A Voyage of Consolation by Sara Jeannette Duncan (top 10 most read books in the world .txt) 📖

of us. The Rome of my imagination was as distinctly seven-hilled as a quadruped is four-legged, the Rome I saw had no eminences to speak of anywhere. Perhaps, as poppa suggested, business had moved away from the hills and we should find them in the suburbs, but this we were obliged to leave unascertained.

Through the warm empty streets we drove and looked at Rome. It was driving through time, through history, through art, and going backward. And through the Christian religion, for we started where the pillar of Pius IX., setting forth the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, reaffirmed a modern dogma of the great church across the Tiber; and we rattled on past other and earlier memorials of that church thick-built into the Middle Ages, and of the Early Fathers, and of the very Apostles. All heaped and crowded and over-built, solid and ragged, decaying and defying decay, clinging to her traditions with both hands, old Rome jostled before us. Presently uprose a great and crumbling arch and a difference, and as we passed it the sound of the life of the city died indistinctly away and a silence grew up, with the smell of the sun upon grasses and weeds, and we stopped and looked down into Caesar's world, which lay below us, empty. We gazed in silence for a moment, and then Emmeline remarked that she could make as good a Forum with a box of blocks.

"I shouldn't wonder but what you express the sentiments of all present," said her father admiringly. "Now is it allowable for us to go down there and make ourselves at home amongst those antique pillars, or have we got to take the show in from here?"

"No, Malt," said the Senator, helping the ladies out, "I can't say I agree with you. It's a dead city, that's what it is, and for my part I've never seen anything so impressive."

"Mr. Wick," remarked Miss Callis, "has not visited Philadelphia."

"Well, for a municipal cemetery," returned Mr. Malt, "it's pretty uncared for. If there was any enterprise in this capital it would be suitably railed in with posts and chains, and a monument inscribed 'Here lies Rome's former greatness' or something like that. But the Italians haven't got a particle of go--I've noticed that all through."

We went down the wooden stair, a century at a step, and presently walked and talked, we seven Americans, in that elder Rome that most people know so much better than the one with St. Peter's and the Corso, because of the clinging nature of those early impressions which we construe for ourselves with painful reference to lists of exceptions. We all felt that it was a small place to have had so much to say to history, and were obliged to remind ourselves that we weren't looking at the whole of it. Poppa acknowledged that his tendency to compare it unfavourably, in spite of the verdict of history, with Chicago was checked by a smell from the Cloaca Maxima, which proved that the Ancient Romans probably enjoyed enteric and sewer gas quite as much as we do, although under names that are to be found only in dictionaries now. Mrs. Malt said the place surprised her in being so yellow--she had always imagined pictures of it to have been taken in the sunset, but now she saw that it was perfectly natural. Acting upon Mr. Malt's advice, we did not attempt to identify more than the leading features, and I remember distinctly, in consequence, that the temple of Castor had three columns standing and the temple of Saturn had eight, while of the Basilica Julia there was nothing at all but the places where they used to be. Mrs. Malt said it made her feel quite idolatrous to look at them, and for her part she couldn't be sorry they had fallen so much into decay--it was only right and proper. This launched Mr. and Mrs. Malt and my parents upon a discussion which threatened to become unwisely polemic if Emmeline had not briefly decided it in favour of Christianity.

Momma and Mrs. Malt expressed a desire above all things to see the temple and apartments of the Vestal Virgins, which Miss Callis with some surprise begged them on no account to mention in the presence of the gentlemen.

"There are some things," remarked Miss Callis austerely, "from which no respectable married lady would wish to lift the veil of the classics."

Momma was inclined to argue the point, but Miss Callis looked so shocked that she desisted.

"Perhaps, Mrs. Wick," she said sarcastically, "you intend to go to see the Baths of Caracallus!"

To which momma replied certainly _not_, that was a very different thing. And if I am unable to describe the Baths of Caracallus in this history, it is on account of Miss Callis's personal influence and the remarkable development of her sense of propriety.

At momma's suggestion we walked slowly all round the Via Sacra, looking steadily down at its little triangular original paving-stones, and tried to imagine ourselves the shackled captives of Scipio. If the party had not consisted so largely of Emmeline the effort might have been successful. Fragments of exhumed statuary, discoloured and featureless, stood tipped in rows along the shorn foundations and inspired in Mr. Malt a serious curiosity.

"The ancients," said Mr. Malt with conviction, "were every bit as smart as the moderns, meaning born intelligence. Look at that ear--that ear took talent. There isn't a terra-cotta factory in the United States that could turn out a better ear to-day. But they hadn't what we call gumption, they put all their capital into one line of business, and you may be sure they swamped the market. If they'd just done a little inventing now, instead--worried out the idea of steam, or gas, or electricity--why Rome might never have fallen to this day." And no one interfered with Mr. Malt's idea that the fall of Rome was a purely commercial disaster. Doubtless it was out of regard for his feelings, but he was exactly the sort of man to compel you to prove your assertion.

We found the boundaries of the first Forum of the Republic, and poppa, pacing it in a soft felt hat and a silk duster, offered a Senatorial contrast to history. He looked round him with dignity and made the gesture which goes with his most sustained oratorical flights. "I wouldn't have backed up Cato in everything," he said thoughtfully. "No. There were occasions on which I should have voted against the old man, and the little American school-boys of to-day would have had to decline 'Mugwumpus' in consequence." And at the thought of Cannae and Trasimene the nineteenth century Senator from Illinois fiercely pulled his beard.

We turned our pilgrim feet to where the Colosseum wheels against the sky and gives up the world's eternal supreme note of splendour and of cruelty; and along the solitary dusty Appian Way, as if it were a country lane of the time we know, came a ragged Roman urchin with a basket. Under the triumphal arch of Titus, where his forefathers jeered at the Jews in manacled procession, we bargained with him for his purple plums. He had the eyes and the smile of immemorial Italy for his own, and the bones of Imperial Rome in equal inheritance, which he also wished to sell, by the way, in jagged fragments from his trouser pockets. And it linked up those early days with that particular afternoon in a curiously simple way to think that from the Caesars to King Humbert there has never been a year without just such brown-cheeked, dark-eyed, imperfectly washed little Roman boys upon the Appian Way.


CHAPTER XII.

We were too late for the hotel _dejeuner_, and had to order it, I remember, _a la carte_. That was why the Count was kept waiting. We were kept waiting, too, which seemed at the moment of more importance, since the atmosphere of the classics had given us excellent appetites. Emmeline decided upon ices and _petits fours_ in the Corso for her party, after which they were going to let nothing interfere with their inspection of the prison of St. Paul; but we came back and ordered a haricot. In the cavernous recesses beyond the door which opened kitchen-ward, commands resounded, and a quarter of an hour later a boy walked casually through the dining-room bearing beans in a basket. Time went on, and the Senator was compelled to send word that he had not ordered the repast for the following day. The small waiter then made a pretence of activity, and brought vinegar and salt, and rolls and water. "The peutates is notta-cooks," said he in deprecation, and we were distressed to postpone the Count for those peutates. But what else was possible?

The dismaying part was that after luncheon had enabled us to regard a little thing like that with equanimity, my parents abandoned it to me. Momma said she knew she was missing a great deal, but she really didn't feel equal to entertaining the Count; her back had given out completely. The Senator wished to attend to his mail. With the assistance of his letters and telegrams he was beginning to bear up wonderfully, and, as it was just in, I hadn't the heart to interfere. "You can apologise for us, daughter," said poppa, "and say something polite about our seeing him later. Don't let him suppose we've gone back on him in any way. It's a thing no young fellow in America would think of, but with these foreigners you never can tell."

I saw at once that the Count was annoyed. He was standing in the middle of the salon, fingering his sword-hilt in a manner which expressed the most absurd irritation. So I said immediately that I was awfully sorry, but it seemed so difficult to get anything to eat in Rome at that time of year, that the head-waiter was really responsible, and wouldn't he sit down?

"I don't know what you will think of us," I went on as we shook hands. "How long have you been kind enough to wait, anyway?"

"Since a quarter of an hour--only," replied the Count, with a difficult smile, "but now that I see you it is forgotten all."

"That's very nice of you," I said. "I assure you momma was quite worked up about keeping you waiting. It's rather trying to the American temperament to be obliged to order a hurried luncheon from the market-gardener."

"So! In America you have him not--the market garden? You are each his own vegetable. Yes? Ah, how much better than the poor Italian! But Mistra and Madame Wick, they have not, I hope, the indisposition?"

"Well, I'm afraid they have, Count--something like that. They said I was to ask you to excuse them. You see they've been sight-seeing the whole morning, and that's something that can't be done by halves in your city. The stranger has to put his whole soul into it, hasn't he?"

"Ah, the whole soul! It is too fatiguing," Count Filgiatti assented. He glanced at me uncertainly, and rose. "Kindly may I ask that you give my deepest afflictions to Mistra and Madame Wick for their health?"

"Oh," I said, "if you _must_! But I'm here, you know." I put no hauteur into my tone, because I saw that it was a misunderstanding.

He still hesitated and I remembered that the Filgiatti intelligence probably dated from the Middle Ages, and had undergone very little alteration since. "You have made such a short visit," I said. "I must be a very bad substitute for momma and poppa."

A flash of comprehension illuminated my visitor's countenance. "I pray that