artist from the first, and, contrarv to his fears, he soon found himself perfectly at home. He seemed to tit in there from the first. In less than an hour he felt that he had known that place and these people all his life.

He looked around him, and he saw that here was another and a superior class of people to anything he had seen in Rome. Here was a Roman prince, who really looked and behaved the gentleman — a quiet and an unpretending man.

There was a cardinal over in the centre of a group of beautiful ladies in bright colours, and away back yonder in a corner out of the light, as usual, sat the good secretary of legation, telling over the points of his last novel to an ancient princess from Germany.

There were generals talking of war in the Spanish tongue, and politicians talking of finance in French, and gentlemen talking art in their own tongue; and yet a was as quiet as a snow fall.

"This is a new current of life," said artist to himself, "I should have been here before." Then he fell to thinking of the tall, dark beauty who had moved before him for ever, who was moving now noiselessly across the saloon, looking at him just the least bit from under her dark sweeping lashes as she passed, and he asked himself how long he, with his impulsive and imperious nature, would find a welcome there.

To Murietta this was a paradise. It was a paradise of noiseless birds and of dreams. He had seen society — enough of it — but it had never pleased him in any form before encountered. Sometimes it had been formal, sometimes stiff and cold and corpse like, sometimes noisy and turbulent and loud. This was peace and rest Verily it was paradise.

The little woman was there, too, the busy, bustling Mrs. Bunch, who presided at the top of the intolerable and tortuous corkscrew stairs, in the noisy little menagerie of animals from all parts of the earth, which the good threadbare secretary of legation had called, or rather miscalled, heaven.

"Do you like Roman society?" said a spinster, stirring her cup of tea by the side of Murietta, and at the same time keeping her long curls swinging and twisting round and round as she stirred the spoon.

The artist did not have time to answer, for the spoon kept going, and the curls kept turning, and the tongue kept on, and all together and all at once, as if tongue and spoon and curls were all a sort of machine that had been patented as parts of a wheel, and must all run together or stop together.

"Roman society is mixed, very mixed. I came here and sat down on the Seven Hills, to use a classical quotation, thirty years ago." Then she stopped and sighed, and the spoon and the curls and the tongue and all, to the artist's infinite satisfaction, all stopped together, but the patent machine suddenly started again. "I was but a child then. O, I was ever so small you know, and I know all about Roman society, and if you go with one set you must not go with another; and if you belong to one club you must not enter another; and if you subscribe to one church, you must expect to have all the others for enemies; for there is the new Baptist Church, well, they sank forty feet to get a foundation for it, and even then they came upon a beautiful mosaic that the government took to put in the museum; forty feet! just imagine it; they used to come every week to get subscriptions for sinking their foundation, and I called it the sinking fund. Well, I gave money to this church, and then I had all the papists for enemies, as well as every other church in the world, to war with, and I was nearly ruined. Oh, Rome is mightily mixed, the people are so split up."

"But you have not the Protestant denominations here?"

"All, everything, even to the howling Methodists. Why, they came here from the States and opened tents away out on the Campagna and established missions there, and prayed for the destruction of the Catholic Church and the death of the pope for a whole month together, and then fell to quarrelling among themselves, and had each other arrested for slander and fraud and all the ordinary sins and crimes that you can well think of."

And thus the tongue ran on in a rapid but quiet way, and the curls went round and the spoon eddied and spun as if it was in the hands of a school marm in a country town in the West, till Annette at last came by, and sat carelessly down by the other side, carelessly as if she belonged there.

Of all intolerable people on earth there are none, perhaps, half so terrible as persons who will persist in talking when they ought to be silent; when in fact nobody wants to hear them talk under any circumstances or at any time.

The safest thing to do is to be silent in ninety nine cases out of a hundred. You can remember, perhaps, fifty occasions in your life when you have said too much. You cannot remember one when you said too little. You may spend a whole evening a silent listener in society, and leave everyone your friend. It would be very hard to do that much if you talked, even though you talked like an angel.

"As I was saying" began the spoon and the tongne and the corkscrew curls, "here in Rome you must be very particular what you do, where you go, who you mix with, and where and how you worship. And now, Mr. Murietta, you will pardon me for what I am about to say, but really you are to some extent in my hands. You are my charge — my child — ha, ha, my child!" and here the spoon spun around, followed faster and faster by the corkscrew curls and the meddlesome tongue. "I am sure you will pardon me, but if you wish to get on in Rome, and I am sure you want to get on in the 'Eternal City,' if I may again be permitted to use a classical quotation, therefore I say if you wish to get on you must be carefiil who you mix with in Rome or whom you speak to. And, Mr. Murietta, if you wish to be careful whom you speak to, allow me to caution you with respect to one lady, one person — ha, ha! — one person, that is the 'comely appellation,' if I may be permitted to use a classical quotation — " She stopped suddenly, spoon and curls and tongue and all, as if she had been a kind of clock that had run down. Then as if half reviving she said, "Yes, with respect to this one person, in all confidence, if you expect to move in our circle — "

Then the spoon stopped and the tongue and the curls, and the artist sat looking at the little machine in amazement, while the One Fair Woman, who had all the time been silent, sat looking the other way, and tapping the soft carpet with her foot as if nervous and annoyed.

Then the spoon and the curls and the tongue began again, and went round and round and round as if winding themselves up to some great pitch, and then leaning a little forward, and going still a little faster, the tongue said —

"You understand?"

Murietta knitted his brows. "I do not understand."

"Well then, the Countess Edna —"

The artist arose, pale and excited. He stood there almost trembling. Then the One Fair Woman took his arm, and they moved away together and in silence.

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