Part 51 (1/2)

Ten minutes for the Pantheon! She had been three-quarters of an hour with the dressmaker! That was her life! She walked in through the gray old portico, and, still fretting, her mouth still in the cold, ugly line, she stepped through the huge bronze doorway and stood under the vault ... ”_ah!_”

She always forgot how it affected her or she would come in every day as other people said their prayers. It was as though it had been made for her and had waited till she came, sore-hearted, to look at it and find a pa.s.sing peace.

She lifted her face to the huge open circle at the center of the dome high over her head. Quiet strength came into her heart from those great gray stones. Century after century they had enclosed that lovely circle of open sky and sunlit cloud and swallow-flights. Every other ancient roof in Rome had gone down to heaps of rubbish, save only this, steadfast, enduring, letting in the innocent clear light of every day down to the heart of the old temple.

Daylight--that was what made the Pantheon a place apart for her--honest daylight. How cheap beside it was the theatrical yellow of the windows back of the altar in St. Peter's!

She looked about her for a place to sit, and, seeing no chair, took a prie-dieu and sank to her knees on it as though she were praying. She was praying in her way. She continued to look up at the heaped golden clouds, at the infinite depth of the blue, blue sky, at the ineffable clarity of the light, pouring in through the great round opening. It seemed to smile at her, an honest, loving, rea.s.suring smile that flooded her vexed, somber heart as it flooded the somber, ancient building. What strength, what strength in those gray stones, to hold together where everything else had been broken and dispersed! How beautiful primitive things were! How consoling and healing--the hardness and strength of stones, the clarity of light, the transparency of the sky! If you could only somehow make your life up of such things--strength, suns.h.i.+ne, simplicity--and music!

She continued to gaze up, her hands clasped. Yes, she was praying, she was praying for a little share of all that.

What was that absurd Mr. Livingstone saying? Marise glanced up sharply from her book and listened. Why, he was talking about Crittenden's--old Mr. Crittenden dead and had left that lovely old mountain home to some indifferent nephew? To make sure, she put her book down and asked a question or two. How strange that she should be talking about _Ashley_ to people here in a Roman _pension_! Ashley! Crittenden's! Cousin Hetty!

She seemed to have gone again back to her book, but she was not reading.

She was looking at a sunlit green valley, a white road winding through it, a gla.s.s-clear little river chanting under willows, low, friendly homes under tall elms, ugly old people with plain speech and honest, quiet eyes, smiling down lovingly on a skipping, frisking little girl.

”... I see them s.h.i.+ning plain, The happy highways where I went And may not go again.”

After a time she closed her book and went up on the roof for a quiet moment alone, to go back to Ashley, to look at those blue, remembered hills.

But there was some one else on the terrazza. She made out a man's figure under the grapevine. Being a girl, she thought impatiently, she was obliged to turn back and shut herself up in her stuffy room. It continued to be exactly as it had been in Bayonne. The world was one great Jeanne, with a nose twitching for scandal. Ashley was far away!

She had watched the horrid little tragedy of the swallow with such intensity that when the catastrophe came she almost felt those curved claws sink into her own flesh ... _bon Dieu!_ What was that man doing climbing out of the window--a madman! No, _he_ had seen the cat, too!

What a leap! And now how he ran--like a _prestissimo alla forte_ pa.s.sage! _Ah!_ He had caught that wretched cat. But the swallow was dead. He was too late! How gently he picked it up. Did _men_ ever feel compa.s.sion for things hurt?

Oh! _oh!_ the swallow had flown out of his hands! How it soared up and up! Who would not soar, saved by a strong, kind hand from such terror!

He had turned to come back. It was a good face--but after she had seen the expression of the deep-set, steady eyes she could see nothing but that. Eyes that looked kind, but not weak. In the world about Marise it had been an understood axiom that only weak people were kind.

And what now--eh _bien_! To defend the cat! What did he care about a cat?

Yet she saw it at once. What he wanted was justice. Think of any one's wanting justice for anything--let alone a _cat_!

No--how quaint, how amusing--one unexpected thing after another!--he wasn't a bit conceited about what he'd done--how _funny_ that he was embarra.s.sed and shy! Why, no man with Latin blood could have restrained himself by any effort of self-control from a little flourish of self-satisfaction after such a das.h.i.+ng exploit. He wasn't thinking how she must be admiring him. He wasn't thinking of himself at all. How--how _nice_--to see him blus.h.i.+ng and stammering like a nice, nice boy. She could scarcely keep back the laugh of touched and pleased amus.e.m.e.nt that came to her lips.

Eh bien, he might blush easily and be shy, but he knew as well as any Latin how to catch at a chance indication from a woman, and how to be at the right place at the right hour. When she and il Maestro came out of Donna Antonia's door, she saw his tall figure at the end of the street.

Ridiculous, what a start it gave her! And as soon as Visconti had left her there he was beside her with one long bound. Now she would really look at him enumeratingly and see what sort of face he had.

But when she looked at him she saw that his eyes were smiling down at her, and she went no further than the eyes again.

She began to tell him about Ashley, of which she had dreamed the night before, the first time in so long. It had been a good dream, all about going home to Cousin Hetty and playing dolls up in the attic again. And it was good, how good, to talk to some one about it, the first time--why, since she had left Ashley! He seemed like--like what Americans meant when they spoke of their ”own home folks.” Marise had never had any such. There was a real reason to give herself the fun of telling about Crittenden's too, since this Crittenden was soon to be there. She would just let herself go for once!

But how she did run on when she let herself go! She hardly knew herself, chattering like this, as fast as her tongue could wag. Chattering and laughing and gesticulating--and not able to stop--the foolish way people do who have drunk too much champagne, the foolish way a canary does when you take the dark cloth from his cage and he sees that the sun is s.h.i.+ning, the way silly girls do the first time they have a conversation with a young man. Yes, that was the way her voice sounded. Why could she not stop chattering and laughing? What must he be thinking of her? She would stop. She would change the subject. She would look at her watch and say that she was late for an engagement and must take a tram-car and leave him.