Part 53 (1/2)

”In Rome you probably cracked a whip,” suggested Mr. Crittenden. ”But I bet you a nickel it didn't make any difference _what_ you did, your slave came when he got good and ready and brought you another kind of wine from the one you ordered--and lukewarm at that. They'd probably used up all the Monte Cavo snow to cool the wine down in the slaves'

hall.”

”What possible basis have you for saying all _that_?” cried Mr.

Livingstone, exasperated.

”That's the way things are! Folks that try to use slave labor always get what's coming to them in the way of poor service.”

”Oh, but in Rome you had the right to kill him!” cried Mr. Livingstone, jealous of his rights.

”Sure you could kill him--and in New York you can fire your stenographer. What good would that do you? You couldn't get intelligent service out of the next slave either, unless you had him educated to be intelligent, and if you did that he'd be such a rare bird that you'd save him for something better than standing around waiting for you to clap your hands at him. He'd be running your business for you.”

”Oh, pshaw, Crittenden, why be so heavy-handed and literal! Why wet-blanket _every_ imaginative fancy?”

”Oh, I didn't realize you were imaginatively fancying,” said Mr.

Crittenden, laughing. ”I thought you were trying imaginatively to reconstruct the life of ancient Rome. And I was trying to do my share.”

They pa.s.sed through dusky, ill-smelling pa.s.sages, clambered over a pile of rubble and stood in twilight at the foot of a long, steep, vaulted stairway. Far up, like a bright roof to its obscurity, were green leaves, blue sky, bright suns.h.i.+ne. All that sparkling, clear radiance seemed to heighten the boyish fit of high spirits that had entered into the usually rather silent Mr. Crittenden. He pointed up to the stairway and cried, ”From antiquity to the present! I'll meet you at the top!”

and off he went, bounding up the high, steep steps two at a time, as if his vitality had suddenly swept him away in the need for violent exertion.

When the two girls emerged later, ”Ladies, allow me to introduce to you the present day,” he said, calling to their attention with a sweep of his hat the dark, sumptuous green of the cypresses and pines, the splendor of the golden-blue sky, the fresh sprinkled smell of the earth on the shady paths. ”Not so bad for poor little old actuality, is it?”

The girls sank breathlessly on a bench. Livingstone appeared, slowly hoisting himself up the steps, one at a time, and puffing. Mr.

Crittenden walked around and around restlessly, as though that upward swoop had been but an appetizer to his desire to let out the superabundance of his strength. He looked, Marise thought, like a race-horse fretting and pawing and stepping sideways. How could he have that eager look in this dusty cemetery of human strength and eagerness?

Glancing up at his face, she saw it lighted and s.h.i.+ning with amus.e.m.e.nt--what seemed like tender, touched amus.e.m.e.nt. He was looking at something down the path. Marise looked with him and saw a workingman, one of the gardeners, digging in the earth of a rose-bed. Beside him capered and staggered a little puppy, a nondescript little brown cur with neither good looks nor distinction, but so enchanted with life, with itself, with the soft, good earth over which it pranced that to see it was, thought Marise, like playing Weber's ”Perpetual Motion.” As she looked it tried to run in a wavering circle around its master, tripped over its own feet, tumbled head over heels in a soft ball, clumsily struggled up and sat down to draw breath, a pink tongue hanging out of its wide, laughing mouth, its soft young eyes beaming with mirth at its own adventures. Its master glanced down and addressed some clucking, friendly greeting to it, which threw it into an agony of joy. Wagging its tail till its whole body wagged, it flung itself adoringly at its master's trousers, pawing and wriggling in ecstasy.

Mr. Crittenden caught Marise's eye, and shared with her in a silent smile his delighted sense of the little animal's absurdity. ”Perhaps if we looked down from this height and got a bird's-eye view we could settle that point,” said Eugenia to Mr. Livingstone, who was still concerned about the location of the Temple of Mars. ”There's a fine view from the wall at the end of this path.”

They strolled together to the wall, and Mr. Livingstone spread out on it his plan of the Forum.

Marise looked down dispiritedly at the mutilated pillars and broken pieces of carved marble, and most of all at the bits of old Roman flagged paving. Nothing gave her a more acrid sense of futility than those old, old flag-stones over which so many thousands of human feet had eagerly, blindly sought their journey's end. Had any of them ever found what they sought? She murmured under her breath, ”Isn't it all horribly, horribly depressing? Doesn't it make you feel all those endless centuries bowing your shoulders down to the earth--why not now as well as later?”

She had stated it as she felt it, a truism, what every one must feel.

Eugenia and Livingstone accepted it as such. ”Yes, I often feel as ancient as the stones,” said Eugenia pensively.

Mr. Crittenden put in hastily, ”Not on your life, it doesn't depress me!

Why should it? You don't seem to realize, Miss Allen, what an immense difference there is between us! I never really took it in before myself--not until this visit to Rome. But it's immense! Enormous! Let me tell you about it. They're dead and we are alive! Alive!”

Marise looked up at him, thinking that in truth she had never felt any one so alive. He bent his eyes to hers as Livingstone, with a little gesture of giving him up, drew Eugenia to the corner of the wall and traced lines on his map.

Mr. Crittenden went on whimsically, ”I don't believe you ever fully considered the great importance of that point, Miss Allen. It came home to me all over again as I was looking at that puppy. Millions of dogs have lived and died before him; but by some amazing miracle life is just as fresh a wonder to him as if he were the first puppy ever born into the world! It's incredible! I never realized it till I struck all these relics of dead-and-gone men--it's incredible how none of them, not all the millions of them, can tarnish the newness of my own life for me! I can go my own new path over those old paving-stones--me and the puppy--and you--and all of us!”

Marise laughed a little, still looking at him, listening to something he was not saying, which played about his bold, clear face like sunlight and shone on her as warmly.

Now a spark of wildness came into his eyes, half laughingly reckless, half desperately in earnest. ”You saw what happened to the puppy when its master threw it a kind word? Well, I haven't the gift of wriggling all over so wonderfully as that, and I haven't any tail to wag, but when you look at me like that, Miss Allen, I....”

”We _think_ the third line of pillar-stumps is the side wall of the Basilica Julia,” said Eugenia, stepping towards them, the guide-book in her hand.

VI