Part 52 (2/2)

No, there was nothing whatever to be known from surfaces, Marise told herself. The subject of the portrait was always really quite invisible behind the thick, thick screen of his physical presence. All that was safe to do was to watch the strokes by which one by one he himself painted his own portrait.

Marise often told herself all this as she was hurrying down the corridor to be the first person in the breakfast room--the first, that is, after Mr. Crittenden, who was a very early riser.

I

To begin with there was the das.h.i.+ng outline sketch of the first two or three days when, in a few bold lines, he had seemed to set up the figure on the canvas; the rescue of the swallow; justice for the cat; that first walk and homesick talk about Ashley, and at the end those stammering words of his which had seemed to show--Oh, that had now turned unreal to Marise! He couldn't have said that--and meant it!

Then the soiree, the impression of force and originality he had made on the people he had met there, her natural certainty that he must of course have calculated that impression in order to profit by it--and then--at this recollection, Marise always laughed silently at her own astonishment when he had called Donna Antonia ”a bad-tempered, stupid old woman.” Donna Antonia certainly was that, and every one knew it. But n.o.body else would dream of saying it out loud, any more than they would give their honest impression of the ritual of a secret society.

II

And then, just when she had been so drawn towards him by his strength and kindness--that brusk blow in the face. Marise had felt many times before this a thin, keen blade slipped into her back by a hand that took care to be invisible. But never before had she encountered open roughness. It was staggering! Breath-taking! Always, as she remembered it, her first thought was, as it had been then, a horrified wonder why any one should wish to hurt her. Always afterward with the memory of his dreadful, stammering distress, his remorseful kissing of her hands, his helpless inability to unsay what he had said, she knew once more, as she had known then, that she had encountered something new, something altogether different from any human relations.h.i.+p she had ever known, a relations.h.i.+p where you did not say things in order to please or displease people, or to make this or that impression, but because you thought they were true. That was fine--oh, yes, that was fine. But it was like das.h.i.+ng yourself against hard stones--it hurt! And it made her fear the hand that had hurt her. She watched it, and sometimes all but put out her fingers to touch it, to see if it were really so strong and hard as it looked. She feared it. She envied its strength.

III

That had been a stroke of the portrait-painting brush which frightened her to remember. But there were others that made her laugh, like the time, off in a hill-village in the Roman country-side, when he stepped into a little shop to buy a box of cigarettes, and came back with a great paper-bag of the villainous, hay-like tobacco issued to the Italian army, unsmokable by any but an Italian private soldier. To their amazed laughter, he had replied sheepishly, with a boy's grin of embarra.s.sment that the little daughter of the shop-keeper, ambitiously doing her best to wait on a customer, had misunderstood his order and had weighed it out and tied it up before he realized what she was doing.

”I was afraid if I let them know she'd made a mistake her father would jump on her. Fathers do seem to do such a tall amount of scolding anyhow. And she was so set up over having made a sale all by herself.”

Marise had laughed with the others over that, and laughed when she thought of it--but her laugh often ended abruptly in bewilderment--how was it he could be so kind, so tenderly kind to an Italian child he had never seen before, and so sternly rough with her? That rankled; and then, when she had had time to think, she recognized it, all over again, with the same start of astonishment, for the truth-telling she had never encountered.

IV

Mr. Livingstone had said something sentimental about man's love being based on the instinct to cherish and protect, and woman's on the desire to be cherished and protected. Eugenia had acquiesced; Marise, who hated talk, sentimental or otherwise, about love, had said nothing. But Mr.

Crittenden had protested, ”Oh, Livingstone, you've got that twisted.

That's the basis of love between group-ups and children. You don't insult your equals trying to 'protect them'! Nothing would get me more up in the air than to have somebody 'protect' me from life. Why should I want to do it to anybody else? Protect your grandmother! A woman wants to be let alone to take her chances in life as much as a man!”

V

They were crossing the Forum, on their way to a stroll in the shady walks of the Palatine. From the battered, shapeless ruins of what had been the throbbing center of the world rose suffocatingly to Marise's senses the effluvium of weariness and decay. She always felt that Rome's antiquity breathed out upon her a cold, dusty _taedium vitae_.

She thought of this, turning an attentive face and inattentive ear to Mr. Livingstone, who was trying to make out from his guide-book where the Temple of Mars had stood.

”You're holding that map wrong end to,” said Mr. Crittenden.

”It's too hot to stand here in the sun,” said Eugenia very sensibly.

They pa.s.sed on, over heaps of ancient refuse, into the ruins of the myriad-celled palace of the Caesars, silent now, not an echo left of all the humming, poisonous intrigues that had filled it full.

”Here,” said Mr. Livingstone, stopping in a vaulted, half-wrecked chamber, ostensibly to comment on things, really to get his breath after the climb, ”here in such a room, only lined and paved with priceless marbles, and hung with Asiatic silks, here you lay at ease in an embroidered toga on a gold-mounted couch, and clapped your hands for a slave to bring you your Falernian wine, cooled with snow from Monte Cavo,--that was the life!”

”I thought it was in the Arabian Nights you clapped your hands for a slave,” said Eugenia.

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