Part 23 (2/2)

Presently they pa.s.sed a little wayside shrine. Within its penthouse eave an oil-lamp flickered before the frescoed Madonna and Child; the shelf in front of the picture was heaped with flowers just beginning to fade.

Manisty stayed the horse a moment; pointed first to the shrine, then to the bit of road beneath their feet.

'Do you see this travertine--these blocks? This is a bit of the old road to the temple. I was with the exploring party when they carried up the Medusa and some other of their finds along here past the shrine. It was nearly dark--they did not want to be observed. But I was an old friend of the man in command, and he and I were walking together. The bearers of the heavy bronze things got tired. They put down their load just here, and lounged away. My friend stepped up to the sort of wooden bier they were carrying, to see that all was right. He uncovered the Medusa, and turned her to the light of the lamp before the shrine. You never saw so strange and wild a thing!--the looks she threw at the Madonna and Child. ”Ah! Madam,” I said to her--”the world was yours when you went down--but now it's theirs! Tame your insolence!” And I thought of hanging her here, at night, just outside, under the lamp against the wall of the shrine--and how one might come in the dark upon the fierce head with the snakes--and watch her gazing at the Christ.'

Lucy shuddered and smiled.

'I'm glad she wasn't yours!'

'Why? The peasants would soon have made a saint of her, and invented a legend to fit. The snakes, for them, would have been the instruments of martyrdom--turned into a martyr's crown. Italy and Catholicism absorb--a.s.similate--everything. ”_Santa Medusa!_”--I a.s.sure you, she would be quite in order.'

There was a pause. Then she heard him say under his breath--'Marvellous, marvellous Italy!'

She started and gave a slight cry--unsteady, involuntary.

'But you don't love her!--you are ungrateful to her!'

He looked up surprised--then laughed--a frank, pugnacious laugh.

'There is Italy--and Italy.'

'There is only one Italy!--Aristodemo's Italy--the Italy the peasants work in.'

She turned to him, breathing quicker, the colour returning to her pale cheek.

'The Italy that has just sent seven thousand of her sons to butchery in a wretched colony, because her hungry politicians must have glory and keep themselves in office? You expect me to love that Italy?'

Within the kind new sweetness of his tone--a sweetness no man could use more subtly--there had risen the fiery accustomed note. But so restrained, so tempered to her weakness, her momentary dependence upon him!

'You might be generous to her--just, at least!--for the sake of the old.'

She trembled a little from the mere exertion of speaking, and he saw it.

'No controversy to-night!' he said smiling. 'Wait till you are fit for it, and I will overwhelm you. Do you suppose I don't know all about the partisan literature you have been devouring?'

'One had to hear the other side.'

'Was I such a bore with the right side?'

They both laughed. Then he said, shrugging his shoulders with sudden emphasis:

'What a nation of revolutionists you are in America! What does it feel like, I wonder, to be a people without a past, without traditions?'

Lucy exclaimed: 'Why, we are made of traditions!'

'Traditions of revolt and self-will are no traditions,' he said provokingly. 'The submission of the individual to the whole--that's what you know nothing of.'

'We shall know it when we want it! But it will be a free submission--given willingly.'

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